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| Christopher Dawson |
- The great world religions are, as it were, great rivers of sacred tradition which flow down through the ages and through the ages and through changing historical landscapes which they irrigate and fertilize (12)
- An ideology, in the modern sense of the word, is very different from a faith, although it is intended to fulfill the same sociological functions. It is the work of man, an instrument through which the conscious political will attempts to mould the social tradition to its purpose. But faith looks beyond the world of man and his works; it introduces man to a higher and more universal range of reality than the finite and temporal world to which the state and the economic order belong (14)
- In the West, spiritual power has not been immobilized in a sacred social order like the Confucian state in China and the Indian caste system (...) but it has had far-reaching effects on every aspect of social and intellectual life (16)
- There has never been any unitary organization of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity (22)
- No historian denies that the coming of Christianity to the peoples of the West had a profound effect on their culture; nevertheless, this great spiritual revolution left the material conditions of Western life unchanged” (23)
