The Greatest Christian Hero, Philosopher, and Poet: Christopher Dawson's Italian Trinity

Abstract

Christopher Dawson (born 1889), a Catholic scholar and renowned philosophical historian, spent his academic life exploring the relationship of religion, sociology and culture. He believed that without an understanding of religion it is impossible to comprehend the culture of humanity or peoples. His magisterial work, Religion and Culture, established him as an historian’s historian. He ended his days as Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard Divinity School, the first Catholic to occupy a chair there.To follow the history of Italy through the centuries is to penetrate to the very heart of western civilization. The artists, thinkers and statesmen of this small, but complex and vital country are part of our own past and have helped to make the present world what it is. What was achieved by the legions of Rome more than two thousand years ago has remained a powerful influence on history ever since. The cultures of ancient Greece and Israel took their dominant position in our western heritage through the medium of an Italian translation. Christianity was propagated from Rome, the fifteenth century Renaissance from Florence, and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in great part from Padua. European history would have been very different without the work of Columbus and Galileo in discovery, Raphael and Michelangelo in art, Aquinas and Vico in philosophy, St Francis and a long list of Popes from Gregory the Great to John XXIII in religion. Italian museums and churches contain what must seem a disproportionate number of the greatest masterpieces of human creativity.