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The Church as a divine society possess an internal principle of life which is capable of assimilating the most diverse materials and imprinting her own image upon them.

Christopher Dawson

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Christopher Dawson
Age: 80 †
Born: 1889
Born: October 12
Died: 1970
Died: May 25
Historian
Sociologist
Y Gelli Gandryll
Christopher Henry Dawson
Life
Image
Materials
Assimilating
Capable
Imprinting
Divine
Internals
Principles
Internal
Church
Diverse
Society
Possess
Upon
Principle

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The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution.
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The moment that the state came into conflict with the higher power, the moment that it set itself up as an end in itself, it became identified with Augustine's earthly city and lost all claims to a higher sanction than the law of force and self-interest. Without justice, what is a great kingdom but a great robbery, magnum latrocinium?
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The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.
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It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.
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You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for
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Natural Theology says not only look up and look out-it also says look down and look in, and you will find the proofs of the reality of God in the depth of your own nature.
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If man attempts to suppress the animal side of his nature by a sheer effort of conscious will, nature finds a hundred unexpected and unpleasant ways to take its revenge.
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Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum
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The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms
Christopher Dawson
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Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces.
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Faith transcends reason because divine truth is not only higher, but also wider than the human mind, and the rationalist in his haste for premature simplification always tends to shut his eyes to one aspect of the truth and to seek a false harmony of thought by the sacrifice of an essential element of reality.
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The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.
Christopher Dawson
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American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.
Christopher Dawson
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For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity.
Christopher Dawson
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It is Christian culture that has created Western man and the Western way of life.
Christopher Dawson
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Law describes the way things would work if men were angels.
Christopher Dawson
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Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.
Christopher Dawson
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No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced
Christopher Dawson
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Reason lives on the systematization of the past, but Faith is the promise of the future.
Christopher Dawson
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Thus Christian humanism is as indispensable to the Christian way of life as Christian ethics and a Christian sociology.
Christopher Dawson