The Rise & Decline of Christendom in the West
Christopher Dawson’s Panoramic View of Christian Europe
by James Hitchcock
Few historians have allowed themselves to range over the entire panorama of history as boldly yet as carefully as did Christopher Dawson, and as a mature scholar he made a division of European history into seven distinct phases: Greece, Rome, the Formation of Christendom, the Middle Ages, the Age of Religious Division and Humanistic Culture, the Age of Revolution, and the Disintegration of Europe.1
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James Hitchcock is Professor emeritus of History at St. Louis University in St. Louis. He and his late wife Helen have four daughters. His most recent book is the two-volume work, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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