Christopher Dawson Archives ~ Page 2 of 8 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Why Did Liberal Humanism Fail?

By Russell Hittinger|2023-10-19T19:26:10-05:00October 19th, 2023|Categories: Books, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Modernity|

Liberal humanism has suffered from a twofold crisis. On the one hand, it is at war with the religion that nurtured it, and not only cannot make sense of its own history, but also is befuddled even by the “natural” spirituality of man. On the other hand, it has come to loathe the very kind [...]

How Would Christopher Dawson Redeem the West?

By Russell Hittinger|2023-10-12T05:16:04-05:00October 11th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christendom, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, St. John Henry Newman, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

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. Soren Kierkegaard observed that a distinguishing mark of [...]

Discovering the Truth Through Holiness and Beauty

By David Deavel|2023-10-04T17:26:14-05:00October 4th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christopher Dawson, David Deavel, Education, Liberal Learning, Senior Contributors|

If we want to win souls for Christ, we must touch their imaginations. Christopher Dawson’s idea of teaching Christian culture was certainly consistent with that idea of facts, events, history, and description. The adventure, the romance, and the beauty of the story of the Body of Christ after Pentecost shows the splendor of the truth [...]

“Besieged”: The Saints—the Aristocrats of the Soul

By Bradley J. Birzer|2023-09-02T15:34:04-05:00September 2nd, 2023|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Catholicism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, History, Senior Contributors, Western Civilization|

The saints have served as the heroes in Western culture, and have been the impetus for renewal in the Western Tradition. God has called them, and they, by responding to His call, have become the aristocrats of the soul. Christopher Dawson, the brilliant Anglo-Welsh Roman Catholic historian of the twentieth century, argued that understanding the [...]

Christopher Dawson & the History We Are Not Told

By Jeffrey Hart|2023-05-25T12:19:06-05:00May 24th, 2023|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Catholicism, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured, History, Timeless Essays|Tags: 1MA, Jeffrey Hart|

Christopher Dawson radically revises our sense of the continuity of Western culture. For the ordinary educated consciousness, what happened in Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman order tends to be a blank page labelled “the dark ages.” But as Dawson makes clear, there were heroic continuities, an enormous effort on the part of [...]

A Quick & Dirty Guide to the Middle Ages

By Bradley J. Birzer|2023-04-23T17:38:55-05:00April 23rd, 2023|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured, History, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

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. Petrarch, ca. 1350, first employed the term “Medieval” to argue that his time (ca. 1350) had advanced beyond the so-called “dark ages.” [...]

Lost Temples, Giant Spiders, & the Death of Western Civilization

By Stephen Masty|2023-02-01T12:10:37-06:00January 31st, 2023|Categories: Christopher Dawson, Modernity, Morality, Russell Kirk, Stephen Masty, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

All civilizations wither and die. But maybe the inevitable death of civilizations is partly a lesson in the Vanity of Human Wishes and partly God’s jest, rescued from cruelty because He also designed a Heavenly Reward to be seen in the next movie. You will need to wear your Indiana Jones fedora and stick with [...]

“Vital Tension” as the Creative Spiritual Energy of History

By Charles Klamut|2023-08-30T18:35:33-05:00November 20th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured, Timeless Essays|

In spite of modern man’s spiritual failure, historian Christopher Dawson believed it possible to return to that vitality which for many centuries built Western culture: Christianity. Jesus Christ came to reveal to men that they have no enemies but themselves. –Pascal It is this vital tension between two worlds and two planes of reality which [...]

Revisiting Christopher Dawson on Culture

By Christopher Morrissey|2022-08-04T18:39:19-05:00August 4th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Islam, Rome, Timeless Essays|

The essence of Rome, by being conscious of one’s cultural debts, is the refusal to make a definitive synthesis or mediation. Only in Rome are there Athens and Jerusalem. Only because of Rome are there “two cities because one remains silently present.” Remi Brague’s observation about the historical essence of Rome shows that “Romanity” is [...]

Looking Beyond the Bloody Chaos of History

By Christopher Dawson|2022-02-18T10:13:41-06:00February 12th, 2022|Categories: Christendom, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Quotation, St. Augustine|

It was in this age of ruin and distress that St. Augustine lived and worked. To the materialist, nothing could be more futile than the spectacle of Augustine busying himself with the reunion of the African Church and the refutation of the Pelagians, while civilisation was falling to pieces about his ears. It would seem [...]

T.S. Eliot & Christopher Dawson on Religion and Culture

By Benjamin Lockerd|2023-10-12T05:23:23-05:00January 6th, 2022|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|

Eliot scholars have ignored the Dawson connection. The central claim Dawson and Eliot made, based on their wide-ranging knowledge of anthropology and history, was that every culture has a cult, some religious system that serves as an ultimate source of value and meaning. “Eliot’s reputation as a critic of society has been worse than his [...]

In Defense of Patriarchy

By R. V. Young|2020-08-10T10:03:43-05:00August 9th, 2020|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Family, Marriage|Tags: 1MA|

“Patriarchy” is a word that has almost ceased to communicate a definable meaning in contemporary discourse. Feminist theory deploys the term so loosely that it may be applied to any institution or instance in which men dominate women or are perceived to do so. “Most feminist criticism,” Heather Jones avers, “tends to represent the family [...]

Christopher Dawson and the Religious Impulse

By Jared Zimmerer|2020-05-23T17:30:06-05:00May 23rd, 2020|Categories: Books, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Civilization, Culture, Government, History, Religion|

How does religion act as a driving force of politics and culture? Christoper Dawson argued that “we cannot understand the inner form of a society unless we understand its religion,” and we cannot make sense of any culture or its achievements without knowing the religious inspiration from which its creativity flowed. Imagine a diagram consisting [...]

The Horrors of Modern Public Opinion

By Bradley J. Birzer|2021-03-14T20:29:36-05:00August 16th, 2019|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christopher Dawson, Democracy, Fascism, Government, Politics, Senior Contributors, War, World War II|

Christopher Dawson believed that the free peoples of the Allied Powers in World War II had become too accustomed to employing scientifically-formed propaganda to create public opinion: “Public opinion can itself be the greatest enemy of freedom, as well as of peace, as soon as it becomes dominated by the negative destructive forces of fear [...]