A website dedicated to the life and work of Christopher Henry Dawson (1889-1970), the British sociologist and historian of culture. Here you will find
articles about Dawson & a selection of his writings, a
bibliography, a
bookstore, and finally the
blog where I will post articles and interviews as they relate to Christianity and culture.
Christopher H. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century."1 Despite this, most of his books have been out of print for decades now, and graduate students today are ignorant of his work. A gifted, eloquent and prolific writer, Dawson wrote more than twenty books and numerous articles on the nature of Christian culture. This topic concerned him so deeply that he considered it his vocation to explore the cultural role of religion, the relationship between Christianity and world cultures, and the specific history and institutions of the Christian religion. As a result of this vast research, he emphasized the need to recover the spiritual tradition at the root of the Western European history. A life dedicated to the study of world cultures led him to claim that: "It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture... A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture."2 Writing against the positivistic and nihilistic attitude of his age, Dawson challenges commonly held assumptions about culture and history, and unmasks Western religion of progress. His contentions have as much relevance today as they had when he wrote them.
As in his earlier J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth, Bradley Birzer provides an excellent overview of a major intellectual figure from the twentieth-century Catholic literary revival. Dawson is lesser-known than figures such as Tolkien, but was lauded in his day by the likes of T. S. Eliot, Arnold Toynbee, and Russell Kirk. For Dawson, a convert to Roman Catholicism, religion was the key of history and the basis of culture, and with that core principle in mind, he sought to analyze both the course of world history and the underlying currents of his own age. His scholarship was capacious, as he wrote studies in periods from pre-history to the modern age. He was also one of his era's most incisive social critics, especially in his early and consistent analysis of, and opposition to, totalitarianism. His historical works were regarded as incisive and innovative in their day, and his cultural criticism anticipated the work of contemporary thinkers like Michael Bureligh in seeing modern ideologies as "political religions."
Bradley Birzer traces the contours of Dawson's intellectual biography more fully than any previous scholar. Rooted in dispostive research and written with deep sensitivity to the centrality of Dawson's faith to his scholarship, Birzer provides both an outstanding introduction to Dawson's thought and much material for seasoned Dawson scholars to ponder. Sanctifying the World is a fine contribution to the ongoing revival of interest in Dawson's thought and in the Catholic literary revival generally. - Adam Schwartz
