The Age of the Gods

Introduction

vii Introduction dermot Quinn The Age of the Gods is an astonishing book by an extraordinary writer. Nearly forty years old when it was published, Christopher dawson was no longer young for a first-time author. he had worked on the book for nearly fifteen years and had thought about its major themes even longer. Nor, as a part-time lecturer at exeter University in the southwest of england, was he a figure of much academic standing. Nor was he likely to make much of a splash. Quiet, shy, and reserved, he was a scholar’s scholar, an improbable popularizer. Yet The Age of the Gods helped change that picture. In scope and erudition, imagination and seriousness, judgment and verve, it stands unrivaled, as does its author, in early-twentieth-century english historical writing. ernest Barker, his oxford tutor, thought dawson “without exaggeration” the most learned student he had ever taught—“a man who was of the company of acton and Baron von hügel.” The Age of the Gods, with its sweeping survey of the spiritual and material life of man from the earliest civilizations to the beginning of the greek city states, gives some sense of the range and depth of that learning. When it appeared in 1928, the first in a projected series of books on the Life of Civilizations, The Times Literary Supplement proclaimed it “the best short account of our knowledge of pre-historic man, especially since the dawn of the Bronze age, that has so far been written.” The anonymous reviewer of The Journal of Hellenic Studies thought it “admirable.” J.L.Myres in The Classical Review found it “constructive.” gordon Childe in Antiquity considered it “the most successful effort” he had ever come across to “reanimate the frame of prehistoric humanity.” even C.daryll forde, a somewhat pedantic anthropologist who offered trivial criticisms, conceded that The Age of the Gods was “clear and well balanced,” “skillful and conscien- viii Dermot Quinn tious,” “suggestive and illuminating”—qualities obvious to readers ever since, who have marveled at its combination of poetry and prose, careful scholarship, and intoxicating religious beauty.1 They have seen in it an almost mystical quality, as if the author, knowing his materials with such intimacy, has entered into deeper communion with them, so that he is no longer a commentator on ancient peoples but, in a way, their companion. “a culture can only be understood from within,” he tells us at the beginning of the book. “It is a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and a common attitude to life.” almost contradicting his own thesis, dawson, an outsider, seems to enter “the inner life of primitive culture.”2 There are few books more deeply felt or imaginatively realized in recent historical writing. It is good that a new generation is being introduced to it. Yet, The Age of the Gods is not an easy book to read or to categorize. some will find its detail daunting (although others will be fascinated ), but they will wonder, as they make their way through Megalithic tombs and Beaker People, through peasant cultures and warrior cultures , what precisely it is that they are reading. It is not a popular work nor a specialist one but one that lies somewhere in between: a highly erudite and even, at times, obscure cultural history of the first civilizations , pitched at the intelligent general reader who must be prepared to do some work to receive his reward. In fact, The Age of the Gods brilliantly exemplifies dawson’s double ability to analyze and to synthesize , to break down and to build up, to offer extremely close readings and exceptionally broad ones, so that, by the end of the book, the reader has scrutinized the smallest detail of an egyptian vase and thought about its place in the huge sweep of man’s search for the divine. That is why Myres applauded dawson’s capacity “to clarify his presentation of a very large mass of facts and to suggest fresh aspects in which they deserve to be examined carefully.” he gets to the heart of things. Nearly 1. Times Literary Supplement, June 28, 1928, 478; Journal of Hellenic Studies 49, Part 1 (1929):122–24; Classical Review 42, no. 5 (November 1928): 172–74; American Anthropologist 34, New series, no. 2 (april–June 1932): 340–41. 2. The citations to Christopher dawson, The Age of the Gods: A Study in the Origins of Culture in Prehistoric...