Christopher Dawson’s Saints

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Christopher Dawson’s Saints

Christopher Dawson’s Saints gathers together his scattered writings on saints and their formative role in history and offers a glimpse of history’s “mysterious and inexplicable element due not only to the influence of chance or the initiative of the individual genius, but also to the creative power of spiritual forces.” 

“There are few, even among Catholics, who realize the importance of the lives of the saints for the history of Western civilization. Nowhere else do we find such a rich tradition of authentic biographical material, which throws light on almost every aspect of life and thought for a period of nineteen hundred years. The lives of the saints have created the pattern of Christian culture through the centuries. They have been the archetypes of Christian experience through which successive generations have learnt the following of Christ according to the forms of their own age and culture.” ~ Christopher Dawson 

Christopher Dawson, the greatest Catholic historian of the twentieth century, devoted his life to the study of Christian culture, the “periphery of a circle which has its centre in the Incarnation and the faith of the Church and the lives of the saints.”