The Vision
of Christopher Dawson Araceli Duque
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.
