Defining the Canon

A list of the works to be considered authoritative began to take form in the Christian community earlier than I had supposed. We always hear that the “definitive” list was not compiled in the 4th century, but less attention is paid to the fact that many of these works were considered authoritative well before then.

In about 180 CE (at almost the same time Irenaeus was defending the four Gospels against Marcion, who wanted to acknowledge Luke alone) there appeared the first listing of the books of the New Testament that bears a similarity with the present Christian canon. The Muratorian canon (as the list came to be known) listed the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline letters, and the rest of the present New Testament with the omission of Hebrews, James, and the two letters attributed to Peter. The list included, however, the Shepard of Hermas, a popular work of the late first century. No definitive canon was established until the fourth century, and even then there would be disagreement over the Epistle to the Hebrews, but the attempt to form a distinctive Christian canon had begun.

– Robert Bruce Mullin, A Short World History of Christianity (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008)

Aristotelian Influences – Part 3

Or The Triumph of Aristotle in Medieval Theology

However, in 1231 Pope Gregory IX, while maintaing the prohibition, appointed a commission of theologians, William of Auxerre, Stephen of Provins and Simon of Authie, to correct the prohibited books of Aristotle, and as this measure obviously implied that the books were not fundamentally unsound, the prohibition tended to be neglected. It was extended to Toulouse in 1245 by Innocent IV, but by that date it was no longer possible to check the spread of Aristotelianism and from 1255 all the known works of Aristotle were officially lectured on in the University of Paris. The Holy See made no move against the university though in 1263 Pope Urban IV renewed the prohibition of 1210, probably out of fear of Averroism, the renewed prohibition remaining a dead letter. The Pope must have known perfectly well that William of Moerbeke was translating the prohibited works of Aristotle at his own court, and the prohibition of 1263 must have been a check to Averroism, not as a seriously meant attempt to put an end to all study of the Aristotelian philosophy. In any case the prohibition was of no effect, and finally in 1366 the Legates of Pope Urban V required from all candidates for the Licentiate of Arts at Paris a knowledge of all the known works of Aristotle. It had by then long been clear to the mediaevals that a work like the Liber de Causis was not Aristotelian and that the philosophy of Aristotle was not, except of course, in the eyes of the Latin Averroists, bound up with the interpretation given it by Averroes but could be harmonised with the Christian faith. Indeed the dogmas of faith themselves had by then been expressed by theologians in terms taken from the Aristotelian system.

This brief summary of the official attitude to Aristotle on the part of ecclesiastical and academic authority shows that Aristotelianism triumphed in the end. This does not mean, however, that all mediaeval philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries extended an equal welcome to Aristotle or that they all understood him in the same way: the vigour and variety of mediaeval thought will be made clear in succeeding chapters. There is truth in the statement that that shadow of Aristotle hung over and dominated the philosophic thought of the Middle Ages, but it is not the whole truth, and we would have a very inadequate idea of mediaeval philosophy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries if we imagined that it was inspired and characterized by a slavish acceptance of every word of the great Greek philosopher.

Frederick Coplestone, S.J. – A History of Philosophy, Volume 2 (Doubleday, 1993)

Aristotelian Influences – Part 2

Or The Prohibition of Aristotle in Medieval Theology

However, the system of Aristotle did not meet with universal welcome and approbation, though it could not be ignored. Largely because the Liber de Causis (until St. Thomas discovered the truth), the so-called Theologia Aristotelis (extracts from the Enneads of Plotinus) and the De secretis secretorum (composed by an Arab philosopher in the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century) were wrongly attributed to Aristotle, the latter’s philosophy tended to appear in a false light. Moreover, the attribution of these books to Aristotle naturally made it appear that the Arab comentators were justified in their neo-Platonic interpretation. Hence it came about that in 1210 the Provincial Council of Paris, meeting under the presidency of Peter of Corbeil, Archbishop of Sens, forbad the public or private teaching of Aristotle’s ‘natural philosophy’ or of the commentaries on them. This prohibition was imposed under pain of excommunication and applied to the University of Paris. In all probability ‘natural philosophy’ included the metaphysics of Aristotle, since when the statutes of the university were sanctioned by Robert de Courcon, Papal Legate, in 1215 Aristotle’s works on metaphysics and natural philosophy, as well as compendia of these works and the doctrines of David of Dinant, Amalric of Bene and Maurice of Spain (probably Averroes, the Moor or Maurus) were prohibited, though the study of Aristotle’s logic was ordered. The study of the Ethics was not forbidden.

The reason for the prohibition was, as already indicated, largely due to the ascription to Aristotle of works which were not by him. Amalric of Bene, whose writings were included in the prohibition of 1215, maintained doctrines which were at variance with Christian teaching and which would naturally appear to find some support in the philosophy of Aristotle, if the latter were interpreted in the light of all the books attributed to him, while David of Dinant, the other heretical philosopher whose writings were prohibited, had actually appealed to the Metaphysics, which had been translated into Latin from the Greek version brought from Byzantium before 1210. To these considerations must be added the undoubted fact that Aristotle maintained the eternity of the world. It was, therefore, not unnatural that the Aristotelian system, especially when coupled with the philosophies of Daivd of Dinant, Amalric of Bene and Averroes, should appear as a danger to orthodoxy in the eyes of the traditionalists. The logic of Aristotle had long been in use, even if the full Organon had come into circulation only comparatively recently, but the complete metaphysical and cosmological teaching of Aristotle was a novelty, a novelty rendered all the more dangerous through association with heretical philosophies.

Frederick Coplestone, S.J. – A History of Philosophy, Volume 2 (Doubleday, 1993)

Aristotelian Influences – Part 1

Or The Rise of Aristotle in Medieval Theology

The translation of work of Aristotle and his commentators, as well as of the Arabian thinkers, provided the Latin Scholastics with a great wealth of intellectual material.  In particular they were provided with the knowledge of philosophical systems which were methodologically independent of theology and which were presented as the human mind’s reflection on the universe. The systems of Aristotle, of Avicenna, of Averroes, opened up a wide vista of the scope of human reason and it was clear to the mediaevals that the truth attained in them must have been independent of Christian revelation, since it had been attained by a Greek philosopher and his Greek and Islamic commentators… It is, of course, true that Aristotle’s system not unaturally took the limelight in preference to those of his commentators, and his philosophy tended to appear in the eyes of those Latins who were favourably impressed as the ne plus ultra of human intellectual endevour, since it constituted the most sustained and extensive effort of the human mind with which they were aquainted; but they were quite well aware that it was the work of reason, not a set of revealed dogmas. To us, looking back from a long way off, it may seem that some of the mediaevals exaggerated the genius of Aristotle (we also know that that they did not realise the existence of different strate or periods in Aristotle’s thought), but we should not put ourselves for a moment in their place and try to imagine the impression which would be made on a mediaeval philosopher by the sight of what in any case is one of the supreme achievements of the human mind, a system which, in regard to both completeness and close reasoning, was unparalleled in the thought of the early Middle Ages.

Frederick Coplestone, S.J. – A History of Philosophy, Volume 2 (Doubleday, 1993)

Coplestone’s “A History of Philosophy”

It is well known that in many ways St. Augustine was influenced by Plato, whereas St. Thomas Aquinas was more influenced by Aristotle. Though the distinctions of influence are not so stark, it is true that each “baptised” the thought of these two great Greek philosophers in their own way. That said, I have found it very helpful to know a little about the philosophy of Plato when reading Augustine, and the same goes for Aristotle when reading Aquinas. The Summa was in many ways a confusing labyrinth of philosophical jargon and nonsense until I came to understand (in part) the thought of Aristotle. Once I had a grasp on the Aristotelian distinctions of form and matter, St. Thomas opened up before me in all it’s grandeur. Perhaps that is putting it too dramatically, but something like that surely happened.

In an endeavor to more fully understand the philosophical underpinnings of my Christian faith, not to mention trying to better understand my own existence and the world around me, I have been slowly making my way through Frederick Coplestone’s A History of Philosophy. There are 9 volumes in all (for us in the United States), and I have just made my way into Volume 2. The first volume deals with ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and is perhaps the most important volume for understanding great Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, as it goes through in good detail the thought of both Plato and Aristotle. Volume 2 picks up with the philosophical influences of the early church fathers, which acts as a prelude to the first great Christian philosopher, St. Augustine. It should be noted that Coplestone is fully aware that the early fathers did not make distinctions between philosophy and theology. Therefor he readily admits of the dangers inherent in untangling a philosophy (his work is after all one of the history of philosophy) from the theology of those who saw no such distinctions. Nevertheless, clear influences of neo-platonism and, to some extent, stoicism can be traced in the thought of these early Christian thinkers such as Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, and John Damascene. Likewise, these influences can be seen in the two great minds of the Western Church, Augustine and Aquinas.

In all, the 2nd volume of Coplestone’s work will cover the philosophy of the early Church through St. Augustine, and on to St. Anselm, St. Bonaventure, St Albert the Great, St Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus; a period that spans 1,300 years. Coplestone covers all of this under the heading of “Medieval Philosophy” though he recognizes that he uses the term losely and that no period ever remains distinct from that which precedes it or comes after. I happily detect a note of Christopher Dawson’s influence! Volume 3 will pick up where volume 2 left off and go through what Copleston refers to as “Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy.” This 3rd volume will begin with William of Ockham and go through to Francis Bacon and the dawning of a Renaissance philosophy with Francis Suarez.

The first 3 volumes of Coplestone’s A History of Philosophy will serve as an introduction to his much more lengthy treatment of modern philosophy. As Coplestone notes, you can’t understand modern philosophy without understanding what came before. As the famous dictum has it: all philosophy is but footnotes to Plato. This may be a slight overstatement, but the whole of philosophy can certainly be seen as a working out of the issues raised by Plato nearly 2,500 years ago. It’s just that in this working out, there are some outright rejections of parts of Plato’s thought if not all of it. Nonetheless, these rejections have no basis without Plato and those that followed him.

As I said, Volume 4 of Coplestone’s A History of Philosophy begins his lengthy treatment of modern philosophy. The next 6 volumes will cover everything from Descartes to Hume to Kant to Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, all the way through to the philosophy of the last century with Bertrand Russel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jean-Paul Sartre; what is now known as post-modern philosophy. Of course, everything in between is covered as well, and this is primarily whyI have chosen to read through Coplestone’s intimidating 9 volume work. For reasons unknown to myself, I have a keen interest in modern philosophy, but I recognize the need for understanding the philosophy of the ancient Greeks and the classical Christian thinkers of the Church’s first millennium. The fact that Coplestone will give me a grounding in the “pre-modern” philosophers before plunging me into the thought of Descartes and beyond is something that I truly appreciate.

Having never taken a university class in anything resembling philosophy or theology – my university studies were more along the lines of calculus and advanced physics – I am self taught in matters pertaining to philosophy and theology. While the journey is fascinating, being self taught comes with its own very real limitations. I know plenty of “stuff” but not having the advantage of a classroom and a professor with whom to interact, I find it hard to synthesize all that I have learned. I know Plato taught X and Aquinas taught Y and Nietzsche taught Z, but I have hardly a clue on how X, Y, and Z are related or why Nietzsche taught Z in stark contrast with Plato’s X. This is where Coplestone comes in. By going on a journey from Plato to Sartre, I hope this synthesization – which is indeed a higher faculty of reason – will begin to materialize.

Coplestone’s A History of Philosophy comes highly recommended by many in the academic world. While Coplestone was a Jesuit and writes from a clearly Christian and Thomist point of view, his massive work also enjoys the support of secular philosophers. The blurb on the back of the book probably says it best, although keep in mind this is a blurb from the publisher so the danger of exaggeration is always present.

Conceived originally as a serious presentation of  the development of philosophy for Catholic  seminary students, Frederick Copleston’s nine-volume  A History Of Philosophy has  journeyed far beyond the modest purpose of its author to  universal acclaim as the best history of  philosophy in English.

Copleston, an Oxford Jesuit  of immense erudition who once tangled with A. J.  Ayer in a fabled debate about the existence of God  and the possibility of metaphysics, knew that  seminary students were fed a woefully inadequate diet  of theses and proofs, and that their familiarity  with most of history’s great thinkers was reduced  to simplistic caricatures. Copleston set out to  redress the wrong by writing a complete history of  Western philosophy, one crackling with incident and  intellectual excitement — and one that gives full  place to each thinker, presenting his thought in a  beautifully rounded manner and showing his links  to those who went before and to those who came  after him.

The result of Coplestone’s prodigious labors is a history of philosophy that is unlikely ever to be surpassed. Thought magazine summed up the general agreement among scholars and students alike when it reviewed Coplestone’s A History of Philosophy as “broad-minded and objective, comprehensive and scholarly, unified and well proportioned… We cannot recommend [it] too highly.”

After having read some 600 pages into the multi-thousand page work, I can add my recommendation as well. It may take me 10 years to complete all 9 volumes, but I have decided that is just fine with me. As I get older, I am learning the fine art of patience, a virtue I have lacked my entire life. If the good Lord blesses me with many more years I will enjoy learning more and more about philosophy, a topic I find so fascinating. If I do not make it through all 9 volumes that is ok too. There are far more important things in life, and my relationship with my Lord and Saviour is all that really matters in the end. Reading Coplestone (and Chesterton, and von Hildebrand, and C. S. Lewis, and Emil Brunner, and Ratzinger, and…. oh I could go on) is just icing on the cake of life.

I hope to quote more from Coplestone in the future of this blog. Not that the history of philosophy is oh so exciting (although, to me it kind of is), but one of the purposes of this blog is to help me think through the things I have read. In fact, that may be the real reason this blog exists. I find that as I quote verbatim from the authors I read, and write about the things they are saying, I am much more apt to remember the things I have learned. Whether or not anybody else actually reads what I write or quote is completely secondary (no offense!). I just recognize that others may benefit from what I read and write as well. All that to say, look for some quotations from Coplestone in the future, although don’t expect uber excitement unless your a bit of a philosophy dweeb like myself.

Until next time, have a very blessed Holy Week!

Ratzinger on Historical Method

For some reason, I know not why, I am fascinated by the question of historical knowledge. So what exactly can we “know” from the study of history? I often think that many of us have too bold an epistemology when it comes to history. I was happy to read that Joseph Ratzinger, once Cardinal and now Pope, in the opening pages of his 1977 work Eschatology, lays out his thoughts on the historical method as it relates to exegesis. In typical Catholic fashion he takes a view of history that is more incarnational in nature. Rather than seeing the past as a set of datum to be studied and analyzed, Ratzinger sees the past as part of the present. History is never just history; it is a living history. In Eschatology (Catholic University of America Press, 2007), Ratzinger writes:

It is according to this nonhistorical model of the natural sciences that exegetical results are very largely assessed today. They are thought of as a sum of fixed results, a body of knowledge with immaculate credentials, acquired in such a fashion that it has left behind its own history as a mere prehistory, and is now at our disposal like a set of mathematical measurements. The measuring of the human spirit, however, differs from the quantification of the physical world. To follow the history of exegesis over the last hundred years is to become aware that it reflects the whole spiritual history of that period. Here the observer speaks of the observed only through speaking of himself: the object becomes eloquent only in this indirect refraction. Now this does not mean that at the end of the day all we know is ourselves. Rather are we faced at this point with a kind of knowledge familiar to us from philosophy. (Not that the two are identical, nevertheless, they have a family resemblance.) The “results” of the history of philosophy do not consist in a catalogue of formulae which can be totted up into a final sum. Instead, they are series of raids on the deep places of being, carried out according to the possibilities of their own time. The history in which these explorations were made remains a living history, not a dead prehistory. As philosophizing continues, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas do not become prehistory: they remain the originating figures of an enduring approach to the Ground of what is. In their way of thought, and its access to the Origin, a certain aspect of reality, a dimension of being, is caught as in a mirror. None of them is philsophy or the philosopher.It is the multivalent message of the entire history, and its overall critical evaluation, that truth is disclosed and with it the possibility of fresh knowledge. Something analogous is true of such a foundational text as the Bible. Here, too, and especially where the heart of the scriptural message is concerned, there is no such thing as a definitive acquisition of scholarship: no interpretation from the past is ever completely old hat if in its time it turned to the text in true openess. Unfortunately, historical reason’s criticism of itself is still in its infancy. But one thing is certain: to employ in this domain the pardigm of knowledge characteristic of the natural sciences is fallacious. Only by listening to the whole history of interpretation can the present be purified by criticism and so brought into a position of genuine encounter with the text concerned.

The Music of Sparta

Or The Scandal of the Strings

Here is your completely random and amusing historical tidbit for today. The topic is that warrior haven of Sparta and its take on music during the 7th century before Christ. From Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization, Vol. 2: The Life of Greece (Simon & Schuster 1966):

In that dim past before Lycurgus came, Sparta was a Greek city like the rest, and blossomed out in song and art as it would never do after him. Music above all was popular there, and rivaled man’s antiquity; for as far back as we can delve we find the Greeks singing. In Sparta, so frequently at war, music took a martial turn – the strong and simple “Doric mode”; and not only were other styles discouraged, but any deviation from this Doric style was punishable by law. Even Terpander, though he had quelled a sedition by his songs, was fined by the ephors, and his lyre nailed mute to the wall, because to suit his voice, he had dared to add another string to the instrument; and in a later generation Timotheus, who had expanded Terpander’s seven strings to eleven, was not allowed to compete at Sparta until the ephors had removed from his lyre the scandalously extra strings.

As humorous as the scandal of the strings is to us 21st century types, it seems that Sparta was a very musical city, even if that music served national (i.e. milataristic) purpose. I don’t know about you, but I find this highly fascinating! Durant continues:

Sparta, like England, had great composers when she imported them. Towards 670 [B.C.], supposedly at the behest of the Delphi oracle, Terpander was brought in from Lesbos to prepare a contest in choral sining at the festival of the Carneia. Likewise, Thaletas was summoned from Crete about 620; and soon after came Tyrtaeus, Alcman, and Polymnestus. Their labors went mostly to composing patriotic music and training choruses to sing it. Music was seldom taught to individual Spartans; as in revolutionary Russia, the communal spirit was so strong that music took a corporate form, and group competed with group in magnificent festivals of song and dance. Such choral singing gave the Spartans another opportunity for discipline and mass formations, for every voice was subject to the leader. At the feast of the Hyacinthia King Agesilaus sang obediently in the place and time assigned to him by the choral master; and at the festival of the Gymnopedia the whole body of Spartans, of every age and sex, joined in massive exercises of harmonious dance and antistrophal song. Such occasions must have provided a powerful stimulus and outlet to the patriotic sentiment.

History Within Culture – Part III

As, I said earlier this is a rather lengthy essay. The essay in question is “Why We Need Christopher Dawson,” written by Glenn W. Olsen in the Spring 2008 issue of Communio. So far in this series of posts, I have related Olsen’s treatment of Dawson’s approach to history, as opposed to the more generally held view of historical “time periods.” (See Part I and Part II). Now we move on to Olsen’s response to one of Dawson’s Catholic critics, Robert A. Markus. This section of Olsen’s essay will also serve as a useful critique of the usual over-simplifications of Church history, especially as it pertains to the middle ages and the “pre-Vatican II Church.” It would seem Markus is guilty of this tendency to over-simplify in order to fit a preferred narrative of history. As Olsen’s response to Markus is a bit long, I will do my best to edit appropriately in order to present only the most pertinent excerpts. But I fear this post will still be longer than I would like. Nonetheless, what Olsen has to say on this matter is very much worth reading.

Glenn W. Olsen, from “Why We Need Christopher Dawson” (Communio, Spring 2008):

Dawson has been criticized by Catholics such as the patristics specialist Robert A. Markus, who desires a radical critique of society by Christianity, for laying “much stress on the Church’s role in creating a ‘Western Civilization,’” and in this failing “to see the cost to the Church in becoming thus identified  with a culture largely of its own making.”…

… Nevertheless, Markus’ idea that Dawson failed “to see the cost to the Church in becoming… identified with a culture largely of its own making” seems to embody multiple misunderstandings or misreadings of Dawson.

First… “Western Civilization” was not then the traditional expression, but it became to be a phrase increasingly used after the War, in part to define the “Western” values under attack as the Cold War commenced…

At first sight, the point Olsen makes above seems to be a vague one, but it will make more sense in the light of what follows.

Second, whatever could be called “Western Civilization” in Dawson’s vision, he himself never thought of it as something largely of the Church’s making. His repeated emphasis, as we saw above, was on the plurality that had made the West: Judaism, Greek learning, Roman ideals of government and law, Christianity, and the Celtic and Germanic cultures of the North. Of these Christianity was very important, but Dawson did not have the rationalist and mono-causal view not uncommon among historians which sees some person or institution (but not God) as “making cultures.” That is, he was not in the habit of seeing anything so complicated as “Western Civilization” as “largely” of anyone’s own making.

Third, Dawson did not exactly hold that the Church (simply) identified with the cultures it help make. Certainly he understood that it sometimes did this, though arguably more in the modern period than the earlier… Especially in the early middle ages, the Church often assumed the posture of a teacher, teaching both Christian and Roman ways to barbarian peoples; but it also often criticized these same “students.” There are few periods where in which the Church has not engaged in cultural criticism, and Dawson’s books relate much of this. He repeatedly shows the Church criticizing cultural developments it had had a hand in…

Fourth, I would have thought that Dawson’s portrayal of things like the Reformation and the dividing of Christendom thereafter are testimony to his lively sense of the tragic in history, of how one does not necessarily reap what one sows, or more likely that one both does and does not reap. The dividing of Christendom is an example of the fact that often in history problems emerge beyond anyone’s solution. Dawson’s treatment of the earlier Gregorian Reform of the eleventh century certainly embodied a sympathy for the radical critique of traditional Germano-Christian society into which the Gregorians entered, their insistence that the Church should be free from lay and royal control. We might say in this regard that, to the degree in which he shows the Church identifying with various cultural phenomena, Dawson very clearly saw the cost of these identification and of the Church’s various “triumphs,” limited and passing as they might have been…

In sum, Markus seems to assume especially an early medieval Church and papacy more in control of European development and more triumphant than it ever was, and this becomes the basis for his not particularly accurate description of Dawson. Markus seems to be unaware of much recent scholarship on the early middle ages which stresses how much human experience varied across the continent, and how diverse Europe was…

Markus tends to view the period of Constantinian settlement and the middle ages – in some ways all Church history until Vatican II – as a time of the triumph of a Church led by a strong papacy. This undifferentiated view, not unlike that of those today who view Jewish history always with an eye to the Holocaust, is fundamentally misleading in being teleologically driven by a fixed idea that radically underestimates the resistance through the centuries of all kinds of social structures to “manipulation from above,” and then blames the papacy for all its failures to criticize radically such things as the presence of slavery in Christian society… In the case of Christian history, no one particular person or institution is responsible for the deeds of “Western Christendom,” good or bad. Markus is absolutely right that the papacy has a special responsibility to engage in social criticism, but it takes hardly any knowledge of Church history to see that it very frequently fulfilled this responsibility, just as it has frequently failed to extirpate this or that evil from society.

It is rather odd for Markus to write that “Late Antique Christianity had no legacy of reforming ideas to bequeath to a Church confident in its ability to mould secular society to serve it needs and purposes.” There is a sense in which such a statement can be justified, if it means that the elaborate reform terminology and ideas of Augustine, centered on the idea of reformatio in melius (“reform to the better”) as delineated by Gerhard Ladner, was lost in the early middle ages. But the Carolingian period of the late eighth and ninth century was in fact full of a language of reform, now under the heading of correctio, used to promote all kinds of educational, legal, moral, and liturgical reforms. Dawson details a good bit of this… For Markus to write, “[t]he emergence of an increasingly centralized ecclesiastical structure dominated by the Roman see deprived the Church of an element of an internal self-criticism that had been encouraged under its earlier condition” seriously fails to convey a sense of the weakness of the papacy both before and after the time of Gregory VII (1073-85), and the degree to which reformers like Alcuin, and later such reformers as the founders of Cluny, depended on what support the papacy could supply, even if largely moral. Dawson was in fact much more clear about such things than a critic such as Markus. It is almost bizarre for Markus to write that, in the early middle ages after the time of the rise of Islam in the seventh century, “The Western Church was deeply marred… by its triumph.” This was a time when no European government, including the papacy, functioned very efficiently. Markus perhaps reveals his own agenda – and certainly his deeply flawed notion of an unchanging triumphant papacy – in the further comment that “The marks of triumph became permanent features of its entire future until the 1960s.” That is, according to him pre-Vatican II history was of a piece until finally the Church was liberated from its monochromatic past by Vatican II. Dawson never descended to such simplicities.

And there you have it. As Olsen says in the ensuing paragraph, “[s]o much for one recent critic of Dawson’s allegedly triumphalistic notion of Christian culture.” By the way, if Markus writes a response to Olsen, I would be very interested in seeing it.

In the next post in this series, we will begin to take a look at Olsen’s own critique of Dawson, focusing on Dawson’s thinking within Romantic categories and why that’s not such a bad thing.

History Within Culture – Part II

In Part I of this series, I mentioned Dawson’s view of history centered on culture versus the more prominent view of distinct time periods (ancient, medieval, modern) and the impact it has on how we view history. From what I gather reading Glenn W. Olsen’s essay, this is Dawson’s most enduring contribution to historical studies. In this post I will attempt to elaborate on Dawson’s overall view of history with respect to the way history is generally viewed. As is usual with my posts, I will let the author speak for himself, as I could and do not have anything to add. I should also mention that the author in this case is Glenn W. Olsen, not Christopher Dawson. Although, Olsen will serve as a useful introduction to the thought and enduring legacy of Dawson. That is, after all, the point of this series of posts.

So let’s get right to it. In the following passage, Olsen sets up for us the contrasting views of history (from “Why We Need Christopher Dawson”, Communio, Spring 2008):

One could argue that Dawson’s most memorable books are written in pursuit of the overarching shared vision of life of this or that society as it evolved over time, and then of the subcultures that composed each society, its doctors, warriors, or chiefs. The merit of this approach might be illustrated by comparing it with the outline of history still present, despite the inroads of subjects such as World History, in the curricula of most history departments in the United States. Typically, while denying they are Eurocentric, these divide the history of the world into three epochs derived from the periodization of European history: ancient, medieval, and modern, probably with some residue of the Petrarchan equation of ancient with “Golden Age,” medieval with “decline,” and modern with “return to or progress along the right path.” As a schema this does little more than replicate with a slight Western flavor what Mircea Eliade judged the most basic pattern of mythical thought across the world religions, the loss of a “once upon a time” (Eden) in a sad present (history), but with an Eden of possible recovery shining before us (utopia or, on a slightly less grand scale, a world made safe for democracy)…

This brings us to Dawson’s particular method, centering historical inquiry on the cultures in which the history takes place. Olsen continues:

Dawson consciously decided on “culture” as a better word than “civilization” to speak of his interests. “Civilization” as derived from civitas, had too urban and intellectual an association for him. If he was to talk globally about human communal life, a good deal of which had not centered on cities, the better word was “culture,” for, coming from cultus, this could designate any habit of being or shared pattern of life, urban, rural, nomadic, agricultural, familial, or monastic. It also suggested that life, like religio, is typically tied to the gods, that is, that human communities commonly are part of a larger community of God and man. That is why culture is embodied religion. Only those of us who have inherited the prolonged attempt of recent centuries to undo the ties between religion and culture, to separate God from man, to marginalize religion, cannot see this. Man’s usual situation for most of history has been within a religious community composed of gods and men.

That said, Dawson thought the best way to study any culture was over its life-cycle, from origin to maturity, the latter being the point at which its form was most realized (here he was closest to the Romantics), to decline and afterlife. Few cultures actually die, most pass on something of themselves after their moment of greatest flourishing to successors, and in a sense live to the present. Homer and Sophocles are still read today. Thus it makes little sense to speak of a Roman period simply succeeding a Greek period. Rather, after a kind of fulfillment in the so-called Classical period of the fifth century B.C., Greek culture continued to develop in the Hellenistic period and was central, for instance, to the articulation of Christian theology…

Though Dawson knew a great deal about and wrote about many of the cultures of the world, arguably he most fully illustrated his idea of the formation of culture in his studies on Christian culture. This he saw as foreshadowed by Israel, formed around the figure of Christ, and facilitated by the Roman Empire; then under the influence of Greek philosophy as passing into a kind of intellectual and spiritual maturation in the patristic period, followed by the bringing of entire peoples to Christianity in the middle ages, along with further cultural innovations, such as the chansons de geste, Gothic architecture and scholasticism. This culture, called Christendom by the time of Charlemagne, was divided in the sixteenth century and subsequently laid under siege, especially by modern nationalism, but again, in certain respects continues to the present.

So what difference does it make if we view history through the cultures in which the history is contained, or if we view history as a succession of time periods, ancient (“golden age”), medieval (“decline”), modern (“rebirth”)? Olsen elaborates:

In any case, Dawson propsed that, so far as the history of Christianity is concerned, our basic historical schema should be the stages of the development of Christian culture. This leads to a rethinking of still current assumptions about the relation between Christianity and Western history.

First of all, the so-called middle ages, viewed as a stage of the development of Christian culture, was not just a middle period between two times of high achievement, a period so lacking in distinctive characteristics that it was to be labeled “middle.” Rather, the medieval stage of the formation of Christian culture was to be seen as a time of the first great missionary expansion of Christianity, when, against great odds, whole peoples had been joined to Christendom and the Church had in fair measure communicated a sense of the faith. It was a time when the Christian literary and artistic imagination blossomed.

Moreover, the so-called Renaissance (if ever the characterization of a period has taken the part from the whole, it is in regard to the Renaissance), was not in general a time of de-Christianization, though that might, especially according to geography and social class, have been one’s experience. As such fine historians since Dawson’s time as Augustine Thompson have now shown for the early Italian Renaissance, this was a time when – say in the great cities of Italy – life continued to be lived according to a Christian, liturgical, rhythm.

Finally, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were in important respects attempts to form the most thoroughly Christian society yet, in which, as a stunning book by Brad Gregory on the willingness of early modern Christians to die for their faith has shown, the Christian hold on Europe continued to develop (W. H. Lewis long ago suggested that the seventeenth was the most Christian of centuries). Certainly an argument can be made that the Baroque, Catholic and Protestant, represents the most distinctly Christian and European art form ever conceived, finding the Christian, incarnate, God in all things and seeing the world as a stage on which the Christian drama plays out. And so it goes.

The point, then, is that overly to separate the various stages of Christian development into too-distinct periods obscures the fact that they were all part of a living and continuing entity, Christendom or Christian culture.

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Part III

History Within Culture – Part I

In the Spring 2008 issue of Communio, Glenn W. Olsen wrote a rather lengthy essay entitled “Why We Need Christopher Dawson”.  I haven’t read too much in the way of scholarly history, but I’ve read enough to understand the differing views on the nature of history (i.e. what can we “know” from historial inquiry?). I find the topic fascinating and thus far* have not read a better treatment of it than N. T. Wright in Part II of The New Testament and the People of God. So when I read Olsen’s essay on Christopher Dawson’s approach to history through culture, I was very intrigued. I found myself agreeing with much of the essay, and can second Olsen’s opinion that we need more of a Christopher Dawson view of history in the world.

I will attempt to do a series of posts (how many I don’t know) on Olsen’s essay. This will also serve as an introduction to Dawson’s thought, which is the primary reason for me to do this series of posts. Also me typing this out will help me remember it better. See. My reasoning can be very simple at times. I should also note that this touches on some of the discussion that has been had recently over at the fides quaerens intellectum blog.

By way of introduction, here is how Olsen starts out his essay, which serves to set the stage for a discussion about Dawson:

Historians have a rather short half-life. Whether one views historical writing as a branch of literature or as a kind of science, it is based on documentary research. As this advances more evidence becomes available by which to understand the past, making earlier narratives to that extent dated. Add to this the inevitable changes in perspective brought about by history itself, carrying the historian with it, and modifying ideas about what in earlier times is most valuable and important, and we find every generation rewriting the past. Even the historian most devoted to philology, that is to avoiding anachronism by using words and ideas only as they were used in the period he wishes to study, must begin with words and ideas as they are presently defined and laboriously work back to earlier meanings – and the present usage with which he must begin is itself shifting. The upshot is that few historians are read by many beyond their own times. If they are, it is because they are a Thecydides or a Gibbon, that is, historians of such great stature, intelligence, style, or insight as writers – in the case of Gibbon, so amusing and incisive – that we cannot lay their histories down. No matter that we may strongly disagree with the interpretive framework of a Gibbon, he draws us into his web, and we can always make allowances for the limitations of his perspective.

So why should we continue to read Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), now dead for more than a generation? Truth be told, some in the historical community, having asked that question, have suggested that Dawson is passé, an interesting and important writer in his own day, but now either not sufficiently up-to-date, or embodying perspectives once plausible, but now less so. We will consider one such critic below, but first we need to address the question at hand: why should we continue to read Dawson?

Probably most would agree that his greatest historical contribution was his writing of history around the idea of Christian culture, an innovation which in turn expressed his conviction that culture is embodied religion. At the heart of culture lies religion: Dawson’s genius lay in his working out this insight in a series of books and essays. These all, in one way or another, dealt with the idea of culture, but perhaps it is fair to say that, once having defined the relation of religion to culture, he was more interested in using this idea to write history than in pursuing its final philosophical foundations. This latter is the goal toward which we move here. The claim is that Dawson is stil worth reading not just because he was an illuminating historian and a fine sylist, but because his organizing ideas, true in themselves, continue to provoke reflection on the nature of culture. At the same time, this reflection should be useful even for historians, inasmuch as it points to the need to make room for, and give priority to, apprehend meaning as the causa causarum in history.

I can second that statement about (Edward) Gibbon. I am working through his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire now, and I must say it is easily the most enjoyable history book I have ever read.

After the exceprt above, Olsen goes on to contrast Dawson’s view of history as cultural evolutions versus the generally held view of cut and dry “time periods” (e.g. ancient, medeival, modern). It is surprsing to me how the differing approaches to history impact what we can learn and how we understand history. But more on that in a later post. I will also add – because I know you were wondering – that Glenn W. Olsen is a professor of history at the University of Utah with a PhD in the history of the Middle Ages.

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* “thus far” doesn’t mean all that much as I readily admit that I am not well read in this area.

Part II
Part III