An Elusive Synthesis

On Christopher Dawson's "Religion and Culture"

As promised in the introduction, the A-track will also feature periodic book reviews. Let this be the first!

I’ve quoted several times from Christopher Dawson’s 1947 Gifford Lectures (published in 1948 as Religion and Culture),¹ which gave me the initial nudge toward the ideas about ‘mental metabolism’ that took shape in the first and second A-track entries.

But why Religion and Culture? Why should we care about Christopher Dawson at all?

In order to understand that, we need first to look at…

The Who and When of Christopher Dawson

Born in 1889 in a devout Anglo-Catholic family, Dawson converted to Catholicism in 1909 while studying history at Trinity College in Oxford, and pursued a career as an independent scholar. By the 1930s, he had become quite an established historian of culture, reportedly influencing both T.S. Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien.

On the surface, he was an Englishman who read and criticized old books for other Englishmen to admire: that may seem a rather workaday fact for the 1930s. But surfaces can be misleading. The early 20th century was not a good time to be Catholic and cozy with comparative religion. To pursue the career he did, Dawson needed to have some guts. 

The late 19th century saw the spread of what the Germans called (rather smugly) “higher criticism,” but which came to be known more popularly as “historical criticism.” It combined archaeology, anthropology, and the budding art of textual criticism to interpret ancient texts — in particular, the Bible. But since historical criticism was born in Germany (which was still predominantly Protestant), Church authorities were wary about Catholic scholars adopting it wholesale. Such concerns underlay Leo XIII’s 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus, for instance, which set strict limits governing which elements of historical criticism Catholic Biblical scholars could (though more often couldn’t) use. 

Unfortunately, this defensiveness didn’t fix the mess in Biblical scholarship or in its tangential disciplines. “The difficulties raised by historical criticism,” writes Rev. Denis Farkasfalvy, O. Cist., “kept on multiplying until they finally resulted in a broad and general crisis, later called by the collective name ‘modernism’ that was painful and often confusing for modern Catholic biblical scholarship.” (Inspiration & Interpretation: A Theological Introduction to Scripture, p. 165).² The crisis peaked in the early 1910s and witnessed the apostasy of several major Catholic scholars, such as Alfred Loisy, although others, like Rev. Marie-Joseph Lagrange, O.P., remained faithful to the Church. It was the faithful scholars who eventually carried the day. 

During the decades that followed the initial period of modernism, we can observe a slow transition in Catholic theology from a defensive style of apologetics to a more open and positive approach that welcomed a variety of new trends in modern thought. Lagrange’s new style of scholarship received a major boost from the [1943] encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu by Pius XII, a document which, soon after its publication, was hailed as a long-awaited recognition and promotion of modern Catholic biblical scholarship. (ibid, p. 166)

Recall that Dawson converted to Catholicism as an adult in 1909, at the height of the modernist controversy. He therefore came of age as a Catholic scholar with a penchant for archaeology and comparative religion decades before the thaw affirmed in Divino Afflante Spiritu. To have done so while remaining faithful to the Church couldn’t have been easy; it suggests a man with deep faith, an open mind, and a pliable heart. 

Dawson’s Project in Religion and Culture

Understanding this background helps us appreciate Dawson’s subtle vision, which makes Religion and Culture essential reading. He attempts to find a middle way between secular scholarship, on the one hand, which treats the spectacle of world religions as “a museum of dead cults and anthropological curiosities” (RC, p. 18), and the Magisterial attitude that considers the study of comparative religions a Trojan horse for religious indifferentism (cf. Pascendi, 7). How does he do it?

At least in the Gifford Lectures, Dawson is at an advantage. “The terms of the Gifford foundation,” he writes, “presuppose the existence of a science of Natural Theology which is competent to study the nature of the Divine Being and the relations of man and the universe to Him.” (Religion and Culture, p. 3) Since Pascendi regards the rejection of “natural theology” as a first principle of modernism, Dawson has already begun his study of the history of religions on the right foot.

Indeed, he spends the entire first lecture narrating the history of natural theology in the West and its decline in the aftermath of the Reformation, which ruptured the harmony between the lived religious experience of believers and the natural theology which grew out of that experience, binding heart to mind and mind to heart. This loss of a shared religious experience was compounded by the scandal of the Thirty Years’ War and its attendant conflicts, which left many wondering whether the world might be better off without traditional religion at all. 

But as Dawson notes, the initial Enlightened response wasn’t to abolish religion altogether. Despite the variety of their metaphysical systems, most Enlightened thinkers — Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and the lot — promoted a natural religion of the mind, a prelude to Kant’s “religion within the bounds of bare reason.” One might say that they resurrected the commonplaces of natural theology, but uprooted would be a better word. These thinkers, suggests Dawson, removed the theological edifice from its foundations on the rock of direct religious experience. In doing so, they left it anemic, powerless to confront the alternative ideologies which erupted on the Western stage during the latter 18th century. 

As a result of this rupture and the subsequent parallel development of comparative religious studies from secular, Enlightened principles, Dawson believes that Western civilization has soundly severed its mind from its heart. He echoes William James and Carl Jung both in characterizing this division and regarding it as the root of an unprecedented civilizational crisis: 

On the one side we have a world which is full of religious richness and depth but incapable of rational demonstration. On the other, an intelligible order without spiritual depth or direct contact with religious truth. No doubt it is possible, as history has shown, to construct proofs of religion and of the existence of God which are valid even within this rational order. But the life of these constructions is derived from the other order. In themselves they are essentially arid and if one may use the word, heartless, so that the religious man who is confronted with them will always reply with Pascal ‘Not the god of the philosophers and the scientists, but the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob — Deum meum et Deum vestrum’. The problem of religious thinkers throughout the ages has been to build a bridge between these two worlds. (ibid, p. 20)

As a historian of culture, however, Dawson aims not to build a new bridge, but to “show how religion has fulfilled this task: how the vital relation has been maintained between the depths of the Unconscious and the surface of the social order: how religion asserts its internal spiritual autonomy and how it is molded and conditioned by the influences of environment and social function.” (ibid, p. 22) He dedicates the remainder of Religion and Culture to this project.

Having already shown that the religious impulse is seated deep within the human psyche, Dawson moves swiftly from defining culture (“a way of life which is based on a common tradition and characterized by a common environment”, ibid, p. 47) to showing that every culture is necessarily religious in nature. 

It is clear that a common way of life involves a common view of life, common standards of behavior, and common standards of value, and consequently a culture is a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and common ways of thought far more than to any uniformity of physical type. … From the beginning the social way of life which is culture has been deliberately ordered and directed in accordance with the higher laws of life which are religion. (ibid, pp. 48-49) 

Dawson spends the next six lectures considering this relationship from both sides. From the cultural side, he looks at the “social organs” through which the religious impulse has shaped concrete cultures (prophecy, priesthood, and kingship), while from the religious side, he looks at the multiple “orders” (natural, human, and divine) which the world religions have sought to harmonize in various syntheses with culture. In the final lecture, he revisits the West’s problematic condition in light of his historical survey, pondering how we could reintegrate the Western mind and heart in a new synthesis of religion and culture which accommodates not only the modern scientific worldview but the existence of rival religions… 

…and he does it all in less than 300 pages!

The Good…

At first blush, Dawson’s thesis seems fairly common, at least in conservative Catholic circles: since religion is the key to history and the West abandoned religion, it’s no wonder we’re facing world-historical calamities, yada yada yada. When it comes from the average after-Mass or dinner party interlocutor, that thesis is almost always supported by cheap causes.

What makes Religion and Culture such a rewarding investment of time and energy, by contrast, is the combination of Dawson’s lucid style with his extensive erudition.³ Together, these give renewed force to cliched positions I’d grown accustomed to ignore. 

For instance, some people seem hell-bent on reconceiving the cosmos as a one vast liturgical celebration. Knowing the stated (and inflexible) liturgical preferences of the folks who push this interpretation, I can’t help but doubt that they’ve given the alternative positions sufficient attention. 

But then Dawson takes your hand and whisks you away to the banks of the Indus to consider the religious culture of India,⁴ in which priesthood has played such an integral role not just in Hindu piety, but in the emergence of the only serious rival to Western metaphysics. 

Nowhere is the conception of the priest as master of the sacrifice worked out with such elaboration of detail and with such ingenuity of speculative theory. … From the primitive conception of the magical potency of the sacred formula there develops the speculative theory of the creative power of the divine word — the Brahman; until finally we reach the conscious philosophical identification of the enlightened mind, with the Atman — the self — with Brahman, the ultimate basis of all things and the sole transcendent supersubstantial Reality. Now the whole of this development from beginning to end is dominated by the theory of the sacrifice. (ibid, p. 92)

Dawson proceeds carefully through Vedic literature, from the the Rig Veda and Brahmanas up into the mystical Upanishads, demonstrating how “the ritual science of the priesthood gave birth to a true natural theology, for the first time in world history.” (ibid, p. 96) That philosophical metaphysics could owe such a debt to the arcane world of ritual sacrifice is a hard pill for me to swallow, but Dawson makes his case well.

This is just one example of the erudition which saturates Religion and Culture and which drove me daily to Wikipedia and Google. Overall, it leavens Dawson’s thinking, making him more circumspect than his countryman who rashly equated Europe with the faith and the faith with Europe. “The identification of religion with the particular cultural synthesis which has been achieved at a definite point of time and space by the action of historical forces is fatal to the universal character of religious truth,” he writes. “It is indeed a kind of idolatry — the substitution of an image made by man for the eternal transcendent reality.” (ibid, p. 206)

But Dawson isn’t naive about the prospects of religion in a multicultural world. He knows that “faith itself is cultural. It does not exist in a naked state, as sheer religion. Simply by telling man who he is and how he should go about being human, faith is creating culture and is culture.” (Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, p. 67)⁵ Recognizing both that religion necessarily involves culture, and that we tend too easily to identify religion with its variable cultural expressions, Dawson concludes by posing what seems to me an absolutely essential question: 

How is the profound primitive intuition of the dependence of human life on the divine law to be separated from the idolatrous identification of God’s law with the temporal conditions of a particular age and society, without being also separated from its vital connection with man’s earthly, bodily existence and transferred to a plane of inhuman abstraction? (Religion and Culture, p. 208)

If we can no longer live in ignorant bliss of competing routes to revelation and salvation, but are no less driven by the charm of reason and the bitterness of existence to seek understanding and liberation, what are we to do? Is there any hope for a global synthesis of religion and culture? Dawson offers no easy answers to these questions. At most, he sketches the fundamental conditions required for such a synthesis.

On the one hand, the assertion of the absolute transcendental spiritual claims of religion must not be interpreted as a denial of the limited, historically conditioned and temporal values of culture, and on the other the forms of a particular culture, even when they are inspired or consecrated by a religious ideal, must not be regarded as possessing universal validity. (ibid, pp. 208-209)

But he is quick to add that we shouldn’t expect any extant religions, past or present, to accommodate this condition without resistance.

Apart from the cultures which are idolatrous in the sense that they identified their own forms with the divine image, there are still more which attribute to their way of life and their social tradition a universal moral or spiritual validity, so that in practice they are identified with the divine order and the moral law. The result is that every conflict of cultures is seen as a conflict of different spiritual principles, in other words a conflict of religions. (ibid, p. 209)

With Israel currently mired in yet another conflict with the Arab world and Russian Orthodox bishops justifying the invasion of Ukraine as a kind of neo-crusade, it’s hard not to appreciate Dawson’s prescience.⁶

Religion and Culture left me with a deeper sense of the concrete forms that culture has taken, an achievement that will cast a long shadow on my own developing philosophy of culture. But Dawson also gave me a new and, I think, deeper appreciation for the state of the modern West. Rather than leaving me hopeless, he showed me what questions need to be asked and answered if the West is to thrive again. In this respect, I owe as much to Religion and Culture as to Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. 

…the Ambiguous…

But as with Popper, I have a few questions about Dawson’s project and process. 

Chiefly, I wonder what Dawson thinks “natural theology” actually means. Early on, he says it “is nothing more or less than the philosophic or scientific study of religious truth.” (ibid, p. 44) Really? Is that so? What is “religious truth?”

Dawson notes that “religion has its origins in the depths of the soul and it can be understood only by those who are prepared to take the plunge.” (ibid, p. 33) Following James, Jung, and others, Dawson sees religious experience as a matter of contemplative intuition, but he is quick to note that conflating the distinction between reason and intuition with that between reason and faith is premature.

The difference between the discursive reason and the intuition of the contemplative is not the same as the difference between the natural and the supernatural (in the technical, theological sense of the words) — between reason and faith; it is simply a question of the different levels of consciousness which are equally parts of human nature. … The possibility of Natural Theology and indeed of any genuine theology depends on our view of the nature of these deeper levels of consciousness. (ibid, pp. 33-34)

I certainly think there’s more depth to human consciousness than scientific positivism allows, and that religion lives no less in those depths than in the rites and rules we usually associate with it  — that’s my chief reason for preferring Jung to Freud, for instance. But I can’t help feeling that Dawson’s approach risks conflating natural theology with depth psychology. Traditionally, the phrase ‘natural theology’ has meant something closer to substance metaphysics. Plumbing the depths of the soul certainly provides one entrance to metaphysics, but it’s not the only route, nor is it the destination. 

That’s not to say that there aren’t profound questions raised by depth psychology which demand metaphysical and theological answers. I had already been toying with reading the works of Rev. Victor White, O.P., a Dominican theologian and close friend of none other than Carl Jung. Rather than dismiss Dawson’s project, therefore, I think I’ll do more than toy with the idea and actually give them a look. 

…the Bad

Not all of Dawson’s questionable positions awoke my piety. He makes quite the compelling case that the West needs to synthesize religion and culture, but he doesn’t see much room for the contributions of either politics or economics in realizing that synthesis. 

Now, writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Dawson might be forgiven for a little skepticism about political solutions to cultural problems. But I’m much less willing to forgive his neglect of economics, especially since he studied it during his time at Oxford. 

He consistently fails to give it attention, and when he does he gives it short shrift. “Conquerors, the prospectors and the traders inevitably tend to limit their intercourse to the more superficial and external aspects of social life. It is only when the religions of different cultures come into contact with one another, either by syncretism or missionary activity, that real contact is made with the spirit of the alien culture.” (ibid, p. 104; emphasis mine) Maybe Dawson brings certain negative assumptions about the character of merchants and traders, but whatever his impression, the facts belie his contention. 

I had the pleasure of visiting the St. Louis Art Museum last year for a traveling exhibit called Global Threads: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz. I was stunned to discover that Indian textile craftsmen and merchants engaged for centuries, before and after the coming of Christianity, in a bustling trade that brought them into contact not only with the rich and famous, but with the pious, of foreign lands. 

I saw copes made in India by Hindu craftsmen which were covered in filigreed excerpts from Greek and Cyrillic translations of the Bible; I saw both Zen and Southeast Asian Buddhist devotional tapestries which featured images of the Buddha fine-tuned to match local preferences hung next to Muslim tapestries that featured no human figures whatsoever — but did feature Arabic calligraphy! Wherever I looked, I saw how economic interests fuel cultural fusion. Nothing about those creative marvels struck me as superficial: to be vendible, these products needed to appeal to their purchasers’ piety. 

Bottom Line

Despite its ambiguities and defects, I found Religion and Culture eminently worth reading. If you are interested in the philosophy of culture and the history of world religions, I can’t recommend it enough. 

(Though if you keep reading Theories of Everything, you might not need to read the book at all. Dawson has many appearances yet to make in these “pages”!)

1. I read a first edition of Religion and Culture published by Sheed & Ward, but the most readily available edition on Amazon is a 2013 reprint from The Catholic University of America Press. Forgive the resulting disparity between page numbers.

2. St. Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis was targeting real and pernicious influences, no doubt. But the document treats these several influences as various instances of a single, putatively unified body of doctrine which it names “modernism.” Doing so gives the document a feverish, “stop the wily conspirators before it’s too late” tone, redolent of white Americans’ response to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For example, “since the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) employ a very clever artifice, namely, to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement into one whole, scattered and disjointed one from another, so as to appear to be in doubt and uncertainty, while they are in reality firm and steadfast, it will be of advantage, Venerable Brethren, to bring their teachings together here into one group, and to point out the connexion between them, and thus to pass to an examination of the sources of the errors, and to prescribe remedies for averting the evil.” (Pascendi, 4, emphasis mine) 

If it’s not clear, I am anything but a fan of the “Pian monolith” that dominated the Church from the pontificates of Bl. Pius IX through Pius XI. I don’t deny that threats to the integrity of the faith were real, but I’m convinced that the aggressively hierarchical, virtually authoritarian mode of government which the popes adopted to deal with those threats was largely counterproductive. Publicly demonizing not just openly heretical but even merely questionable opinions in a polity like the Church does nothing to dissuade their adherents, it merely drives them into the shadows of dissimulation and doubletalk — which, perversely, comes to justify the systemic conditions which cast those shadows in the first place. The Church at this time was like Ourorobos mistaking its tail for a predator.

3. Not only does Dawson demonstrate mastery of the Western tradition, he cites classic texts from the Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist traditions with facility and historical sensitivity, and is no less at home with anthropological literature about primitive cultures in Africa and the Americas.

4. One of the intriguing features of Religion and Culture is that, despite Dawson’s Catholicism, Christianity and Judaism are conspicuously absent from his examples. Since Dawson dedicated his 1948 Gifford Lectures to the religious roots of the West (published in 1950 as Religion and the Rise of Western Culture), I suspect that he felt the first set of lectures should address non-Western religions.

5. You know, there were several moments while reading Religion and Culture where I thought I could be reading Ratzinger instead of Dawson.

6. Draw two lines of longitude from the north pole, one through the Carpathian and the other through the Ural mountains: you have just enclosed five currently raging land wars, all driven by ethnic and socio-religious conflicts spanning generations.