Saturday, August 22
“ The breakdown of the political organization of the Roman Empire left a great void which no barbarian king or general could fill, and this void was filled by the Church as the teacher and law-giver of the new peoples. The Latin Fathers — Ambrose, Augustine, Leo and Gregory — were in a real sense the fathers of Western Culture, since it was only in so far as the different peoples of the West were incorporated in the spiritual community of Christendom that they acquired a common culture.
• Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 1950
