The Making of Europe

 

What shaped Europe?
Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) entitled his work The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity. Since its publication, the book has been reprinted more than eighteen times. At a time when Europe was breaking apart, he asserted some of the ingredients that shaped European culture: the Roman Empire, the Classical Tradition and Christianity, the Church, and the Barbarians.

For Dawson the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century until the rise of a new German Roman Empire in the tenth century was a fruitful time and not the Dark Ages that they have been called. He underlined the importance of the Eastern Mediterranean for the West and considered not only the Byzantines, but also Islam and Moslem Culture.

 

Who was the most enlightened?
Dawson was not interested in being politically correct: he understood that in philosophy, natural sciences, and many other fields, the Moslem world in these centuries was more enlightened than its Christian counterpart. It was not until the fifteenth century that the Christian West achieved the "leadership of civilisation which we regard today as a kind of law of nature."

 

In looking at the conversion of the barbarians in these centuries, Dawson was quite positive about the role of the Christian Church. For him conversion was more than a political choice by a ruling clique. It was the introduction of a new culture to Northern Europe, the marriage of Roman and Christian values in Germanic society. There is no sentimentality here about Irish-Celtic monasticism in opposition to its Roman counterpart. Dawson understood that the early medieval Church, in spite of all the chaos around it, maintained its unity from Ireland to Scandinavia and Sicily.

 

For Dawson there was no doubt that Europe was a unity. If its civilisation was to survive, he argued, "it is essential that it should develop a common European consciousness and sense of historic and organic unity." In order to reach back to this unity, Dawson saw the need to rediscover the Christian foundations of Europe.

 

In Dawson's awareness is our own need to reassert who we are. Not by making formal declarations in European documents but by returning to a common history and learning from it. The idea of Europe is bound up with a common Christian heritage.