Christopher Dawson’s Medieval Essays may seem at first glance a rather modest work. Dawson originally published six essays, delivered as the Forwood Lectures at Liverpool University, in 1934 under the title Medieval Religion. Twenty years later in 1954, he added six more essays to the collection, two of which had been published elsewhere, under the title Medieval Essays. In spite of the modest title and the circumstances of composition and compilation, Medieval Essays is not a loose and eclectic collection. It is a work of signal importance not only for those interested in the thought of Christopher Dawson but for...

The following essays cover so wide a field in space and time that it may be difficult for the reader at first sight to grasp their connection with one another. True, they all deal with some aspect of “medieval” culture, but the word medieval is in itself unsatisfactory or insignificant. It was coined by post-Renaissance scholars to cover the gap between two periods of positive achievement which were regarded as the only ones worthy of the attention of the educated man—the classical civilization of Greece and Rome and the civilization of modern Europe. But this conception is the very...

The tradition of higher culture which was created by the ancient Greeks and transmitted by the Roman Empire and the Christian Church to modern Europe was never an exclusively Western one. It arose in the Mediterranean, where the warrior peoples of Europe first came into intimate contact with the higher civilization of the Ancient East, and from the union of these two disparate elements represented by the warrior tribe and the sacred city a new culture was born which proved stronger and more adaptable than either of its constituent elements. In the age of Alexander it spread eastwards across Asia...

St. augustine has often been regarded as standing outside his own age—as the inaugurator of a new world and the first medieval man, while others, on the contrary, have seen in him rather the heir of the old classical culture and one of the last representatives of antiquity. There is an element of truth in both these views, but for all that he belongs neither to the medieval nor to the classical world. He is essentially a man of his own age—that strange age of the Christian Empire which has been so despised by the historians, but which...

The study of medieval religion is of primary importance alike for those who wish to know something of the history of Christianity and for those who wish to know something of the history of Europe. We cannot understand the religious problems of the world today unless we understand something of their roots in the history of the past, and we cannot understand the secular history of modern Europe unless we understand something of that long thousand-year process of change and growth which we name the Middle Ages. Those thousand years saw the making of Europe and the birth and rebirth...

It is impossible to understand the history of the medieval Church, and its relations with the State and to social life in general, if we treat it in the analogy of modern conditions. The Church was not only a far more universal and far-reaching society than the medieval State, it possessed many of the functions that we regard as essentially political. As F. W. Maitland used to insist, it is difficult to find any definition of a State which would not include the medieval Church, while the State under feudal conditions often lacked prerogatives and functions without which we can...

The transformation which religion underwent in passing from the ancient to the medieval world was, as we have seen, mainly a sociological one. It was not accompanied by any revolutionary change in doctrine such as those that took place at the Reformation, or even those which marked the breaking away of the oriental Churches from the Church of the Empire. In matters of dogma medieval religion is characterized, above all, by its conservative spirit. It had inherited from the patristic age an enormous mass of theological learning, and its chief problem for centuries was how this learning was to be...

The history of the early Middle Ages is remarkable for its discontinuous character; indeed, at first sight it seems to consist of a series of false starts. As soon as one set of conquerors have established themselves successfully in their new territory and have begun to repair the devastation they have caused and to build an ordered society, a fresh movement of conquest takes place and all is to do over again. Thus in Italy the work of Theodoric was undone by Justinian, and the work of Justinian by the Lombards; in Ireland and Northumbria the achievements of the new...

The ultimate criterion by which we must judge the value of a religion is not its cultural fruits but its spiritual truth. This, however, is not the criterion which the historian or the sociologist applies in his judgment of an age or a civilization. A false religion which produces a great art or a great literature, a religion which expresses itself in a brilliant civilization, will naturally be of greater interest to him than a true religion which produces only martyrs or mystics. But while the historian is justified in judging the cultural value of a religion by its cultural...

We have seen how the medieval development consisted, above all, in a gradual process of interpenetration between the barbaric society of the young peoples of western Europe and the Christian culture of the later Roman Empire embodied in the Catholic Church. The new peoples received Christianity, and in doing so they acquired a new culture and a new soul.

And nowhere do we see this process so clearly as in the history of medieval literature, for here we are not forced to rely, as in social history, on partial and fragmentary evidence which at best only throws light on the...

In the tenth century the state of western Europe seemed not far removed from that state of universal war which Hobbes regarded as man’s natural state. It was a time when every man was the enemy of every man, and men lived without other security than that which their own strength and cunning could give them. “In such condition there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain . . . no commodious Building . . . no Knowledge of the face of the Earth . . . no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and what is...

The quarrel between Romanticism and Classicism has caused more ink to be spilt than any other literary controversy, even that of the Ancients and the Moderns, and after more than a century of warfare matters stand very much where they were at the beginning. Goethe’s famous definition “Classicism is health, Romanticism is disease” is typical of the sweeping generalizations on which the controversy has thriven. For each party has identified its enemy with anything that it despised in literature, and there has been little attempt to arrive at a common basis of definition. Moreover, the controversy has been embittered by...

It would be strange to write of medieval religion without some mention of one who is not only one of the greatest of English religious poets but also the most remarkable and the most authentic representative of the religious sentiment of the common people of medieval England.

And yet for some reason William Langland has never received the attention that he deserves. He is little read, and those who read him seldom realize his true greatness. It is a reproach to modern England that when every minor poet has been edited and re-edited to satiety, and when the classics of...