Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson concludes that the period of the fourth to the eleventh centuries, commonly known as the Dark Ages, is not a barren prelude to the creative energy of the medieval world. Instead, he argues that it is better described as "ages of dawn" for it is in this rich and confused period that the complex and creative interaction of the Roman empire, the Christian Church, the classical tradition, and barbarous societies provided the foundation for a vital, unified European culture. In an age of fragmentation and the emergence of new nationalist forces, Dawson argued that if "our civilization is to survive, it is essential that it should develop a common European consciousness and sense of historic and organic unity." But he was clear that this unity required sources deeper and more complex than the political and economic movements on which so many had come to depend, and he insisted, prophetically, that Europe would need to recover its Christian roots if it was to survive. In a time of cultural and political ambiguity, The making of Europe is an indispensable work for understanding not only the rich sources but also the contemporary implications of the very idea of Europe.

An Introduction to the History of European Unity

The Making of Europe

Progress and Religion was perhaps the most influential of all Christopher Dawson's books, establishing him as an interpreter of history and a historian of ideas.

An Historical Inquiry (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

Progress and Religion

The Gods of Revolution

The renowned historian Christopher Dawson devoted his long and brilliant career to precisely the kind of historical research of which theologians and churchmen stand in great need, particularly if they are to meet the authentic demands of the ecumenical e

The Formation of Christendom

Christopher Dawson wrote The Judgment of the Nations in 1942, in the midst of the horrors of World War II.

The Judgment of the Nations

Robert Royal

The essays presented in this volume are among the most wide-ranging, intellectually rich, and diverse of Christopher Dawson's reflections on the relations of faith and culture

Enquiries Into Religion and Culture (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

The Crisis of Western Education

In this new edition of his classic work, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Christopher Dawson addresses two of the most pressing subjects of our day: the origin of Europe and the religious roots of Western culture. With the magisterial sweep of Toynbee, to whom he is often compared, Dawson tells here the tale of medieval Christendom. From the brave travels of sixth-century Irish monks to the grand synthesis of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Dawson brilliantly shows how vast spiritual movements arose from tiny origins and changed the face of medieval Europe from one century to the next. The legacy of those years of ferment remains with us in the great cathedrals, Gregorian chant, and the works of Giotto and Dante. Even more, though, for Dawson these centuries charged the soul of the West with a spiritual concern -- a concern that he insists "can never be entirely undone except by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself."

The Classic Study of Medieval Civilization

Religion and the Rise of Western Culture

The dividing of Christendom

The Movement of World Revolution, originally published in 1959, explores many of the themes Dawson considered most important in his lifetime: the religious foundation of human culture, the central importance of education for the recovery of Christian humanism, the myth of progress, and the dangers of nationalism and secular ideologies.

The Movement of World Revolution

Dawson expresses a desire for Europe to rediscover and renew its foundational Christian sources in order to recover a deeper sense of integrity. This edition includes an introduction by George Weigel.

Understanding Europe (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

*A new edition of Christopher Dawsons classic work on Christian higher education*

The Crisis of Western Education (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

Dermot Quinn

Religion, Dawson firmly believed, is the great creative force in any culture, and the loss of a society's historic religion therefore portends a process of social dissolution. For this reason Dawson concluded that Western society must find a way to revitalize its spiritual life if it is to avoid irreversible decay. Progress, the real religion of modernity, is insufficient to sustain cultural health. And an ahistorical, secularized Christianity is an oxymoron, a pseudo-religion only nominally related to the historical religion of the West. Dawson held that the hope of the present age lay in the reconciliation of the religious tradition of Christianity with the intellectual tradition of humanism and the new knowledge about man and nature provided by modern science. Dynamics of World History shows that though such a task may be difficult, it is not impossible.

Dynamics of World History

A Way to the Renewal of Human Life

The Historic Reality of Christian Culture

John J. Mulloy

Assembles the author's essential essays exploring themes ranging from the interdependence of history and sociology to the need to go beyond nationalist history toward a history of the entire process of cultural development.

Christopher Dawson

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