"The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism." -- Christopher Dawson
Christopher Henry Dawson (1889 — 1970) was an English independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and Christendom.
"American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.""And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens.""As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism.""As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.""But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.""Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.""Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces.""For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity.""Humanism and Divinity are as complementary to one another in theorder of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being.""If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear.""It is clear that this essential Christian doctrine gives a new value to human nature, to human history and to human life which is not to be found in the other great oriental religions.""It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.""It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or of the West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole.""Law describes the way things would work if men were angels.""Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers.""Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum.""Moreover, behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.""No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.""No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced.""The Church as a divine society possess an internal principle of life which is capable of assimilating the most diverse materials and imprinting her own image upon them.""The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language.""The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.""The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution.""The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.""This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other.""Thus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology.""Unlike other peoples the United States found their origin in a deliberate act of corporate self-assertion, and ever since the Revolution every little American has been taught to associate himself personally with this creative act.""Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one.""You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for."
Brought up at Hartlington Hall, in Yorkshire, Dawson was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford. His background was Anglo-Catholic, but he became a Roman Catholic convert in 1914. As a post-graduate student, he studied economics, and then at Oxford history and sociology. He also read in the work of the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch. In 1916, Dawson married Valery Mills.
He began publishing articles in The Sociological Review, in 1920. His starting point was close to that of Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee, others who were also interested in grand narratives conducted at the level of a civilization. His first book, The Age of the Gods (1928), was apparently intended as the first of a set of five tracing European civilization down to the twentieth century; but this schematic plan was not followed to a conclusion.
His general point of view is as a proponent of a 'Old West' theory, the later term of David Gress, who cites Dawson in his From Plato to Nato (1998). That is, Dawson rejected the blanket assumption that the Middle Ages in Europe failed to contribute any essential characteristics. He argued that the medieval Catholic Church was an essential factor in the rise of European civilization, and wrote extensively in support of that thesis.
He received also a measure of academic recognition, and was considered a leading Catholic historian. From 1940 for a period he was editor of the Dublin Review. He was Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University from 1958-1962.
His writings in the 1920s and 1930s made him a significant figure of the time, and an influence in particular on T. S. Eliot, who wrote of his importance. He was on the fringe of 'The Moot', a discussion group involving Eliot, John Baillie, Karl Mannheim, Walter Moberly, Michael Polanyi, Marjorie Reeves, Bernard Lonergan and Alec Vidler; and also the Sword of the Spirit ecumenical group. According to Bradely Birzer, Dawson also influenced the theological underpinnings of J. R. R. Tolkien's writings. Russell Kirk was another who greatly admired Dawson, although the two men never met.
As a revivalist of the Christian historian, Christopher Dawson has been compared with Kenneth Scott Latourette and Herbert Butterfield.Comparisons have also been made between the work of Dawson and German sociologist and historian Max Weber. Both employ a metahistorical approach to their subjects, and their subjects themselves bear similarities; namely, the influence of religion on aspects of western culture.
