The Case for Christendom

MEDIEVAL ESSAYS (271 pp.)--Christopher Dawson--Sheed & Ward ($3.50).

Europe's statesmen and its NATO generals can get as far as common-defense plans and frontierless trade patterns. Beyond this, the idea of a unified Europe tends to be a rainbow-colored vision; most Europeans, educated in mutually contradictory nationalisms or ideologies, specify no satisfactory universal basis for it. One of the few who attempt the statement is British Historian Christopher Dawson. "The source of the actual sociological unity which we call Europe," Dawson says flatly, "is Christian culture." His lifelong argument: without educating themselves in their universal Christian cultural foundations, Europeans will never grasp why their continent can be more than a congeries of geographical neighbors, serviced by the same wagonlit: system.

Dawson, now 64, has spent the last 40 years examining how Christianity got itself into Europe's bloodstream, and how and why it made the body grow. He has focused his studies on Europe's Middle Ages, a period that many European historians skip over lightly.* Although a Roman Catholic himself, Dawson does not take the tack of the conventional Catholic medieval apologist, who regards the period as a happy but vanished Golden Age when there were no Protestants around. For Historian Dawson, the Middle Ages can be studied only as a fusion of religion and culture, a "long 1,000-year process" that formed Western culture and continues to influence it.

Medieval Essays is a handy sampler of Dawson's view of history. He writes with the smooth mixture of clarity, scholarship and happy metaphor that characterizes good British historians, and the imperturbability of a man content with a limited audience. (His 15 books have had an average U.S. sale of 3,600 copies.)

The Waiting Room? The word medieval still holds a connotation of cobwebbed armor, bad sanitary facilities and picture-postcard Gothic cathedrals. Although 20th century historians deal more kindly with medieval man than did their Victorian forerunners, he still seems even further removed from modern mentality than the classic Greeks and Romans.

Dawson challenges this idea of the medieval man's remoteness. Modern civilization, he says, owes far more to men like St. Augustine and Pope Gregory VII than is admitted, and medieval men deserve the credit for much that is attributed to earlier or later periods. The modern world, for example, praises 16th century Renaissance humanists for reviving the Latin classics and scientific learning. Actually, says Dawson, it was medieval scholars who produced the really "new fact in the history of the West''--the rediscovery of Greek learning by the 13th century.

The tragedy of a modern Western man's education, in Dawson's estimate, is the gap in his learning and understanding between the classical ages and modern times, between Plato and Isaac Newton. The gap was created, he thinks, because medieval culture was so intertwined with religion. Since Renaissance humanists were tired of religion, and later European scholars thought that religion had no business anywhere outside the church, they all either ignored or missed the fact that the so-called Age of Faith was in fact the formative period of their own culture.

Writes Dawson in his first essay: "If, as I believe, religion is the key of history and it is impossible to understand a culture unless we understand its religious roots, then the Middle Ages are not a kind of waiting room between two different worlds, but the age which made a new world, the world from which we come and to which in a sense we still belong."

The World Astray. Some of Dawson's essays turn over bits of information that the nonscholarly reader hardly expects to find. (Sample: Christianity got its ideas about courtly love and chivalrous knighthood from the Moslem civilizations of Spain.) But he seldom loses sight of the central struggle of the Middle Ages: the effort to build a truly universal Christian civilization--"the City of God on earth." Mostly the struggle was in the form of competition between the Church and the Holy Roman Empire--"between the ideal of a theocratic empire and that of a theocratic church, each of which was inspired by the same vision of an all-embracing Christian society.''

The great effort of the Middle Ages failed, largely because of the loss in the spiritual prestige of the papacy during its 14th century sojourn in Avignon. But the struggles it evoked had firmly implanted in Europe a common heritage of religion, law, art, science and leisure. Even in the dark days of the 14th century, as the hoped-for synthesis was fast collapsing, Christian Europe threw up its greatest religious poets--Dante and William Langland, the poor London clerk who wrote Piers Plowman.* Both of them, says Dawson, although on different levels, wrote, convinced "that the world had gone astray."

Although Dawson, along with Dante and Langland, sometimes stops for a quiet tear over medieval man's passing, he is far more interested in communicating the worth of medieval man--his feeling for spirituality, his sense of social commu nity, his universal values--to his descend ants in modern Europe. For one thing, the medieval "world of Christian culture" is more akin to the present than the humanist traditions that have governed Europe since the Renaissance.

Says Dawson: "The [medieval world] was always at grips with the problem of barbarism. It had to face the external threat of alien and hostile cultures, while at the same time it was in conflict with barbaric elements within its own social environment which it had to control and transform. And in this work it could not rely on the existence of common standards of civilization or common moral values. It had to create its own moral order before it could achieve an ordered form of civilized existence."

For NATO statesmen, Historian Dawson offers the comfort of a historical parallel: for the everyday citizen in the world of 1954, a reminder that a long-created moral order is already in existence.

* Gibbon, writing in the Decline and Fall, scornfully dismissed them as "the triumph of barbarism and religion." -- Dawson rates Langland's contemporary, Chaucer, as more of a courtly storyteller who "took the world as he found it," very like his Italian opposite number. Boccaccio. Not so Langland, who wrote bitterly of his times:

Loud laughed Life . . .

And armed him in haste--with words of harlotry

And held Holiness for a jest--and Courtesy for a waster.

And Loyalty a churl--and Liar a gentleman,

Conscience and counsel--he counted it a folly.

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