What other writers have said about Christopher Dawson
“The most powerful intellectual influence in England.” – T.S. Eliot
“In Mr. Christopher Dawson we have a historian of the first rank.” – E.W.F. Tomlin
“[Christopher Dawson] was among the most original and creative English and European historians of this century. His concept and vision of history rank among those of Alexis de Tocqueville, Henri Pirenne, Max Weber, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. His work belongs to the realm of metahistory. In opposition to the so-called “pure”, or academic, historians who simply want to know “what has happened”, he was deeply concerned with the nature and meaning of history, with the cause and significance of historical change. He wanted history to be more than antiquarianism and firmly believed that it was only when history entered into relations with philosophy and produced the types of men like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Robertson and Gibbon, that it became one of the great formative elements of modern thought.” – J. Lukaszewski, Rector of the College of Europe, 1972-1990
“Dawson’s work has always been original and sincere. His thoughts and feelings are always his own. They are never taken by him at second hand, and this quality makes his treatment of a subject rewarding. However often a subject may have been dealt with by his predecessors, Dawson’s handling throws new light on it.” – Arnold Toynbee
“Christopher Dawson had reverence in all he wrote and did; he had, too, in his unobtrusive way, “bright splendour”. He wrote from within what were for him divinely inspired values, and as such he was perhaps the last and certainly one of the most distinguished representatives of all that was most humane in English Catholicism.” – Prof. R.C. Zaehner
“[Christopher Dawson is] a man and a scholar of the same sort of quality as Acton and von Hügel”. – Ernest Barker, Dawson’s history tutor at Oxford
