Today, October 12, 2008, would have been Christopher Dawson’s 119th birthday.  Born in 1889, three years before J.R.R. Tolkien and nine years before C.S. Lewis, Dawson died in the spring of 1970.  He belonged to an amazing generation of British Christian Humanists, all of whom worried about the decline of order in the West, the nearly irreparable separation of the cult (Christianity) from the culture, and the progressive narrowing of ideas.  Like many of his generation, Dawson despised ideologies and mere academic theories as fanciful and demeaning to the complexity and true diversity of life.  With the loss of nuances in one’s thinking, one became, essentially, non-human, either losing the ability to think altogether or becoming nothing but a mechanized automaton.  Such mechanization occurred in government, industry, education, agriculture, the arts, and in nearly every aspect of life. 

Should it surprise a Dawson then that horrors on a previously unimagined scale followed in the wake of the narrowing of ideas and the loss of a proper imagination in the world?  Very quickly, the twentieth century proved, when society ignores the sacrifice and redemptive power of the true Logos, Demos, Mars, and Leviathan each demand burnt offerings.  To be sure, each of these gods asks in a pleasing fashion at first, stroking the egos of the brilliant and giving a sense of dignity to those who follow the brilliant.  But, the demands become greater and greater, the rewards increasingly petty, until That Hideous Strength rules the world.  And, then, Hell is unleashed upon the world.  One million dead here, 65 million there.  Blood spills, spreads, and coagulates.  Mounds of human bodies rot and civilization, order, and freedom collapse.  Families go without fathers, mothers lose their babies, and friends betray one another.

Perhaps the ancient Greeks, the pre-Socratics especially, were correct in their understanding of the world, trapped in its cycles.  Birth, corruption, death; birth, corruption, death; birth, corruption, death.

A student and follower of St. Augustine, Dawson knew the true Logos had broken the cycle.  The great poet, T.S. Eliot, himself quite taken with St. Augustine and Dawson, wrote:

Now I fear disturbance of the quiet season:

Winter shall come bringing death from the sea,

Ruinous spring shall beat at our doors,

Root and shoot shall eat our eyes and our ears

Disastrous summer burn up the beds of our streams

And the poor shall wait for another decaying October.

Why should the summer bring consolation

For autumn fires and winter fogs?

What shall we do in the heat of summer

But wait in barren orchards for another October?

Some malady is coming upon us.  We wait, we wait,

And the saints and martyrs wait, for those who shall be martyrs and saints.

Destiny waits in the hand of God, shaping the still unshapen:

I have seen these things in a shaft of sunlight.

Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen

Who do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing,

Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time.

Come, happy December, who shall observe you, who shall preserve you?

With St. Thomas á Beckett, we wait for December, for the Logos to enter the world, the Word Incarnate.  And, perhaps, as we wait, someone holy will be murdered in the cathedral.  But, in the end, the cycles will be broken, “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, making peace by the blood of his cross” (St. Paul to the Colossians, Chapter 1). 

Or, as Dawson put it:

“The only remedy is to be found in that spiritual force by which the humility of God conquers the pride of the evil one.  Hence the spiritual reformer cannot expect to have the majority on his side.  He must be prepared to stand alone like Ezekiael and Jeremy.  He must take as his example St. Augustine besieged by the Vandals at Hippo, or St. Gregory preaching at Rome with the Lombards at the gates.  For the true helpers of the world are the poor in spirit, the men who bear the sign of the cross on their foreheads, who refused to be overcome by the triumph of injustice and put their sole trust in the salvation of God.”

Thank you, Christopher Dawson, for such profound words and necessary reminders.  Though we enter the arena, we stand with He who created the world, He who loves us beyond all comprehension, He who has broken the cycles of the world, He who will claim victory, bringing all things to Himself through the cross.  Blessed are we.

October 12, 2008.  I’m sure it’s a joyous day in heaven, for “only the dead can dance.” Happy Birthday, Christopher.  And, dance away.