David Jones and Christopher Dawson

I.

THE LEGACY OF CULTURAL HISTORIAN Christopher Dawson extends beyond his now widely recognized contributions to the fields of Christian history and education. He was also a major influence on the work of David Jones (1895-1974), the British poet and painter best known for his epic of World War I In Parenthesis (1937), and The Anathemata (1952), a long poem on the evolution of Western culture. Dawson and Jones became friends during the 1920s as part of the salon of Catholic intellectuals that "convened in the house of Charles Burns, doctor and psychologist, in St. Leonard's Terrace, Chelsea." ¹ The publisher Tom Burns, Charles's brother, alludes more informally to "the fairly frequent parties which seemed to spring up spontaneously at our house." ² As well as the Burns brothers, Dawson, and Jones, occasional guests included Eric Gill, Stephen Spender, and, once, Jacques Maritain. ³ Much of their discussion revolved around the fate of civilization in the modern age. In his preface to The Anathemata, Jones relates that

in the late nineteen-twenties and early 'thirties among my most immediate friends there used to be discussed something that we christened "The Break." We did not discover the phenomenon so described; it had been evident in various ways to various people for perhaps a century; it is now, I suppose, apparent to most. Or at least most now see that in the nineteenth century, Western man moved across a rubicon which, if as unseen as the 38th Parallel, seems to have been as definitive as the Styx. ⁴

Tom Burns writes that "in endless talk and rumination with friends like David Jones and Christopher Dawson and Harman Grisewood, we would come to face what we called 'the Break'—an alienating event in what was known of our civilisation: more a slow-burner than an event, in fact." ⁵ Burns's summary of the nature of this "Break" stresses themes familiar from the later writings of Dawson and Jones:

It seemed to us that the Reformation, the age of Revolution and Industrialism had eroded the territory of the sacral in daily living: modern man was losing a vital dimension in his life, the utilitarian motive was self-sufficient; a culture without religion was no culture—and scarcely civilised.

Dawson's conviction that religion is the basis of human culture, and Jones's distinction between the utile and the gratuitous in human making, were inspired in large measure by these 1920s conversations.

Their discussions led to "the spontaneous generation of an idea for a review dedicated to reforming the Catholic Church, at least in its local manifestation." ⁶ This review was called Order, and had as its main targets "ecclesiastical materialism," "the hideous aesthetic expressions of modern religion," and the complacent Catholic press. ⁷ Tom Burns singles out The Tablet of the 1920s as especially "sectarian and puritanical, pompous and parochial. . . . I attacked it mercilessly, without, of course, the slightest idea that I would myself be in the editorial chair forty years on." For the cover of Order, Jones carved a wood engraving of "a unicorn prancing in an enclosed garden to 'cleanse the waters,' as in the medieval myth." The "medieval myth" is a legend alluded to by Jones in the "Dai's Boast" passage of In Parenthesis:

I am the Single Horn thrusting
by night-stream margin
in Helyon. ⁸

In his note to these lines, Jones quotes from the Itinerarium de Joannis de Hese, which tells of a stream in Helyon poisoned each night by "venomous animals": "but in the morning, after sunrise, comes the Unicorn, and dips his horn into the stream, driving the Venom from it, so that the good animals can drink there during the day." ⁹ The unfinished wood engraving, He Frees the Waters, opposite page 213 in The Anathemata, also illustrates this scene.

Order has been completely ignored in accounts of...