Religion, the Basis of Culture
For the West to reintegrate religion into its culture, and yet to avoid the dangers of theocratic extremism, it would be wise to follow Christopher Dawson’s nuanced cultural theory. Dawson saw through the illusions of secularism, but his view of the religious dimension of culture is complex. In his wide-ranging study of history Progress and Religion (1929), Dawson considers “a society which has lost its religion” to be “a society which has lost its culture.” His further exploration of the subject was presented as part of the Gifford Lecture series in 1947 and published shortly thereafter as Religion and Culture (1948). In this seminal work, he proposes his famous thesis: not only does religion give culture its vitality, it is also the key to history. There is nothing moribund or extreme about Dawson’s view. His insight into religion as the key to history guides us to the depths of Western self-knowledge.
To help overcome the machinations of secularization, and grasp the religious underpinnings of history, this essay will focus on Dawson’s third Gifford lecture, entitled “The Relation between Religion and Culture,” where he outlines how religion produces culture and how culture animates society.
The Formation of Individuals
Dawson defines culture as “an organized way of life which is based on a common tradition and conditioned by a common environment.” Culture, in brief, is “the form of society.” His use of the word “form” evokes the Platonic conception of form as the essence of a thing, and if we carry the concept forward using Thomistic terminology, the relation between culture and individuals is a healthy hylomorphism, in which culture is the form and individuals are the matter. Instead of a dualistic system in which culture and individuals are separate substances, a hylomorphic relationship occurs when culture and individuals create a composite named society. Just as the form (the soul) and matter (the body) together constitute a human person, culture and individual persons must be considered in light of their relationship to the other; specifically, Dawson notes, culture will “inform and transform the diverse human material of which it is composed.” So, without culture, society would be reduced to its matter, or “a crowd or a collection of individuals brought together by the needs of the moment.” But society could never be a collection of individuals without form. A society of individuals requires animation as a human person does. Because culture is the soul of society, akin to the soul’s relationship to the body, a society divorced from its culture is inanimate. A soulless society, by its very nature, will quickly fall into materialism.
The Dynamism of Religion
The religious spirit is not an accident of human nature; it is a large part of the nature of man. Dawson observes how “from the beginning man has already regarded his life and the life of society as intimately dependent . . . on superhuman powers which rule both the world and the life of man.” He even compares the influence of culture on society to how divine powers influence the seasons, because culture is “ordered and directed in accordance with the higher laws of life which are religion.” In other words, culture as the soul of society is informed by cosmic axiology.
Dawson’s central idea is that culture cannot be purely man-made. Although religion remains “essentially mysterious,” since it is supernatural, “the social way of life is founded on a religious law of life.” In Dawson’s view, the relationship between religion, individuals, culture, and society creates a chain reaction: religion affects individuals, individuals affect culture, and culture affects society. Fundamentally, culture is divinely inspired, for “throughout the greater part of mankind’s history, in all ages and states of society, religion has been the great central unifying force in culture.” Dawson notes that religion serves as the basis of culture, “the guardian of tradition, the preserver of the moral law, the educator and the teacher of wisdom.”
Religious beliefs and ideals have expressed themselves in unique cultures throughout various civilizations. For this very reason, religion is the key to understanding human history and culture. A society and its cultural achievements cannot be understood “unless we understand the religious beliefs that lie behind them.” The religious spirit manifests itself in the creative works of culture such as visual art, architecture, music, and literature. It is also responsible for the articulation of philosophy, the education of the community, and the preservation of sacred tradition, all of which are dedicated to a religious end.
For example, history attests the cultural work of the Sumerian and Egyptian temple priesthoods, the Brahmin caste in ancient India, the clergy and the monastic orders in medieval Christendom. These religious institutions, however, always looked beyond society to the supernatural, as evidenced in their worship. On this point, Dawson anticipates Josef Pieper’s famous theory that divine worship—the highest expression of leisure—is the basis of culture because it is the basis of religion. The word culture has linguistic roots in the Latin cultus, or “worship of deity.” Moreover, the Greek word leitourgia, “the work of the people” or “public service,” is the root of liturgy, a contemporary word applied to designate the entire range of worship practices of a community. Liturgy, in turn, is a vital social organ at the heart of religion that generates culture. What is valued is worshiped, and thus, what is worshiped is embodied in the products of culture. It follows that if we approach leisure as rich and life-affirming worship, and not as hedonistic amusement, we could return Western culture to its healthy religious heritage.
The Development of Culture
Every historic religion, from the lowest to the highest expression, agrees with two fundamental supernatural principles. First, all religions acknowledge the existence of divine or supernatural powers whose nature is mysterious, but that control the world and the life of man. Second, they associate these powers with particular people, things, places, or rituals, which act as channels of communication between the human and the divine worlds. For instance, according to Dawson, “on the lowest levels of culture we find the Shaman, the fetish, the holy place and the sacred dance, while on the higher level we have the prophet and priest, the image or sacred symbol, the temple and the sacramental liturgy.” Thus, every historical culture represents “a theogamy, a coming together of the divine and the human within the limits of a sacred tradition.” This coming together of the supernatural and the natural produces the energy required for the creation of culture. A case in point is that all societies assign their origin to divine or semi-divine mythical figures: “the great historic cultures . . . look back to the personality of some historical prophet or lawgiver as the source of sacred tradition or the mediator of divine revelation.” Civilizations throughout history have discerned a transcendent reality and developed their cultures in accordance with it.
Dawson challenges the misconception that societies suffer from extreme conservatism and lack of progress due to religion. All living culture is intensely dynamic because of the religious spirit: “religion holds society in its fixed culture pattern . . . but it also leads the people through the wilderness and brings them back from captivity and inspires them with the hope of future deliverance.” Indeed, social change is an intricate process with no easy solution. Although the historian has difficulty identifying the relative impact of cultural factors (spiritual and material) on society, he or she cannot deny that the creative force of new religious beliefs and doctrines has a greater impact on culture than new political ideas or new scientific inventions. Dawson notes: “[I]f the impulse to change comes . . . from the organs of the sacred tradition itself or from some other source which claims superhuman authority . . . the elements in society which are most sensitive to religious impulses and most resistant to secular influences themselves become the willing agents of change.”
This interplay of religion and culture has existed throughout human history. As new religions emerge, they clash with old cultures and yield two results: the new religion can assimilate into the old culture, creating a higher culture based on synthesis. Or, the old culture rejects the new religion, producing a lower culture equivalent to antiquarianism. The Roman Catholic Church has dealt with these shifts in the responses to its attempt to engage modern Western culture at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). On one hand, many of the faithful think with the Church and participate in the unfolding cultural synthesis. On the other hand, some of the faithful resort to entrenched antiquarianism, which Pope Pius XII warned against in Mediator dei (1947), and participate in the insular groups that reject Vatican II as a valid development in the Church.
The Transformation of Society
Dawson’s lecture bears witness to the etymology of culture. Since the Latin word cultura refers to the assisted growth of living things, especially in terms of horticulture, it may be fitting to use the life cycle of plants as a metaphor to display more fully Dawson’s schema of religion, individuals, culture, and society. The seed of religion germinates the “way of life” of individuals. The “way of life” roots the individuals in cultural soil fertilized by divine power and mystery. The root of culture then grows into the plant of society that reflects its divine source. The plant of society finally blooms into a fruitful civilization that intelligently and constructively orders itself around a shared vertical axis.
With this image in mind, we can admit that no matter how “earthbound and socially conditioned” religion appears, it accesses “some trans-social and superhuman reality towards which their worship is directed.” And similarly, no matter how “universal and spiritual” religion appears, it cannot escape “clothing itself in social institutions and traditions.”
Culture, enriched by religion, is the genesis of historical epochs that would not exist without cultured societies. To that end, we can only hope that culture can continue to steer societies away from the desacralized “way of death” toward the sacralized “way of life.”
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