Schism, Church History 

This book is based upon lectures given at Harvard by Christopher Dawson as first occupant of the Charles Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies. It covers the period from the Reformation to the French Revolution - "a century of civil war in the strict sense, and then a century or more of cold war."

It is the author's most detailed treatment of a historical period since he published The Makings of Europe. His chapter on the Baroque Culture - in which we see the religious unity of reformed Catholicism producing a new flowering of culture from Poland to Peru - is equal to anything in his earlier book. So, on a smaller scale, is the contrast he draws between Puritanism in England and Puritanism in America; so, too, is the chapter in which he communicates his own admiration for John Wesley.

In addition to the light it sheds upon its period, the book has a double relevance to our present condition.

1. The slow stirring of life of Ecumenism - the conviction that all belong together who call Christ their Savior - is helped by an understanding of how the great cleavages occurred. With clarity and charity Professor Dawson shows how men on both sides felt that they could do no other.

2. Deeper and wider than the divisions among Christians is the secularization within which the Christian Order must carry on its struggle for survival. The author feels that, far more than the earlier cleavage between the Eastern and Western Churches, the quarrel between the Catholics and the Protestants had the extrusion of religion from public life for its inevitable result: therefore its healing is essential if religion is to vitalize society as it alone can.

Readers of the author's earlier books will not need to be told of his view that moral and psychological differences are a greater obstacle than theological to religious unity - "because they go so deep into the unconscious mind and have become part of the personality and of the national character." No historical period could give him a better opportunity than the one treated here to show this principle at work.

Christopher Dawson was born in Wales and educated at Winchester and at Trinity College, Oxford. In 1914 he entered the Catholic Church. For twelve years he was lecturer at University College, Exeter, and later at Liverpool and Edinburgh Universities.

In 1958 he became the first Charles Chauncey Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University. Among his previous books are The Crisis of Western Education, The Movement of World Revolution, The Making of Europe, The Dynamics of World History and Religion and Culture.

Taken from the inside flaps.