Dawson (and Lewis) on the benefits of history
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Christopher Dawson (1889-1970)
Last week I began reading Christopher Dawson’s 1932 book The Making of Europe, one of the first histories seriously to push back on the Renaissance and Enlightenment image of the early medieval period as “the Dark Ages” and to rehabilitate the period as a crucial—even the crucial—era in the development of Western culture. It’s great so far.
Dawson starts strong. In his introduction he offers several reasons why he has written the specific book he has about the time period he has chosen, and among them are the following:
One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves—away from obvious and accepted facts—and discovers a reality that would otherwise be unknown to us. There is a real value in steeping our minds in an age entirely different to that which we know: a world different, but no less real—indeed more real, for what we call “the modern world” is the world of a generation, while a culture like that of the Byzantine or the Carolingian world has a life of centuries.
“History should be the great corrective to that ‘parochialism in time’ which [is] one of the great faults of our modern society.”
History should be the great corrective to that “parochialism in time” which Bertrand Russell rightly describes as one of the great faults of our modern society. Unfortunately, history has too often been written in a very different spirit. Modern historians, particularly in England, have frequently tended to use the present as an absolute standard by which to judge the past, and to view all history as an inevitable movement of progress that culminates in the present state of things. There is some justification for this in the case of a writer like Mr. H. G. Wells, whose object it is to provide the modern man with an historical background and a basis for his view of the world; but even at the best this way of writing history is fundamentally unhistorical, since it involves the subordination of the past to the present, and instead of liberating the mind from provincialism by widening the intellectual horizon, it is apt to generate the Pharisaic self-righteousness of the Whig historians or, still worse, the self-satisfaction of the modern Philistine.
“Parochialism in time” is an excellent way to think of the problem. Modern people would scoff at someone who spent their entire lives in one town but think nothing of reading only the very latest books. That kind of parochialism is even more damaging and dangerous than the homebody’s, because it keeps the mind small and warped to fit only the shape of the present.
Dawson’s argument here anticipates—and probably even inspired—similar arguments in CS Lewis’s work, notably in The Abolition of Man and, even more clearly, in CS Lewis’s great essay “On the Reading of Old Books.” (For a little more about Dawson’s influence on Lewis, their mutual respect, and their awkward first meeting, see here.) Lewis wrote the essay in 1944 as an introduction to a new translation of St. Athanasius’s De Incarnatione Verbi Dei (On the Incarnation). Early in the essay he writes that
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
Dawson, like Lewis, is also alert to the misuse of the past, especially as a polemical weapon in what we would now call culture wars:
There is, of course, the opposite danger of using history as a weapon against the modern age, either on account of a romantic idealisation of the past, or in the interests of religious or national propaganda. Of these the latter is the most serious, since the romanticist at least treats history as an end in itself; and it is in fact to the romantic historians that we owe the first attempts to study mediaeval civilisation for its own sake rather than as a means to something else. The propagandist historian, on the other hand, is inspired by motives of a non-historical order, and tends unconsciously to falsify history in the interest of apologetics.
“One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves.”
Dawson cites as examples the work of Catholic historians aiming to defend the Church against the attacks of modern atheists using medieval stereotypes as a cudgel, and we might add to this the uses to which history has been put in modern cultural and political debates, which often come in pairs: Marxist histories histories in which everything is exploitation and money and Whiggish histories in which everything is the fight for liberty; the tidy whitewash of Neo-Confederate history and the everything-looks-like-a-nail slavery-centric approach of the 1619 Project; freethinkers’ histories of religion as the font of all evil in the world and their counterparts in which all evil stems from Nietzsche, or Darwin, or Voltaire.
But “this way of writing history,” Dawson notes, “defeats its own ends, since as soon as the reader becomes suspicious of the impartiality of the historian he discounts the truth of everything that he reads.”
Such propagandist histories fail because they do not confer the very first benefit of history Dawson lists—they do not take us out of ourselves, but instead “subordinat[e] the past to the present,” especially our own interests. For all their faults, the Romantics were at least interested in the past for its own sake. Only if, like them, we surrender to the past and try to understand it on its own terms can we reap the benefits Dawson describes, or feel Lewis’s “clean sea breeze” freshening our minds.
