How to Study the Historical Imprint of Religions on Cultures According to Christopher Dawson

Abstract

Christopher Dawson is one of the great philosophers of history. He understood the signs of the times and anticipated what was to come in Western society. He considered religion to be the soul of cultures and showed this in his writings. The aim of this article is to articulately present Dawson’s vision of how to study religions from his discipline. To this end, it first shows the possibility of the scientific study of religion. Then it explains the method suggested by Dawson for such a study and the relevance of religious experiences and religious social types as sources for the study of religion. Finally, it analyses the constitutive elements of religion and the notions of religion that Dawson handles, always from a historical approach open to the transcendent.

1. Introduction

The aim of this article is to present in a structured way Christopher Dawson’s vision of how to study religion and its cultural manifestations. There are two reasons for doing so. The first is that Dawson’s philosophy of history is a valuable contribution to this field in the twentieth century and he seems to be the great ‘forgotten one’, especially when compared to the likes of Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee. The second reason is that religion is a fundamental concept in his work. For Dawson, religion is the soul or engine of cultures (Pujals 1953, p. 2; Capánaga 1963, p. 236; Watkin 1971, p. 5; Corcuera 1992, pp. 153–55; Dawson 1929, p. 95).

An initial difficulty in approaching this work is that there are no articles in which Dawson addresses the question of the historical study of religion directly. Thus, his vision will be drawn from texts that vary in content and substance, while attempting to approach the subject holistically.

On the other hand, there are also limits to the historical approach to the study of religion, which Dawson himself recognizes. The concept of the intervention of a transcendental divine principle in the life of man is what prevents a complete investigation of the history of Christian culture and a perfect understanding of its ideal (Dawson 1957, p. 109).

By recognizing these limits, Dawson is less locked into his historical approach to reality. This openness allows him to approach the divine principle that moves cultures, while his assessment of religion will be that of a “Christian researcher who is attentive to the balance and union of reason and faith” (Antúnez 2006, p. xvi).

This is a particularly critical point as the perception of religion has changed in recent years. The context in which Dawson lived and wrote was that of a society in which the idea of religion was being emptied of content and religious life was centered mainly on following traditions and customs. Intellectually, rather than talking about God, the central theme was the idea of God or the conditions of possibility for thinking about God. Similarly, the focus was not so much on an objective religious content that was considered to be true, but rather on a sociology or historiography of religion that focused on religious manifestations, where cultural and religious relativism was gaining more and more weight.

The obvious, the religious manifestation, could not be denied, but the existence of an ontologically prior objective reality could be denied. In recent years, there seems to be a re-evaluation of spirituality and religiosity, but always within a rather relativistic context, where the objectivity of the religious experience is understood as something just derived from personal subjectivity, in the context of a plurality of narratives.

Hence the importance of re-evaluating this politically incorrect author (Olsen 2008). Dawson strongly emphasizes the importance of the objective reality of the existence of God or a God-like existence as a necessary condition for talking about religion. Without this starting point, his thought is not understood.

It should not be forgotten that Dawson is a convert to Catholicism in an Anglican context. Such a conversion corresponded to a conviction based on strong intellectual reasons. His vision, in fact, influences authors such as T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien (Birzer 2003, p. 136), and Rémi Brague (Olsen 2008, p. 118), and connects with an intellectual style such as that of the Oxford Movement.

Although historians have a rather short half-life, Dawson continues to be read and written about. In this sense, there are recent publications on his idea of progress (Cervantes 1999; Stuart 2011), on his conception of culture (Herce 2013), on his vision of liberalism and history (Quinn 1998; Antúnez 2014), and on his analysis of the relationship between theology and social sciences (Staudt 2009), among others. However, no-one has stressed how important is understanding religion as something truly transcendent, which refers to an objective reality called God, when studying cultures.

That is why Dawson devoted part of his writings to the study of the “meaning of the religious experience of the human species”. He does not give attention to the study of comparative religion itself, although Stuart (2022, chapter V) dedicates a chapter of his book to it, because at that time Dawson thought that “the science of comparative religion created a museum of dead cults and anthropological curiosities” (Dawson 1948, p. 18).

In terms of sources, two volumes are of particular interest. The first is Progress and Religion, which devotes a third of its pages to the subject and was initially conceived as the first book of a broad study to be entitled The Life of Civilizations. The second, Religion and Culture, is devoted entirely to the study of the argument in question. This book grew out of Dawson’s 1947 Gifford Lectures, which served to emphasize the doctrine—central to his work and novel at the time—that religion is the keystone of culture.

A more condensed work of his vision appears in a small volume published in 1931 under the title Christianity and the New Age. This essay pays special attention to early religion and the great religions of the East. In it, Dawson shows the sense of unity of religious experience and indicates the basic needs of human nature that all religions seek to satisfy (Mulloy 1961, p. 10).

With these and other sources, the article begins by addressing the possibilities, reasons, and motivations for the scientific study of religion. It then describes Dawson’s suggested method of study and stresses the importance of religious experiences and social religious types as sources for the study of religion. Finally, it analyses the constitutive elements of religion and the notions of religion that Dawson uses in his study.

2. The Scientific Study of Religion

According to Dawson, the great civilisations have understood themselves not merely as forms of social organisation, but in relation to a transcendent divine order, revealed in the inspired books of the prophets and lawgivers who lay the foundations of their culture. All great civilisations possess a corpus of sacred scriptures, have their sacred language and their sacred order of religious teachers who are taught to study and interpret the sacred rites and scriptures. This close relationship between civilisations and world religions is what Dawson intends to study (Dawson 1929, p. viii).

The starting point is the difficulty of admitting the possibility of a scientific understanding of religion. This situation derives both from the claim of naturalistic theology to reduce God to a celestial architect of the cosmos, and from the study of comparative religions as a museum of cults and anthropological curiosities. Both approaches laid the foundations for an increasingly flawed science of religion.

Afterwards, with psychology, the gap widened between the rich world of religious depth and its rational study without spiritual depth or real contact with religious truth (Dawson 1948, chp. I; Antúnez 2006, p. 142). The hiatus between the question of God and rigorous rational knowledge increased.

Such a separation between psyche and reason is unnatural, since the world of culture only came into existence through cooperation between the two realities. “World religions have been the keystones of the world cultures, so that when they are removed the arch falls and the building is destroyed” (Dawson 1948, p. 22). It is therefore necessary to look at the religious dimension of reality to reach an understanding of the inner forms of a society and its culture (Dawson 1948, p. 50).

Those who study religion find it difficult to build a bridge between these two worlds: that of reason, which has become increasingly arid; and that of the soul, which has lost the sacred avenues of tradition through which it manifested itself in culture. However, it is possible to repair this dualism because the two worlds are not completely impenetrable.

“In the higher cultures the existence of religion has always involved the existence of theology—that is to say, a rational system of religious knowledge (…) And it is obvious that if there is no true knowledge of the object of religious experience, religion loses its validity” (Dawson 1948, p. 21).

With this argument, Dawson intends to claim that, if theological science has been historically given, a certain knowledge of God is possible, and natural theology’s mission is to deal with it.

On its own ground, the historical study of religion must show how world religions have performed that task of bridging the vital relationship between the depths of the human unconscious and the surface of the social order, by showing how religion claims its spiritual autonomy while being influenced by the environment and by its social function. Having faced these tasks, natural theology can focus on its fundamental issues: “the transcendent element in religious experience and the eternal and absolute validity of religious truth” (Dawson 1948, p. 22).

However, to begin the historical study of religion, it is necessary to admit provisionally the two fundamental issues just mentioned, because the study of religion begins and ends on the theological plane, not on the sociological or historical plane. This is the case even if sociology and history are indispensable for the understanding of religion in civilisation and in human life.

This statement of Dawson’s should be qualified. Dawson seems to be saying that I must first consider the hypothesis of the existence of God to be valid in order to then observe the sociological and historical data, such that the premise guides my research, as if science works with an abductive or hypothetico-deductive method. However, the opposite reasoning would also be valid. By means of an inductive method I can start from sociology or history and arrive at the conclusion of the existence of God. This is basically what he does when he observes that historically, the presence of a supernatural reality is a cultural constant; he concludes that one must start from that premise when doing sociology or historiography of cultures. In reality, what he observes are traces of this relationship with supernatural reality.

3. Methodology

Having justified the possibility of the study of religion through natural theology, sociology, and history, what method does Dawson follow? His approach is surprising because he asks about the meaning and significance of historical data. “Without such a question, historiography is reduced to mere analysis, to the point of falling into a banal curiosity about folkloric aspects” (Carmo 1997, p. 9).

In Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Dawson starts from a fact that strikes him: the peculiar evolution of Western culture, understood as continuous transformation and innovation. And he asks himself, “What makes him tick?” (Dawson 1950, p. 8).

The hypothesis of studying the essential role of religion in the growth of Western culture is justified by historical facts. For Dawson, certain particular aspects of human experience cannot be privileged to the detriment of the rest, without giving each its proper specific weight.

To avoid falling into some kind of reductionism, these aspects must be considered in the totality of historical reality (Dawson 1950, pp. 3–6). It is the historian’s task to continuously verify the data while respecting the complexity of reality, which is certainly not uniform. In this sense, the sociology of religions also has something to say, whilst bearing in mind that historians who have tended to ignore theologians and sociologists have tended to reduce religion to its sociological and cultural elements. “If sociology needs the help of philosophy and theology to understand the spiritual elements of a social process, they in turn render it valuable services” (Dawson 1957, p. 31).

These methodological difficulties in coordinating disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, psychology and theology in the study of religion and its cultural function require special attention, precision, openness and intellectual honesty. At the same time, this collaboration is fundamental.

For a study of religion to bear fruit, it must accept the autonomy of religious science, by the very nature of the religious phenomenon. All religion is based on the recognition of a supernatural reality of which man is aware and towards which he must orient his life (Romera 2008, pp. 16, 23). Therefore, the existence of the transcendent reality that we call God is the foundation of all religion in all ages and among all peoples (Romera 2008, p. 111).

This claim requires some scientific study as the one by Romera, but it is not the aim of this work. The influence of the supernatural in human history is clear. It is only a late development in human history to call this God. The movement from non-natural beings and powers to God requires discussion, but Dawson does not conflate the two.

Being so, neither sociology, nor history of religions, nor the study of cultures and their respective religions can be undertaken without recognising this God or supernatural reality that lies at the basis of religions. Moreover, it is necessary to address the study of different cultures and epochs with empathy, for it is impossible to “understand the past without understanding the things in which the people of the past had placed their hopes” (Dawson 2007, p. 21).

At the same time, the way to study history should not be that of one who seeks to justify ends or reach apologetic conclusions, but to seek the truth and to manifest it in order to transmit it, “for as soon as the reader becomes suspicious of the historian’s impartiality, he distrusts the truth of everything he reads” (Dawson 2007, p. 19). And this may also be what happened to Dawson in some intellectual circles, precisely because he was a believer who professed his faith.

What is important in natural theology is knowledge of spiritual reality and truth. In this sense, “what then is the value of a religious theory which rules out the witness of the saints, or a metaphysical system which shuts its eyes to the sources of spiritual truth? Is it not as fundamentally irrational as a physical science which refuses to study the facts of nature and contents itself with text books, abstract argument and logical definitions?” (Dawson 1948, p. 80).

The researcher should go to the significant sources: to those who have followed the way of the saints, have purified their minds of all that is not God, have progressed in prayer and spiritual perfection, and have attained that supreme intuition of the divine reality. The validity of religious experience cannot be denied in toto, even if there are difficulties or abuses. This is why, for example, Dawson turns to philosophers such as Ibn Khaldun or Al-Ghazali to know what prophetic religion is in Islam, because they give value to religious experience or prophetic inspiration (Dawson 1948, pp. 74–81).

In short, for Dawson, religion is the keystone of cultures and civilisations, and going to the historical data, analysing each culture and religion in its particular aspects, is the way to study it (Dawson 1984, p. 254). This approach must be empathetic, avoiding the telescopic vision of those who project preconceived philosophical ideas or approaches onto historical data, in line with Dawson’s critique of Toynbee (Herce 2015, p. 53). A holistic vision is also necessary so that each aspect has its own specific weight, taking account of the historical reality in toto. The aim of the study must be to know and manifest the truth, to make it evident. Dawson assumes that knowing that truth is possible through natural theology, which must be aided by other sciences to avoid a one-sided, non-organic approach. Finally, it is essential to go to the source of the personal religious experience of those whose life of faith makes culture, because culture is made by people.

“Dawson defended the irreducibility of religious experience from reductionist thinkers such as James Frazer, Sigmund Freud, and Émile Durkheim. At the same time, inspired by Friedrich von Hügel, Dawson held religion to be a field of tension involving personal experience and intellectualism along with institutionalism” (Stuart 2022, p. 183).

Let us focus then on religious experience.

4. Religious Experience

“Religious experience is the totality of acts and attitudes that shape and express man’s relationship with divinity: both his intellectual openness to God and his free response” (Romera 2008, pp. 30–31). It is a vital itinerary, a way of existing in reference to a transcendence. Therefore, the answer as to who or what the divine or transcendent is, conditions man’s understanding of himself and determines the way he conducts himself in life and refers to the divinity (Romera 2008, pp. 41–42).

At the same time, “the possibility of natural theology depends on our way of considering the nature of the deepest layers of consciousness” (Dawson 1948, p. 34). For Dawson, in the depths of consciousness there are not subrational experiences, but true forms of knowledge that are susceptible to scientific treatment and allow for the existence of a science of religious truth such as theology.

This kind of knowledge would be the highest and most genuine form of perception accessible to man. “The movement of introversion, by which man attains a consciousness deeper than that of his discursive reason but no less real, appears to be a universal human experience, common to almost all forms and stages of human culture” (Dawson 1948, p. 35). This simple intuition of the transcendent spiritual Being is present in many forms of religious experience and constitutes a fundamental natural basis of the idea of God and the condition for man’s higher religious development.

Alongside this experience of inner openness, Dawson points out that religion manifests itself in the experience of the limits of human nature. In primitive cultures, religion is created by man, with his reason, hopes and fears. This responds to a fundamental internal and external limitation of human nature, which cannot be overcome simply by a further reaching out of reason and will. The scope of man’s rational activity is limited by the depth of his unconscious soul and by the transcendent element embedded in external reality. This element of transcendence is a primordial element of human experience. Man is born into a world which he has not made, cannot understand, and on which his existence nevertheless depends (Dawson 1948, pp. 29–30).

Starting from this double experience of internal and external finitude-transcendence, Dawson considers valid both the demonstration of the existence of God that arises from observing the order of the universe, and the experience of transcendence associated with a movement of man’s internalisation. Dawson does not prove his claim with a demonstration, he simply takes for granted those made by others: the starry sky above and the moral law within, as Kant said.

Dawson notes that the experience of cosmic transcendence, which corresponds with the vestiges of God in creation (Romera 2008, pp. 207–10), by itself tends to be multiform and leads to polytheism. However, if it is reinforced by the experience of inner transcendence, it leads to a stronger affirmation of the transcendent Self (Dawson 1948, pp. 31–36).

On the other hand, knowledge of God cannot be attained thanks to an intuitive or immediate act of a finite intelligence that operates based on sensible experience. This implies the impossibility of deducing a cognitive immediacy of God from the fact that an existential immediacy can be given (Romera 2008, pp. 111–13). This distinction is not clear in Dawson, who upholds the validity of intuitive knowledge of God, in the Augustinian sense, without claiming an argumentative leap to cognitive immediacy.

In this vein, Dawson affirms that intuitive knowledge of transcendent spiritual Being is valid. The primary source of religious truth is revelation, while reason would be a secondary source, because philosophical or theological religion is the result of a secondary reflective activity.

The concept of revelation is universal, as old as religion itself. In primitive religions the foundations are laid on the authority of an immemorial tradition or on some supernatural means of communication with higher powers (oracles, visions, inspirations…), whereas natural theology is only found in some advanced civilisations.

This idea, however, would seem to contradict the intuition that there can be a natural theology prior to revealed theology, because it might be that our concept and desires for a supranatural Being are affected by our view of nature. This option seems reasonable especially if religion is understood as something of the individual, where the religious life comes first and then the reflection on it.

But Dawson introduces with the historical data a richer vision of the individual. Religion is not something merely individual, but social. Then religion is first lived and the natural religious life is built up in the structures and documents of a social religiosity. Subsequently, the value of revelation is claimed for these books and a theology is made from them. Finally, the reflection of natural theology appears.

“Thus the Hellenic Natural Theology was preceded by the Orphic revelation, the Vedantic Philosophy develops directly from the revealed teachings of the Upanishads, as its name—Uttara Mimamsa, the Later Enquiry—denotes, and the humanist Natural Theology is a rational superstructure erected on the foundations of the Christian theology of revelation” (Dawson 1948, p. 43).

Religion does not have to do with reason alone, but has its roots in the whole of human nature (Pérez Marcos 2022). Therefore, in order to access it, there are natural levels of knowledge, such as the experience of contemplative intuition which cannot be disregarded and which may be more valid for the study of religion than rational access.

In more current terms, I would say that first it is the experience of the encounter with a God who reveals himself to me, and then comes the reasoning about him and about the event. Hence the priority of the religious experience that is not a mere sentimental experience or a mere rational access to the supernatural.

Dawson’s conclusion is that any scientific study of religion must take into consideration the different revelations and religious traditions that emerge from that culture. Furthermore, in order to understand the nature of religion, natural theology must be considered, because natural theology is “the philosophic or scientific study of religious truth” (Dawson 1948, p. 44). If religious truth was completely beyond the reach of rational enquiry, then there would be no room for natural theology and the historical study of religion would become an exploration of irrational thought and behaviour. In turn, natural theology cannot be a complete and self-sufficient body of demonstrable religious truth, because it would fall into rationalism.

Where does Dawson take us with this reasoning? He leads us to argue that to know cultures it is necessary to know religion, and to make a scientific study of religion it is necessary to know revelation and natural theology. It requires faith and reason (Kasak and Kull 2018). And this study is possible because man is capable of transcendence—he is capax Dei, in Augustinian terms.

As Romera points out, religious experience left to itself can lead to phenomena of perversion of the religious, and so it is necessary to deepen this experience in order to discern what is authentic, always bearing in mind that man’s existential reference to God goes far beyond the merely intellectual. This intellectual elaboration is the task of theology, insofar as it is an explicit reflection on the contents of faith. And this faith implies an openness, trust and acceptance of God’s revelation that is a consequence of and responds to man’s intellectual character (Romera 2008, pp. 43–46).

Natural theology allows the union between theology and philosophy, between the world of historical religion and the domain of rational thought. In this way, the problem of the modern world of the rupture of the communion between the spiritual and the rational order can be faced. This problem cannot be solved by natural theology alone, but natural theology is necessary, because its rejection would mean that God would have no place in the human intellect (Dawson 1948, p. 44).

The proper way to approach the study of religion is to explain religious phenomena theologically, not anthropologically. Even so, some sciences such as history have content to contribute.

In my opinion, this approach makes it clear that Dawson is moving away from a position like Feuerbach’s and therefore from any religion that is ultimately a projection of the human spirit and is reducible to an anthropology. I do not think that he is denying the value of a sociological or anthropological investigation from below, but rather that he opens the door so that this investigation does not remain locked in the human spirit. This is clearly a legitimate position and for Dawson, a necessary condition for the historical investigation of the cultural imprints of religion.

5. The Historical Science of the Social Types of Religion

Access to the literature and thought of other religions, archaeological discoveries of peoples that no longer exist, and the contributions of psychology and the study of the unconscious have fuelled a growing interest in religions (Dawson 1975, pp. 31–32). The risk lies in studying only religious phenomenology, forgetting that religion is essentially a dynamic relationship between man and God. One cannot disregard the divine object when studying the relationship of human experience and divine reality. If the possibility of theological knowledge is denied, our attitude towards the religious phenomenon is different and the results of the study of this phenomenon will atrophy (Dawson 1975, p. 33).

This is one of the most controversial claims: the reason why Dawson rejects the comparative study of religions. A scientific study of religious phenomenology is possible but it would not be religious without a real God to support it. It is a matter of conceptualization. There is no Feuerbachian perspective in which religion is reduced to a kind of anthropology.

After arguing with Dawson for the possibility of scientific knowledge of religion, in this section we will see what this relationship of man to God is like, focusing on historical science.

Dawson detects three types of social organs present in all civilisations (Dawson 1948, chp. IV–VI) that mediate between the community and the divine world: the priest, who is the representative of specialised religious activity; the king or lawgiver, who is the personal representative or embodiment of divine power; and the prophet or seer, who is the spokesman of the divine will, the interpreter of dreams and oracles, and the revealer of sacred mysteries.

The prophetic type is found throughout the whole scale of religious experience and spiritual phenomena. It is the most important, for the analysis of his traits and his work allows one to plunge “beneath the surface of cultural tradition and social custom to the deepest levels of religious consciousness” (Dawson 1948, p. 66).

The danger of corruption and drift of false prophetism is balanced by the priesthood, which normally acts as a regulating and authoritative principle in religion and as an institutional link between religion and civilisation. Thus, the inspirations of the prophet call for sacred formulas and rituals for which the priest acquires specialised experience and preparation.

Among the social organs of religion, the priesthood exerts the most direct and lasting influence on civilisation, for it represents religion embodied in a stable institution of the social structure. Its importance has always been enormous in the formation of a culture. Moreover, as the priest is the head of the community, the guardian of sacred traditions and the repository of sacred actions, he “forms an integral part of the structure of society and assumes a corporate responsibility for the religious life of the community” (Dawson 1948, p. 87).

Among the functions of the priest (teaching, serving the divinity, being minister of the temple, recognising the divine will and decrees), the main one is the offering of sacrifice, which is the vital bond of communion between the people and their gods. The priest shares in the power and prestige of the gods because he can open and close the channels through which divine blessings reach the community (Dawson 1948, pp. 88–89).

Finally, if the prophet is the organ of divine inspiration and the priest is the organ of sacred knowledge, instructor and minister of sacrifice, the king is the organ of sacred power.

The king is regarded as sacred, as a bearer of divine power or even as a god or son of the gods. He is the cornerstone that unites heaven and earth and ensures the harmony of the two worlds. The existence of the king or lawgiver entails the sacred presence of law.

“Behind the philosophic idea of natural law, there is the much older theological idea that law is not a purely political or social creation but requires a divine sanction and origin in order to make it truly law. It is therefore not the State but God who is the source of all law, and the kings and the judges are not so much law makers as vindicators and guardians of the unchanging decrees of justice to which they are themselves subject” (Dawson 1948, p. 154).

Having seen, according to Dawson, the possibility and validity of religious knowledge, the appropriate method for a religious science, and the sources to which one must turn, from religious experience to the contribution that history can make, we will now stop to see what are the elements that constitute religion, to arrive at a notion in accordance with his approach.

6. Constitutive Elements

Before unravelling the elements of religion, let us take a more generic approach to the vision of historical religion. For Dawson, this vision has two fundamental points: the first is the belief in the existence of supernatural or divine powers of a mysterious nature that govern the world and the lives of humans; the second is the relationship that these powers have with particular people, things, places or ceremonies, which act as means of communication or rapprochement between the human world and the divine world: “on the lowest levels of culture we find 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” (Dawson 1975, p. 39).

All religions look beyond society to a superhuman reality to which they direct their worship. At the same time, if a religion is to exert a permanent influence on human life and behaviour, it has to incarnate itself in a culture and clothe itself in certain social institutions and traditions. This double aspect is present in the usual meaning of the concept of “religion”. This concept is used to describe man’s relationship with divinity or superhuman powers and to indicate the various organized systems of belief and worship in which these relationships have been expressed.

The belief in the existence of such relationships is a general conviction of man, common to all peoples and stages of culture. “There is a world of eternal spiritual realities in which and for which the world of man exists. That is the primary intuition that lies at the root of all religion, even of the most primitive kind” (Dawson 1932b, p. 98). And this intuition when embodied in a culture gives rise to the second aspect: organized systems, institutions, and religious traditions.

Dawson recognizes certain difficulties in delimiting a clear distinction between religion and magic in primitive cultures (for an explanation, see Alessi 1994, pp. 294–304), because magic appears at times as an alternative method of relating to the same needs and situations that have to do with religion. What, then, is the essential criterion of religion? For Dawson, it is the attitude of worship. Without worship, religious rites become magical techniques. And he concludes that the main elements of religion are the act of worship and the object of worship. From the interaction of these two factors arise the organized systems of thought and behaviour known as religions (Dawson 1975, p. 27).

“The religious attitude is only possible in the presence of the eternal and the transcendent. Any object that falls short of this fails to inspire the sense of awe and self-surrender which is essential to true religion” (Dawson 1930, p. 187). This is true even of the most primitive forms of religion which always possess an element of transcendence, without which they would cease to be a religion (Dawson 1942, pp. 95–96).

The normal object of religious worship is a god, a superhuman being who controls the world or some aspect of nature and on whom man depends. But there are also other forms of superhuman power, or sacred things, which are also objects of worship: spirits and ghosts; auguries and omens; men, animals, and objects.

As for the act of worship, Dawson asserts that it is proper to its religious nature to transcend the social realm, because it essentially has to do with that which is superior to man: the divine powers on which both the life of society and the lives of individuals depend. This sense of transcendence of divinity is characteristic of the religious attitude and gives rise to a twofold relationship between religion and culture: the social mode of life influences the approach to religion, and religious beliefs influence social action (Dawson 1975, pp. 28–29). That is, there is an ascending and descending transcendence (Dawson 1957, p. 93) and at its root is the fact of God’s existence.

In some cases, it might seem that religion is strongly conditioned by culture or other factors. But, for Dawson, the converse proposition also follows from this statement: religion conditions culture. And moreover, it does so with greater intensity, due to the transcendence of its object and its acts of worship (Dawson 1948, p. 58).

Having clarified this point, Dawson traces a synthetic historical itinerary of how this double ascending and descending relationship of religion with culture has taken place.

Initially, the specialization of some people appears for the development of techniques of communication with the divine, which gives rise to shamans or prophets, and for the development of techniques of worship or sacrifice, which gives rise to the priesthood. These people organize themselves, giving rise to two classes that have a profound influence on the development of culture as they transmit religious traditions in their societies.

In the next historical step, the traditions develop and come into conflict with individual religious leaders who do not abide by the existing religion.

In their development, religious traditions tend to encompass the entire cultural structure, so that religion and civilization are founded in a social unity dominated and permeated by religious conceptions. Thus, religion is no longer only a form of worship and a body of doctrine, but also includes a social ethic, a system of laws, a cosmology, a sacred history, and a philosophy (Dawson 1975, pp. 29–30).

These elements refer to the fundamental needs of the human soul and the religious experience of the common person (Dawson 1932a, chp. III). These needs consist for some historians in the need for God, for the supernatural, for the transcendent, while for others they are salvation, deliverance, redemption, or eternal life. Both elements are in one way or another represented in every historical religion (Dawson 1931, p. 29) and, as already stated, constitute for Dawson sufficient proof of a divine existence with which the human being enters into relationship.

7. Notion of Religion

To conclude our research on Dawson’s understanding of how to study religion, let us now focus on his approach to the notion of religion. It seems that he assumes the meaning of religion as self-evident, so he does not define it, but in some cases, he provides clues to understand its neuralgic points.

A first definition is found in Religion and Life: “Religion is neither philosophy, nor science, nor morality, but neither more nor less than communion with the divine life, whether we regard it individually as the very act of communion or externally as a system of beliefs and practices by which man brings his life into relation with the powers that govern universal life” (Dawson 1946, p. 12).

In Religion and Modern State, Dawson asserts that religion is not the world of subjective emotion, as opposed to a world of objective reality embodied in business and politics, but that, “religion is the sphere of the absolute, while business and politics belong to the sphere of the relative. Religion is the fixed pole around which human life revolves and to which all its parts must be related” (Dawson 1936, p. 124). Religion must maintain its metaphysical and absolute foundation, while at the same time it must enter into relationship with man’s life and the social order, if it is to exert a permanent influence on human life and behaviour (Dawson 1931, pp. 21, 57–60, 65).

In turn, in The Judgment of Nations, Dawson states how religion cannot become a tool of social control in the service of the state: “A religion (…) which is being used either as a means to a political end or, at best as an instrument of culture, has lost its transcendent character and has therefore ceased to be a religion in the full sense” (Dawson 1942, p. 108). That is, its higher instance is God, the supernatural, not the intraterrestrial.

In The Modern Dilemma, he repeats in other terms an analogous idea: “The moment that a society claims the complete allegiance of its members, it assumes a quasi-religious authority. For since man is essentially spiritual, any power that claims to control the whole man is forced to transcend relative and particular aims and to enter the sphere of absolute values, which is the realm of religion” (Dawson 1932b, p. 95).

Therefore, from an anthropological point of view and according to Dawson, religion is a communion of man with the divine life, which responds to the essential need of man, allows him to participate in transcendence, to enter the sphere of the absolute (values, truths, realities…) and manifests itself in individual and social life, by orienting personal behaviour as a fruit of that relationship.

8. Conclusions

Dawson always appreciated the upbringing he had received, but he never ceased to search for truth through history, the study of cultures and lived religion. “His style was not one of prejudice, quite the contrary. He was, above all, a man with an open mind, always ready to confront any idea, starting with his own. He was not interested in being right; he was interested in the truth” (Fuster 2001, p. 257).

His works have the flavour of the authentic, of what resists the passage of time. Along with his pioneering role, is the surprising relevance of many of his statements. “Dawson’s greatest value lies in the intelligence and enormous panoramic breadth of his perceptions, more than in the rigorous structuring of a philosophy or a philosophical study (…) No one can deny, however, the value and depth of an important number of his philosophical intuitions, born from the meditation of history, as well as the consistency that emerges from all of them, even if they sometimes suffer from a certain lack of systematicity” (Antúnez 2006, p. xxvi).

This, in part, is because culture or religion as a whole is difficult to grasp and requires focusing on the most important factors. But still, “religion’s central role in the life of culture may be the very thesis of Dawson’s corpus of writing” (Staudt 2012, p. 37).

The research of this paper has allowed to outline important aspects of how to study religions according to Dawson’s writings. He understands religions as the soul of cultures: if the latter are seen as an organic whole, the spirit that animates them should be understood.

The study of religion begins and ends on the theological plane, not on the sociological or historical plane. That is why the historical study of religion needs to admit initially the transcendent element of religious experience and the validity of religious truth. The soul of cultures can only be seen if its possible existence, manifested in cultures, is admitted.

As we already anticipated, this is a critical point of his statements because it would seem to deny the possibility of an inductive path to God—something that is possible and that Dawson himself defends when he gives value to the sociological investigation of religion. Rather, I conjecture that what he rejects is that a Feuerbachian anthropology is valid for the study of history.

Furthermore, an empathetic and open approach is necessary, seeking a holistic vision without prejudice or reductionism. The aim of the study must be to know and manifest the truth, and that is possible through natural theology aided by other sciences to avoid a biased non-organic approach. Social and historical sciences are indispensable for the understanding of religion in civilisation and in human life.

This leads him to turn to the religious experience of specific people when he seeks to study a religion. He accepts both the validity of the knowledge that is given in a true relationship with God, and that the person can transcend himself and reach the intuition of God. Still, the proper way to approach the study of religion is to explain religious phenomena theologically, not anthropologically.

A scientific study of religion requires faith and reason, revelation and natural theology, to overcome the modern rupture of the communion between the spiritual and the rational order. Natural theology allows the union between theology and philosophy, between the world of historical religion and the domain of rational thought. This study is possible because human being is capax Dei.

The belief in the existence of supernatural powers that govern the world and human lives is important, but also that these powers communicate with particular people, things, places or ceremonies. Part of the contribution of the historical sciences to the study of religion is the analysis of the three social types of religion present in all civilisations: the prophet, the king and the priest.

If a religion is to exert a permanent influence on human life and behaviour, it has to incarnate itself in a culture and clothe itself in certain social institutions and traditions. Religious traditions tend to encompass the entire cultural structure, so that religion and civilization are founded in a social unity dominated and permeated by religious conceptions. Thus, religion is no longer only a form of worship and a body of doctrine, but also includes a social ethic, a system of laws, a cosmology, a sacred history, and a philosophy.

For Dawson, a religion is a communion of man with the divine life, which responds to the essential need of man, allows him to participate in the sphere of the absolute, and manifests itself in individual and social life, by orienting personal behaviour, as a fruit of that relationship.

All in all, Dawson takes a historical approach to the study of religion. This causes him to have a limited, though not reductionist, vision, because he values positively natural theology and religious experiences. Religion for Dawson is objectively transcendent because of its relationship with God. It introduces into man’s life a new element of freedom that enriches the person and exerts a transforming and creative influence. Faith changes society by first changing man himself.