The Formation of Christendom Quotes

“Language is the gateway to the human world. (...) Language is far older than civilization. (...) The fact that it is possible to teach apes to ride bicycles, but impossible to teach them to talk, suggests that it is the use of language rather than the use of tools which is the essential characteristic of humanity. The word, not the sword or the spade, is the power that has created human culture.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“The difference between God and the rational animal is far greater than that between man and the insect world, and it is inconceivable that the human intelligence can understand the process of divine revelation, even though he is the recipient of it.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“It is the cultures of the great world religions which have shaped the course of civilization, and these possess a kind of supercultural position. (...) The three great religions of the East - Confucianism, Brahmanism and Buddhism - and the three world religions in the West - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - have been the great unifying factors in the civilization of the world. They are, as it were, the spiritual highways, which have led mankind through history from remote antiquity down to modern times. (...) In the past all these world religions with the exception of Judaism have been what I have termed supercultures - common forms of faith and moral order which embraced and united large numbers of previously existing cultures with their own languages and histories.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“If we look at the world today in isolation from the past and the future, the forces of secularism may seem triumphant. This, however, is but a moment in the life of humanity, and it does not possess the promise of stability and permanence.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“No less important than the ideal of martyrdom was that of virginity, which also goes back to the first age of the Church. Indeed the two ideals were associated - first by the cult of virgin martyrs, like St. Agnes, which was so popular, and secondly by the idea that virginity was a kind of living martyrdom, a witness to the power of the faith to transcend human weakness.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“The unity of the new Christian community was essentially a supernatural unity (...). This union was realized above all in the sacraments which were the channels for the transmission of the life of the Spirit and the means by which the faithful were incorporated into the divine organism or mystical body of which Christ is the head.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“And when at last Peter does confess Jesus to be 'the Messiah', 'the Son of the Living God', this is immediately followed not by any declaration of future triumph, but by Jesus' announcement of his passion and death. The revelation of the mistery of the kingdom is at the same time the revelation of the mystery of the cross.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“We have the material conditions for world unity, but there is as yet no common moral order without which a true culture cannot exist. The entire modern world wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, and watches the same films, but it does not possess common ethical values or a sense of spiritual community or common religious beliefs. We have a long way ot go before such a universal spiritual community is conceivable, and meanwhile what we call modern civilization remains an area of conflict - a chaos of conflicting ideologies, institutions, and moral standards.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“No culture is so primitive that it is entirely determined by the natural influences of environment and economic function, nor yet any is so advanced that it is not conditioned by these influences.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“No culture is more striking than that of Eskimo peoples of the Arctic, which is remarkably ancient and stable, distinctive and highly specialized. It is a classical example of the way in which people can learn to adapt itself to a harsh and unfavorable environment by creating a specialized way of life adapted to its peculiar circumstances. Eskimo culture is a work of art (...) since it uses the poor material that nature provides with admirable skill and artifice in order to construct a social world which is the best of all possible worlds for the Eskimos - who call themselves Innuit. The Men.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“Human nature always retains its spiritual character - its bond with the transcendent and the divine. If it were to lose this, it must lose itself and become the servant of lower powers, so that secular civilization, as Nietzsche saw, inevitably leads to nihilism and to self-destruction.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“There is in human nature a hunger and a thirst for the transcendent and the divine which cannot be satisfied with anything less than God.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“The intellectual climate has become increasingly unfavorable to the study of the relations between religion and culture in the modern world and the modern university. For theology has long since lost its position as a dominant faculty in the university and as an integral part of the general educational curriculum. It continues to exist on sufferance only as a specialized ecclesiastical study designed for the clergy. Consequently the student in a modern university may be totally ignorant of religion.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“As a modern Austrian writer—Sigismund von Radecki—has well said, “It is not art, but rather the archetype towards which art strives to ascend.”2”
― Christopher Dawson, Formation of Christendom

“Thus the coming of Islam seems to be nothing less than a divine judgement on the Byzantine world for its failure to fulfil its mission. And the cause of that failure was the same as that for which St. Ephrem, the greatest of the Syrian Fathers, reproached the Greeks in the fourth century - the unbridled lust for theological controversy which made the most sacred dogmas of the faith slogans of party warfare, sacrificed charity and unity to party spirit.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“The main intellectual effort of the patristic age was devoted to the development of the biblical tradition and its adaptation to the understanding and needs of Gentile culture. [...] In the later periods, the Fathers who were most Greek in culture, like Origen and St. John Chrysostom and Theodoret, were also the ones who did most for the study and exposition of the Bible. The essential achievement of the patristic age was the synthesis of Eastern religion and Western culture, or, to be ore precise, the uniting of the spiritual traditions of Israel and of the Christian Church with the intellectual and artistic tradition of Hellenism and the political and social traditions of Rome. This synthesis has remained the foundation of Western culture and has never been destroyed, in spite of the tendency of the Reformation to re-Hebraize Christianity and that of the Renaissance to re-Hellenize culture.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“Persecution and martyrdom were taken for granted by the Christians as normal conditions of the Church's life. They had been foretold in the gospels and had found their supreme archetype in the example of Christ himself. The martyr was following in his master's steps, and his death expressed that identity between the Head and the Members which was the key principle of the Pauline theory of the Church. Consequently it is not surprising that the idea of martyrdom is the dominant motif of early Christian literature and thought throughout the whole of this period from the New Testament to Eusebius. In the first age of the Church the ideal of sanctity was embodied in the figure of the martyr - the man who 'bears witness' with his blood to the Christian faith.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“Chritians' experience of persecution and their consequent hostility to the Roman Empire found its most passionate expression in the pages of the Apocalypse. Rome is Babylon, the great mother of harlots, drunken with the blood of the Saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, the Empire the kingdom of the Beast which seeks to destroy the Church.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“For two and a half centuries a long war was waged between the Church and the Roman Empire which began in the age of Nero and never entirely ceased, in spite of occasional periods of truce and relaxation, until the conversion of the Emperor Constantine. The causes of persecution were not immediately obvious, since the Roman Empire was not usually intolerant in religious matters and the Christians were not merely politically inoffensive, but inculcated obedience to the Roman government as a religious duty.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“In the later part of the first century, the more the Christian converts were detached from the Jewish community, the more they were exposed to the hostility of the pagan world, since they no longer had the status of a recongnized national community to protect them. Thus the early Christians seemed to be living in a social vacuum, suspended between the Jewish and the Gentile worlds, and this cultural isolation was but the social expression of the deeper spiritual issue of which they were so highly conscious.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“An interpretation which confines itself to the moral teachings of the gospel deprives Christianity of its historical and theological roots. Christianity without the Old Testament ceases to be Christianity and becomes quite a different religion, as the Fathers saw when they condemned the Gnostics, Marcion and the Manichees. The continuity of Christianity with the tradition of the Old Testament and the conception of the Church as the new Israel is a fundamental part of the Christian faith.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“The intimate connection between Christianity and Judaism - between the Old Israel and the New - is the central theme of the Catholic liturgy, so that the Two Testaments or Covenants are shown as integral parts of one divine experience. It is not merely that Israel was for more than a thousand years the unique vehicle of divine revelation, it is also that in the tradition of Israel a unique relation was established between God and man and human society and history, a relation which was not broken by the defection of Israel but was carried on and extended in the Christian Church and its history. Thus the Old and the New Testaments or Covenants form a single integrated development which has no parallel among the religions of the world.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“The history of Israel is the record of its faithfulness or failure in the fulfillment of a divine mission. Israel stood alone among the peoples of the ancient East as the one witness to the Law of the one God. Every culture is a moral order, but the moral order of Israel was identical with the Law of Yahveh, as revealed to Moses and elaborated in the teachings of the priests and prophets.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“World religions like those of India and China were the religions of great cultures which regarded themselves as world civilizations; they had no rivals in their own worlds. But Israel was always conscious of its minority status - as one people among many nations, and as smaller and weaker than the historic empires that surrounded it from the beginning - Egypt and Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, and Rome. For the Jews themselves and the Christians afterwards, this uniqueness was the result of a divine vocation and election. Israel was chosen from among the nations to be the witness to God and the bearer of divine revelation.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“From the beginning the Jewish tradition stood out in uncompromising hostility to the religious traditions of the more civilized peoples that surrounded the Jews. While the rest of the ancient world was being integrated into one great society by the influence of Hellenistic culture and education and Roman government and law, one little people obstinately refused to be assimilated. The stronger the external pressure of the world society, the more intense was the consciousness of the Jewish people of a unique destiny which set them apart from the nations.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“Nowhere is this idea of divine revelation so strongly expressed or so clearly identified with the tradition of culture as in the case of Israel. For here the whole social form and historical destiny of the people had been imposed on them by the Word of Yahveh, which was not merely, as in other cases, a sacred tradition of learning, but a way of life embodied in a moral law and a sacred history which set it apart from all the other peoples of the ancient world.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“A subculture may possess a very rich intellectual and religious tradition. (...) The Jews have everywhere exerted a considerable cultural influence (...). And since they have often occupied key positions in the dominant cultures - as government officials, court physicians, bankers and merchants, scholars, and men of letters - their influence has been out of all proportion to their numbers.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“The modern ideological world movements - the Enlightenment, Liberalism, Democracy and Socialism - are none of them comprehensible without a knowledge of the Christian culture which underlies them all.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“Modern man may deify science and technology and set up a religion of 'Scientific Humanism' which offers the utopian prospect of unlimited progress. But all such constructions are inevitably fragile, since they are dependent on human will as well as intelligence, and we have seen in our own generation how the irrational element in human nature may prove stronger than scientific intelligence.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom

“The secular state becomes almost automatically totalitarian, so that no room is left for man's spiritual freedom.”
― Christopher Henry Dawson, The Formation of Christendom