On Christopher Dawson

Dawson’s, The Making of Europe, subtitled, “An Introduction to the History of European Unity” was written in 1932.  He argues against subordinating the past to the present, but it seems to me he is doing that very thing when he writes,

“Modern scientists rightly insist on the way in which the existence of modern man is conditioned by the inheritance of his prehistoric past.  But if this is true of our remote Neolithic ancestors, it is much more so of those immediate ancestors whose influence still directly molds our lives and determines the very language which we speak and the names of the places in which we live.  For this was the period in which the age-long prehistoric tradition of our race emerges into the full light of history and acquires consciousness through its first contact with the higher civilisation.  Without this creative process there would have been no such things as European civilisation, for that civilisation is not an abstracted intellectual concept, like the ‘civilisation’ of eighteenth-century philosophers, it is a concrete social organism, which is just as real and far more important than the national unities of which we talk so much.

“The fact that this truth is not generally realized is due, above all, to the fact that modern history has usually been written from the nationalist point of view. Some of the greatest of the nineteenth-century historians were also apostles of the cult of nationalism, and their histories are often manuals of nationalist propaganda.  This shows itself in the philosophic historians, who were affected by the Hegelian idealization of the State as the supreme expression of the universal idea, as well as in writers like Treitschke and Froude, who were representatives of a purely political nationalism.  In the course of the nineteenth century this movement permeated the popular consciousness and determined the ordinary man’s conception of history.  It has filtered down from the university to the elementary school, and from the scholar to the journalist and the novelist.  And the result is that each nation claims for itself a cultural unity and self-sufficiency that it does not possess.  Each regards its share in the European tradition as an original achievement that owes nothing to the rest, and takes no heed of the common foundation in which its own individual tradition is rooted.  And this is no mere academic error.  It has undermined and vitiated the whole international life of modern Europe.  It found its nemesis in the European war, which represented a far deeper schism in European life than all the many wars of the past, and its consequences are to be seen to-day in the frenzied national rivalries which are bringing economic ruin on the whole of Europe.”

Comment:  One can sympathize with a European historian living in 1932 and watching the rise of National Socialism, but here in 2014 it seems to me Dawson did the same thing he excoriates.  He subordinates medieval history to the idea that Europe is one culture and one “race.”  Setting aside his use of the term “race,” can we find evidence that Western (for I assume he means “Western”) Europeans are a single culture and tradition?  I don’t think so.  Giving a life-span to these terms from Dawson’s perspective, we see them as being longer than the memory of the people who are supposed to embody them.  If the British have no recollection of their Anglo-Saxon-Viking-Jute-Frisian-Norman forebears; then their idea of British culture can understandably be described as ignoring them.  And if the Spaniard has no recollection of the Visigoth or Saracen that dominated his land, isn’t he justified in taking little more than a superficial interest in whatever they did in the past? Let the historian tell the Spaniard that Barcelona was named after the powerful family of Barca in Carthage and that Cordova is traced to its primitive form “Kartah-duba” meaning “an important city,” but is he going to make use of that in any but a superficial way?

On the other hand, the Britain understands that his history is different from the Spaniard’s.  Didn’t his ancestors defeat the Spanish armada?  Didn’t his privateers make Britain rich on the plunder from Spanish galleons?  Didn’t the British Empire succeed far beyond Spain’s?  So what can we point to that might convince the British and Spanish that they share one “culture”?  They share some history, that is true, but their ancestors played different roles.  What can Dawson point to (and this will be an unjust criticism because I have been reluctant to read Dawson far enough to put this criticism to a fair test) that might convince the British and Spanish that they share one culture? 

No doubt there are different definitions of the term “culture” but Dawson must be defining it narrowly as something that Europeans can understand as a unifying concept:  Here it is!  Look!  Now gather together all ye Europeans and sing a unifying anthem.

I suspect Dawson is a Continentalist rather than an Atlanticist, but assuming his assertions, where am I going to get my American “culture”?  I had my DNA checked through Ancestry.com and am 100% European (perhaps 80% from the British Isles), but despite knowing a fair bit of the history Dawson is describing, I identify my cultural underpinnings here in this land the British began as a colony.  I do think we in the U.S. have a cultural affinity with Britain, and not so much with Spain despite the Spanish having been here in Southern California before the descendants of Britain descended upon it.

On being “well read” in history

Putting Dawson’s quote in context, he writes, “. . . “The later mediaeval centuries – the eleventh, for example, or the thirteenth – have each of them a distinctive individual character; but to most of us the centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman Conquest present a blurred and vague outline which has no real significance to our minds.  We are apt to speak of Anglo-Saxon England, for example, as though it was the same all through, not remembering that the age of Edward the Confessor is separated from that of the Anglo-Saxon conquest by as wide a gap as that which divides it from the time of Cromwell and Mazarin, or as that which separates our own age from the age of Edward III and Chaucer. 

“In reality that age witnessed changes as momentous as any in the history of European civilization; indeed, as I suggest in my title, it was the most creative age of all, since it created not this or that manifestation of culture, but the very culture itself – the root and ground of all the subsequent culture achievements.  Our difficulty in understanding and appreciating that age is due in part to the creative nature of its activity.  It was an internal organic process which did not manifest itself in striking external achievements, and consequently it lacks the superficial attractiveness of periods of brilliant cultural expansion, like the Renaissance or the Augustan Age.”

After this occurs the passage I quoted yesterday:  “Nevertheless it is not the ‘easy’ periods of history that are the most worth studying.  One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves – away from obvious and accepted facts – and discovers a reality that would otherwise be unknown to us.  There is a real value in steeping our minds in an age entirely different to that which we know: a world different, but no less real – indeed more real, for what we call ‘the modern world’ is the world of a generation, while a culture like that of the Byzantine or the Carolingian world has a life of centuries.’

And then Dawson writes, “History should be the great corrective to that ‘parochialism in time’ which Bertrand Russell rightly describes as one of the great faults of our modern society.  Unfortunately, history has too often been written in a very different spirit.  Modern historians, particularly in England, have frequently tended to use the present as an absolute standard by which to judge the past, and to view all history as an inevitable movement of progress that culminates in the present state of things.  There is some justification for this in the case of a writer like Mr. H. G. Wells . . . but even at the best this way of writing history is fundamentally unhistorical, since it involves the subordination of the past to the present, and instead of liberating the mind from provincialism by widening the intellectual horizon, it is apt to generate the Pharisaic self-righteousness of the Whig historians or, still worse, the self-satisfaction of the modern Philistine.”

Comment:  To be “well read” in any period of history is a provocative idea.  I approached that most recently in regard to the American Civil War.  Prior to that, I approached it in regard to Islamism and before that the very medieval period that Dawson refers to.   I was well-enough-read, recently, to get into several debates (arguments) over the merits of Generals Longstreet, Hood, Bragg, Sheridan and McClellan.   But some of those Civil-War buffs knew details about routes, distances, supplies and orders that were beyond anything I knew (or was interested in).  At a certain level I wasn’t badly read, but I wasn’t well-read compared to some of those guys.  

It seems to me the American Civil War is easier to steep oneself in than Dawson’s period.  In regard to the ACW, even if one goes into the pre-war histories of generals and leaders, one is still dealing with only a generation or so, but the medieval period grows out of the Roman period (Empire) and develops differently in the various European areas over several centuries.   How does one steep oneself in such a divergent chaotic and long set of facts and speculations?  Maybe, however, I’ll be able to steep myself in Dawson’s book, assuming I finish it.  I am still reading Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, and am up to page 290.  Maybe if I didn’t skip around so much I could do more steeping.

Further on the Theodosian Code

From page 128-9 of Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire: “. . . After their rousing introduction, the assembled Roman fathers get down to the nitty-gritty:

“We give thanks for this regulation of Yours!” (repeated 23 times)

“You have removed the ambiguities of the imperial constitutions!” (23 times)

“Pious emperors thus wisely plan!” (26 times)

“You wisely provide for lawsuits. You provide for the public peace!” (25 times)

“Let many copies of the Code be made to be kept in the governmental offices!” (10 times)

“Let them be kept under seal in the public bureau!” (20 times)

“In order that the established laws may not be falsified, let many copies be made!” (25 times)

“In order that the established laws may not be falsified, let all copies be written out in letters!” (18 times)

“To this copy which will be made by the consitutionaries, let no annotations upon the law be added!” (12 times)

“We request that copies to be kept in the imperial bureau shall be made at public expense!” (16 times)

“We ask that no laws be promulgated in reply to supplications!” (21 times)

“All the rights of landowners are thrown into confusion by such surreptitious actions!” (17 times)

Heather then writes, “A ceremony introducing a new compendium of law was a highly meaningful moment for the Roman state. We’ve already seen the role that education and self-government played in the traditional Roman self-image. For Roman society as a whole, written law possessed a similarly loaded significance. Again in the Romans’ own view of things, its existence made Roman society the best of all possible means of ordering humanity. Above all, written law freed men from the fear of arbitrary action on the part of the powerful (the Latin word for freedom – libertas – carried the technical meaning ‘freedom under the law’). Legal disputes were treated on their merits; the powerful could not override the rest. And Christianization merely strengthened the ideological importance ascribed to written law. For whereas Christian intellectuals could criticize as elitist the moral education offered by the grammarian, and hold up the uneducated Holy Man from the desert as an alternative figure of virtue, the law was not open to the same kind of criticism. It protected everyone in their designated social positions. It also had a unifying cultural resonance, since God’s law, whether in the form of Moses and the Ten Commandments or Christ as the new life-giving law, was central to Judeo-Christian tradition. In ideological terms, therefore, it became easy to portray all-encompassing written Roman law – as opposed to elite literary culture – as the key ingredient of the newly Christian Empire’s claim to uphold a divinely ordained social order.”

Frederick Maitland gives us a less-sanguine view of Theodosius’ accomplishment: In his History of English Law, volume 1 page 5 he writes, “Among the gigantic events of the fifth century the issue of a statue-book seems small. Nevertheless, through the turmoil we see two stature-books, that of Theodosius II and that of Euric the West Goth. The Theodosian Code was an official collection of imperial statures beginning with those of Constantine I. It was issued in 438 with the consent of Valentinian III. Who was reigning in the West. No perfect copy of it has reached us. This by itself would tell a sad tale; but we remember how rapidly the empire was being torn in shreds. Already Britain was abandoned (407). We may doubt whether the statute-book of Thodosius ever reached our shores until it had been edited by Jacques Godefroi. . . Already before this code was published the hordes of Alans, Vandals and Sueves had swept across Gaul and Spain; already the Vandals were in Africa. Already Rome had been sacked by the West Goths; they were founding a kingdom in southern Gaul and were soon to have a statute-book of their own. Gaiseric was not far off, nor Atilla. Also let us remember that this Theodosian Code was by no means well designed if it was to perpetuate the memory of Roman civil science in that stormy age. It was no ‘code’ in our modern sense of that term. It was only a more or less methodic collection of modern statutes. Also it contained many things that the barbarians had better not have read; bloody laws against heretics, for example.

On the Theodosian Code

[from Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, pages 124-5]  “On Christmas Day 438, a new compendium of recent Roman Law, the Theodosial Code (Codex Theodosianus), was presented to the assembled senators in the old imperial capital.  All senatorial meetings were fully minuted and the minutes passed on to the emperor. . . The Praetorian Prefect of Italy, Glabrio Faustus, who presided, and in whose palatial home the senators had gathered, opened the meeting by formally introducing the text to the assembly.  After reminding the audience of the original edict that had established the law commission, he presented the Code to them.  In response, the assembled senators let rip at the tops of their voices:

‘Augustuses of Augustuses, the greatest of Augustuses!’  (repeated 8 times)

‘God gave You to us!  God save Your for us!’ (27 times)

‘As Roman Emperors, pious and felicitous, may you rule for many years!’ (22 times)

‘For the good of the human race, for the good of the Senate, for the good of the State, for the good of all!’ (24 times)

‘Our hope is in You, You are our salvation!’  (26 times)

‘May it please our Augustuses to live forever!’  (22 times)

‘May You pacify the world and triumph here in person!’  (24 times)”

“. . . The great and good of the Roman world were speaking with one voice in praise of their imperial rulers in the city that was still its symbolic capital.  Only slightly less obvious . . . is the second message: the confidence of the senators in the Perfection of the Social Order of which they and their emperors were symbiotic parts.  You can’t have complete Unity without an equally complete sense of Perfection. . . And, as the opening acclamations make clear, the source of that Perfection was, straightforwardly, God, the Christian deity.  By 436, the Senate of Rome was a thoroughly Christian body.  At the top end of Roman society, the adoption of Christianity thus made no difference to the age-old contention that the Empire was God’s vehicle in the world. 

“The same message was proclaimed at similar ceremonial moments all the way down the social scale, even within Church circles. . . Many Christian bishops, as well as secular commentators, were happy to restate the old claim of Roman imperialism in its new clothing.  Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea was already arguing, as early as the reign of Constantine, that it was no accident that Christ had been incarnated during the lifetime of Augustus, the first Roman emperor.  Despite the earlier history of persecutions, went his argument, this showed that Christianity and the Empire were destined for each other, with God making Rome all-powerful so that, thorough it, all mankind might eventually be saved. 

“This ideological vision implied, of course, that the emperor, as God’s chosen representative on earth, should wield great religious authority within Christianity.  As early as the 310s, within a year of the declaration of his new Christian allegiance, bishops from North Africa appealed to Constantine to settle a dispute that was raging among them. This established a pattern for the rest of the century: emperors were not intimately involved in both the settlement of Church disputes and the much more mundane business of the new religion’s administration.  To settle disputes, emperors called councils . . .”

Comment:  This code is shot through with what the Reformers later would see as heresy.  You do not trust in a political leader for salvation. The book of Ephesians indeed says that Christ “gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service . . .”   I don’t find any precedent in the New Testament for this sort of devotion to an emperor, but this is part of the age-old debate between Protestants and Catholics.  Protestants won’t believe it unless they can find it in the Bible, but Catholics rely upon tradition as well as Scripture and since their tradition has grown up in Rome, the investiture of the Pope with great authority seems only fitting.

Theodosus II was of course the Eastern emperor, but Heather assumes that the same sort of thing was going on in Valentinian III in the west.  It is called the Theodosian code rather than something more all-encompassing because only this one example has survived. 

What about “the Holy Roman Empire”?  There is this interesting from Wikipedia:  The precise term Holy Roman Empire was not used until the 13th century, but the doctrine of translatio imperii ("transfer of rule") was fundamental to the prestige of the emperor, the notion that he held supreme power inherited from the emperors of Rome.  The office of Holy Roman Emperor was traditionally elective, although frequently controlled by dynasties. The German prince-electors, the highest ranking noblemen of the empire, usually elected one of their peers as "King of the Romans", and he would later be crowned emperor by the Pope; the tradition of papal coronations was discontinued in the 16th century. The empire never achieved the extent of political unification formed in France, evolving instead into a decentralized, limited elective monarchy composed of hundreds of sub-units, principalities, duchies, counties, Free Imperial Cities, and other domains.  The power of the emperor was limited, and while the various princes, lords, and kings of the empire were vassals and subjects who owed the emperor their allegiance, they also possessed an extent of privileges that gave them de facto sovereignty within their territories. Emperor Francis II dissolved the empire in August 1806 after its defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz.”

Toward a definition of “Empire”

In The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997, Piers Brenden on page xviii and xix writes, “The British Empire had a small human and geographical base, remote from its overseas possessions.  In the late eighteenth century it gained fortuitous industrial, commercial and naval advantages that rivals were bound to erode.  Having such a limited capacity to coerce, it sought accord and found local collaborators.  But imperial domination, by its very nature, sapped their loyalty. . . The history of empires,’ he wrote, ‘is the history of human misery.’  This is because the initial subjugation is invariably savage and the subsequent occupation is usually repressive.  Imperial powers lack legitimacy and govern irresponsibly, relying on arms, diplomacy and propaganda.  But no vindication can eradicate the instinctive hostility to alien control.  Gibbon, himself wedded to liberty, went to the heart of the matter: ‘A more unjust and absurd constitution cannot be devised than that which condemns the natives of a country to perpetual servitude, under the arbitrary dominion of strangers.’  Resistance to such dominion provoked vicious reprisals, such as the British inflicted after the Indian Mutiny, thus embedding ineradicable antagonism.  Yet Britain’s Empire, much better than any other, as even George Orwell acknowledged, was a liberal empire.  Its functionaries claimed that a commitment to freedom was fundamental to their civilizing mission.  In this respect, Lloyd George told the Imperial Conference in 1921, their Empire was unique: ‘Liberty is its binding principle,’ To people under the imperial yoke such affirmations must have seemed brazen instances of British hypocrisy. . .  And in the twentieth century, facing adverse circumstances almost everywhere, the British grudgingly put their principles into practice.  They fulfilled their duty as trustees, giving their brown and black colonies the independence (mostly within the Commonwealth) long enjoyed by the white dominions.  The British Empire thus realized its long-cherished ideal of becoming what The Times called in 1942 ‘a self-liquidating concern.’”

Observations:  While the above isn’t precisely a definition, we who have not been influenced by Lenin, will understand what Gibbons means when he uses the word “empire.”  Rome and Britain subjugated a long list of cities and tribes.  After that it occupied them and made them colonies.    Britain because of influence of the Enlightenment and Humanism perhaps could not feel good about all aspects of their empire building – at least not ultimately.  That did not seem to be true of the Russian empires.

In Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present, ed by Norris and Sunderland, we read on page 251, “In the last years, enfeebled by strokes, Stalin was arguably the most powerful man in the world.  Not only did he control the USSR and much of Eastern Europe, but the communist leaders of China, North Korea, and Vietnam deferred to him.  In 1950 he agreed that Korean leader Kim Il Sung could invade South Koreas, thus opening the way to the Korean War. . .”

“Like his predecessors Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great, Stalin was both a state builder and an empire builder.  Historically Russia’s ‘national’ identity was an imperial one – nation, absolute state, and empire intimately intertwined – and Stalin contributed to that tradition in an exceptionally brutal manner.  His legacy was a hypercentralized state, a crudely industrialized economy, a country in which millions died to build his idea of socialism, and other millions to defend their country against the enemies of Communism.”

Did capitalism cause the world wars?

It would be difficult to prove that Capitalism produced the two world wars.   At the time of the First World War, Monarchies were instrumental.  At the time of the second Fascism (being a system of National Socialism) was instrumental.  Liberal Democracy, antithetical to both those systems, has been the last man standing, the only viable system remaining after the 20^th century conflicts and Russian Communism collapsed in 1989. 

Fukuyama (whom I like to cite) hasn’t changed his mind since writing The End of History and the Last Man.  What he did object to was the activism of the Neocons and wrote a book divorcing himself from them.  A problem I have with Fukuyama is that in supporting Kojeve and Hegel he too subscribes to a sort of historical determinism, except his subscription is fairly mild and he does seriously consider Nietzsche’s denouncing of the “last man” and the threat of the occasional ubermensch

Comparing Empires and is the U.S. one?

Wikipedia says Carr was a “quasi-Marxist.”   Marx preached an historical determinism which may be where Carr got his, but a lot of the “the US-is-an-Empire” talk came from that rather than from a showing that the US is like Rome or the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch or British Empires.   It has become for the modern Marxist/Leftist a pejorative term rather than a quest to determine what it is precisely that comprises an Empire and whether the U.S. fits. 

Since Marx we’ve had Francis Fukuyama building on Kojeve arguing that Hegel was right after all (and Marx was wrong).  The end of history is Capitalism, or to use its modern expression, Liberal Democracy, and not Communism.  The Leninistic “Imperialism is the highest form of Capitalism” argument therefore becomes otiose.

Niall Ferguson, no Marxist, thinks the U.S. is an Empire but hasn’t produced a definition or an argument to substantiate that idea as far as I know.  There is a sense in which the U.S. performs like the “World’s policeman” on occasion.  And there was the handing off of the “world’s policeman’s baton” from Churchill to Eisenhower and the U.S. becoming committed in South East Asia somewhat as a result, but unfortunately not to attempt to rescue France’s chestnuts but to attempt to keep a domino from falling (in the then believed theory about the best way to battle Communism). 

Wilson, representing a majority view (IMO) supported the “four freedoms” at the end of WWI and did not approve of the French, British, and Italians desire to split up the after-WWI-pie but was outsmarted by them.  The U.S. as the last-man-standing in regard to military and economic power after WWII enforced its prejudice against empires.  The breakup of the British, Dutch and French empires after WWII was to some extent due to this U.S. prejudice.  So I end up shaking my head at Ferguson’s arguments and setting his books aside (although I did complete a few). 

Someone in regard to India pointed out that Britain made an inconsistent empire in that it promoted the idea of “freedom.”  Sooner or later a colony, as in the case of the 13 & India is going to see that inconsistency and revolt in order to become like Britain, free.  Colonies, at the very least, seem to be one of the things an Empire needs to have in order to be called an Empire – at least so it seems to me.

Does the U.S. have troops in Japan and Germany in order to exercise Imperial demands?    That would be a bit hard to demonstrate because following in Britain’s footsteps it advocates freedom and could not get away with exercising a force that would counter that.  China and others in Asia feared a resurgence of Japanese militarism; so the U.S. is saying, “look, we shall keep troops there.  We shall make sure that doesn’t happen.”   The same situation exists in Europe.  Some still fear a German militaristic resurgence; so the U.S. is there to assure other European nations that it will not permit that to happen.  

If someone wants to argue that the U.S. is currently performing the role of “World’s policeman” I would not argue with that.  Pat Buchanan and others have argued that we can’t afford to keep doing that, and here we may be entering S. P. Huntington’s realm.  It should be the “core nation” from each “civilization” that does that and not just one nation for the whole world.

In short there are some interesting things being written about world power and the future.  Earlier Marxist-based ideas have for the most part been set aside in view of ideas more closely reflecting the modern world. Who today would argue that there is a historical-necessity at work that will force the world’s nations to become Communistic?  And if someone did, who would pay attention to him?