The full history.

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Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, by Bradley J. Birzer (Christendom, 300 pp., $30)

RUSSELL KIRK said that the modern conservative "is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character--with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest." The spiritual and moral regeneration of Western man--the ordering of the soul and its relation to the ordering of the commonwealth--was also a central theme for the Welsh-born English historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), whose works markedly influenced Kirk.

Kirk first imbibed Dawson's thought through T. S. Eliot, whose Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) were strongly informed by Dawson. Eliot and Dawson had similar ideas on tradition, imagination, culture, and faith. Both were for a time the editors of influential periodicals of ideas, and each contributed occasionally to the other's magazine, Dawson to Eliot's Criterion and Eliot to Dawson's Dublin Review. For his part, Kirk wrote that his own understanding of Western history was the result of having been "saturated in Dawson's historical studies.... My own books reflect Dawson's concepts."

Many other historical and philosophical scholars recognized Dawson, a traditionalist and Roman Catholic layman, as one of the preeminent historians at work in the 20th century, but in the years since Vatican II, Dawson has been strangely forgotten. In this new book, Bradley J. Birzer--historian and director of American studies at Hillsdale College--strives to restore Dawson's reputation. And he succeeds, demonstrating that, while Dawson was a relevant thinker who pressed for Western cultural renewal during the Cold War, he is equally relevant in the post-9/11 age.

Born into a devout Anglican household and educated at Oxford, Dawson was a child of the late afternoon of Queen Victoria's reign. This era was described by Chesterton as the time of the "the breakup of the compromise," a period when secularism, industrialism, and scientism largely overthrew Europe's lingering culture of Christian faith that had long held at bay the naturalist claims of Darwin and Comte. The idea of man as a being especially created and beloved by God gave way to the view that he is a cog in a vast machine: made not for eternity but for utility, useful until broken, and ultimately expendable. (This new age had been foreseen by Emerson: "Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind.") Dawson lamented the passing away of what had long been called "Christendom" and recognized that, with the fading of faith in Britain and Europe, men would seek to fill the resulting void with one form or another of ideology.

Even as Dawson came to this realization, the buds of Fascism, Communism, and other ideologies were beginning to sprout. The world he had known was disappearing; and he determined as early as 1909 that his life's work would be the writing of a multi-volume cultural history of the world that would reflect the role of religion in the shaping of nations' cultures. This project would serve as both a reminder of what had once been and a challenge to conserve and restore.

His own faith, meanwhile, moved in the direction of Roman Catholicism. He embraced the ancient faith in 1913 and was received into the Church the following year. Within a short time he began writing his first magazine articles, which would lay the foundation for his life's work. Over the remaining half century of his life, Dawson--a careful writer--never fulfilled his ambition. But he did publish many articles and books--notably The Making of Europe (1932), Enquiries into Religion and Culture (1933), and Religion and Culture (1948)--that, together, form at least the beginnings of the larger study he envisioned.

Certainly they form a history of Western culture that stands strongly at odds with H. G. Wells's 1920 Outline of History, which was massively influential throughout the Twenties. Wells saw history as the saga of mankind's rise from apelike beginnings and slow emergence toward an ever more godlike being. But, having seen the bloody fruits of nationalism in World War I, mankind now stood prepared, or so Wells thought, to recognize the need for an omnicompetent World State. Wells declared, "Our true God now is the God of all men." Of course, this amorphous deity would need earthly prophets: enlightened elites who know what's best for everyone.

Dawson saw humanity and its history differently, as is evidenced in many of his works, including the one Birzer deems his best, The Judgment of the Nations (1942). Dawson recurrently addresses the question: What does it mean to be a human being? What is man's end, and how ought he to live--especially in the age of a Planning Elite? In an unsigned review of The Judgment of the Nations published in the Times Literary Supplement, Dermot Morrah wrote, "The scientific and other forces that have compelled society to think constantly in terms of the mass cause us all to accept the idea of ever more complete planning. But planning tends only too easily to totalitarianism; and the reason, according to Mr. Dawson, is that in the secular state it always concerns itself with riches or power, which are means, and not with the destiny of the soul, which is the end."

Just so. Or, as Birzer writes, Dawson "feared that almost every aspect of modernity attempted to mechanize the human person, making him less than God intended him to be." Like Augustine, Dawson saw man as a being created and beloved by God, but flawed by sin. Man's nature is not entirely fleshly and not entirely spiritual, but a mysterious blending of the two. By embracing Christ and his Church, Augustine and Dawson held, man enters into a right relation with God and becomes, so to speak, a bridge for others to enter into that same relationship.

The Christian, Dawson believed, sanctifies the world by his witness and his work, which is suffused with integrity, curiosity, imagination, and creativity--a reflection of the creative Divine: The person of faith redeems the time.Within this new fellowship, men attain the wisdom of knowing that, while they must live in the City of Man, which will in time decay and fail, they are also citizens of the City of God, which endures.

The horrors wrought by 20th-century ideology led many to discount what little faith they had in the City of God's existence. "Can you believe, God makes you breathe? / Why did he lose six million Jews?" asked Greg Lake in Emerson, Lake & Palmer's sardonic hymn "The Only Way" some 30 years after the Holocaust: a sentiment that would seem to reflect more upon man's own appalling choices and capacity for cruelty amid his glorious "ascent" than upon the question of God's existence. Dawson did not shy from confronting the eternal questions that arise in the aftermath of pogroms, police-state regimentation, and other blots upon the history of both religious and ideological cultures. "Even at the worst moments of history--whether the Vandals' sacking of Rome or the ideological atrocities of the mid-20th century--the human person can call on divine help, Dawson believed," writes Birzer. "With Soviet tyranny and oppression in Poland, Dawson wrote in the middle of the Cold War, the spiritual element allowed the Poles and other Eastern Europeans 'to survive.'"

Dawson knew something the whole world would learn in 1989: that "the forces that appear to make human civilization so irresistible--its wealth, its economic organization, and its military power--are essentially hollow, and crumble to dust as soon as the human purpose that animates them loses its strength." Dawson held that all culture arises from the cult--from the religious belief systems adopted by communities of men in specific times and locales.

Further, Dawson believed that history is not simply a series of accounts of human conflict as told by the winners, but is instead the working out of God's mysterious design on earth, only fitfully discerned as such. Man works out his salvation on earth through the agency of the Church, through the communities in which he lives, and through imagination: what Plato called "divine madness"--a mind beside itself--which allows one to order his soul properly. As Joseph Pearce (author of the appreciative and intelligent introduction to Birzer's book) said on one occasion, imagination enables us to begin to enter into the mind and experiences of others, upon which the Golden Rule--"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"--is predicated. The effect of imagination is to deepen one's understanding of the larger world outside one's own head.

In highlighting the importance of imagination to Dawson's historical thinking, Birzer has performed a signal service to the better understanding of Dawson's thought. And in this work as a whole, the author has succeeded in crafting a superbly researched and convincing intellectual and spiritual biography.

Mr. Person is the author of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mindand Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow.