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Jacob D. Rhein

How Dawson ReadTheCity of God

To examine how the twentieth-centuryEnglish historian Chris-

topher Dawson read St. AugustinesCity of Godbrings to the fore-

ground the problem of method, since one must ask whether any

apparent influences came directly from The City of Godor were de-

rived from other sources. Augustine and Dawson had several texts

in commonthe letters of St. Paul, for instanceand it is likely

that Dawson took ideas from many scholars who were influenced

by Augustine. Nevertheless, what I intend to do in this article is to

consider the ways in which Dawson developed the themes treated

in City of God to illuminate modern issues while trying to indicate

evidence of direct influence where possible. As Dawsons biographer

Bradley Birzer writes, Dawson admitted that nearly all of his ideas

were an attempt to reinterpret and reapply the Augustinian theory

of history.1And in his private notes Dawson calls TheCity of God

the urgent work of the greatest father on the most important sub-

ject.2Knowing how Dawson read that work is therefore central to

grasping the significance of his own writings.

The basis for this article will be two of Dawsons essays, The Dy-ing World and The City of God, published together as St. Augus-

tine and His Age in Dawsons coauthoredMonument to St. Augustine


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how dawson read the city of god 37

(1931). Using these two essays as an outline, this article will com-

prise, first, a comparison of Augustines view of his age with Daw-

sons perspective on the twentieth century presented in Progress andReligion (1929); and second, a comparison of Augustines response to

the sack of Rome in theCity of Godwith Dawsons response to World

Wars I and II inJudgment of the Nations(1943). In this second section,

I will refer to Dawsons own copies of theCity of God, which contain

his original markings and annotations. Dawson found in theCity of

Goda vision of history as the birthing process of a universal spiritual

society that transcends time and that is created by charity, whichalone unites humanitys religious and social instincts.

I. Augustines Age: The Dying World

Augustines writing of The City of God was prompted by the sack

of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410a.d.But this particular

catastrophe was only one episode in a collapse of Roman civilizationspanning several centuries in both directions. That collapse was in

part due to economics. As Dawson points out in Progress and Religion,

Rome was an agrarian state from the beginning: The foundation of

her power and of her very existence was the peasant-soldier citizen.3

While possessing no higher culture of their own, these peasant-

soldiers adopted the Greek ideal ofpaideia, which sought to produce

a higher type of man through a process of intellectual and moral

education.4And, although Rome had only negligible contributions

to make to the content of Greek thought, holding itself slightly aloof

from the speculative character of Greek philosophy, it far surpassed

the Greek mind in its ability to organize the materials of the world

to embody its cultural principles. The Roman attitude is summed up

nicely by Quintilian: if the Greeks bear away the palm for moral

precepts, Rome can produce more striking examples of moral

performance.5 Indeed, the great agrarian republic produced someoutstanding cases of classical pagan virtue. One thinks for example of

Marcus Regulus, of whom Augustine writes in theCity of Godthat he


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was so conscientious in his worship of the gods that he kept his vow

to return to captivity in Carthage where he was put to a torturous

death.6But with the conquest of the Mediterranean, writes Dawson,

all this was changed.7At the end of the Punic Wars and the destruc-

tion of the republics habitual enemy, Carthage, Rome found itself

master of the whole of the Mediterranean, and the rural Latin so-

ciety was transformed into an Empire. A progressive degeneration

and transformation of the characteristic Roman types took place.8

This was due largely to the movement of Roman society from ruralto urban forms and to the influence of oriental luxuryworse than

any enemy[that] crept into Rome for the first time.9A citizen of

Imperial Rome would have enjoyed an extraordinarily comfortable

life: attending public baths and gymnasiums, conversing in the forum

and in public libraries, eating grain provided by state taxation, and

engaging in ceremonial festivals in honor of the gods.10But what this

meant for the conquered empire was that it was required to sup-port an entire city living beyond its means. Despite its infrastructural

glory, the city of Rome was for the most part . . . entirely unproduc-

tive, an enormous leech on the economy of the agrarian peoples it

ruled.11As Dawson writes,

It was literally Rome that killed Rome.That great cosmopolitan

city of gold and marble, the successor of Alexandria and

Antioch, had nothing in common with the old capital of therural Latin state. It served no social function, it was an end

in itself, and its population drawn from every nation under

heaven existed mainly to draw their Government doles, and

to attend the free spectacles with which the Government

provided them. It was a vast, useless burden on the back of

the empire which broke at last under the increasing strain.12

Centuries before Augustine, classical civilization had lost its roots inthe human soil and was growing more and more empty and sterile.13

The situation was unsustainable.


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But in addition to economic factorsand both Dawson and Au-

gustine would say, more important than economic factorsRoman

society collapsed because of the burnout of its spiritual and moralcapital. In the first several books of theCity of God,Augustine careful-

ly traces this moral collapse through the writings of Roman histori-

ans who mourned the loss of the earthy Romanpietas after the end of

the Punic Wars: the Roman commonwealth was so overwhelmed by

a host of evils arising from the prosperity and security of her affairs

that the sudden overthrow of Carthage is seen to have harmed Rome

more than did its prolonged enmity.14

Indeed, Cicero contends . . .that in his day [the commonwealth] perished entirely, and nothing at

all remained of [it].15Rome did not have the moral or spiritual in-

tegrity to adapt to the increase of wealth and power, and the virtuous

pagan culture was overwhelmed by the cult of material pleasure and

success.16As Dawson writes, all the vast development of material

prosperity and external display [of Rome] had no spiritual purpose

behind it. Its ultimate end was the satisfaction of corporate selfish-ness.17Augustine corroborates Dawsons verdict:

Only let it stand, [the Romans] say; only let it flourish with

abundant treasures, glorious in victory orwhich is better

secure in peace, and what do we care? . . . Let the poor serve

the rich because of their abundance, and let them enjoy under

their patronage a senseless idleness; and let the rich abuse

the poor as their clients and the appendages of their pride.. . . Let nothing unpleasant be required; let no impurity be

forbidden; let kings care not how good their subjects are, but

how docile.18

Perhaps the most significant result of this moral failure within

Roman civilization was the general withdrawal from social life by its

citizens. This was expressed not only in the secular entertainment

and idleness already mentioned, but also in mysticism and asceticismthroughout the subject territories. Dawson notes that the popular

religious movements of the time were marked by the desire to find


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spiritual life outside the life of the city and of society in an esoteric

ideal of individual salvation. . . . The reigning culture had become

almost completely secularized, and the religious and the social in-stincts were becoming opposed to one another, with disastrous im-

plications for the culture.19He continues:

The Roman Empire, and the Hellenistic civilization of which

it was the vehicle, became separated in this way for any living

religious basis . . . and thereby, in spite of its high material and

intellectual culture, the dominant civilization became hateful

in the eyes of the subject Oriental world. Rome was to themnot the ideal world-city of Virgils dream, but the incarnation

of all that was anti-spiritual, Babylon the great, the mother of

Abominations, who bewitched and enslaved all the peoples

of the earth, and on whom at last the slaughter of the saints

and the oppression of the poor would be terribly avenged.20

Christians certainly had a share of the mystical-ascetic impulse,

but Nicene Christianity remained, along with Judaism, the only re-

ligion that managed to avoid the trend of pursuing individual salva-

tion and abandoning social life. Instead of forsaking the public world

for the sake of a private Nirvana, Christians created in the midst of

the collapsing secular civilization a new spiritual society, populated

especially by the poor, and pastored by bishops such as Sts. Ambrose

and Augustine, who preserved in their own persons the best of clas-

sical culture, blending and integrating it with the faith.21This new

society, the Christian Church, was the one living creative force in

the social and spiritual life of the age and to a great extent an al-

ternative and appealing substitute for the communal life of the city-

state.22Thus, writes Dawson, the Church stands out in this dark

age as the one hope of humanity both spiritually and materially. It

saved the individual from being entirely crushed under the pressure

of the servile state and it opened to him a new world of social andspiritual activity in which the free personality had room to develop

itself.23This was true to such an extent that by Augustines day, The


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vital centre of the society of the future was to be found, not in the

city-state, but in the Christian ecclesia.24

Constantine was at least dimly aware of this horizon, as was Theo-dosius who in 380a.d.made Christianity the official religion of the

Roman Empire and stopped all state support for the former pagan

religionthe culmination of a series of religious reforms in which

Christianity came to acquire civil recognition. But the legislation of

Christianity was not enough to stave off the collapse of the empire.

If Christianity was a revolution in religious and cultural terms, the

revolution did not extend to institutions.25

And it seems from Au-gustines writings that even the Roman society of his day, though

Christianized, [was] not one where Christian values prevail[ed].26

The building of a new civilization on Christian principles would be

the task of the next eight centuries. And, in the decades immediately

following Theodosiuss rule, Rome continued to slump into its de-

cline while Christianity became the scapegoat for the social ills that

plagued the empire. The sack of Rome by the Visigoths was thus theedge of a storm that was to last, not for decades, but for genera-

tions, until the very memory of peace was gone. It was no ordinary

political catastrophe, but a day of the Lord such as the Hebrew

prophets describe, a judgement of the nations in which a whole civi-

lization and social order which had failed to justify their existence

were rooted up and thrown into the fire.27

II. Dawsons Age: Progress and Religion

Dawsons own time had profound parallels to the age of Augustine.

He too was living at a time when the dominant civilization was

undergoing what seemed to be the violent throes of death: most

significantly exhibited by the two World Wars, during the latter of

which Dawson brought forth much of his best historical work. While

the nations of Europe soaked each other in blood, Dawson wouldhave seemed, as Augustine must have seemed in his own day, to be

engaging in a futile task, much like the activity of an ant which works


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both acquired wealth and power through the endeavor.32So on the

whole the economic transformation of capitalist Europe was quite

similar to that of imperial Rome: modern Europe and Americaappear as the heirs and continuators of the old Roman tradition of

world pacification and organization on a far wider stage than that of

the Mediterranean world.33

The cultural result was similar, too. Dawson speculated in 1929

that Europe had entered upon a new phase of culture . . . in which

the most amazing perfection of scientific technique [was] being de-

voted to purely ephemeral objects, without any consideration oftheir ultimate justification. It seems, he writes, that a new society

[has been] arising which will acknowledge no hierarchy of values, no

intellectual authority, and no social or religious tradition, but which

will live for the moment in a chaos of pure sensation.34Dawson

connected this prediction of secular social decay to its ancient coun-

terpart . . . the great cities of the Roman Empire, which lived for the

games of the amphitheater and the circus.

35

But while the material aspects and cultural effects of the two pe-

riods were comparable, the spiritual dynamics were markedly differ-

ent. The situation that Christians have to face to-day [sic], Dawson

wrote in 1943, has more in common with that described by the

author of the Apocalypse, than with the age of St. Augustine.36And

the reason for this is simple: the collapse of ancient Rome was the

collapse of a pre-Christian civilization, whereas the collapse of Eu-

rope was the collapse of a post-Christian one. And it is perhaps one

of Dawsons most important insights that neithercollapse was caused

by Christianityneither by its rise, as Edward Gibbon claimed had

happened in the ancient world, nor by its fall, as many of Dawsons

contemporaries might have supposed was happening in the modern

world. For the dominant religion of modernity, Dawson said, was not

Christianity but the religion of Progress, or Liberalism, which has

been, in fact, the working faith of our civilization.37The religion ofProgress was characterized first in the writings of Rousseau, whose

political philosophy had a distinctly eschatological flavor, and later


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in the philosophical-historical writings of thinkers such as Hegel.38

The catastrophic events of the twentieth century were largely caused

by the failure of this eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religion tosuit to the needs of human life the new industrial world it had pro-

duced. Europe had achieved a paradise of material production at the

cost of human flourishing: Our civilization is becoming lifeless and

moribund, says Dawson, because it has lost its roots and no longer

possesses vital rhythm and balance. . . . The rawness and ugliness

of modern European life is the sign of biological inferiority, of an

insufficient or false relation to environment, which produces strain,wasted effort, revolt or failure.39This was not the kind of progress

that the cultural architects had promised, and the twentieth century

turned with rage on the very societies that had produced it.

In some ways this should have come as no surprise since the lib-

eral religion of Progress was intrinsically revolutionary, born during

the age of secular revolutions in Europe following the religious wars

that were sparked by the Protestant Reformation. And, according toDawson, The revolutionary attitude[which] is perhaps the char-

acteristic religious attitude of Modern Europeis in fact nothing

but a symptom of the divorce between religion and social life caused

by the secularization of Christian Europe during the eighteenth cen-

tury.40But whereas the religious instinct of Romes imperial age was

social withdrawal, the religious instinct of the modern world would

be that of social upheaval, since the dominant religion had taken up

the apocalyptic vision of Christianity while rejecting its theological

claims. The liberal faith, says Dawson, owed its strength to the ele-

ments that it had derived from the religious tradition that it attempt-

ed to replace. Thus, in so far as it succeeded in secularizing European

culture, it undermined the foundations on which its own existence

depended. Instead of uniting Europe in a new spiritual unity, it had

helped to destroy the spiritual tradition to which European culture

owed its unity and its very existence.41The intrinsic weakness ofthis religion of revolution is that it could cope with neither success

nor failure. Where it fails it ends in despair; where it is successful,


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the finitude of its goals becomes apparent and the movement ends

in disillusionment, having cut out the ground on which it stood. And

when the process of disillusionment is complete, warns Dawson,this religious impulse that lies behind the revolutionary attitude may

turn itself against social life altogether, or at least against the whole

system of civilization that has been built up in the last two centu-

ries.42 The final result is that the religious impulse that had been

denied its normal expression, and driven back upon itself, would

become an anti-social force of explosive violence.43

III. Augustines Response: The City of God

In Dawsons view, Augustine was the founder of the philosophy of

history because he was the first person to write a metahistory,

that is, a work concerned with the nature of history, the meaning

of history, and the cause and significance of historical change.44

Augustines aim in theCity of God,however, was pastoral. As GerardODaly writes, It is more in keeping with what Augustine actually

says about his aims to think of the works readers as Christians

or others closely concerned with Christianity, who require[d]

fluent and convincing rebuttals of pagan views, both for their own

satisfaction and as weapons to be used in arguments with defenders

of paganism.45 Indeed, nearly half of the City of God deals with

defeating the specious claim that the sack of Rome was a punishment

for a failure to worship the traditional deities.46 So Augustine did

not write history in the sense of compiling a chronological series

of past events. Rather, what Augustine presents in theCity of Godis

a synthesis of universal history in the light of Christian principles.

His theory of history is strictly deduced from his theory of human

nature, which, in turn, follows necessarily from his theology of

creation and grace.47

It would be impossible to elucidate every strain of influence thatthis theory of history had on Dawson. But the marginalia in Daw-

sons own copies of theCity of Godprovide a useful indicator of how


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one might narrow in on some passages of Augustines work that he

thought were especially important. Dawsons library contains two

copies of the book, one in Latin, which he likely purchased as a stu-dent from Parker and Son Booksellers, and the other translated and

abridged, which was given to him as a gift in 1931by Ernest Barker,

the medievalist and professor of political science who was Dawsons

tutor at Trinity College, Oxford.48There are markings in both cop-

ies, comprising for the most part marginal lines that appear to have

been made in haste with a blunt pencil.49These markings generally

highlight passages that have to do with providence, time, and humannaturenot a bad summary of Dawsons preoccupations.

What Dawson means by Augustines theory of human nature

is perhaps best indicated by the two passages he highlighted in both

copies of the text (corresponding in Dysons translation to Book XI,

chapter 28 and Book XII, chapter 28). And if this indicator is ac-

curate, then Dawsons appropriation of Augustines anthropological

theory can be reasonably divided into two major aspects: human be-ings are social creatures who are moved by love. Thus, in his defense

of the goodness of bodily existence against the Platonists, Augustine

writes, and Dawson doubly highlights, that

our true religion rightly affirms [that God is] the Maker both

of the world, and all creatures therein, bodies, and souls, of

which, in earth man, the chief piece wasmade alone, after

His image . . . yet was he not left alone,for there is nothing inthe world so sociable by nature, and so jarring by vice, as man is;

nor can mans nature speak better either to the keeping of

discord whilst it is out, or expelling it when it is entered; than

in recording our first father, whom God created single (from

him to propagate all the rest), to give us a true admonition to

preserve a union over greatest multitudes.50

Dawson also doubly highlights Augustines treatment of manscreation as a rational being in the image of God. If we were stones,

water, wind, fire, or so, says Augustine, we should want sense and


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life, yet should we have a natural appetite for our due places, for

the motions of weights are like the bodys loves, go they upward or

downwards:for weight is to the body, as love is to the soul. 51It is from these two principles of human nature that Augustine

builds his sociological theory that every human society finds its con-

stituent principle in a common willa will to life, a will to enjoy-

ment, above all, a will to peace.52Thus, says Dawson, The sociology

of St. Augustine is based on the same psychological principle which

pervades his whole thoughtthe principle of the all-importance of

the will and the sovereignty of love.53

Augustine defines a peopleas an assembled multitude of rational creatures bound together by a

common agreement as to the objects of their love.54Consequently,

if we are to discover the character of any people, we have only to

examine what it loves.55But the objects of love ultimately reduce

to two alternatives: the love of self extending even to the contempt

of God, which is what creates the City of Man, or the love of God

extending to the contempt of self, which creates the City of God.

56

From this generalization, says Dawson, springs the whole Augus-

tinian theory of history, which Augustine then applies as he traces

out the earthly courses of the two cities.57

Dawson further points out that Augustines theology of creation

and grace underlies these anthropological claims. For although his

anthropology is reasonable, it is rooted not in reason but in revela-

tion. And this is what makes Augustines work unique in the history

of history-writing. The idea of Creation enabled Augustine to break

out of the dominant Hellenistic conception of time as an eternal

recurrence.58Because God is an eternal Creator, time itself can be

recognized as a creature. As Augustine writesand, again, Daw-

son takes special noteif eternity and time be well considered,

time never to be extant without motion, and eternity to admit no

change, who would not see that time could not have being before

some moveable thing were created; whose motion, and successivealteration (necessarily following one part or another) the time might

run by? . . . Before it is time past, after it is time to come: but no time


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passed before the world, because no creature was made by whose

course it might pass.59

Moreover, unlike all other religions besides Judaism, Christianityfrom the first based its teaching on a sacred history with a clearly de-

fined direction.60The religion of the Hebrews looked forward to the

coming of the Messiah, while Christianity claimed that he had come

and would come again. The Incarnation was thus for Augustine the

single most important event that had happened or that would hap-

pen in created time, the one event that gave meaning to the whole of

history. The significance of the Incarnation was that it contained thepromise of eternal life for the faithful; or rather, that Christ himself

was Eternal Life for those who would believe in him.61Christ came to

call to himself from fallen humanityfrom themassa damnatathose

who were predestined by grace to eternal life.62Thus the whole of

the redeemed City, he writes, that is, the congregation and fellow-

ship of the saintsis offered to God as a universal sacrifice for us

through the great High Priest Who, in His Passion, offered Himselffor us in the form of a servant, so that we might be the body of so

great a Head.63

History therefore has an organic unity64and an ultimate goal.65

It is the process of development and growth of a spiritual society that

is trans-temporal because it is in relationship with an eternal Being,

who gives eternal life to its members. On account of this insight,

Augustine was in Dawsons view the first man in the world to dis-

cover the meaning of time.66What he had recognized before anyone

else was that The measure of time is not to be found in things, but

in the soultime is spiritual extensiondistentio animae.67If time

were mere motion, then the past and the future would not exist;

but they do exist because all times are present to Gods eternity,

and consequently are present to those spiritual beings who are in

relationship with him. The City of God can thus be older than the

world, since its first and truest citizens are the angels and as wide ashumanity since God has become a human being.68It is co-extensive

with the spiritual creation in so far as it has not been vitiated by sin.


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It is, in fact, nothing less than the spiritual unity of the whole uni-

verse, as planned by the Divine Providence, and the ultimate goal of

creation.69This meta-historical vision was an extraordinarily effective re-

sponse to the double crisis of Augustines age. On the one hand, it re-

sponded to the crisis of despair by relativizing the importance of the

state. For it places God, not Rome, at the center of human history:

Thus, when illustrious kingdoms had long existed in the East, God

willed that there should arise in the West an empire which, though

later in time, should be more illustrious still in the breadth andgreatness of its sway.70Then, says Augustine, He who gave power to

Marius also gave it to Gaius Caesar; He Who gave it to Augustus also

gave it to Nero; He Who gave it to the Vespasii, father and son, the

gentlest of emperors, also gave it to Domitian, the cruelest; and . . .

He Who gave it to the Christian Constantine also gave to the Apos-

tate Julian.71 I entirely fail to see what difference it makes, aside

from the most empty pride and human glory, that some men shouldbe conquerors and others conquered.72

On the other hand, and perhaps more important, Augustines his-

torical vision united the religious and the social instincts, which were

being pulled apart by the secularization of the empire. In a passage of

which Dawson was particularly fond, Augustine writes,

For as long as this Heavenly City is a pilgrim on earth, she

summons citizens of all nations and every tongue, and bringstogether a society of pilgrims in which no attention is paid

to any differences in the customs, laws, and institutions by

which peace is achieved or maintained. She does not rescind

or destroy these things, however. For whatever differences

there are among the various nations, these all tend toward

the same end of earthly peace. Thus she preserves and follows

them, provided only that they do not impede the religion by

which we are taught that the one supreme and true God is

to be worshiped. And so even the Heavenly City makes use

of the earthly peace during her pilgrimage, and desires and


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maintains the co-operation of mens wills in attaining those

things which belong to the mortal nature of man. . . . Indeed,

she directs that earthly peace towards heavenly peace. . . .This peace the Heavenly City possesses in faith while on its

pilgrimage, and by this faith it lives righteously, directing

towards the attainment of that peace every good act which it

performs either for God, orsince the citys life is inevitably

a social onefor neighbor.73

Dawson explains that for Augustine, although the kingdom for

which the Christian hoped was a spiritual and eternal one, it was nota kind of abstract Nirvana but rather a real kingdom which was to

be the crown and culmination of history and the realization of the

destiny of the human race.74Consequently, he writes,

St. Augustine never separates the moral from the social life.

The dynamic force of both the individual and the society is

found in the will, and the object of their will determines

the moral character of their life. And as the corruption of

the will by original sin in Adam became a social evil by an

hereditary transmission through the flesh which unites fallen

humanity in the common slavery of concupiscence, so too the

restoration of the will by the grace of Christ is a social good

which is transmitted sacramentally by the action of the Spirit

and unites regenerate humanity in a free spiritual society

under the law of charity.

75

The upshot is that, while it is impossible to identify the City of

God with the Church, it would nevertheless be an even more

serious error to separate the two concepts completely. . . . Certainly

the Church is not the eternal City of God, but it is its organ and

representative in the world.76The Church is, despite all its apparent

imperfections, the most perfect society this world can know,

and, indeed, the only true society since it alone has its source ina spiritual will.77 In other words, the Church is actually the new

humanity in the process of formation, and its earthly history is


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that of the building of the City of God which has its completion

in eternity.78Viewed from this eternal perspective, history is not

an external process of events, but an internal spiritual developmentto which every individual contributes in proportion to his spiritual

powers.79

As Dawson explains, the result of this historical vision was that,

unlike the more socially-static East, which was influenced by Ori-

gens conception of time as a continuous process with no definite

goal,80the Western Church would be preoccupied in the following

centuries with the concrete problems of its corporate life.81

Duringthis time, the European civilization would be born, which owed

its origin neither to racial unity nor to political organization but to

the spiritual forces which united Romans and barbarians in the new

society of Christendom.82Augustines desacralization of the state,

combined with his insistence on the importance of social life, largely

made possible the ideal of a social order resting upon the free per-

sonality and a common effort toward moral ends. And thus, Dawsonconcludes, the Western ideals of freedom and progress and social

justice owe him more than we realize.83

IV. Dawsons Response:Judgment of the Nations

Just as Dawsons interpretation of the twentieth century made

explicit reference to Augustines understanding of the downfall of

Rome in theCity of God, so his response to the ruin of modernity

reflected Augustines reply to his own age. Yet, as was already noted,

Dawsons analysis of the spiritual dynamics of the World Wars

suggests that the modern situation was fundamentally different from

that of the early fifth century. Dawson writes in The Judgment of the

Nations: In [Augustines] day the world was falling, and the gates of

the Church stood open as a city of refuge for a defeated humanity.

To-day [sic] the world is strong; and it has no pity for weakness andsuffering. It has no use for Christianity which it despises as the most

dangerous form of escapism and defeatism.84Given Dawsons earlier


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characterization of Christianity as a movement that combined the

religious and social instincts, this latter statement should strike the

reader as strange. Why, after fifteen hundred years, was the religionthat had built Europe viewed by Europeans as a kind of escapism?

The historical answer to this question has two stages: first, the

dividing of Europe by the Reformation; and second, the rise of

the liberal religion of Progress, which pushed explicitly Christian

ideas and institutions out of public life. We [Christians], Dawson

admitted, must ourselves take our share of the responsibility for

the present world crisis. We have failed to make our voices heardbefore the nations. We have allowed the blessed vision of peace,

the City of God whose king is Truth, whose law is Charity, whose

frontier is Eternity, to be hidden behind the dust of controversy and

narrowed to the field of our own feeble and partial sight.85During

the Reformation, a new belief had arisen, particularly in Puritan

circles, in the possibility of the realization of the Holy Community

on earth by the efforts of the elect, and this belief was the singlemost important influence on and the immediate predecessor of the

modern Western belief in progress, in the rights of man and [in]

the duty of conforming political action to moral ideals.86This new

ideology, which can be called both Progress and Liberalism, was

largely conceived first as a means to end the religious wars in post-

Reformation Europe, and so prepared the way for the complete

secularization of society by making a sharp division between the

public world of economics and politics and the private world of

religion and intellectual culture. It confined planning to the lower

sphere and left the higher entirely free and entirely unorganized.87

Christianity was thereby forced out of its public role as the unify-

ing principle of society and was reduced to the realm of personal

opinion and feeling, whose expression often took forms of escapism

from the rising secular culture.

Nevertheless, Dawson observes that because it is the religiousimpulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society

and a culture, it follows that a society which has lost its religion be-


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comes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.88And this

was just what had happened to Europe. The various liberal parties

failed to give adequate expression to the ideology of Liberalism andto the still deeper social tradition that lay behind it, with the result

that while the liberal movement in the wider sense transformed the

world by an immense liberation of human energies, such as the abo-

litionist movement and the recognition of the political equality of

women, liberalism in the narrower sense proved incapable of guid-

ing the force it had released.89During the two centuries when Lib-

eralism or Progress was the dominant creed, the nations of Europeand North America made great strides in organizing and mechaniz-

ing the world. But the dominant creed subsequently failed to give

that new mechanical world a spiritual direction that could encourage

true human flourishing. As Dawson put it in 1943, the revolution-

ary tendencies in modern civilization which were originally inspired

by a positive humanitarian optimism have become perverted into a

Revolution of Destruction.

90

Europe was from its foundation primarily a spiritual rather than

a political or economic community. And the loss of awareness of this

fact, let alone the earlier loss of Europes spiritual unity, was con-

sequently the cause of its internal conflict.91The crisis manifesting

itself in the two World Wars was therefore

not the breakdown of the traditional culture of Christendom,

[but] the catastrophe of the secular culture. . . . For the failureof our civilization to satisfy mans deeper needs has created a

spiritual vacuum, a heart of darkness and chaos beneath the

mechanical order and the scientific intelligence of the modern

world. Hence the demand for a new order, for a total solution

of our social problems, for a replanning of society which will

transform human life and remake man himself. They are,

in fact, symptoms of the fundamental religious needthe

need of salvationmanifesting itself in new forms which

correspond to the purely secular culture in which they have

arisen.92


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The World Wars were being waged not between the inhabitants

of the City of God and the city of man, but between rival versions

of the self-sufficient earthly city, each of which claimed to possess adivine or ideological sanction as the fulfillment of history. The Euro-

pean civil war was being fought out between two rival forms of the

libido dominandi, that is, the attempt of the mind to dispense with

the Spirit to build a world that should be entirely in mans power

and should find its end in him, which, as St. Augustine showed,

[is] a universal tendency that runs through the whole of history and

takes on different forms in different ages.93

Therefore, says Daw-son, while the fundamental Augustinian principle of the Two Loves

and the Two Cities retain their validity, they have assumed a new

form in these times, unlike anything in the previous experience of

the Church. For to-day [sic] a deliberate attempt is being made to

unify and energize human society from its lower depths: to bring

Jerusalemthe spirit of Man as the vessel of the Spirit of Godinto

servitude to Babylonthe spirit of man degraded into the blind in-strument of a demonic will to power.94

He goes on to detail more precisely how this was taking place.

A civilization which concentrates on means and neglects almost

entirely to consider ends must inevitably become disintegrated and

despiritualized, he writes.95 Our democratic societies [viz., Eng-

land and America] have done this by devoting all their planning to

the technical and industrial organization and leaving the sphere of

culture to the private initiative of individuals, i.e. to unplanned ac-

tivities. The Nazi, Fascist, and Socialist states, by contrast, have in-

stituted centralized planning for definite ends. But they have been

even more crudely materialistic than the democratic states.96The

two World Wars are thus the result of the application of similar tech-

nique in an opposite spirit and for opposite ends: science and mecha-

nization being used, in the one case, in a commercial spirit for the

increase of wealth; in the other, in a military spirit for the conquestof power. And as the conflict proceeds, the more complete becomes

the mechanization of life, until total organization seems to be the


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necessary condition of social survival. 97 This, he writes, is the

greatness and misery of modern civilizationthat it has conquered

the world by losing its own soul, and that when its soul is lost it mustlose the world as well.98

The Church, in Dawsons view, could not accept this new situa-

tion as it did when it accepted the fall of Rome. For that was an ex-

ternal disaster, which left the sources of spiritual vitality unimpaired,

while this is a spiritual catastrophe which strikes directly at the moral

foundations of our society, and destroys not only the outward form

of civilization but the soul of man which is the beginning and end ofall human culture.99At a deeper level than the conflict of the two

competing worldly visions of capitalist democracy and totalitarian-

ism, there was at work the law of spiritual duality and polarization

which is expressed . . . in St. Augustines doctrine of the two cities

Babylon and Jerusalem whose conflict runs through all history and

gives it its ultimate significance.100The world therefore had two al-

ternatives: either it would be completely engulfed by consumerismand totalitarianism, which would ultimately destroy humanity, or it

would recover Christianity as the center of its culturewith the

Divine Humanity of Christ as the shared object of its loveand so

become again a true society. Dawson writes,

The only way to desecularize culture is by giving a spiritual

aim to the whole system of organization, so that the machine

becomes the servant of the spirit and not its enemy ormaster. Obviously this is a tremendous task, but it is one that

we cannot avoid facing in the near future. If culture is not

to be dynamized from below by the exploitation of the sub-

rational animal forces in human nature, it must be activized

from above by being once more brought into relation with

the forces of Divine power and wisdom and love.101

In Augustinian terms, the only alternative to a civilization artificiallyheld together by the libido dominandiwas a spiritual society united

by the love of God. And this is just to say that the only alternative to


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logos56

the destruction of Western civilization was the creation of a modern

Christendomnot because the Church is itself the City of God,

but because Christendom is the temporal ordering of society by theChurch to the eternal population of that City.102

Dawsons Augustinian solution to the problems of his day was to

suggest to society that it change the object of its love in such a way

that would reunite the religious instinct with the social instinct, by

making Christianity once again the heart of European culture. Only

Christianity could do this, because it alone was a religion of char-

ityof love for God and neighbor. The reconciliation of the na-tions, he says, can only be accomplished on a deeper plane than that

of political power or economic interest. It is essentially a spiritual

task which demands the spiritual vision that is faith and the spiritual

will that is charity.103Indeed, Christianity, when it has the freedom

to be itself and is not relegated to the private sphere, necessarily

has a world mission that is based on its conception of a spiritual

society which transcends all states and cultures and is the final goalof humanity. Wherever Christianity exists there survives a seed of

unity, a principle of spiritual order, which cannot be destroyed by

war or the conflict of economic interests or the failure of political

organization.104The hope of the world therefore rests on the exis-

tence of a spiritual nucleus of believers who are the bearers of the

seed of unity.105

And what is perhaps most remarkable about Christianitys mis-

sion for a spiritual universalism, carried out and visibly embodied

in the superpolitical society of the Church, is that this mission gives

to history a supernatural direction.106What distinguishes the Chris-

tian view of history from that of secular philosophy, Dawson notes,

is above all the belief in the divine government of the world and the

intervention of the Spirit in history and in the power of man to resist

or co-operate with this divine action.107 So whereas the Christian

historical vision had worked in Augustines age primarily to relativizethe temporal by downplaying the importance of the collapse of Ro-

man civilization, in the twentieth century Dawson believed it could


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work to relativize the temporal by challenging the inevitability of

secularism and conflict. History is providentially guided, but it is

not predetermined. The Christian view of history is therefore theone force capable of saving all that is good in the liberal religion of

Progress. The new theory of time which St. Augustine originated,

Dawson writes, also renders possible a new conception of history. If

man is not the slave and creature of time, but its master and creator,

then history also becomes a creative process. It does not repeat itself

meaninglessly; it grows into organic unity with the growth of human

experience. The past does not die; it becomes incorporated into hu-manity. And hence progress is possible.108

But the kind of progress available to humanity is not the prog-

ress of a mechanistic universe, which would be merely progress

to eternal death.109Rather, it is the progress of populating the eter-

nal City of God by the temporal work of Christian culture. For, as

Dawson understood, Christianity, more than any other religion, is

characterized by its doctrine of spiritual renewal and regeneration.It stands for the restoration or transformation of human nature in

Christin other words the creation of a new humanity.110This task

would in turn give meaning to the material progress of the mecha-

nized world, and would keep it at the service of humanitarian goals.

A Christian culture would not shun scientific advances, but, like Au-

gustine, rejoice in them while acknowledging their finitude: How

wonderful, how astonishing, are the achievements of human industry

in devising clothing and shelter! writes the saint:

What progress man has made in agriculture and navigation!

. . . How many medicines and remedies do we find used to

preserve or restore health? . . . What of the delight which the

mind find in the ornaments of oratory and in the abundant

diversity of poetry? Or that which the ears find in musical

instruments and the various kinds of melody which have been

devised? . . . How fully has [humanity] come to understand

so many things of this world! . . . And here we are speaking

only of the natural capacities with which the human mind is


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logos58

adorned in this mortal life, not of the faith and the way of

truth by which man achieves life immortal.111

Thus, the Liberal project that originated in Christianity could be

renewed and steadied by Christianity if only it would recognize its

subordinate position, and indeed, its vocation, within the larger task

of populating the Eternal City.112Its goal would then be not progress

and freedom for its own sake, carried out by homo incurvatus in se

man turned in upon himselfbut rather progress and freedom for

the sake of God and neighbor.The prerequisite for rescuing Liberalism from itself, however,

was the return to unity in a single visible Church, which could be

accomplished only by a systematic reengagement with the sources

of Christian culture, through a reproposal of the concept of natural

law, and through renewed emphasis on the Churchs vocation to wit-

ness to its identity as a spiritual community held together by love.

For this, Christians would need nothing less than the power of the

Spirit, in whose strength they faced and overcame the pagan civili-

zation of the Roman Empire and the pagan savagery of their barbar-

ian conquerors, and in whose strength they would also master the

challenges of modernity.113

Notes 1. Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Daw-

son(Fort Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2007), 26.

2. Christopher Dawson, handwritten notes (1930s?) in University of St. Thomas special

collections, box 8, file 53, MiscellaneousSaints.

3. Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Inquiry (Washington, DC:

University of America Press 2001 [First published in London: Sheed and Ward,

1929]), 166. Hereafter cited as Progress.

4. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Vol. I, trans. Gilbert Highet (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1945), xvii.

5. Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, in The Great Tradition, ed. Richard M. Gamble

(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007), 124.


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6. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (New York: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1998), 24[I 15]. Hereafter cited as Dyson.

7. Progress, 166.

8. Ibid., 166.

9. Dyson, 129.

10. Christopher Dawson, St. Augustine and His Age, in A Monument to St. Augustine,

ed. T. F. Burns (London: Sheed and Ward, 1934[1930]), 1920. Hereafter cited as

Monument.

11. Monument, 20.

12. Progress, 167.

13. Monument, 25.

14. Ibid., 130[III 21]

15. Dyson, 76[II 21].

16. Monument, 21.

17. Ibid.

18. Dyson, 75[II 20]. Dawson paraphrases this passage in Monument, 22.

19. Ibid., 23.

20. Progress, 179.

21. Monument,33.

22. Ibid., 30, 24.

23. Ibid., 3233.

24. Ibid., 25.

25. Gerard ODaly,Augustines City of God: A Readers Guide(New York: Oxford University

Press, 1999), 3; see also 38.

26. Ibid., 83

27. Monument, 38.

28. Ibid.

29. Progress,16466.

30. Ibid., 161.

31. Ibid.

32. See ibid., 162.

33. Ibid., 161.

34. Ibid., 176.

35. Ibid., 177.

36. Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations(London: Sheed and Ward, 1943), 7.

Hereafter cited as Judgment.

37. Progress,15.

38. See ibid., 15557.

39. Ibid., 5960.

40. Ibid., 178.

41. Ibid., 168.

42. Ibid., 178.


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logos60

43. Ibid., 177.

44. Birzer, 7375.

45. ODaly, 36.

46. See, for example, Dyson, 176[IV 27] and Monument,20.

47. Ibid.

48. The two copies are S. Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis episcopi de Civitate Dei libri XXII

(Lipsiae: Sumptibus Ernesti Bredtii, 1877), cited hereafter as CD1, and The City of

God, trans. John Healy, with an introduction by Ernest Barker (London: J. M. Dent,

1931), cited hereafter as CD2. For more on Dawsons relationship with Barker, see

Birzer, 2728. Dawsons library also includesAn Augustine Synthesis (London: Sheed

and Ward, 1945[1936]) by Erich Pryzwara, SJ,who had contributed toA Monument

to St. Augustine. In this volume, Dawson highlights passages from Book XI, chapter 28;

Book XIV, chapter 28; and Book XV, chapters 1and 2. I have omitted these since they

could not have been made until after theJudgment of the Nationswas published.

49. In the Latin version, Dawson made such markings in each of the following sections,

which are standardized here to the 2010Cambridge edition translated by R. W.

Dyson: Book VII, chapter 32; Book VIII, chapters 1, 12, and 26; Book X, chapters 6,

18, and 20; Book XI, chapters 2, 25, 26, and 28; Book XII, chapters 17and 28(16

and 27in Dawsons text); Book XIV, chapter 26; Book XVIII, chapter 22; Book XIX,

chapter 17; Book XX, chapter 30; and Book XXII, chapter 24. In the abridged Eng-

lish text, whose divisions are numbered rather differently, Dawson marked passages

in Book V, chapters 13, 17and 21(3, 7, and 12in Dawsons text); Book XI (his Book

X), chapters 6and 28; and Book XII, chapter 28(his Book XI, chapter 26). There are

also substantial markings in the two tables of contents of CD1, and a few indecipher-

able markings on the back pages of both CD1and CD2. I have chosen simply to ignore

these for the purposes of this article, since they are less specific than the marginalia

and their meanings less clear.

50. CD2, 26364. Cf. Dyson, 539[XII 28]. Italics added.

51. Ibid., 21213. Cf. Dyson, 48788[XI 28]. Italics added.

52. Monument, 59.

53. Ibid.

54. Dyson, 960[XIX 24].

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid., 632[XIV 28].

57. Monument,60.

58. See ibid., 69.

59. CD2, 181; cf. Dyson, 456[XI 6].

60. Monument,45. Italics in original.

61. See Dyson 307[VII 32]. The relevant passage is marked in CD1.

62. Ibid., 630[XIV 26]. Marked in CD1.

63. Ibid., 400[X 6]; see also 422[X 20]. Both relevant passages are marked CD1.

64. Monument, 71.


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65. Ibid., 67.

66. Ibid., 69.

67. Ibid., 70.

68. Ibid., 66.

69. Ibid., 67.

70. Dyson 212[V 13]. Marked in CD2.

71. Dyson, 228[V 21]. Marked in CD2.

72. Dyson, 217[V 17]. Marked in CD2.

73. Dyson, 94647[XIX 17]. Marked in CD1and cited in Monument, 66, 76.

74. Monument, 47.

75. Ibid., 75.

76. Ibid., 72.

77. Ibid., 75.

78. Ibid.

79. Dawson, handwritten notes, MiscellaneousSaints.

80. Monument, 68.

81. Ibid., 52.

82. Judgment, 152.

83. Monument, 77.

84. Judgment, 6.

85. Ibid., 116.

86. Ibid., 35.

87. Ibid., 83.

88. Progress, 180.

89. Judgment, 45.

90. Ibid., 7.

91. See ibid., 16; see also Progress, 169.

92. Judgment, 90.

93. Ibid., 109.

94. Ibid., 7.

95. Ibid., 80.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid., 74.

98. Ibid., 68.

99. Ibid., 9.

100. Ibid., 125.

101. Ibid., 87.

102. See ibid., 14154.

103. Ibid., 154.

104. Ibid., 153.

105. Ibid.

106. Ibid., 141.


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107. Ibid., 103.

108. Monument, 71.

109. Progress, 173.

110. Judgment, 88.

111. Dyson, 1162[XXII 24]. Marked in CD1.

112. SeeJudgment, 140, 152.

113. Ibid., 154.

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C o p y r i g h t o f L o g o s : A J o u r n a l o f C a t h o l i c T h o u g h t & C u l t u r e i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f L o g o s : A

J o u r n a l o f C a t h o l i c T h o u g h t & C u l t u r e a n d i t s c o n t e n t m a y n o t b e c o p i e d o r e m a i l e d t o

m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s e x p r e s s w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n .

H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l a r t i c l e s f o r i n d i v i d u a l u s e .

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