Christopher Dawson

British Catholic historian who wrote The Making of Europe, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, and The Dynamics of World History — arguing that religion is the soul of culture and that Western civilization cannot be understood apart from its Christian foundations.

Created the Catholic philosophy of history as a serious academic enterprise — Dawson's argument that each civilization has a spiritual 'soul' (a dominant religious vision) that shapes all its cultural expressions, and that Christianity is the soul of Western civilization, provides the most sophisticated articulation of the religious interpretation of history.