Sanctifying the World Quotes

“Christopher Dawson was one of the most counter-cultural of all intellectuals. As the world rejected God, Dawson embraced God. As the world rejected myth, Dawson embraced myth. As the world rejected the significance of prophets, Dawson attempted to speak as one. As the world mocked the saints as superstition, Dawson regarded them as the only lights—reflecting the true light of the Logos—in history.”
― Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson

“But for the Catholic, the imagination and the ability to create is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the imagination bridges both the appetites and the higher reason as well as the material and the spiritual. Without the imagination, man cannot sanctify the world. Further, without the imagination, man cannot envision unity. Instead, trapped in his own subjective understandings of the world, the man drowns in his own appetites and reasons, never seeing the beauty of all other things in the Created Order. The Protestant Reformation, therefore, did great damage not only to the unified Body of Christ—ravenously ripping it apart—but it also fundamentally changed the meaning of man, at least as man understands himself. Equally important, the Reformation, by denying the imagination as a holy function and mistrusting it as if it were from the devil, ultimately distorted and perverted man’s relationship to the Holy Spirit. It is no wonder then, Dawson believed, that this breakdown in society and this disordering of the human soul and its relationship to God led to secularism, liberalism, and, ultimately, to totalitarianism. Once the imagination is destroyed, man becomes the measure of all things, and who-ever wields the most power becomes “right.” With the imagination mocked, distorted, and ignored, man sees another only as a collection of parts, to beused and manipulated. Hence, the loss of imagination leads to the gulags, the holocaust camps, and the killing fields.”
― Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson

“The time is approaching when the cities become one city,” Dawson wrote....It will be “a Babylon which sets its mark on the mind of every man and woman and imposes the same pattern of behaviour on every human activity.” This new conformity will disrupt and attenuate thenatural and divine order of grace, in which each thing uniquely has its place, gifts, and purpose. One can effectively label all of these creeping, adulterating forces “progressivism,” Dawson continued. They result from “the unloosing of the powers of the abyss—the dark forces that have been chained by a thousand years of Christian civilization and which have been set free to conquerthe world.” Together, these dark forces have “the will to power.”
― Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson