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Works of Christopher Dawson
Medieval Essays
No one who would seek to think deeply about the Middle Ages and its role in the formation of the modern world may neglect this book. There is simply no other like it.
Medieval Essays is the mature reflection of one of the most gifted cultural historians of the twentieth century. Christopher Dawson commands the substance and the breadth of cultural history as few others ever have. He ranges from the fateful days of the late Roman Empire to the final destruction of Byzantium, from the rise of Islam to the flowering of western vernacular literature, from missions to China to the caliphs of Egypt, from the tragedy of Christian Armenia to complex religious realities of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Spain, from philosophy to literature, theology to natural science. The very breadth of his canvas makes the precision of his judgments and the vitality of his analyses all the more remarkable.
The Times Literary Supplement said of the original edition: "These essays, though concerned with topics derived from a remote past, are designed to display the relevance of those topics to the problems and controversies of the present." The judgment is yet truer today. Few, if any, studies of the Middle Ages are more significant for understanding the cultural dynamics of the twenty-first century. Fortunately, few are as readable, illuminating, or challenging.
- GenresHistoryPhilosophy
240 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 2002
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135 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Henry Dawson
152 books155 followersChristopher Henry Dawson (12 October 1889, Hay Castle – 25 May 1970, Budleigh Salterton) was a British independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and Christendom. Christopher H. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century".
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May 8, 2020
As the name implies this is a collection of 12 essays regarding the Middle Ages and thematically similar to The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Perhaps he describes it best in the ackowledgements:
Each one stands alone, despite some minor editing to make reference to past essays or future ones. But there is some thematic unity. Dawson's conversion to Catholicism as a 25 year old student/professor as Oxford clearly shapes his understanding of the Middle Ages and the goals of the aspirations of the Medieval period. The tensions inherent in the Middle Ages, almost as if teleologically, move towards that Medieval synthesis, only to break down. But there is much insight available with regards to Western civilisation, where it came from, what it is, where it is going and to where it should be aiming.
The essays/chapters are as follows:
I The Study of Christian Culture is a brief chapter on historiography and Dawson's view that "Christian Culture is the source of the actual sociological unity which we call Europe [and] If, as I believe, religion is the key of history and it is impossible to understand a culture unless we understand its religious roots" (p. 7)
II The Christian East and the Oriental Background of Christian Culture This chapter focuses on the oriental origins of Christianity, first in the form of Oriental orthodoxy, then Byzantine/Greek Orthodoxy. The desert fathers and monasticism, Greek philosophy and Oriental mysticism feature prominently.
III The Christian West and the Fall of the Empire This chapter is offered as an antedote to Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. One chracteristic trait of Dawson is that he spends the first half of a chapter signing the praises of a topic, then spends the second half disecting it. This chapter is the first of several to laud then condemn a topic: "There has probably never been an age in which the opportunities for living an enjoyable and civilized existence were so widely diffuse" (p. 34) followed by "The cosmopolitan urban culture of the later Empire broke down through its own inherent weaknesses... It was an elaborate superstructure built on relatively weak and unstable foundations." (p. 40) The particular weakness was the loss of (pagan/civic) faith and the descent into material hedonism.
IV The Sociological Foundations of Medieval Christendom Christianity's (especially the monastic ideal) provide a unifying factor beyond tribal allegiance. It is in the Middle Ages that the concept of Europe is forged.
V Church and State in the Middle Ages Here the inheritors of Rome, the Church and the Empire compete for claim to universal (or at least European) allegiance from the disparate Germanic tribes. The Investiture Controversy up to the Guelph and Ghibelline wars feature prominently but are reinterpreted "The struggle between the Papacy and the Empire was not a struggle between the Church and the secular State such as we know today. It was a conflict between two parallel forms of the same ideal... each of which was inspired by the same vision of an all-embracing Christian society" (p. 80)
VI The Theological Development of Medieval Culture This chapter, in twenty short pages, manages to describe the rise and fall of the Medieval synthesis. One is left with the impression of a very dynamic and open era as theology moves from the Church Fathers through Neo-Platonism, Latin Averroism, the Thomistic pinnacle and the nominalist decline. "This points to an aspect of medieval Western culture which is seldom sufficiently recognized- namely, its openmindedness and its readiness to incorporate foreign elements in its intellectual tradition." (p. 91)
VII The Moslem West and the Oriental Background of Later Medieval Culture Here again Professor Dawson spends the first half of the chapter exaggerating the positive contributions of Islam (is Spain now in the Orient?) and then pulls the rug out. Much like Rome before it, "Moslem Spain, in spite of its high civilization, was based on insecure social foundations...The later Khalifate was, in fact, a slave state." (p. 115) If one were to only reasd the first half of either chapter, one would assume that the golden age of Rome/Muslim Spain continues to today.
VIII The Scientific Development of Medieval Culture. Here Professor Dawson attempts to dispell the myths of stagnation in the sciences. But just like in the previous chapter (and chapter III) the first third of the chapter overemphasizes the dearth of western knowledge and the advantage of the Islamic world. And if one were to only read the first third of the chapter, one would be left in complete amazement that the first man on the moon was not Persian or Andalusian. I particularly found the summary of the evolution of science interesting: 1) "The Greek ideal of science was essentially intellectualist. It was the contemplation of reality as an intelligible order" (142) 2) "astronomy was inseparable from astrology, and his chemistry from alchemy. In a word, Arabic science was magic" (143) 3) "his experimental science is not magic, but applied science" (144).
IX The Literary Development of Medieval Culture and X The Feudal Society and the Christian Epic
These chapters are mostly about the chansons de geste and the tension between the semi-pagan feudal lords and the Christian superstructure of society and how, gradually, the barbarian tribal chiefs were converted into crusaders and finally Chivalrous knights "the dualism which underlay early medieval culture and how great a gap had to be bridged before the churchman and the feudal warrior could meet on common ground." (155) Again Dawson (over)emphasises the one aspect, only to correct it later "Indeed the ethos of early feudal society has, in some respects, more in common with that of the gangster and the gunman than with the later code of chivalry" (166) "But while the feudal vassal was thus the true descendant of the barbarian warrior, he was at the same time a Christian knight." (170)
XI The Origins of the Romantic Tradition By happenstance I read The Medieval Experience by Francis Oakley just before rereading Medieval Essays and both deal with the alleged Arabic influence on the Troubadours and both make strong assertions of cause and effect without much approaching even weak evidence. "But although the culture of the Troubadours had no essential connection with the Albigensian heresy, it also had no organic relation to Catholicism. Its roots were in another culture and another tradition..." (206)
If Islamic poetry (Hispano-Arabic and sometimes even Persian are all thrown into the mix rather randomly) impacted either the form or the content of the Romantic poetry of the Troubadours the evidence is thin. A medieval tapestry with ten red threads out of the thousands can hardly be called red, though the redness cannot be denied entirely. The overemphasis is in the end unconvincing, the Troubadours variety of poetry had a variety of imspirations and unique additions from each individual poet. Music and romantic love are too universal, the Medieval Troubadours need not look further than their own heart to develop such juvenile ideas as obsession, adulation and sycophantic fixation. And the geography and chronology don't lend to any easy causal relationship.
If I were an Arab poet, I would prefer to let the Provençals keep the Troubadour poetry anyways, especially the subject matter.
XII The Vision of Piers Plowman This is the final chapter, and a good place to end any discussion of the Middle Ages as William Langland's tome is very characteristic of the ethos of the waning of the Middle Ages. In an era dominated by plague, the 100 years war, the Avignon captivity and Great Schism, corruption, greed, nominalism, Langland's poetry offers an insight into the lives of those unfortunate enough to not share Chaucer's inner-circle. But Dawson's fawning over Langland, "Here is the Catholic Englishman par excellence, at once the most English of Catholic poets and teh most Catholic of English" (213) is excessive and betrays a level of Jansenism more than Catholicism. Dawson uses Wyclif as a foil to show Langland's genius, but in the end they are two sides of the same coin by my estimation.
Dawson concludes the chapter and book with this contradiction or paradox, "it is not surprising that we should find many points of resemblance between the writings of Wyclif and those of Langland. Both were children of the same age, who had grown up under the same spiritual influences and who reacted against the same abuses. Both, in spite of their hostility to the Friars, were strongly influenced by Franciscan ideas. And yet no two men could be more dissimilar in character and spirit. Wyclif, the famous doctor, with his ponderous learning and his bitter tongue, has all the faults and virtues of the Puritan reformer- a narrow mind, harsh, unbending, arrogant, austere, whihc, in spite of its genuine religious earnestness, lacks human warmth and spiritual sympathy. Langland, the poor clerk, had none of Wyclif's righteousness or his strength of purpose; he always pictures himself as a poor feckless creature...
The spiritual successors of Langland are to be found not in the Catholic Church, nor even in the Church of England, but among the Puritans and the rebels." (p.238-9)
Come again?
The present volume is founded upon my book Medieval Religion, which was published in 1934. It contains all the six essays which appeared in the earlier work, as well as four unpublished essays, Numbers I, II, XII and X. In addition to these I have included an essay on the decline of the Roman world which first appeared in A Monumnet to St. Augustine and one on Church and State in the Middle Ages which is reprinted by kind permission of Burns and Oates from a volume of lecture on Church and State delivered at Cambridge in 1935
Each one stands alone, despite some minor editing to make reference to past essays or future ones. But there is some thematic unity. Dawson's conversion to Catholicism as a 25 year old student/professor as Oxford clearly shapes his understanding of the Middle Ages and the goals of the aspirations of the Medieval period. The tensions inherent in the Middle Ages, almost as if teleologically, move towards that Medieval synthesis, only to break down. But there is much insight available with regards to Western civilisation, where it came from, what it is, where it is going and to where it should be aiming.
The essays/chapters are as follows:
I The Study of Christian Culture is a brief chapter on historiography and Dawson's view that "Christian Culture is the source of the actual sociological unity which we call Europe [and] If, as I believe, religion is the key of history and it is impossible to understand a culture unless we understand its religious roots" (p. 7)
II The Christian East and the Oriental Background of Christian Culture This chapter focuses on the oriental origins of Christianity, first in the form of Oriental orthodoxy, then Byzantine/Greek Orthodoxy. The desert fathers and monasticism, Greek philosophy and Oriental mysticism feature prominently.
III The Christian West and the Fall of the Empire This chapter is offered as an antedote to Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. One chracteristic trait of Dawson is that he spends the first half of a chapter signing the praises of a topic, then spends the second half disecting it. This chapter is the first of several to laud then condemn a topic: "There has probably never been an age in which the opportunities for living an enjoyable and civilized existence were so widely diffuse" (p. 34) followed by "The cosmopolitan urban culture of the later Empire broke down through its own inherent weaknesses... It was an elaborate superstructure built on relatively weak and unstable foundations." (p. 40) The particular weakness was the loss of (pagan/civic) faith and the descent into material hedonism.
IV The Sociological Foundations of Medieval Christendom Christianity's (especially the monastic ideal) provide a unifying factor beyond tribal allegiance. It is in the Middle Ages that the concept of Europe is forged.
V Church and State in the Middle Ages Here the inheritors of Rome, the Church and the Empire compete for claim to universal (or at least European) allegiance from the disparate Germanic tribes. The Investiture Controversy up to the Guelph and Ghibelline wars feature prominently but are reinterpreted "The struggle between the Papacy and the Empire was not a struggle between the Church and the secular State such as we know today. It was a conflict between two parallel forms of the same ideal... each of which was inspired by the same vision of an all-embracing Christian society" (p. 80)
VI The Theological Development of Medieval Culture This chapter, in twenty short pages, manages to describe the rise and fall of the Medieval synthesis. One is left with the impression of a very dynamic and open era as theology moves from the Church Fathers through Neo-Platonism, Latin Averroism, the Thomistic pinnacle and the nominalist decline. "This points to an aspect of medieval Western culture which is seldom sufficiently recognized- namely, its openmindedness and its readiness to incorporate foreign elements in its intellectual tradition." (p. 91)
VII The Moslem West and the Oriental Background of Later Medieval Culture Here again Professor Dawson spends the first half of the chapter exaggerating the positive contributions of Islam (is Spain now in the Orient?) and then pulls the rug out. Much like Rome before it, "Moslem Spain, in spite of its high civilization, was based on insecure social foundations...The later Khalifate was, in fact, a slave state." (p. 115) If one were to only reasd the first half of either chapter, one would assume that the golden age of Rome/Muslim Spain continues to today.
VIII The Scientific Development of Medieval Culture. Here Professor Dawson attempts to dispell the myths of stagnation in the sciences. But just like in the previous chapter (and chapter III) the first third of the chapter overemphasizes the dearth of western knowledge and the advantage of the Islamic world. And if one were to only read the first third of the chapter, one would be left in complete amazement that the first man on the moon was not Persian or Andalusian. I particularly found the summary of the evolution of science interesting: 1) "The Greek ideal of science was essentially intellectualist. It was the contemplation of reality as an intelligible order" (142) 2) "astronomy was inseparable from astrology, and his chemistry from alchemy. In a word, Arabic science was magic" (143) 3) "his experimental science is not magic, but applied science" (144).
IX The Literary Development of Medieval Culture and X The Feudal Society and the Christian Epic
These chapters are mostly about the chansons de geste and the tension between the semi-pagan feudal lords and the Christian superstructure of society and how, gradually, the barbarian tribal chiefs were converted into crusaders and finally Chivalrous knights "the dualism which underlay early medieval culture and how great a gap had to be bridged before the churchman and the feudal warrior could meet on common ground." (155) Again Dawson (over)emphasises the one aspect, only to correct it later "Indeed the ethos of early feudal society has, in some respects, more in common with that of the gangster and the gunman than with the later code of chivalry" (166) "But while the feudal vassal was thus the true descendant of the barbarian warrior, he was at the same time a Christian knight." (170)
XI The Origins of the Romantic Tradition By happenstance I read The Medieval Experience by Francis Oakley just before rereading Medieval Essays and both deal with the alleged Arabic influence on the Troubadours and both make strong assertions of cause and effect without much approaching even weak evidence. "But although the culture of the Troubadours had no essential connection with the Albigensian heresy, it also had no organic relation to Catholicism. Its roots were in another culture and another tradition..." (206)
If Islamic poetry (Hispano-Arabic and sometimes even Persian are all thrown into the mix rather randomly) impacted either the form or the content of the Romantic poetry of the Troubadours the evidence is thin. A medieval tapestry with ten red threads out of the thousands can hardly be called red, though the redness cannot be denied entirely. The overemphasis is in the end unconvincing, the Troubadours variety of poetry had a variety of imspirations and unique additions from each individual poet. Music and romantic love are too universal, the Medieval Troubadours need not look further than their own heart to develop such juvenile ideas as obsession, adulation and sycophantic fixation. And the geography and chronology don't lend to any easy causal relationship.
If I were an Arab poet, I would prefer to let the Provençals keep the Troubadour poetry anyways, especially the subject matter.
XII The Vision of Piers Plowman This is the final chapter, and a good place to end any discussion of the Middle Ages as William Langland's tome is very characteristic of the ethos of the waning of the Middle Ages. In an era dominated by plague, the 100 years war, the Avignon captivity and Great Schism, corruption, greed, nominalism, Langland's poetry offers an insight into the lives of those unfortunate enough to not share Chaucer's inner-circle. But Dawson's fawning over Langland, "Here is the Catholic Englishman par excellence, at once the most English of Catholic poets and teh most Catholic of English" (213) is excessive and betrays a level of Jansenism more than Catholicism. Dawson uses Wyclif as a foil to show Langland's genius, but in the end they are two sides of the same coin by my estimation.
Dawson concludes the chapter and book with this contradiction or paradox, "it is not surprising that we should find many points of resemblance between the writings of Wyclif and those of Langland. Both were children of the same age, who had grown up under the same spiritual influences and who reacted against the same abuses. Both, in spite of their hostility to the Friars, were strongly influenced by Franciscan ideas. And yet no two men could be more dissimilar in character and spirit. Wyclif, the famous doctor, with his ponderous learning and his bitter tongue, has all the faults and virtues of the Puritan reformer- a narrow mind, harsh, unbending, arrogant, austere, whihc, in spite of its genuine religious earnestness, lacks human warmth and spiritual sympathy. Langland, the poor clerk, had none of Wyclif's righteousness or his strength of purpose; he always pictures himself as a poor feckless creature...
The spiritual successors of Langland are to be found not in the Catholic Church, nor even in the Church of England, but among the Puritans and the rebels." (p.238-9)
Come again?
October 1, 2019
Dawson loves the Middle Ages, and it shows in his delight in that period of history. Originally published in 1934, and supplemented in 1954, Dawson helped change the general attitude toward the “Dark Ages.” He champions the high culture and scientific advancement of the period, with its contributions from the Middle East and Europe. Overall, this is a good text for studying medieval culture and religion.
His love of medievalism is clearest in this summation of European culture in the 1200s:
“...there has never been an age in which Christianity attained so complete a cultural expression as in the thirteenth century. Europe has seen no greater Christian hero than St. Francis, no greater Christian philosopher than St. Thomas, no greater Christian poet than Dante, perhaps even no greater Christian ruler than St. Louis.” (158-159)
His love of medievalism is clearest in this summation of European culture in the 1200s:
“...there has never been an age in which Christianity attained so complete a cultural expression as in the thirteenth century. Europe has seen no greater Christian hero than St. Francis, no greater Christian philosopher than St. Thomas, no greater Christian poet than Dante, perhaps even no greater Christian ruler than St. Louis.” (158-159)
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