"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.

"The world of divine power and mystery"

“THE object of religion essentially transcends human life and the human way of life. Over against the world of human experience and social behavior there stands the world of divine power and mystery, which is conceived by the primitive no less than by the advanced theist as essentially creative and the ultimate source of all power.”

~Christopher Dawson: Religion and Culture.

"No human power can stop this progress to the abyss"

“BUT THIS IS JUST THE TRUTH which the modern world has denied. It has put its trust in the “arm of flesh”; it has believed the word of man rather than the Word of God. It has reversed the whole hierarchy of spiritual values so that our civilization has been turned backwards and upside down, with its face toward darkness and nonentity and its back to the sun of truth and the source of being. For a short time—whether we reckon it in decades or centuries is of small importance—it remained precariously skating on the thin ice of rationalism and secular humanism. Now the ice has broken and we are being carried down the flood, though we may delude ourselves that the forces that have been released are our own creation and serve our will to power.

“Is it possible to reverse this process? No human power can stop this progress to the abyss. It can only come about by a profound movement of change or conversion which brings the human spirit once more into a vital relation with the spirit of God.”

~Christopher Dawson: The Judgment of the Nations.

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Birzer: "Dawson’s Christendom and the Catholic Intellectual Life"

Dawson’s Christendom and the Catholic Intellectual Life
by Bradley J. Birzer

"As it turned out, the Christendom trilogy served as the last great work of English-Welsh historian and man of letters Christopher Dawson (1889-1970).  Sort of. The trilogy derived, originally, from lectures Dawson had delivered while teaching at Harvard University between 1958 and 1962. As desired, the Christendom trilogy would consist of The Formation of Christendom (1967); The Dividing of Christendom (1965); and The Return to Christian Unity. (1) In the broad, each volume represented one of three great periods of the Christian world: the ancient-medieval nexus; the Reformation and Counter Reformation; and the Church in the age of democracy, nationalisms, and ideologies.

"Though The Formation of Christendom is technically volume one of Christendom, it came out two years later than volume two, The Dividing of Christendom. The idea to publish the lectures as a trilogy came to Dawson in 1963.  His publisher, Frank Sheed, readily agreed.The only question was whether to publish them separately as a three-part work or immediately as a three-volume set. Sheed wanted to get them out as soon as possible, as he hoped the books would serve as the basis of discussions for the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Not unreasonably, Sheed had believed that Dawson—along with a number of other Christian Humanists, such as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson—would serve as the intellectual touchstone and fountainhead for the council and its important deliberations and reforms. After all, important figures such as Romano Guardini had been calling for reformation of the liturgy since the 1920s."

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