Dawson
and
The
White Stones
One of the poems in The White Stones is based on the story of
a mediaeval missionary to China printed in a book edited by the
historian Christopher Dawson. Dawson was also a friend of David Jones
from the 1920s on, and one of the 50 influences cited by him in the
introduction to The Anathemata.
The book is The Mongol Missions and it was published in 1955.
The translator is an anonymous English nun. I am using a download of
the American edition, Mission to Asia. The book includes the
narrative of “John of Plano Carpini” (there are other ways of
reproducing this place-name) who set out on his mission to the Mongol
court in 1240. The poem is 'Frost and Snow, Falling' and has “On
the 9th of May, 1247 they began their home journey”, which is a
quotation from p. xv of Dawson's introduction to the volume (American
edition by Harper Torchbooks). To be exact they reached Batu's camp
on 9th May and waited there a month before receiving
Imperial permission to travel.
At the first sighting on the horizon, it seems possible that there
is an ideological link, and that Dawson's ideas were somehow taken up
by Prynne and offer an overlap between two generations of great
poetry, Jones and Prynne. Less than a second later, I imagine, this
starts to seem utterly unlikely. Dawson was a Catholic historian
whose positions were a reaction to Spengler's, but who was mainly a
professional historian, not a theorist, and whose abilities as a
thinker were modest – inhibited by an English diffidence and
dislike of abstractions which was not eased by his loyalty to the
Church of Rome (and the very limited scope it allowed to original
thought by men not in holy orders). 'Frost and Snow' draws on the
original 13th C text of Piano Carpini and not at all on
original work by Dawson. So, in doing this piece of research, I am
expecting to neutralise the idea that there could be a link between
Prynne and Dawson (and indeed Jones, Spengler, and Catholic theorists
of the decay of Western civilisation). It seems at first glance that
Prynne, writing 'Frost and Snow, Falling', was interested in the
high snowfall deep inside the Eurasian land mass, and the causal
basis of farming, and culture thriving on its surplus production, in
a climate which had less snow and did not freeze the seed of any
arable crop in the ground. Peasant economy, and feudalism, and the
Catholic Church, therefore had an eastern edge, and Carpini travelled
beyond it.
A
phrase from Letter to the Ephesians
“Cosmocrats
of the Dark Aeon” is
a non-Biblical phrase which appears in Dawson's
1939 book Beyond
Politics
and again in
David Jones' poem The
Narrows.
Dawson is re-translating
this from the Greek, Ephesians 6:12 in the King James version has:
For
we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against...
But there is a longer version:
For
we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers,
against
the lords of this age,
rulers of this darkness, against spiritual
…
– as there are two different versions of this text on-line. It is my
bad luck to hit on a verse which exists in two different forms. The
Greek version I have does not have the extra phrase, but there must
be some basis for it. The Douay-Rheims English version is “For
our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against
principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this
darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.”
This
is the standard Catholic translation and Dawson was probably
referring to this longer text (whatever language he used).
The Greek Testament I have says kosmokratoras tou skotou tou. The
word aeon is not in this Greek text and the 'darkness' is evidently
spiritual darkness. It is credible that the idea of the visible world
as being a snare is a Gnostic element picked up by Paul at a moment
when Gnosticism was not clearly divided from Christian doctrines.
Dawson's injection of the word “aeon”, one of the keywords of
Gnostic thought, is a puzzling echo of this. If this world is ruled
by the powers of darkness, it is not in the hands of God – and our
senses are giving us wrong information. Christ was incarnated into a
hostile cosmos. This is Gnostic. The darkness (skotos) can only be
the flooding of the senses with deceitful information.
What did Dawson mean? He was certainly thinking of human, secular
powers, and these were probably any technocratic and inorganic power,
not just the totalitarian States of the 1930s.
It was his luck to provide tiny pieces which were picked up by two
great poets.
'The
Narrows' was not published during Jones' lifetime but was included in
The
Roman Quarry,
a volume taken from his archive, which did not include the Notes
which all the Faber books had. It is
a monologue of a Roman soldier and includes
that phrase from Dawson's 1939 book and relates to the English
Channel as a barrier against invasion – so a composition date of
around 1940, with German invasion being actively feared, seems
credible. His
character foresees wars:
Still
more, and internecine too,
when the cosmocrats of the dark aeon
find themselves
wholly at a loss
in the meandered labyrinth of
their own monopolies.
Reading
Dawson, it seems
likely that Jones' version of the “cosmocrats”
was the financial powers which ran the Empire, owned it, kept the
profits from it, and that his interpretation of the phrase was
anti-capitalist. The
critique must include the forces of war – both the technology which
makes modern war so cruel, the governments whose policies favour it,
the armaments cartels which were so often discussed back then, and
the unholy alliance of press interests and public passions which gave
militarism its chance.
The most accurate reading of Ephesians 6:12 is as about invisible,
spiritual, malign powers. That is a kind of Christian occultism. Paul
says they are not of flesh and blood. There is almost no chance that
Jones read the verse in this way. He was a 20th century
man. However, he was concerned with the spiritual history of mankind
and his interest in secular politics, income distribution,
legislation, etc. should not be exaggerated.
The triple invocation of Powers is cast in terms sounding like Court
ceremonial, and for that reason I suspect that the original is a
spell of conjuration (since these were calqued on Court honorifics
and means of address), and that the author of Ephesians had heard
some of these spells. These are terms of flattery. It is amusing to
compare them with the titles of offices at the Welsh Court which
Jones picks up in two passages of The Sleeping Lord. There is
indeed a Welsh tract which describes the officials of the court and
their duties (“the Notitia of degrees and precedences”, he calls
it). It is the kind of thing which nationalists stare at while
thinking how there were no more Welsh courts after the completed
English conquest, so 1282 at latest. The old Welsh poetry was full of
flattery and attribution of titles takes up a large part in it. When
Jones reels off “penmilwyr, aergwn, aergyfeddau, cymdeithiau yn y
ffosydd, cadfridogion, tribuni militum”, he is re-enacting a
central function. This whole passage has an occult echo of “powers,
principalities, cosmocrats of the dark aeon”.
So much in the new thought of around 1918-1940 derives from Oswald Spengler.
He more or less invented cultural criticism. But very little of it
agrees with him – it was generally a reaction against him. Dawson and Jones were so intensely involved with Spengler, in the 1920s, that this is where they got their start. Disagreeing with him line by line.
Christopher
Dawson
The key thing in Dawson, for Jones, is the long chronological span –
he sees the last two thousand years as one era and definitely regards
the high Middle Ages, with the unbroken Catholic orthodoxy and the
acknowledged power of the church, as the best time. In fact, his
first book, The Age of the Gods,
describes the origins of European culture in the 1st
millennium BC, again with the realm of the divine as something real
and autonomous from which anything to do with art and philosophy
derives as a secondary expression. The Dividing of Christendom
deals with the modern centuries, less interested in the development
of cities, printing, manufacturing, and so on, than in the loss of
religious unity, which for him is the supreme descriptor of the whole
era. He does not seem interested in the much earlier division of the
Eastern Church from the Western. He sticks to the version of
historical events accepted by other Western scholars, so that his
original thought is not given much space in the books and has to be
worked out from the unstated assumptions. Thus Beyond Politics
is not a demand for the end of democracy, although he says that there
is no point in having more than one party, because they cancel each
other out, and that totalitarianism is better than “heresies and
sects”, i.e. Protestantism, because it offers spiritual unity. He
is completely preoccupied with unity, and this alone would make it
hard for him to develop any original ideas without being overcome
with guilt.
When he writes about the Mongol Khanate, he singles out certain
tribes near Mongolia who were already Christian, and only reluctantly
discloses that they are Nestorian and not Catholic. He is unhappy
about the differences between Europe and Inner Asia and looks forward
to them disappearing as a result of a Catholic mission – this is
the theme of the book. The idea of focussing on the differences
between Europe and the semi-arid steppe, of tracing features of
social organisation back to the economic and climatic base, is quite
alien to him. Dawson wants to define societies through their
religions, and the effects on art and law of religion, and has no
interest in sociology as a possible factor in history.
Dawson is writing in Beyond Politics in response
to the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. He is definitely against
it, although too kind a man not to find positive features in it. He
is definitely not asking for the abolition of democracy in favour of
some kind of Catholic corporatism offering firm leadership from above
and the benevolent silencing of secular culture. He talks wistfully
about the corporatist state in Austria as a “Catholic experiment”;
the Schuschnigg regime (after the assassination of Dollfuss, its
founder) is generally classified now as fascist (“Austro-fascist”)
but as Dawson does not seem to know any details about it we can pass
by this as just a muddled and inchoate lapse. Dollfuss abolished the
parliament in March 1933.
Dawson's writing on the Middle Ages sees them as a period of unity. If we
look at 10th century Europe, we see above all a decentralised region
with poor roads, few towns, and an amazing diversity of languages and
dialects. Diversity is the most obvious feature. If Dawson sees only
unity, it is because he is attentive only to a tiny educated elite,
who use a standard Latin and communicate with each other in writing,
also bound into a corporation, what we call the Church. His belief in
unity seems strikingly wrong. This is a colonial view of Europe,
through the eyes of a corporate group with shared assets. He does not
regard the other 99.5% of the population, the ones who did not know
Latin, as valid interlocutors. He is projecting unity based on the
religion he belongs to and on a language which he learnt at school,
and is disqualifying at every step anything which speaks any other
language or is not part of religious activity. If you scrap the
evidence, what is left is homogeneous and must have unity. It looks
as if he is exchanging legal fictions, generalised ideals, for real
and local experience. The differences between Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and
Norse cultures, as recovered from their surviving literatures,
suggest profound regional differences even in one part of north-west
Europe.
His 1939 book is interpreting 1930s Europe in the same terms, where
differences between classes and parties in a country, or between
different countries, are disastrous. To sum up, Beyond Politics
is a flimsy work, unsystematic, muddled, and without one significant
new idea. He gives much space to coronation as the way in which
Catholic ethics could seize control of the secular power, but gives
no reason to think that this would have any practical effect at all –
more, because he is talking about Britain the Catholicism is
irrelevant.
The most original idea in the book is about an organization in the
intellectual world which would integrate it in the way that the
Church organizes spiritual life – as the Press is too influenced by
the government and by capitalists. He really wants every book to say
the same thing – again, he is dominated by the idea of unity and
seems unfamiliar with the idea that innovation, free contest between
competing views, speculation, or debate, can possibly produce
anything of worth. No, everything was already there in the 12th
century. Anything new is division. He doesn't make clear what form
this normative and corporate organisation would take. I would like to
know more about this, but my guess is that it had no substance and
nobody else picked it up. (It was a time when writers in Europe were forming
associations.) I would suggest that the knowledge economy is
protected, not by a bureaucracy separate from the researchers, but by
intellectual standards which have been internalised by them. If we
skip ahead to the 1950s, civil society is often preoccupied by
intellectual method, as highlighted by ideologies, Fascist, Marxist
or indeed Catholic, which threaten both the quality of knowledge and
civil society. This method actually is an organisation for scholars
and journalists. It allows the free competition of ideas. Dawson,
though, really seems disturbed by the idea that two books could say
different things. We do all have internalised standards (which amount
to an “institution”) but one of those is that we all write
different books! Dawson's dislike of this is almost a neurological
style – the idea of reading more than one historian, of having more
than one political party, makes him uncomfortable, it is discord and
ill-health. In the 1920s, the disaster of the Great War has
discredited authority, and every inherited idea is being challenged.
One kind of young person thrives on this, loves the new modernist
art. Another kind hates it and wants a return to authority and
classicism as quickly as possible.
Dawson basically wants the abolition of political parties, but has
strong anglocentric inhibitions which prevent him from reaching a
conclusion on this and indeed from writing in a logical way.
The impact of The Making of Europe and
The Age of the Gods was partly their sense of the very
long chronological scale. This may show up in Jones' poems where
history reaches a crisis or turning-point, where a thousand years
concentrate in a single moment. But it seems also that this very long
perspective was helped by his indifference to change or to local
effects: he wasn’t interested in the differences between between
different European countries or different centuries and his books
prefer not to register them. He did see links between some
institution in the 3rd century and some process in the 12th
century. This narrative is blank and epic at the same time.
Frost and
Snow
The passage of Carpini quoted in the poem is at page 70 of the
Mission to Asia book.
The
idea is that every sedentary society is the same, and that the
alternative, of wandering, is the opposite which makes every feature
of sedentarism become apparent – losing inevitability to become a
suitable subject
for reflexive knowledge. “The
wanderer with his thick staff […] he is our only rival.”
The nomad is illiterate, no nomad society has ever had much to do
with writing, and a scrounger – he cannot store food because he
only has what he can carry. The poem belongs with a number of others
in The
White Stones
as reflections
on the end of the Ice Age and the differences between the Mesolithic
and the Neolithic as phases of British prehistory.
So that when the snow falls again the earth
becomes lighter and lighter. The surface con-
spires with us, we are its first-born. Even
in this modern age, we leave tracks, as we
go. And as we go, walk, stride or climb
out of it, we leave that behind, our own
level contemplation of the world. The monk
Dicuil records that at the summer solstice
in Iceland a man could see right through the
night, as of course he could. That too is a
quality, some generous lightness which we
give to the rival when he comes in. The tracks
are
beaten off, all the other things underground.
–
this is beautiful but also rational. The
interest is in the relation between soil regimes and the energy flux
from the sun – the description of the monk Dicuil's observations in
Iceland, around AD 830, is there because solar light controls climate
and only after this does mankind lead what life is possible in that
climate. The description of snow as shining with light is singularly
beautiful – however, the point is rather the reverse, that the cold
is due to the lower insolation, of solar heat, at high latitudes, the
thinner vegetation, and
the scattered pastoral
economy that
follows from this. Of
course it is also about how you feel, and how the air on your skin
and the light beaming into your eyes affect this.
Because Prynne goes back to the Mesolithic, and the end of the last
local Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago, it is possible to define a
resemblance to Spengler, and to Dawson as someone whose intellectual
conception was shaped by opposition to Spengler, in the interest in
“the morphology of cultures” and in very long chronological
spans. I can't just abolish this. However, Dawson and Prynne disagree
on just about everything, and few thinkers could have less bearing on
Prynne than Dawson. To be honest, I don’t think Dawson was a great
influence on Jones either – he just wasn't original and decisive
enough as a thinker. Jones was developing his ideas in the 1920s,
when everything seemed to be falling apart, and was fascinated by
Spengler, who redefined the West as merely one culture among other
subjects of “cultural morphology” in a long chronological
perspective. Dawson went through exactly the same experience, and was
a companion of Jones rather than his guide. Prynne's historical ideas
come from geographers, the flow of “historical geography”; that
whole lowland zone of Spengler's hypnotising speculations and the
re-Christianising counter-attack passed him by.
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