The Crisis of Western Education (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

X. The Case for the Study of Christian Culture

x The Case for the Study of Christian Culture at first sight it may seem surprising that there is any need for the discussion of Christian culture study, at least among Catholic educationalists, for one would have expected that the whole question would have been thrashed out years ago and there was no longer room for any difference of opinion. But as a matter of fact this is far from being the case, and the more one looks into the subject, the more one is struck by the vagueness and uncertainty of educated opinion in this matter and the lack of any accepted doctrine or educational policy. no doubt the situation in all the english-speaking countries differs essentially from that of Catholic europe, where the Church has either preserved a privileged position in educational matters or, more frequently , has been forced to resist the hostile pressure of an anti-clerical or “laicist” regime. The Catholics of the english-speaking countries, in england as well as in america and in australia, have not had the need to face the continental type of political anti-clericalism, but on the other hand, they have no privileged position and no publicly established educational institutions of their own. They have had to build their whole educational system from the bottom upwards with their own scanty resources. and so the main problem of Catholic education in the english-speaking countries has been the problem of the primary school—how to secure the necessary minimum of religious instruction for their children. The urgency of this issue has relegated all the problems of higher 99 100 The Crisis of Western Education education to the second place. Catholics have felt that if they can save the schools, the universities can look after themselves. and in fact they have done so, up to a point. Catholics have managed to adapt themselves fairly successfully to the english and american systems of higher education. nevertheless it has been a question of adaptation to an external system, and there has been little opportunity to decide what the nature of higher education should be or to create their own curriculum of studies. all this is comparatively simple. But it is much more difficult to explain the situation in the past, when the Church dominated the whole educational system—schools, colleges and universities—and determined the whole course of higher studies. surely one would have expected that the study of Christian culture would have formed the basis for the higher studies and that the foundations of an educational tradition would have been laid which would have dominated Christian education ever since. But what actually happened was that for centuries higher education has been so identified with the study of one particular historic culture-that of ancient Greece and rome—that there was no room left for anything else. even the study of our own particular national culture, including both history and literature, did not obtain full recognition until the nineteenth century, while the concept of Christian culture as an object of study has never been recognized at all. The great obstacle to this study has not been religious or secularist prejudices but strictly cultural. it had its origins in the idealization of classical antiquity by the humanist scholars and artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. and it followed from this conception that the period that intervened between the fall of rome and the renaissance offered the historian, as Voltaire says, “the barren prospect of a thousand years of stupidity and barbarism.” They were “middle ages” in the original sense of the word—that is, a kind of cultural vacuum between two ages of cultural achievement which (to continue the same quotation ) “vindicate the greatness of the human spirit.” This view, which necessarily ignores the achievements and even the existence of Christian culture, was passed on almost unchanged from the renaissance to the eighteenth-century enlightenment and from the latter to the modern secularist ideologies. and though today every in- Study of Christian Culture 101 structed person recognizes that it is based on a completely erroneous view of history and very largely on a sheer ignorance of history, it still continues to exert an immense influence, both consciously and unconsciously , on modern education and on our attitude to the past. it is therefore necessary for educators to make a positive effort to exorcise the ghost of this ancient error and to give...