Christopher Dawson famous quotes

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

#Philosophical #Mean #Fighting

For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Men #Blood #Class

Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Civilization #Age #Different

The chief safeguard of personal freedom in a democratic society is the anarchy and disorder of capitalist individualism.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Anarchy #Individualism #Disorder

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

#Animal #Men #Giving

The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language
-- Christopher Dawson

#Understanding #Obstacles #Language

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

#Book #Men #Opinion

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.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Religious #Culture #Lost

Moreover, behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture
-- Christopher Dawson

#Strong #Issues #Culture

Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one
-- Christopher Dawson

#Christian #Movement #Humanist

The Church as a divine society possess an internal principle of life which is capable of assimilating the most diverse materials and imprinting her own image upon them.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Church #Principles #Divine

The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Strong #League #Enlightenment

Thus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Christian #Way #Ethics

The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Age #Slumps #Humanist

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

#Spiritual #Religious #Political

As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Christian #Lying #Western Culture

But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Hero #Long #Hollywood

Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Loyalty #Spiritual #Fall

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

#Angel #Men #Law

Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Falling In Love #Men #Feelings

We have entered a new phase of culture - we may call it the Age of the Cinema - in which the most amazing perfection of scientific technique is being devoted to purely ephemeral objects, without any consideration of their ultimate justification. It seems as though a new society was arising which will acknowledge no hierarchy of values, no intellectual authority, and no social or religious tradition, but which will live for the moment in a chaos of pure sensation.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Religious #Perfection #Intellectual

No civilisation, not even that of ancient Greece, has ever undergone such a continuous and profound process of change as Western Europe has done during the last 900 years. It is impossible to explain this fact in purely economic terms by a materialistic interpretation of history. The principle of change has been a spiritual one and the progress of Western civilisation is intimately related to the dynamic ethos of Western Christianity, which has gradually made Western man conscious of his moral responsibility and his duty to change the world.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Spiritual #Responsibility #Men

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

#Revenge #Men #Animal

The true makes of history are the spiritual men whom the world knew not, the unregarded agents of the creative action of the Spirit. The supreme instance of this-the key to the Christian understanding of history-is to be found in the Incarnation- the presence of the maker of the world in the world unknown to the world. ... The Incarnation is itself in a sense the divine fruit of history-of the fullness of time-and it finds its extension and completion in the historic life of the Church.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Christian #Spiritual #Men

Reason lives on the systematization of the past, but Faith is the promise of the future.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Faith #Past #Promise

And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Christian #Principles #Citizens

American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Literature #World #Western

Unlike other peoples the United States found their origin in a deliberate act of corporate self-assertion, and ever since the Revolution every little American has been taught to associate himself personally with this creative act.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Self #Creative #United States

It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Church #Culture #Impossible

You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for
-- Christopher Dawson

#Men #Long #Giving

It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or of the West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole
-- Christopher Dawson

#Race #East #Culture

It is clear that this essential Christian doctrine gives a new value to human nature, to human history and to human life which is not to be found in the other great oriental religions.
-- Christopher Dawson

#Christian #Giving #Essentials

The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms
-- Christopher Dawson

#Europe #Ideas #Political

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

#Order #Grace #Culture

No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced
-- Christopher Dawson

#Lying #Issues #United States

This freedom of political discussion on the highest level is something which Western civilization has in common with that of classical antiquity, but with no other
-- Christopher Dawson

#Civilization #Political #Levels

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion
-- Christopher Dawson

#War #Passion #Past

Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum
-- Christopher Dawson

#Mean #Men #Political