Christopher Dawson Archives ~ Page 4 of 8 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Historical Confrontation & the Birth of Culture

By Stephen Tonsor|2019-08-22T11:22:45-05:00October 5th, 2016|Categories: Books, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, History, Western Civilization|

The Dynamics of World History, by Christopher Dawson, edited by John J. Mulloy. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956) None of the disciplines has been more adversely affected by the increasing fragmentation and social dissolution which has afflicted our liberal civilization than has the study of history. The pursuit of the Fact, isolated from tradition [...]

Can a Conservative Embrace Romanticism?

By Bradley J. Birzer|2021-04-27T21:47:33-05:00August 30th, 2016|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christopher Dawson, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Senior Contributors, T.S. Eliot, The Imaginative Conservative|

Undoubtedly trying to shock many of his readers—most of whom understandably associated him with radicalism in poetry and the Bloomsbury group in London—T.S. Eliot exclaimed rather baldly in the late 1920s, “I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.” […]

The Left-Right Fallacy

By Christopher Dawson|2021-05-24T13:51:03-05:00June 19th, 2016|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, Politics, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Christopher Dawson as he considers the perils of the left-right fallacy in politics and civil society. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher I am very glad to have an opportunity of explaining the reasons why I objected to the current terminology of Left [...]

Christian Education: Initiation into the Christian Way of Life

By Christopher Dawson|2021-05-24T13:56:41-05:00May 25th, 2016|Categories: Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Education, Featured, Quotation, Western Civilization|

Taken in its widest sense education is simply the process by which the new members of a community are initiated into its way of life and thought from the simplest elements of behavior up to the highest tradition of spiritual wisdom. Christian education is therefore an initiation into the Christian way of life and thought, [...]

Christopher Dawson, Education, and the Transcendent

By Leo R. Ward|2021-05-24T10:47:14-05:00November 28th, 2015|Categories: Christendom, Christopher Dawson, Education, Featured|

Above all other twentieth-century men, the late Christopher Dawson took seriously the two theses developed by Newman over a century ago. Newman’s theses were that only the liberally educated are really educated and that a person without an introduction to theological lore lacks an ingredient necessary for liberal education. Dawson wanted to know what, given our situation, [...]

Christopher Dawson’s Six Ages of the Church

By Christopher Morrissey|2019-10-23T12:44:19-05:00November 1st, 2015|Categories: Christendom, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Featured, History, Religion|

Christopher Dawson’s Six Ages of the Church exhibit a cyclical pattern in historical events. Each Age exhibits an overall pattern of “rise and fall” during each cycle of spiritual renewal. Each new Age peaks and then encounters a new onslaught of adversities. It is possible to imagine the entire sweep of this non-linear history in [...]

The Essence of Missionary Christianity

By Christopher Morrissey|2015-10-21T01:02:01-05:00October 21st, 2015|Categories: Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Christopher Morrissey, History, Religion, Rome|

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio “When Greece was captured, she captivated her wild conqueror, and introduced the Arts into savage Rome” — Horace, Epistles, II.1.156 (trans. Laura E. Ludtke) Christopher Dawson has identified Six Ages in the history of the Church. In Dawson’s First Age, we witness a unique encounter of [...]

Christian Culture and the Essence of Europe

By Christopher Morrissey|2019-02-19T14:58:21-06:00October 14th, 2015|Categories: Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Europe, Featured, Islam|

How is it that Arabic translations of Greek writings could flourish for only a few centuries (the ninth to eleventh)? Remi Brague points out how these translations were frequently made by Christians under Arabic rule.[1] Empirical data such as this point to an important principle identified by Brague: namely, that Roman “secondarity” always maintains a [...]

The Essence of Rome: A Tale of Three Cities

By Christopher Morrissey|2019-09-24T11:16:19-05:00September 29th, 2015|Categories: Christopher Dawson, Christopher Morrissey, Culture, Europe, Featured, History, Religion, Rome|

Leo Strauss liked to call to our attention the creative tension between Athens and Jerusalem. With Remi Brague, I would like to refocus our attention onto the apparent mediation of this creative tension that was accomplished by Rome. Now, I say that this accomplishment occurred by the apparent mediation of Rome, only to nod to [...]

Our Cultural Mess

By George J. Marlin|2020-04-02T11:31:31-05:00July 30th, 2015|Categories: Catholicism, Christendom, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture War, Featured|

How did Americans lose the culture war against same-sex marriage? What caused the tide to turn against us? Did we lose sight of our Western heritage and let education disintegrate, as Christopher Dawson warned? Given the latest battle Catholics have lost in America’s Culture War, I asked myself, how did we get into this mess? [...]

Why Christopher Dawson Loved the Church

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-02-12T15:27:57-06:00July 19th, 2015|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, Religion|

When Christopher Dawson passed away in the late spring of 1970, he did so not only as one of the most important Catholic thinkers of his century, but he also did so as a loyal citizen of the City of God, having always resisted the myriad of temptations of this City of Man. As noted [...]

Christopher Dawson and the Failures of the Catholic Church

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-08-03T10:36:27-05:00July 12th, 2015|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Catholicism, Christendom, Christopher Dawson, Featured|

To suggest that Christopher Dawson was one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century is a rather easy thing both to affirm and confirm. His influence on T.S. Eliot, Etienne Gilson, Russell Kirk, David Jones, Eric Gill, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Merton, Sister Madeleva Wolff, Jacques Maritain, Bernard Wall, Tom Burns, Frank and [...]

Religion: The Key to Christopher Dawson’s Culture

By Robert M. Woods|2016-08-03T10:36:28-05:00May 28th, 2015|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured, History, Religion|

He was among the brightest students I have taught. We had just finished talking about how and why Freudian or Marxists interpretations of reality are suffocating in their reductionistic interpretations. The conversation moved to the writings of Christopher Dawson that are happily being reprinted by Catholic University Press of America. As our discussion meandered, he [...]

Mass Murder and Modern Ideological Regimes

By Bradley J. Birzer|2019-09-12T11:29:32-05:00February 24th, 2015|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Ideology, Religion, Revolution, T.S. Eliot|

The twentieth century witnessed the shattering of the traditional social and moral order among nations as the infection of the ideologues and their murderous ideological regimes spread throughout the civilized world. It began in earnest with the assassination of a central European archduke and the consequent destruction of the Old World in 1914. But in truth, the [...]