Indeed, the total negation of traditional Western man is the goal of modern-day “progressives” who in their Nietzschean Will to Power, seek the destruction of Christianity, family, and gender through various ideologies and in illusory calls for “social justice.” Dawson incisively describes how, even in our day, revolutionary and scientific ideologies are influenced, often indirectly and unconsciously, by the spirit of Western religion.
We in the West have become detached from our religious culture and our Western moral tradition. Dawson once observed, “It is religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and culture. . . .A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.”
Publisher's blurb: "With the magisterial sweep of Toynbee, to whom he is often compared, Dawson tells here the tale of medieval Christendom. From the brave travels of sixth-century Irish monks to the grand synthesis of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Dawson brilliantly shows how vast spiritual movements arose from tiny origins and changed the face of medieval Europe from one century to the next. The legacy of those years of ferment remains with us in the great cathedrals, Gregorian chant, and the works of Giotto and Dante. Even more, though, for Dawson these centuries charged the soul of the West with a spiritual concern -- a concern that he insists can never be entirely undone except by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself.
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