Christopher Dawson

In a time of remarkable but selective amnesia in the West reflected perhaps most dramatically in the denial of the Christian roots of Europe in the first drafts of the European constitution, ""Understanding Europe"" is as relevant today as it was on its first appearance in 1952. Christopher Dawson wrote of the uneasiness that characterized twentieth-century Western civilization in the aftermath of two disastrous global conflicts and the attempt to build a new secular civilization on impersonal economic forces. He desired a unified Europe, but one unified by a common Christian religion.Recognizing the emphasis on economic utility and mass productivity in European culture, Dawson argued that a renewed study of Christian faith and culture was essential in order to recover the deeper sense of European unity. In ""Understanding Europe"", Dawson expresses a desire for Europe to rediscover and renew its foundational Christian sources in order to recover a deeper sense of integrity.This edition includes an introduction by George Weigel. Other volumes in the Works of Christopher Dawson series include ""The Making of Europe"", ""Medieval Essays"", and ""Progress and Religion"".

In this work, Christopher Dawson concludes that the period of the 4th to the 11th centuries, commonly known as the Dark Ages, was not a barren prelude to the creative energy of the mediaeval world. Instead, he argues that it is better described as ""ages of dawn"", for it was in this rich and confused period that the complex and creative interaction of the Roman Empire, the Christian Church, the classical tradition and barbarous societies provided the foundation for a vital, unified European culture. In an age of fragmentation and the emergence of new nationalist forces, Dawson argued that if ""our civilization is to survive, it is essential that it should develop a common European consciousness and sense of historic and organic unity"". But he was clear that this unity required sources deeper and more complex than the political and economic movements on which so many had come to depend, and he insisted, prophetically, that Europe would need to recover its Christian roots if it was to survive.

A comprehensive collection of essays from the Middle Ages, this text ranges from the fateful days of the late Roman Empire to the final destruction of Byzantium, from the rise of Islam to the flowering of western vernacular literature, from missions to China to the caliphs of Egypt, from the tragedy of Christian Armenia to complex religious realities of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Spain, from philosophy to literature, theology to natural science.

In this new edition of his classic work, "Religion and the Rise of Western Culture," Christopher Dawson addresses two of the most pressing subjects of our day: the origin of Europe and the religious roots of Western culture. With the magisterial sweep of Toynbee, to whom he is often compared, Dawson tells here the tale of medieval Christendom. From the brave travels of sixth-century Irish monks to the grand synthesis of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Dawson brilliantly shows how vast spiritual movements arose from tiny origins and changed the face of medieval Europe from one century to the next. The legacy of those years of ferment remains with us in the great cathedrals, Gregorian chant, and the works of Giotto and Dante. Even more, though, for Dawson these centuries charged the soul of the West with a spiritual concern -- a concern that he insists "can never be entirely undone except by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself."