Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson.

Mitchell, Philip Irving

Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson. By Bradley J. Birzer. Front Royal: Christendom Press, 2007. ISBN 0-931888-86-7. Pp. xvi + 316. $30.00.

Bradley J. Birzer's Sanctifying the World may currently be the best single volume on Catholic historian Christopher Dawson's life and worldview. It combines the biographical insight of Christina Scott's A Historian and His World (Sheed and Ward, 1984) with the critical and intellectual context offered by studies such as John J. Mulloy's Christianity and the Challenge of History (Christendom Press, 1995), the Wethersfield Institute's Christianity and Western Civilization: Christopher Dawson's Insight (Ignatius Press, 1995), and Adam Schwartz's chapter on Dawson in his The Third Spring (Catholic University of America Press, 2005). Because of Dawson's almost debilitating shyness and because for most of his career he wrote as an independent scholar, it has been tempting for some to treat Dawson as if he avoided intellectual and cultural conflict. Birzer takes pains to show that this was hardly the case. In particular, Birzer advances the available scholarship on Dawson by placing the historian and critic in two broad fields of disagreement: 1) the Catholic neo-Augustinian reaction to the more prevalent Catholic neo-Thomism, a reaction typically associated with the French ressourcement of Maurice Blondel, Henri de Lubac, and Charles Peguy; and 2) conservative social criticism opposed to the Bloomsbury Group with its radical sexual experimentation, as well as to a liberalism that assumed the purity of mass capitalism and of the planed society. As to the latter, Birzer refutes with sufficient evidence the tired charge that Dawson was a fascist.

Birzer organizes his volume around seven periods of Dawson's life, paying particular attention to the literary and ideological efforts in which Dawson took part: LePlay House and the "Order men," J.H. Oldham's Christian intellectual circle "The Moot" Catholic publisher Sheed and Ward, The Dublin Review, the Sword of the Spirit ecumenical movement, the 1947 and 1948 Gifford Lectures, and Dawson's late career at Harvard University. Interspersed with these periods, Birzer offers two chapter-length "interludes" that focus in more detail on Dawson's Augustinianism and on his view of the West and Christianity. The book concludes with reflection on Dawson's enduring influence.

Birzer shows that Dawson was a Christian of his times. He not only places Dawson's work within the twentieth-century European and American Catholic Renaissance, he also draws attention to Dawson's interaction with its Anglo-Catholic cousin, and as such, inadvertently shows how intertwined the various movements were. Birzer is careful to mention the historian's involvement with or influence on such literary and intellectual figures as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Ronald Knox, Eric Gill, David Jones, Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, Dom Bede Griffiths, Nicholas Berdyaev, Thomas Merton, Allen Tate, and Russell Kirk. He also points out the parallels between Dawson's work and that of theologians Romano Guardini and Hans Urs von Balthasar, as well as the early impact on Dawson by John Henry Newman, Paul Claudel, and Ernest Troeltsch.

As a result, Birzer establishes why critics seeking to understand such circles as that of the Inklings or especially that of the English Catholic and Anglo-Catholic converts need to know something of the work of Dawson. For example, Birzer draws attention to the likely influence of Dawson's 1929 Progress and Religion on Lewis's Abolition of Man, as well as the disagreement between Lewis's 1950 essay "Historicism" and Dawson's counter-essays "The Christian View of History" and "The Problem of Metahistory" He points out that Dawson and Tolkien were members of the same parish at Oxford, while Williams was a contributor to The Dublin Review under Dawson's editorship, though Williams had little respect for Dawson himself. Birzer studies Dawson's impact on the work of Eliot in some detail, too, noting how the poet in the 1920s was drawn to Dawson's writings. In 1929, Eliot invited Dawson to write on modern marriage and sexuality as a Catholic layman. The result was the 1929 Christianity and Sex published under Eliot's auspices at Faber and Faber. Dawson also played a role in the 1920s and 30s debate over the New Humanism, contributing to Eliot's Criterion, as well as writing Christianity and the New Age, which stood as the historian's chief critique of Irving Babbitt and of John Dewey. Birzer notes that even though Dawson played a minor role in the Moot, his work had obvious, sustained influence on Eliot's social criticism arising from involvement in that intellectual circle, particularly The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes toward the Definition of Culture. The same kinds of connections are explored by Birzer for many of the above figures.

Sanctifying the World is particularly good at overviewing Dawson's theological and ideological framework. At the heart of Dawson's Augustinian worldview, the book locates the sacramental union of the material and spiritual worlds. History cannot be understood without a sense of the platonic metaxy or middle ground that is humanity. For Dawson, religion and culture can never be separate. Culture arises from the cultus, which in turn arises out of a desire for the transcendent; therefore, no culture can be said to be truly secular. Indeed, the historian who only pays attention to the material and social elements of a culture is not telling the whole story. Dawson himself was best known for telling this story about medieval Christendom, advancing the thesis that the tension between a world-affirming and a world-denying faith gave a particular energy to European culture. However, Dawson insisted that "I am not bellocite, and my view of Western culture is quite different from 'Europe is the Faith'" (152). Birzer traces Dawson's metahistorical account of the West up through the Reformation and the Catholic Baroque, the later a period which Dawson loved and which served him as a reminder that Christendom and the medieval are not synonymous.

During and after the writing of the Gifford Lectures, Dawson became increasingly convinced that the key to cultural transformation would be found in education. Birzer is careful to connect Dawson's pedagogical program with the historian's Christian humanism. Dawson rejected not only the educational program of Dewey, but in turn the Great Books programs of Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins. He felt that such programs artificially abstracted important texts from their network of cultural contexts and debates. In their place, Dawson argued for a curriculum of Christian culture studies that included not only the theological and literary texts of the Christian West but also a study of the social, philosophical, and economic changes that accompanied them. Birzer is particularly useful here in lining out in some detail what the specifics of Dawson's program would have entailed had they been put into practice (235-39).

Readers of Sanctifying the World will find a well-written and interesting introduction to the still too-often overlooked Catholic historian and cultural critic. Birzer's study now serves as the beginning point for those interested in coming to terms with Christopher Dawson and his world.

Philip Irving Mitchell

Dallas Baptist University