RELIGION AND THE RISE OF WESTERN CULTURE Christopher Dawson FOREWORD BY ARCHBISHOP REMBERT G. WEAKLAND, 0.5.8, Imace Booxs DOUBLEDAY NEWYORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLANDIL. ul. Vv. Vil. mun, XIL CONTENTS Introduction: The Significance of the ‘Western Development ‘The Religious Origins of Westem Culture: ‘The Church and the Barbarians The Monks of the West and the Formation of the Wester Tradition ‘The Barbarians and the Christian Kingdom The Second Dark Age and the Conversion of the North ‘The Byzantine Tradition and the Con- version of Eastern Europe The Reform of the Church in the Eleventh Century and the Medieval Papacy ‘The Feudal World: Chivalry and the Courtly Culture ‘The Medieval City: Commune and Gild ‘The Medieval City: School and University ‘The Religious Crisis of Medieval Culture: ‘The Thirteenth Century Conclusion: Medieval Religion and Popular Culture Appendix: Notes on Famous Medieval Art Index a 26 “4 67 84 101 330 140 161 382 199 218 235 231Chapter 1 Introduction: The Significance of the Western Development In My previous series of lectures I abstained as far as pos- sible from dealing with the history of Christian culture, not Decause this lies outside the scope of the Gifford Lectures, but because it is the culture to which we all in some sense belong, and therefore it is impossible for us to study it in the same way as the cultures of the remote past which we can see only through the opaque medium of archaeology or the cultures of the non-European world which we have to understand from the outside and from a distance. This involves a difference in the quality of our knowledge which may almost be compared to the difference between the as- tronomer’s knowledge of another planet and the geogra- pher’s knowledge of the earth on which we live. There is not only a far greater tnass of material available for the study of Western culture than for that of any other; but our knowledge is also more intimate and intemal. Western culture has been the atmosphere we breathe and the life we live: it is our own way of life and the way of life of our ancestors; and therefore we know it not merely by docu- ments aud uiouuments, but from our persuual experience. Hence any study of religion which ignores and leaves on one side the accumulated experience of the Christian past and looks exclusively to the remote and partially incompre- hensible evidence derived from the study of alien religious traditions or even to our own abstract notions of the nature of religion and the conditions of religious knowledge is bound to be not merely incomplete but insubstantial and unreal, And this is most of all the case when we are consid-