As a Catholic cultural historian writing in the 20th century, it is not surprising that the prose and prognostications of Christopher Dawson are marked by a seemingly pessimistic character.

Indeed, as Russell Hittinger observed, one would be forgiven for suspecting Dawson’s criticisms of modernity—especially its cities—were nothing more than the “grumpy remarks of an Englishman ... who was born in a 12th-century Welsh castle.” [1] But though Dawson’s assessment of our present lot is indeed dire, apocalyptic even, he is nonetheless consistently hopeful. While the loss of the spiritual has precipitated the death of culture and the dissolution of society, Dawson affirms that a return to religion contains the seeds of mankind’s restoration. And if spiritual revitalization is the theme of Dawson’s story of rebirth, it could be argued that the countryside would be its setting.

That Dawson prefers the rural to the urban is obvious through even a cursory reading of nearly any of his texts. To those who know his biography, it is the temptation of an easy solution to argue that Dawson’s fondness for the countryside and rural ways of living—and, indeed, his hostility to all things mechanized and industrial—is the irrational and arbitrary product of his upbringing in the moorlands of Yorkshire. Dawson himself wrote that “no one could owe more to childhood impressions than I did,” noting how the wild aliveness of his country home impressed upon him the raw vitality of the world, a world “half history, half poetry.”

But Dawson’s “rural thesis,” if I may call it that, is not merely the inevitable conclusion of a deterministic course of action dictated by his natural environment (an understanding of human anthropology he thoroughly rejected, as we shall see). Instead, his insistence that the countryside was the natural setting of authentic human culture—and the ideal (if not the only) place in which a religious revival could occur—is the result of a long and penetrating look at history.

In Dawson’s assessment, culture does not develop in a vacuum. Rather, a people’s culture is significantly affected by the natural environments from which it springs. “A culture, reduced to its simplest terms,” Dawson tells us, “is simply the way of life of a particular people adapted to a special environment; it is the result of an intimate communion between man and region in which and from which he lives.” [2] In fact, Dawson finds that the higher the culture, the more closely linked to its particular environment it is, the same way that “the greater the artist, the more fully does he enter into his material.”

But it is important to identify the correct causal relationship in play. For Dawson, a culture’s ability to more fully engage with its materialits environmentis what leads to cultural ascendancy. Thus the higher cultures, which are more attuned to their place, are inevitably more diversified and distinct, as Dawson observed in the ancient civilizations:

To every type of agriculture, to every group of cultivated plants, there corresponds a special human culture. The olive, the gift of Athene, was the nurse of the Hellenic culture, as the date palm was the Tree of Life to the people of Babylonia. The wine and olive of the Mediterranean, the rice and mulberry of China, the coconut and taro of the Pacific Islands, the maize and tobacco of Central America, all have their corresponding forms of social organization and property, ideals of well-being habits of work and types of character, as well as a distinct rhythm of life which depends on the cyclic movement of the farmer’s year.

Dawson refers to this innate connection between nature and culture when he observes that the stockbroker is less beautiful than a Homeric warrior or an Egyptian priest because “he is less incorporated with life; he is not inevitable, but accidental, almost parasitic.” [3]

It is true that Dawson argues that religion itself is the factor that draws man more closely into nature, producing a higher cultural development. He makes this unique case quite strikingly, by highlighting how religious rituals surrounding the “common bear” in Siberia likely led to the domestication of animals, or how fertility ceremonies involving the scattering of seeds, meant to imitate the natural growth of vegetation, were a precursor of agriculture. Still, one must note that the organic material of a particular place represents the limited fabric that the minds of early man had at their disposal to weave into their various religious beliefs and practices. After all, it is not an accident that the Hebrews, a desert people, developed an understanding of the Divine that was more historical than the cyclical accounts of their more agrarian counterparts.

At this juncture, it is important to make another critical Dawsonian distinction: Nature may condition culture, but it doesn’t cause it, a mistake that historical determinists made in their explanation of early human development. The human mind and the operation of free-will are ultimately the factors that drive change. Nonetheless, the connection Dawson draws between nature and cultural development is quite striking. And he goes even further, developing the idea of a “biological equilibrium” that determines the vitality and health of a society itself, an equilibrium that is best balanced when man is still close to the earth, and society is largely rural. As Dawson points out, Medieval society was “primarily agrarian,” as the “higher urban civilization [was] a comparatively light superstructure which rested on the broad and solid foundation of rural society.” [4]

Rural society was solid because it was rooted in nature. While not a Medieval romantic, Dawson observed that this allowed the peasant a sort of “freedom” that is lacking in modern society: Namely the freedom to pursue excellence, the ability to live a life that conforms to the natural way of things, instilling habits that enable man to live life as it is meant to be lived. This is clear in the patterns of work found in the countryside, which Dawson turned to Sombart to illustrate. In contrast to utilitarian understandings that emerged in cities, the artists and craftsmen were able to “incarnate themselves in their works; and so it follows the same laws that rule their physical life, in the same way as the growth of a tree or the act of reproduction of an animal, obeys in its direction and measure and end the internal necessities of the living organism.” This subjection of economic activity to human life is the source of the rural man’s freedom.

The solidness of rural life is also found in its stability. While cities, relatively detached from the land, could be more easily caught up in superficial changes, the countryside was a naturally conservative place. “The life of the peasant went unchanged,” Dawson tells us, “following the unvarying rhythm of the life of nature and the changes of the season.” There was a degree of insulation from the changes in the cities, and the countryside maintained a “vital reservoir of human material,” to replenish the urban centers when the monoculture that developed therein invariably withered. And finally, rural life was solid because it was not manmade. There was no crisis of form or purpose in the countryside, because man did not make the countryside as he did the city. The countryside was made by God, and its form and purpose are therefore given. For these reasons, the countryside has historically been the place where the spiritual vitality that forms the basis of any culture is most deeply rooted, most stable.

Unsurprisingly, then, Dawson regards urbanization as one of the “great sources of weakness in our modern European Culture.” Indeed, he calls it the distinctive feature of the bourgeois culture he so detested, involving “the divorce of man from nature and the life of the earth.” [5]  Dawson attributes the cause of our civilization's instability to something beyond mere economic and political change, attributing it instead to “a revolution in the relations of man to nature and in the vital structure of society itself … destroy[ing] the biological equilibrium between human society and its natural environment.” [6] Our cities are ugly, purely manmade creations that have no form and no purpose; predictably, they give rise to men who are purposeless and formless, and who are additionally cut off from the “distinct rhythm of life” that aids stability and virtue.

It follows then, as Dawson noted, that the growth of suburbs around the city is like the growth of cancer cells around a tumor, and is symptomatic of “social disease and spiritual failure.” The “rawness and ugliness of modern European life” isn’t just an offense to aesthetic sensibilities; it is also “the sign of biological inferiority, of an insufficient or false relation to the environment, which produces strain.” [7]

Of course, this isn’t the first time in history that such a development has occurred. More than one mighty civilization has broken due to the strain resulting from alienation from the land. Dawson speaks of two: Hellenic Greece and Imperial Rome. Both, he says, came to power as agrarian civilizations. Rome, especially, was characterized by the “peasant-soldier” citizen, and the capitals of the two great civilizations were very much regional in character, still connected to the land on which they lay. But the classical civilizations “neglected the roots of their life” as culture concentrated more gradually in the cities, and the gap between the townsman and the peasant grew wider. In both cases, peasants gave way to slave labour as the cities became parasitic and predatory—“less dependent on nature and more dependent on the maintenance of an artificial political and economic system”—and the respective civilizations became a “formless, cosmopolitan society, with no roots in the past and no contact with a particular region, a society which was common to the great cities everywhere.”

The tales of the collapse of classical civilization warns us of the perils of too much of an apparent good thing, “for it was literally Rome that killed Rome.” These tales also tell us that progress and decline within a civilization are not mutually exclusive, but can coexist, just as the flower can bloom while the roots decay. These warnings are especially pertinent to us now, and indeed Dawson’s description of Rome as a city with no function beyond advancing its own interestsits population drawn from every nation under heaven and devoid of any regional allegiancesis chillingly applicable to America, or at the very least to Washington.

While the disconnect between nature and man is more pronounced now than ever before, and while the biological equilibrium has never before been more imbalanced, Dawson notes that “scientific control gives our era a different outlook” than that of Hellenistic Greece or Imperial Rome. And while Dawson may be correct that our cities are less parasitic of the countryside than before, this is only true in the sense that they are now more penetrative of it. If there isn’t a startling gap in the cultural capacity of the modern Western city and the modern Western village, it’s because the scientific culture of the urban elites has infiltrated the countryside.

We not have turned our peasants into slaves like the Romans did; instead, we’ve either taken them off the land, brought them into the cities, or thoroughly mechanized and unspiritualized their way of life. Our rural areas are less and less the “vital reservoirs of human material” that they were in the Middle Ages, and are increasingly characterized by the same cultural values found in the cities (perhaps with a veneer of blaze orange or a Southern twang, as is the case of contemporary country music, which is as thoroughly obsessed with mindless drinking and sex as its urban counterparts are). Mechanized organization also characterizes the way in which an increasing amount of agriculture is conducted in the West, as the family farmer has been replaced by the corporate industrialist, who checks the output of his crops in Kansas from his boardroom in Manhattan. Meanwhile, the agricultural laborer relies on machinery and scientific intervention to the point at which what he does is hardly different in form than what occurs on the factory floor. And in perhaps the greatest irony of all, the scientific monoculturalism that characterizes our cities is now penetrating nature itself, with the rise of GMOs that eschew the stability of diversity for the false comfort of control.

We find ourselves perhaps in an even greater bind than were the Romans. Not only are we as thoroughly urbanized as were they, but we’ve also gone and urbanized our countryside. Reading Dawson, spiritual vitality is clearly the key to social cohesion and cultural health. It is equally clear that the countryside is the soil in which such spiritual vitality is able to take root in a solid and stable way, withstanding the unspiritual blights that strike the city.

Unclear is what happens if our countryside's soil is polluted with the same norms that make our cities so hostile to religion. Where then will our spiritual revitalization occur?


[1] Russell Hittinger; “Christopher Dawson on Technology and the Demise of Liberalism”

[2] Christopher Dawson; “Anthropology and the Theory of Progress;” Progress & Religion

[3] “Anthropology”

[4] Dawson; “The Decline of the Religion of Progress;” Progress & Religion

[5] Dawson; “Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind.”

[6] “Decline”

[7] “Decline”