40 Tweets on the Rise of Western Culture (by Christopher Dawson)

Christopher Dawson

1. The great world religions are, as it were, great rivers of sacred tradition which flow down through the ages and through the ages and through changing historical landscapes which they irrigate and fertilize (12)
2. An ideology, in the modern sense of the word, is very different from a faith, although it is intended to fulfill the same sociological functions. It is the work of man, an instrument through which the conscious political will attempts to mould the social tradition to its purpose. But faith looks beyond the world of man and his works; it introduces man to a higher and more universal range of reality than the finite and temporal world to which the state and the economic order belong (14)
3. In the West, spiritual power has not been immobilized in a sacred social order like the Confucian state in China and the Indian caste system (...) but it has had far-reaching effects on every aspect of social and intellectual life (16)
4. There has never been any unitary organization of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity (22)
5. No historian denies that the coming of Christianity to the peoples of the West had a profound effect on their culture; nevertheless, this great spiritual revolution left the material conditions of Western life unchanged” (23)
6. Our generation has been forced to realize how fragile and unsubstantial are the barriers that separate civilization from the forces of destruction (24)
7. The Latin Fathers -Ambrose, Augustine, Leo and Gregory- were in a real sense the fathers of Western culture (26)
8. The conversion of the Roman Empire, the process by which the state of August and Nero became the state of Constantine and Theodosius, has a vital relation to the rise of the new culture (28)
9. Rome was not longer the capital of Caesar, it had become the Apostolic See (28)
10. This stern doctrine came with peculiar force to the declining civilization of the post-Roman world -a world in which war and famine and slavery and torture where the unavoidable facts of daily experience, where the weak could hardly survive, and the strong died young in battle (36)
11. As the darkness deepened over Western Europe it was in the monasteries rather than in the cities that the tradition of Latin culture and the patterns of Christian life were preserved. The monks were the apostles of the West and the founders of medieval culture (43)
12. The Benedictine Abbey was a self-contained economic organism, like the villa of a Roman landowner, save that the monks were themselves the workers and the old classical contrast between servile work and free leisure no longer obtained (48)
13. There arose an autonomous Christian culture centring in the monasteries and permeating the Church and the life of the people by educational and religious influence (51)
14. Throughout the Middle Ages there was a continuous tension which often rose to a conflict between these two authorities. But both of them were regarded as functionaries of the same society, and no one questioned that each of them possessed a sacred character (82)
15. The remarkable thing is not that it [the Carolingian Empire] was a material and political failure, but that the ideal of unity and the tradition of Christian culture which inspired it were able to survive so long in the adverse conditions of the ninth century (84)
16. The wholehearted acceptance of Christianity in Norway and Denmark gradually transformed the spirit of Scandinavian culture. [As Adam of Bremen wrote at that time:] “After their acceptance of Christianity, they have become imbued with better principles and have now learned to love peace and truth and to be content with their poverty; even to distribute what they have stored up and not as aforetime to gather up with what was scattered (98)
17. Adam of Bremen: “There is much that is remarkable in their manners, above all Charity, whence it comes that all things are common among them not only for the native population but also for this stranger” (99)
18. [In the Instruction of St. Stephen to his son St. Emeric (1007-31)] he attributes the greatness of the Roman Empire to its freedom from national prejudices and counsels the prince to welcome strangers and foreigners who bring more languages and customs into the kingdom: “for weak and fragile is a kingdom with one language and custom” -a sentiment which seems strangely enlightened in comparison with the nationalism and xenophobia of modern Europe (117)
19. It was through music and poetry and the vision of a new and delightful way of life that the influence of the higher culture of the Southern Mediterranean penetrated feudal society (155)
20. The ideal of Christian chivalry has always retained its attraction for the Western mind and its influence on Western ethical standards in spite of the criticisms of moralist like Ascham and the tragic irony of the greatest minds of the Renaissance: Cervantes and Shakespeare (160)
21. From the political and economic point of view the period of civic culture which begins in the eleventh century may be regarded as a preparation and foundation of the modern world (...), as the highest point of the development of the medieval spirit (162)
22. The city, like the monastery, was an oasis of security and peace in a world of insecurity and war (162) 
23. It was the religious confraternity or “charity” (...) the seed of the great flowering of communal life in the merchant and craft gilds which were the most striking feature of medieval urban society (170)
24. Medieval political philosophy was dominated by the idea of unity (171)
25. This unity formed a complex hierarchical organism, a body with many members, each having a vital function to fulfill, each with its own office and ministry for the service of the whole (...) but unlike the Aristotelian theory it does not involve total subordination or the institution of slavery (...). It favours the conception of vocation and the internal autonomy of each particular organ (172) 
26. The material poverty of the individual man was compensated by a wider development of communal activity and artistic and symbolic expression that anything that the more material wealthy societies of modern Europe have known (173)
27. To medieval city was more completely a commonwealth -a full communion and communication of social goods- that any society that has ever existed with the exception of the Greek polis, and it was superior even to the latter, inasmuch as it was not the society of a leisured class supported by a foundation of servile labour (173) 
28. Erasmus: “I saw a monarchy without tyranny, aristocracy without factions, democracy without tumult, wealth without luxury… Would that it had been your lot, divine Plato, to come upon such a republic” (174)
29. The medieval ideas of the organic nature of society, of corporate rights and duties and the mutual cooperation of the different specialized social functions in the life of the whole underlie the development not only of the corporate institution of the medieval city but also the representative constitutional organization of the later medieval kingdom (175)
30. Modern science itself could hardly have come into existence had not the Western mind been prepared by centuries of intellectual discipline to accept the rationality of the universe and the power of the human intelligence to investigate the order of nature (190) 
31. “Nothing,” says Robert of Sorbon, “is known perfectly which has not been masticated by the teeth of disputation” (191)
32. The intellectual organization of Christian civilization [with the creation of universities and the formation of new religious Orders] is one of the most remarkable examples of the planning of culture on a large scale that history has ever seen (197) 
33. [In the 13th century, in those great “cathedrals of ideas” that were the first universities] the acquisitions of Aristotelian and Arabic science have been organically incorporated with the Christian tradition in an intelligible unity (197) 
34. The emancipation of the church from imperial and feudal control and the assertion of the primacy of the spiritual power set free new spiritual forces and created the new international society of medieval Christendom (199)
35. By the time of St. Huge (1049-1109) there were more than eight hundred monasteries affiliated to Cluny in France, Italy, Germany and Spain, so that the congregation had become a great international power in the life of Christendom (200) 
36. St Bernard sets up the reformer’s ideal of the prophetic and apostolic mission of a true Pope (...). “For it you are to do the work of a prophet you need the hoe rather than the sceptre” (202) 
37. [Francis of Assisi] was a man of the most intense originality who had a profound influence on the spirit of Western Christianity and Western culture (...). Papacy found in his Order an ideal organ for the evangelization of the new classes and the new society which had grown up the new cities outside the traditional cadres of the territorial feudal Church (210) 
38. The creation of the Mendicant Orders together with the foundation of the universities marks the culmination of the movement towards international and super political unity which was the ideal of medieval Christendom (215)
39. The tragic crisis of the medieval spirit is reflected in the greatest literary achievement of that age, the Divina Commedia of Dante. Nowhere can we find a more perfect expression of the power and the glory of the medieval cultural achievement which reached from Heaven to Hell and found room for all the knowledge and wisdom (...)

Christopher Dawson

Religion and the Rise of the Western Culture

Doubleday

New York, 1957

242 pp.