Christopher Dawson

Christopher Henry Dawson was a British independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and Christendom. Christopher H. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century". The 1988-1989 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour.

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The great obstacle to the conversion of the modern world is the belief that religion has no intellectual significance; that it may be good for morals and satisfying to man's emotional needs, but that it corresponds to no objective reality.

Christopher Dawson

The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and elevated opinions.

Christopher Dawson

The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution.

Christopher Dawson

If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear.

Christopher Dawson

If man attempts to suppress the animal side of his nature by a sheer effort of conscious will, nature finds a hundred unexpected and unpleasant ways to take its revenge.

Christopher Dawson

There is a justifiable reaction against a type of religion which imposed rigid restrictions on any kind of rational enjoyment, while it left men free to exploit one another and to make life hideous in the race for wealth.

Christopher Dawson

The Catholic ideal is to order the whole of life towards unity, not by the denial and destruction of the natural human values, but by bringing them into living relation with spiritual truth and spiritual reality.

Christopher Dawson

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

Christopher Dawson

Humanism and Divinity are as complementary to one another in the order of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being.

Christopher Dawson

Law describes the way things would work if men were angels.

Christopher Dawson