Christianity as Culture

What ails Western civilization? No patient has been thumped and stethoscoped, X-rayed and blood-tested by so many eager diagnosticians. The latest to undertake the task is bearded, bashful Historian Christopher Dawson, 71, who left Britain in 1958 to be Harvard's first professor of Roman Catholic studies. His diagnosis: the patient's heart is not in the right place.

Unlike many of his eminent colleagues, Dr. Dawson presents a specific remedy as well as a diagnosis, in The Crisis of Western Education (Sheed & Ward; $3.95), published last week.

The Secular Side. The heart of Western civilization, says Historian Dawson, is its Christian culture. By this he means not the Christian religion but its impact on the social life and institutions of the West. Today that Western heart is not beating at the center of things, where it belongs, but is fluttering on the fringes, and Western civilization is sick with a bad case of secularism.

One of the most serious symptoms, which may well finish off the patient in the end, is the loss of moral order. Great world cultures of the past-- e.g., China, India, Islam -- were held together by ideals based on a spiritual unity. The Western world, says Dawson, "has become so deeply secularized that it no longer recognizes any common system of spiritual values, while its philosophers have tended to isolate the moral concept from its cultural context and have attempted to create an abstract subjective system of pure ethics. If this were all, we should be forced to conclude that modern Western society does not possess a civilization, but only a technological order resting on a moral vacuum."

But such, says Dawson, is not the whole case. Christian culture still has a tenacious vitality, but it must be made available to the minds and hearts of the young. This means that in Western universities and colleges, secular and religious alike, a strenuous effort must be directed to the study of Christian history, Christian theology and Christian tradition.

Sociology of Faith. Dawson is well aware that non-Catholic educators will be hard to convince that his proposal is not just a device to smuggle Catholicism into schools. It is not a question of faith, Dawson insists, but of sociology. "If one can get the educators to understand the existence of Christian culture as a sociological reality, it is simply a question of finding the ways of studying it that will appeal to the ... student."

He suggests that courses in Christian culture may be worked out by secular experts in the same way that Great Books courses were formulated and coordinated--with different courses of study, such as literature, history, art, philosophy and education. The teaching of Christianity as a social and historical phenomenon is favored by Protestants. But few have yet been persuaded that Dawson's prescription is vital to the patient's survival. Dawson begs to disagree: only by placing Christian values at the center will Western man acquire "the higher moral aims which alone can justify the immense developments of technological power and organization."

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