SOME years ago when the average reader thought of English converts to the Roman Catholic Church, he immediately recalled Messrs. Belloc, Chesterton, and D.B. Wyndham Lewis; now he adds perforce the name of Mr. Dawson. Mr. Dawson resembles his three associates in many respects: he is an historian, for example, who endeavours to re-write the Whig historians, whose anti-Catholic bias is one of the disgraces of modern historiography. Unlike Messrs. Belloc and Chesterton, Mr. Dawson is imbued with the modern ideal of impartiality, and even in his attempt to secure justice for the faith he never leans over backwards into unfairness to the unjust. He is most like Mr. Wyndham Lewis--minus that historian's Gallic irony--in that he is immensely learned, how learned anybody has some opportunity of gauging by reading his "Age of the Gods" or "The Making of Europe." He lectures on culture-history at the University of Exeter, England.

The present volume consists in the first part of essays on mediaeval religion, originally presented at the Forwood Lectures for 1934 at the University of Liverpool; the second part is "The Origins of the Romantic Tradition," which first appeared in the "Criterion"--like Mr. Ezra Pound, Mr. Dawson finds the essence of Romanticism, without XIXth century secretions, in the Provencel literary tradition, when literature and religion co-operated and collaborated, and the present dualism was yet unknown; the third part is a paper on "Piers Plowman." There is a central unity, however, for Mr. Dawson's concern throughout is with the impact of religion on culture, insofar as it is ever possible wholly to dissociate the two. In the Middle Ages, especially in the XIIIth century, Christianity attained its cultural heights: "Europe has seen no greater Christian here than St. Francis, no greater Christian philosopher than St. Thomas, no greater Christian poet than Danto, perhaps even no greater Christian ruler than St. Louis." For the Christian the XIIIth is unquestionably the greatest of centuries, and Mr. Dawson's discussion of the elements in the whole prior development which culminated in that age is at once masterly and full. One would like, above all to linger over more of his statements than this: "The end of (Greek) science was not to do but to know: felix qui potuit rorum cognoscore causas. The reward of the scientist was to share the blessedness of the immortal gods who are eternally satisfied with the contemplation of the ordered course of the heavens and the vision of eternal law." As he points out this ideal was as incomprehensible to the mediaeval Christian as it is to the modern Englishman or American, for whom science is power, and whose ideal hence is not unrelated to that of Arabic science which was magic, since the Arabs, like us, have the application of science to the exigencies of life for our goal--in other words, power over nature. Roger Bacon, as Mr. Dawson says, "seems at first sight"--so he appeared to the Elizabethan dramatist--"to belong entirely to the Arabic scientific tradition," for since he was aware of the possible misuse of science, "like the Arabs he believed that science was power and that the scientist was a wonder worker and a magician."

A grave defect of the book--though the paper on "Piers Plowman" somewhat mitigates it--is Mr. Dawson's failure to relate the break-up of the mediaeval synthesis to social phenomena like the decline of feudalism, that all-embracing system of "organized anarchy," as Professor Haskins once called it. And surely the XIVth century hurly-burly can be shown to be related to the Reformation by economic ties; it is certainly significant that the English schism, in its early stages, was less doctrinal than political, and was anyhow not altogether to be attributed to the amorous ways of Henry VIII, but was part and parcel of an economic motive which despoiled the monasteries. "Money, money maketh man," said old Pindar, and the lines which Langland gives to Lady Meed show that while he was "the Catholic Englishman par excellence, at once the most English of Catholic poets and the most Catholic of English poets: a man in whom Catholic faith and national feeling are fused in a single flame," he perceived a real threat to Christianity in the rapacity of his contemporaries.

It will be seen that Mr. Dawson stimulates dissent, and such stimulation in these days is rare.