The Pervasive Influence of Christopher Dawson

Though few—Catholic or otherwise—remember him now, Christopher Dawson once stood at the very center of the Catholic literary and intellectual revival the four decades preceding Vatican II.  “For Dawson is more like a movement than a man,” his publisher and friend, Frank Sheed, wrote of him in 1938. “His influence with the non-Catholic world is of a kind that no modern Catholic has yet had, both for the great number of fields in which it is felt and for the intellectual quality of those who feel it.”[1]  Excepting Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson—though only briefly and certainly with some hesitation—it would be difficult to find a more prominent Roman Catholic scholar not only in the English speaking world, but throughout the Catholic world and beyond during those forty years.[2]  As Maisie Ward, co-founder of and editor for Sheed and Ward, the most important Catholic publisher of the middle of the twentieth-century, admitted to Dawson, “You were, as I said on Sunday, truly the spear-head of our publishing venture.”[3]  Ward put it into greater context in her autobiography, Unfinished Business.  “Looking back at the beginnings of such intellectual life as I have had, I feel indebted to three men of genius: Browning, Newman, and Chesterton,” she wrote.  “But in my middle age, while we owed much as publishers to many men and women, foreign and English, the most powerful influence on the thinking of both myself and my husband was certainly Christopher Dawson.”[4]  Even among the clergy, none held the reputation that Dawson did by the 1950s.  Again, as Maisie noted rather bluntly, “There is no question in my mind that no priest exists at the moment whose name carries anything like the weight in or outside the church that yours does.”[5]

Certainly, it was in the 1950s that Dawson was at his most influential.  Throughout that decade, as the Iron Bloc divided East from West and the citizens of the western world were intensely interested in the meaning of the West and western civilization, invitations for Dawson to speak, write papers, and present his ideas in any form arrived from various countries, colleges, and religious denominations.  In the non-academic world, he was especially asked to consult on the formation and development/continuation of the UN and NATO.[6]  In the spring of 1959, Henry Luce, publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, who had appreciated Dawson’s work since World War II, used the editorial column of the March 16^th issue to promote Dawson’s work and theories.  Unlike the Marxists and their materialist positions or even the then-eminent position of the American Historical Association President Walter Prescott Webb, who had developed all of his views from his life in Texas, Dawson offered the world a broad vision.  The editorial admitted that most will find Dawson’s take to be “unfashionable,” but “such a theory is at least as scholarly as those merely ‘ideological’ (i.e., political or economic) interpretations which straitjacket many a man’s view of world events.”  Considering the bunk available, Life concluded, one should not dismiss Dawson, for his ideas “may well be true.”[7]  Additionally, Luce ordered a copy of Dawson’s then latest book, The Movement of World Revolution, for each of his nineteen editors at Time.[8]  Dawson, not the Marxists or the Texans, would shape Time editorial policy.

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