English historian and Christian humanist Christopher Dawson stood at the very center of the Catholic literary and intellectual revival in the four decades preceding Vatican II. One can find his influence throughout the twentieth-century Catholic Right. Poet and social critic T. S. Eliot considered him the foremost thinker of his generation, and the founder of American conservatism, Russell Kirk, wrote that he had been “saturated in Dawsonian historical studies [and] my own books reflect Dawson’s concepts.” Dawson’s reputation declined dramatically during the cultural shifts accompanying Vatican II, and few remembered the English Catholic in the final decades of the twentieth century. A revival of interest of Dawson and his body of work increased dramatically in the last years of John Paul II’s and the beginning of Benedict’s pontificates. This book offers the first study of Dawson’s life and thought as a whole. It is especially poignant as a post–9/11 reexamination of the meaning of Western civilization. Sanctifying the World was named by biographer Joseph Pearce as the best book of 2008 and the National Catholic Register named it one of the top eleven books of the year. Bradley J. Birzer is Assistant Professor of History at Hillsdale College. A Senior Fellow with the Center for the American Idea in Houston, he has written extensively on Tolkien, James Fenimore Cooper, the American frontier and American Indians, and Christopher Dawson. Sanctifying the World The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson By Bradley J. Birzer CHRISTENDOM PRESS Copyright © 2007 Bradley J. Birzer All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-931888-86-1 Contents Foreword...................................................................................................vPreface....................................................................................................viiContents...................................................................................................xvIntroduction...............................................................................................11 Dawson the Convert, 1889-1920............................................................................15The Influence of Place and Family..........................................................................15An Unusual Education.......................................................................................20The Path to Conversion.....................................................................................22The Making of a Man of Letters.............................................................................272 Little Platoons, 1920-1930...............................................................................43LePlay House...............................................................................................43Order Men..................................................................................................48Interlude I: An Augustinian Vision of History..............................................................63An Augustinian Metahistory.................................................................................70Homo Religiosus............................................................................................75Language, Profane and Mundane..............................................................................84Sanctifying the Pagan......................................................................................913 Essays in Order, Humanism, and Moots, 1931-1940..........................................................97Essays in Order............................................................................................97Colosseum..................................................................................................114A New Review...............................................................................................117The Moot...................................................................................................1204 Against the Ideologues, 1930-1942........................................................................123"Age of Propaganda"........................................................................................126The First Institution: Family..............................................................................134The Particular or the Universal............................................................................135Beyond Liberalism: The New Leviathan.......................................................................137"Progressive" National Socialism and the Abyss.............................................................142No Fascist: Beyond Ideologies..............................................................................146Interlude II: What is the West?............................................................................151The Birth of the West: Greece and Rome.