Bradley J. Birzer
Christopher Dawson set himself the task of surveying the history of Western Civilization in the light of a master-idea: that religion is the dynamic force, the basic constituent and the inspiration of all higher human activity, and that therefore the culture of an era depends upon its religion.
Looking back over the vast ruins and wastelands of the twentieth century, one can find many exemplars of the human condition, many of them devout Roman Catholics who understood clearly that when man forgets God, the killing fields begin. One of the most important Roman Catholic converts of the past century, Christopher Dawson, may have been arguably the historian of the twentieth century. While the claim may at first seem extreme, there is every reason to at least make him a viable contender.
Reared in an upper middle-class Protestant family, Mr. Dawson first learned to respect the Roman Catholic church from his father, an open-minded and intellectually-oriented British army officer. Other important influences on Mr. Dawson’s eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism were St. Augustine, from whom Mr. Dawson derived many of his most original thoughts; John Henry Newman; the lives of the saints and mystics; his wife (a cradle Catholic); and his closest friend, E.I. Watkin. Perhaps equally important, on Easter 1909, Mr. Dawson had a profound religious experience while visiting, of all places, Rome:
Looking back on that Easter day in 1909 Christopher remembered that he went to visit this church and sat on the steps of the Capitol in the same place where Gibbon had been inspired to write The Decline and Fall and it was there that he first conceived the idea of writing a history of culture. An entry in his journal later that year refers to ‘a vow made at Easter in the Ara Coeli’ and stated that he had since ‘had great light on the way it may be carried out. » Read More
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