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Works of Christopher Dawson
The Gods of Revolution
Rare book
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
5 people are currently reading
245 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Henry Dawson
152 books155 followersChristopher Henry Dawson (12 October 1889, Hay Castle – 25 May 1970, Budleigh Salterton) was a British independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and Christendom. Christopher H. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century".
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 21, 2022
"The Gods of Revolution" is not so much a history of the French Revolution of 1789 but of its ideas, from the Englightenment philosophers that preceded it to the Liberalism and Socialism that followed it in the nineteenth century. As Dawson says, the French Revolution was not just a political revolution but above all a religious one, building the Religion of Man on the ruins of the Ancien Regime and the Catholic Church. Also interesting is his critique of the Industrial Revolution and how it transformed daily life in accordance with the egalitarian philosophical principles of the Englightenment. It is a brilliant and succinct analysis by one of the greatest Catholic historians of the 20th century.
May 17, 2025
“A free society requires a higher degree of spiritual unity than a totalitarian one. Hence the spiritual integration of western culture is essential to its temporal survival…
Consequently it is to Christianity that western culture must look for leadership and help in restoring the moral and spiritual unity of our civilization. If it fails to do so, it means either the failure of Christianity or the condemnation of modern civilization.” (147).
Consequently it is to Christianity that western culture must look for leadership and help in restoring the moral and spiritual unity of our civilization. If it fails to do so, it means either the failure of Christianity or the condemnation of modern civilization.” (147).
January 23, 2009
Really good.
May 4, 2020
Excelente libro. El señor Dawson traza magistralmente los inicios de la Revolución francesa y llega al fondo de los ideales que la hizo germinar. Excelente introducción al tema. Lo aproveché bastante.
El único problema que encuentro con el material es su brevedad. Al solo tener 209 (versión en español), condensa tantos acontecimientos que necesita un tratamiento más pausado.
El único problema que encuentro con el material es su brevedad. Al solo tener 209 (versión en español), condensa tantos acontecimientos que necesita un tratamiento más pausado.
Want to read
December 14, 2009Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Bibliography.
September 17, 2015
Dawson is a truly excellent historian
February 11, 2020
Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was a (mostly independent) British Catholic scholar of ideas who, for a few years in the middle of the 20th century, held the Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University. Dawson was well acquainted with contemporary litterateurs who also took seriously the connection between religion and culture, notably Arnold Toynbee, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot. (Toynbee wrote the introduction to this posthumous book.)
The first edition of The Gods of Revolution had no subtitle, perhaps because it really deserves one of those long, hairy ones given to novels in the 18th century, something like, “General musings on the intellectual causes, course, and consequences of the French Revolution, especially as they join matters of religion and high culture.” Dawson writes well enough, and his insights, even if not philosophically profound, are presented cogently, as in this paragraph contrasting the continental Enlightenment with contemporary England:
“While Voltaire was conducting his campaign against religion among the upper classes on the continent, the Wesleys and Whitefield were preaching a revival of intense personal religion among the lower and middle classes of England and the American colonies. Their inspiration was derived from the Pietist movement of Lutheran Germany, above all from the followers of Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian Brethren, but the new doctrines fell on a ground prepared by the Puritan tradition of the seventeenth century, and acquired a thoroughly national character. They appealed to just those classes which might otherwise have afforded fruitful soil for the political agitator and turned into religious channels the forces which on the continent found an outlet in the revolutionary movement that was inspired by the social mysticism of Rousseau.” (132)
Nevertheless, a serious, unrecognized problem for Dawson is his inability to understand that the superstition of popular Catholicism in 18th-century France was a major contributing factor to Revolutionary adoption of Enlightenment progress as an alternative religion. Furthermore, on a more mundane level, Dawson assumes his readers already have a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the history of the Revolution, as well as some basic French and Latin.
The first edition of The Gods of Revolution had no subtitle, perhaps because it really deserves one of those long, hairy ones given to novels in the 18th century, something like, “General musings on the intellectual causes, course, and consequences of the French Revolution, especially as they join matters of religion and high culture.” Dawson writes well enough, and his insights, even if not philosophically profound, are presented cogently, as in this paragraph contrasting the continental Enlightenment with contemporary England:
“While Voltaire was conducting his campaign against religion among the upper classes on the continent, the Wesleys and Whitefield were preaching a revival of intense personal religion among the lower and middle classes of England and the American colonies. Their inspiration was derived from the Pietist movement of Lutheran Germany, above all from the followers of Count Zinzendorf, the Moravian Brethren, but the new doctrines fell on a ground prepared by the Puritan tradition of the seventeenth century, and acquired a thoroughly national character. They appealed to just those classes which might otherwise have afforded fruitful soil for the political agitator and turned into religious channels the forces which on the continent found an outlet in the revolutionary movement that was inspired by the social mysticism of Rousseau.” (132)
Nevertheless, a serious, unrecognized problem for Dawson is his inability to understand that the superstition of popular Catholicism in 18th-century France was a major contributing factor to Revolutionary adoption of Enlightenment progress as an alternative religion. Furthermore, on a more mundane level, Dawson assumes his readers already have a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the history of the Revolution, as well as some basic French and Latin.
July 25, 2021
Excelente. La modernidad y sobre todo el pensamiento ilustrado intentaron encumbrar a la razón, a lo humano, a lo inmanente por encima de todas las categorías. Pero en su intento de eliminar los atavismos religiosos y tradicionales, que pretendidamente encadenaban a los hombres, terminaron por fundar una nueva fe que sus intelectuales viven con la misma intensidad que los fanáticos de antaño. Será el credo en la democracia y en la revolución perpetua. Esta última entendida no como un proceso bélico y traumático, sino como un fenómeno teleológico, abocado a conducir, mediante un proceso racional, de pretensiones científicas, a la humanidad y a la historia hacia su conclusión lógica; los marxistas pensarán que es la sociedad sin clases, los liberales un mundo subsumido a lo económico y a lo individual, los progresistas hacia una utopía igualitaria donde las categorías pierden rigidez y devienen líquidas.
Una pena que la muerte del autor dejara la última porción del libro un tanto inconexa con respecto al resto de la obra.
Una pena que la muerte del autor dejara la última porción del libro un tanto inconexa con respecto al resto de la obra.
May 2, 2022
This book looks at the religious aspects of the French Revolution, both how religious changes (the rise of the often anti-clerical Enlightenment) impacted the Revolution, and how the revolutionaries themselves were taken with a kind of religious fervor. It is a slim volume, but filled with information (much of which I was unfamiliar with previously). It is a familiar argument, but the author provides fresh material that is not available elsewhere. The book also seemed very polished, despite the fact that it was supposedly unfinished at the time of the author's death.
September 27, 2025
Very insightful look at what an atheistic liberalism causes in society.
August 11, 2024
Otra forma de ver la Revolución francesa.
April 11, 2025
PART ONE: THE REVOLUTION OF IDEAS
1 The European Revolution
2 The Historic Origins of Liberalism
“The men of the age had an unlimited belief in the powers of human reason and in the possibility of an immediate social transformation if only the legislature could be won over to the cause of reason and progress.”
3 The Birth of Democracy
“…the Enlightenment had swept and garnished the western mind without bringing anything to take the place of the religion that it had destroyed. … If the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment were to penetrate beyond the limited world of the privileged classes and change the thought and the life of the people, they had to make an appeal to psychological forces that lay beneath the surface of rational consciousness. They had to be transformed from a philosophy into a religion: to cease to be mere ideas and to become articles of faith. This reinterpretation of liberalism in religious terms was the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thus became the founder and prophet of a new faith—the religion of Democracy. … He saw that all the ills of man and all the evils of society were due not to man's own sin or ignorance but to social injustice and the corruptions of an artificial civilization. If man could return to nature and follow the divinely inspired instincts of his own heart, all would be well. The savage child of nature was happier than the spoiled child of civilization, and the simple faith of the peasant wiser than all the science of the philosophers.”
PART TWO: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
4 The Rights of Man
5 The Altars of Fear
“The religion of the Jacobins… like Christianity… was a religion of human salvation, the salvation of the world by the power of man set free by Reason.”
6 The Reign of Terror
7 The Fall of the Mountain
8 The Turning of the Tide
PART THREE: THE IMPACT OF THE REVOLUTION
9 Religion and the Romantic Movement
“…even those who did not recover their faith in God, lost that faith in man and in the law of progress that had been characteristic of the previous age. Rationalism flourishes best in a prosperous age and a sheltered society; it finds few adherents among the unfortunate and the defeated.”
10 Europe and the Revolution
11 The Revolution and the Modern World
1 The European Revolution
2 The Historic Origins of Liberalism
“The men of the age had an unlimited belief in the powers of human reason and in the possibility of an immediate social transformation if only the legislature could be won over to the cause of reason and progress.”
3 The Birth of Democracy
“…the Enlightenment had swept and garnished the western mind without bringing anything to take the place of the religion that it had destroyed. … If the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment were to penetrate beyond the limited world of the privileged classes and change the thought and the life of the people, they had to make an appeal to psychological forces that lay beneath the surface of rational consciousness. They had to be transformed from a philosophy into a religion: to cease to be mere ideas and to become articles of faith. This reinterpretation of liberalism in religious terms was the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thus became the founder and prophet of a new faith—the religion of Democracy. … He saw that all the ills of man and all the evils of society were due not to man's own sin or ignorance but to social injustice and the corruptions of an artificial civilization. If man could return to nature and follow the divinely inspired instincts of his own heart, all would be well. The savage child of nature was happier than the spoiled child of civilization, and the simple faith of the peasant wiser than all the science of the philosophers.”
PART TWO: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
4 The Rights of Man
5 The Altars of Fear
“The religion of the Jacobins… like Christianity… was a religion of human salvation, the salvation of the world by the power of man set free by Reason.”
6 The Reign of Terror
7 The Fall of the Mountain
8 The Turning of the Tide
PART THREE: THE IMPACT OF THE REVOLUTION
9 Religion and the Romantic Movement
“…even those who did not recover their faith in God, lost that faith in man and in the law of progress that had been characteristic of the previous age. Rationalism flourishes best in a prosperous age and a sheltered society; it finds few adherents among the unfortunate and the defeated.”
10 Europe and the Revolution
11 The Revolution and the Modern World
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April 5, 2014highly theoretical and I could not get into it.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews