“La Dinámica de la Historia Universal”, uno de los libros clave de Dawson, que forman parte de los que pedí por Amazon porque desgraciadamente en mi país es altamente improbable de encontrarlos. Ahora, colocaré el contenido figurado en la contratapa de los mismos, como una pregustación de los temas más importantes, que iré comentando en las próximas semanas.
In scope and in vision Christopher Dawson’s historiography ranks with the work of men like Spengler, Northrop, and Toynbee. Several major themes run through Dawson’s work, but perhaps his most unique contribution was his insistence on the importance of religion in shaping and sustaining civilizations.
Religion, Dawson believed, is the great creative force in any culture, and the loss of a society’s historic religion therefore portends a process of social dissolution. For this reason, Dawson concluded that Western society must find a way to revitalize its spiritual life if it is to avoid irreversible decay. Progress, the real religion of modernity, is insufficient to sustain cultural health. And an ahistorical, secularized Christianity is an oxymoron, a pseudo-religion only nominally related to the historic religion of the West.
Dawson maintained that the hope of the present age lay in the reconciliation of the religious tradition of Christianity with the intellectual tradition of humanism and the new knowledge about man and nature provided by modern science. Dynamics of World History shows that though such a task may be difficult, it is not impossible.
CHRISTOPHER DAWSON (1889-1970) became the first Charles Chauncey Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University in 1958, where he remained until 1962. He twice delivered the University of Edinburg’s prestigious Gifford Lectures (1946-47 and 1948-9) and is widely regarded as one of the most important historians of the twentieth century. John J. Mulloy was the founder and long-time editor of the Christopher Dawson Newsletter. Dermot Quinn is associate professor of history at Seton Hall University.
“Dynamics of World History is extraordinarily valuable, because it is much more than a Christopher Dawson compendium or than an introduction to Dawson. It is a very carefully collected and edited quilt of Dawson’s most important writings: a multicolored quilt, rather than a collection of disparate essays. It covers and comprises what it ought to cover and comprise; and the richness and the quality of Dawson’s historical thinking will catch the eye of its readers at first sight.”
JOHN LUKACS,
Author, Five Days in London, May 1940
“Consistently solid in information, eloquent in composition, and convincing in argument, this is a volume not prudently ignored by any serious student of sociology, history, philosophy, theology, or literature.”
PATRICK HENRY REARDON,
Senior editor, Touchstone
