Christopher Dawson (October 12, 1889 – May 25, 1970) was author of numerous books, articles, and scholarly monographs. He was lecturer in the History of Culture, University College, Exeter; Gifford lecturer and first Charles Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University from 1958 to 1962; and editor of the Dublin Review.
Measuring the Influence of Russell Kirk and Other Conservative Authors
By using Google’s Ngram Viewer, we find that Russell Kirk’s reputation hit its highpoint in 1964, and then began a painful decline that remained unabated until his death in 1994. What does Ngram tell us about other conservative authors, like Robert Nisbet, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Christopher Dawson? While I would never consider [...]
Christopher Dawson and Time
Christopher Dawson believed that history, far from being cyclical, was instead a particular manifestation of God’s will, and thus was “moving towards a great consummation, the revelation of the power and glory of Yahweh through his servant Israel”… As noted in previous essays in this series, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), one of the greatest of [...]
Christopher Dawson and the Nature of Progress
An understanding of progress and its adherents was not just of academic curiosity to Christopher Dawson. It was central to understanding the good life and preventing those who misunderstood history from gaining control and imposing the will of man upon the creation of God… “What has happened will happen again, and what has been [...]
Being Christopher Dawson’s Friend
Despite all Christopher Dawson’s quirks and social fears, friends flocked to him; together, they read poetry, discussed philosophy, farmed, and made crafts. Would there have been a European renaissance of Christian Humanism without this friendship centered around “Tiger Dawson”? Almost certainly not… Though he might very well have been the most important Christian Humanist intellectual [...]
Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind
The spirit of the Gospel…gives, asking nothing in return, and spends itself for others. It is essentially hostile to the spirit of calculation, the spirit of worldly prudence and above all to the spirit of religious self-seeking and self-satisfaction. Even the sinner who possesses a seed of generosity, a faculty of self-surrender, and an [...]
Etched in Glass and Stone: The Childhood of Christopher Dawson
Stories of glass and stone—which told of the holy and sainted—convinced young Christopher Dawson that a saint was a saint not because of his or her individual talents, but as a continuation of the deepest longings and desires of the Church… In 1889, when Henry Christopher Dawson entered the world, he did so with [...]
Christopher Dawson and the Bourgeois Mind
The bourgeois soul for Christopher Dawson is not found simply in support of the free market. The bourgeois soul is found when one puts money above God, in contrast to the religious man, who places God first… “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, [...]
The Conservatism of Robert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet, in direct contrast to Russell Kirk, argued that conservatism was purely a modern ideology. For Nisbet, the entire history of conservatism began as a reaction to the French Revolution… When it came to the history of conservatism, the grand sociologist and man of letters, Robert Nisbet, disagreed with the mighty founder of [...]
A Quick and Dirty Guide to the Middle Ages
The Medieval Church culturally unified Christendom through a common language, Latin, and a common liturgy, tying men together with other men of their own time, but also with the whole communion of saints… “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent,” Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1559) Petrarch, ca. 1350, first employed the term “Medieval” [...]
When Men Became Human: Christopher Dawson’s 500 BC
Though Christopher Dawson remained unsure why the Natural Law developed, he did not hesitate to celebrate it. He remained firmly convinced that the development of Natural Law did not randomly emerge from individual genius, but rather believed that individual genius arose out of the various traditions and norms of each people… As a historian [...]
How Christopher Dawson Tried to Save History
Christopher Dawson stood as an antagonist against the conformity of progressive and professional history, and he rightly noted that such history negates not just personality but the very essence of creativity itself… While the domestic violence (criminals, cops, mobs) of this summer pales in comparison to the outrageous behaviors of the previous one, our [...]
How Would Christopher Dawson Redeem the West?
Christopher Dawson held that the Christian religion created a distinctive culture that not only preceded, but has continued long after, the thirteenth century. It is only by examining this cultural dynamism that one can appreciate why modern society is a mutilated, or a “secularized,” version of Christendom… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series [...]
Newman & Dawson Against Liberalism
Christopher Dawson greatly admired John Henry Newman, for he understood more clearly than any of his contemporaries the coming war of the Church against the ideologues bred by the French Revolution, utilitarianism, and secularization… As Christopher Dawson attempted to discover the sources of the ideological disruptions of the twentieth-century as well as solutions to [...]
Christopher Dawson in China
Christopher Dawson promoted an alternative, if tentative, vision that Christianity could make a comeback as the source of spiritual renewal for desiccated Eastern cultures… In preparation for a trip to the Asian countries of China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore, I have been reading many books and essays on a wide variety of topics by a [...]