Books: The Case for Christendom

MEDIEVAL ESSAYS (271 pp.)—Christopher Dawson—Sheed & Ward ($3.50).

Europe's statesmen and its NATO generals can get as far as common-defense plans and frontierless trade patterns. Beyond this, the idea of a unified Europe tends to be a rainbow-colored vision; most Europeans, educated in mutually contradictory nationalisms or ideologies, specify no satisfactory universal basis for it. One of the few who attempt the statement is British Historian Christopher Dawson. "The source of the actual sociological unity which we call Europe," Dawson says flatly, "is Christian culture." His lifelong argument: without educating themselves in...