Search results for ""Author Christopher Dawson""

In The Gods of Revolution, Christopher Dawson brought to bear, as Glanmor Williams said, “his brilliantly perceptive powers of analysis on the French Revolution. . . . In so doing he reversed the trends of recent historiography which has concentrated primarily on examining the social and economic context of that great upheaval.”Dawson underlines the fact that the Revolution was not animated by democratic ideals but rather reflected an authoritarian liberalism often marked by a fundamental contempt for the populace, described by Voltaire as “the ‘canaille’ that is not worthy of enlightenment and which deserves its yoke.” The old Christian order had stressed a common faith and common service shared by nobles and peasants alike but Rousseau“pleads the cause of the individual against society, the poor against the rich, and the people against the privileged classes.” It is Rousseau whom Dawson describes as the spiritual father of the new age in disclosing a new spirit of revolutionary idealism expressed in liberalism, socialism and anarchism. But the old unity was not replaced by a new form. Dawson insists the whole period following the Revolution is “characterized by a continual struggle between conflicting ideologies,” and the periods of relative stabilization such as the Napoleonic restoration, Victorian liberalism in England, and capitalist imperialism in the second German empire “have been compromises or temporary truces between two periods of conquest.” This leads to his assertion that “the survival of westernculture demands unity as well as freedom, and the great problem of our time is how these two essentials are to be reconciled.”This reconciliation will require more than technological e”fficiency for “a free society requires a higher degree of spiritual unity than a totalitarian one. Hence the spiritual integration of western culture is essential to its temporal survival.” It is to Christianity alone that western culture “must look for leadership and help in restoring the moral and spiritual unity of our civilization,” for it alone has the influence, “in ethics, in education, in literature, and in social action” su”ciently strong to achieve this end.

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Christopher Dawson was one of the most profound historians of his day, with an acute understanding of the ideas and culture movements behind the making of Western society. 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. Dawson’s concern was not so much a solution to the political, social, or economic problems of his day, but rather an understanding of the present as it had evolved from the past as well as the charting of a path into the future. In this work, Dawson argued that the modern period was “not a metaphysical age, and in the East no less than in the West men are more interested in subsistence and coexistence than in essence and existence.” Dawson believed a reduction of culture to material and technological preoccupations would ultimately end in an impoverishment of life. His solution was a return to a renewed Christendom, one not marked by an alliance with secular powers but rather arising out of an organic, spiritual foundation. The Movement of World Revolution is remarkably prophetic in anticipating many of the contemporary struggles about the role of religion in the modern state.

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When first published in 1928, The Age of the Gods was hailed as the best short account of what is known of pre-historic man and culture. In it, Christopher Dawson synthesised modern scholarship on human cultures in Europe and the East from the Stone Age to the beginnings of the Iron Age. His focus was not merely on the material development of early society but more intently on the social and spiritual development of man that accompanied it. Piece by piece, Dawson fit together the varied influences that brought into being the ancient foundations on which modern civilisation was built. Published soon after World War I, the book uncovered the common tradition and unity of culture of European civilisation in hope of bringing cooperation and peace to the people of Europe. It defined what a culture is, how cultures change, and what constitutes progress. Dawson consulted the studies of archaeologists, early historians, anthropologists, and ethnologists, and presented an uncommonly balanced and greatly admired survey of the whole. Presented here with a new introduction by Dermot Quinn, The Age of the Gods continues the popular Works of Christopher Dawson series. Among other topics, the book sketches the glacial age and the beginnings of human life, the Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures and the rise of the peasant culture in Europe, the development of Sumerian culture, the archaic culture of Egypt, the megalithic culture in Western Europe, the age of empire in the Near East, the Bronze Age in Central Europe, the formation of the Indo-European peoples, the Mycenaean culture of Greece, and the beginnings of the Iron Age in Europe.

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In a time of remarkable but selective amnesia in the West reflected perhaps most dramatically in the denial of the Christian roots of Europe in the first drafts of the European constitution, ""Understanding Europe"" is as relevant today as it was on its first appearance in 1952. Christopher Dawson wrote of the uneasiness that characterized twentieth-century Western civilization in the aftermath of two disastrous global conflicts and the attempt to build a new secular civilization on impersonal economic forces. He desired a unified Europe, but one unified by a common Christian religion.Recognizing the emphasis on economic utility and mass productivity in European culture, Dawson argued that a renewed study of Christian faith and culture was essential in order to recover the deeper sense of European unity. In ""Understanding Europe"", 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. Other volumes in the Works of Christopher Dawson series include ""The Making of Europe"", ""Medieval Essays"", and ""Progress and Religion"".

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Religion and Culture was first presented by historian Christopher Dawson as part of the prestigious Gifford Lecture series in 1947. It sets out the thesis for which he became famous: religion is the key of history.The book makes two parallel arguments. First, Dawson argues that religion is, and should be treated as, a separate category of human experience. Second, Dawson claims that religion has a unique place in human culture and has defined and developed different cultures in identifiable ways. Without understanding both premises, he argues, one cannot understand cultural development.Drawing on his profound and sympathetic reading in anthropology, sociology, comparative religion and the literatures of Western and non-Western cultures, Dawson seeks to bridge the gap between religion and the sciences through the tradition of natural theology. His approach respects the natural sciences and their power to plumb the mysteries of the natural world, while recognising that they cannot, alone, explain religious intimations of the transcendent. Religion and Culture was written and published in a time not unlike our own, when the very distinctiveness of religious experience has been denigrated, and religious belief is considered in some circles as an atavistic holdover. And yet, the existence of a purely technocratic culture and its ability to embody and transmit moral or cultural norms remains in doubt. Dawson, who in his day was respected well outside Catholic circles, is an important voice in this continuing debate.

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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. In them, he explores the contact between the spiritual life of the individual and the social and economic organization of modern culture. His focus ranges from the passing of industrialism to the Catholic understanding of the human person, to Islamic mysticism, to a Christian account of sexuality.Dawson argues that modern Western culture is unique in its tendency to ignore its spiritual roots and its once close contact with nature and tradition, and to substitute for them an impersonal economic and materialist organization of mass society. In these essays, he warns against the increasingly secular preoccupations of modern sociological accounts of European culture and insists that they require the supplement and corrective of theology and philosophy. But he is equally insistent on the dangers of a false spiritualism that ignores emerging sociological insights.Widely praised as one of the most important Catholic historians of the twentieth century, Christopher Dawson, in all of his writings, masterfully brings various disciplinary perspectives and historical sources into a complex unity of expression and applies them to concrete conditions of modern society. ""Enquiries into Religion and Culture"" includes an introduction by Robert Royal.

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This is the book we have been waiting for . . . a permanent enrichment of our understanding of the Oxford Movement" proclaimed The Downside Review upon the publication of Christopher Dawson's masterwork in 1933, exactly 100 years after John Keble's sermon National Apostasy stirred a nation. Dawson himself regarded the book as one of his two greatest intellectual accomplishments.Dawson and John Henry Newman were Oxonians and both were converts to Catholicism; both stood against progressive and liberal movements within society. In both ideologies, Dawson saw a pathway that had once led to the French Revolution. Newman, for Dawson, was a kindred spirit.In The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, Dawson goes beyond a mere retelling of the events of 1833–1845. He shows us the prime movers who sought a deeper understanding of the Anglican tradition: the quixotic Hurrell Froude, for instance, who "had none of the English genius for compromise or the Anglican faculty of shutting the eyes to unpleasant facts." It was Froude who brought Newman and Keble together and who helped them understand each other. In many ways, Dawson sees these three as the true embodiment of the Tractarian ethos.Dawson probes deeply, though, to provide a richer, clearer understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of the Oxford Movement, revealing its spiritual raison d'être. We meet a group of gifted like-minded thinkers, albeit with sharp disagreements, who mock outsiders and each other, who pepper their letters with Latin, and forever urge each other on. Newman came to believe, as did Dawson, that the only intellectually coherent bastion against secular culture was religion, and the "on" to which they were urged was the Catholic church. The Spirit of the Oxford Movement provides insights into why Newman, and Dawson, came to this understanding.

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Christopher Dawson wrote The Judgment of the Nations in 1943, in the midst of the horrors of World War II. He took four years in the writing of it, years, he claimed, “more disastrous than any that Europe had known since the fourteenth century.” By his own admission it had cost him greater labour and thought than any other book he had written. It is, perhaps, his most characteristic work.Dawson argues in compressed form for what he laid out more systematically in other books: his view that the West was at an hour of crisis and was fighting for its life as a civilisation. He did not view the disasters of the two World Wars as the cause of that disintegration; they were rather symptoms of a much deeper malaise, that of the loss of the spiritual vision that had created and sustained Western culture through the centuries. He lays out his understanding of what might be necessary for the West to reengage its spiritual and cultural roots and find a new way forward. For Dawson, such a restoration could not be coercive, but needed rather to be based upon a new perception of the inherent cultural creativity of Christianity.The Judgment of the Nations was widely praised upon publication. The Guardian called it “an appraisement of the contemporary situation by an historical thinker of the first importance,” and the Irish Independent “a monument, alike of historical and of philosophical erudition.” It was Dawson’s hope in this work to describe the nature of the spiritual struggle Europe was facing, to map out its true lines, and to point the way through an impending and perhaps probable disaster to a renewal of European life, a renewal whose success or failure would have a decisive impact on the entire world.

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