This article is based on the writings of 20th-century historian Christopher Dawson. As a historian of ideas, rather than bare facts (although his erudition was immense), many of his ideas are still very relevant today.
One of his main themes is the importance of culture. To describe its role, he compares it to a plant using a very striking image: “Every culture is like a plant. It must have its roots in the ground and be open to spiritual sunlight from above. At this moment, we are cutting off its roots and extinguishing every light that comes from above.”
Culture, he says, is a “fragile thing” that, much like a plant, needs to be nurtured and can be easily destroyed. However, in many cases, it can also be revived, as every plant lover knows, and this has happened many times in history.
What did he mean by “cutting off the roots”? He meant the lack of importance given to history, especially European history, and particularly the Middle Ages. That is why he advocated for the study and understanding of history as a crucial aspect of preserving and nurturing culture. The study of Christian culture, which, in his opinion, has contributed much more than people generally think to the development of Western culture, which has now turned into global culture.
His study of history encompassed the whole world, and his first book entitled Age of the Gods examines the great cultures of the ancient world. He did not look down on these cultures but valued them equally with an open mind. One of his maxims was: “Culture can only be understood from within.” Such an understanding of all past cultures led him to emphasize, for example, that the skillful administration of ancient Egypt “had a crucial formative influence on the tradition of European governance through the heritage adopted from Egypt by Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman Empire.” Egypt would therefore be one of those ‘roots’ of modern culture.
He also criticized the modernist tendency towards specialization and focus on technological progress, which has led to the neglect of true ‘human’ progress. In his book “The Crisis of Western Education,” he warns that by progressively abandoning the liberal arts in favor of more practical career-focused subjects, we are exposing ourselves to the danger of losing the “soul” of our culture. Today’s teachers and students could relate to the following words: “The student’s mind is overwhelmed and dazed by the amount of new knowledge that experts accumulate through their work, while the need to use education as a stepping stone to a profitable career leaves little time for reflection. The same goes for the teacher, who has become a kind of government official bound by a routine over which they have little control.” According to Dawson, it is necessary to familiarize ourselves with our past in order to reconnect with those roots. “The crisis of Europe is a crisis of the world,” he wrote. “All the living forces that drive the world today, be it scientific, economic, or political, have their roots in European culture and would wither away if that culture were to collapse.” and it will definitely disturb our modern sensibilities and sound ‘ethnocentric’ or ‘Eurocentric’. However, I believe that we also need to practice tolerance towards earlier viewpoints if we want to extract ideas that can be useful to us today, and Dawson was well aware that culture (like a plant) is not a closed system, but constantly transforms under multiple influences. For example, science reemerged in the West under the influence of the Arab world in the Middle Ages. Similarly, many ideas of European origin, such as the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, spread from Europe to other parts of the world.
Let’s now look at the second part of the earlier quoted sentence, where he says that we “extinguish every light that comes from above”. Here we come to one of the main ideas that permeates all of Dawson’s writings – that religion is one of the major driving forces of history and a key factor in the rise and fall of civilizations: “World religions are great spiritual paths that have guided humanity kr” “Throughout history, from ancient times to modern times,” Dawson argues that religion has fallen out of fashion, at least in most of the Western world. However, he believes that the “religious instinct is part of human nature.” Furthermore, he states that the “forms of violence and aggression threatening to destroy our world [this was written in the 1940s] are the result of starving and frustrating the spiritual nature of mankind.” Dawson was not alone in this viewpoint. The great historian of religious ideas, Mircea Eliade, noted that instead of Homo Sapiens, we should speak of Homo Religiosus because religion – or the idea of the sacred, as Eliade called it – is so important for the structure of human consciousness.
According to Dawson, therefore, if we collectively deprive ourselves of spiritual nourishment, our civilization will wither and die, as it will be deprived of its vitality. As he says in one of his works, “what is missing from our civilization is not power, wealth, and knowledge, but spiritual vitality.” Throughout his extensive historical research The research led to the following conclusion: “A society that has lost its religion eventually becomes a society that has lost its culture.”
Having lived through a large part of the 20th century (1889-1970), Christopher Dawson witnessed the horrors of the First World War and then the Second World War. Like many of his contemporaries, he was deeply disturbed by these events and could see the seemingly unstoppable “progress” of humanity towards totalitarianism. However, unlike many others, he saw that this trend was not only characteristic of fascism and communism, but also of capitalism. He saw them as three forms of the same thing – materialistic tendencies towards the mechanization of human life and the complete subordination of the individual to the state and the economic process.
World religions are great spiritual paths that have led humanity through history from ancient times to modern times.
What can save us from this? According to Dawson, the best way to do so is by The ultimate battle against totalitarianism in any of its forms is “turning the human mind from the edge towards the center.” In other words, “only by rediscovering the spiritual world and rejuvenating human spiritual capacities is it possible to save humanity from self-destruction.”
In conclusion, Dawson’s view on the importance of religion in the history of culture may not be popular at the moment, given the prevailing worldview that religion belongs to the past while the future belongs to technology. But who knows what the situation will be like in twenty or a hundred years? While many have argued that faith is a force that hinders scientific progress, Dawson highlights the flaw in this argument, as science flourished during the early centuries of Islam and it was from that religious culture that it returned to the West. The probable etymological root of the word ‘religion’ – from religare meaning ‘to bind’ – shows us that it is not inherently a dividing force. Any human idea can cause divisions if people misuse it. If it is used It is correct that religion, like politics or science, can be a force that leads to unity and harmony.