"The ultimate spiritual roots of society and the individual"

“THE central conviction which has dominated my mind ever since I began to write is the conviction that the society or culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying culture, however prosperous it may appear externally. Consequently the problem of social survival is not only a political or economic one; it is above all things religious, since it is in religion that the ultimate spiritual roots of society and the individual are to be found.”

~Christopher Dawson: Enquiries.

"The modern world stands no less in need"

"IF Christianity is necessary to Europe, the Catholic Church is no less necessary to Christianity, for without it the latter would become no more than a mass of divergent opinions dissolving under the pressure of rationalist criticism and secularist culture. It was by virtue of the Catholic ideal of spiritual unity that the social unity of European culture emerged from the welter of barbarism, and the modern world stands no less in need of such an ideal if it is to realize in the future the wider unity of a world civilization."

~Christopher Dawson

French Revolution

“TO the liberal idealists—men like Lafayette….and the orators of the Gironde—the Revolution meant the realization of the ideals of the Enlightenment, liberty and toleration, the rights of man and the religion of humanity. They did not see that they were on the edge of a precipice and that the world they knew was about to be swallowed up in a tempest of change which would destroy both them and their ideals. “Woe unto you who desire the day of the Lord! It is darkness and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him, …”; they were a doomed generation, fated to perish at first by ones and twos, and then by scores and hundreds and thousands, on the scaffold, in the streets and on the battlefield.”

~Christopher Dawson: “The Gods of Revolution.”

Storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789.

"The real meaning of history"

“THE real meaning of history is something entirely different from that which the human actors in the historical drama themselves believe or intend.”

~Christopher Dawson: Religion and the Modern State.

"The Church exists in history, but it transcends history"

“WHEREAS the secular historian is in no way committed to the cultures of the past, the Catholic and indeed every Christian is bound to recognize the existence of a transcendent supra-temporal element at work in history. The Church exists in history, but it transcends history so that each of its temporal manifestations has a supernatural value and significance. To the Catholic all the successive ages of the Church and all the forms of Christian culture form part of one living whole in which we still participate as a living reality.”

~Christopher Dawson: The Historic Reality of Christian Culture.