Sin and Grace as Culturally Potent

“The Augustinian theology and philosophy of history with their intense realization of the burden of inherited evil under which the human race laboured and their conception of divine grace as a continually renewed source of supernatural energy which transforms human nature and changes the course of history—all this had become part of the spiritual patrimony of the Western Church and, above all, of Western monasticism, and Christendom had only to return to this tradition to recover its dynamic energy” (Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, p. 122).