Translated into English for the first time, this brief but insightful work of Dom Prosper Guéranger, founder of the Benedictine Congregation of Solesmes, to which Clear Creek Abbey belongs, offers a supernatural view of history viewed through a Christian lens.
Softcover, 72 pages, 5 x 8 inches.
Dom Prosper Guéranger’s The Christian Sense of History is a profound meditation on the divine thread woven through the fabric of human events. In this work, Guéranger confronts the rationalist and naturalist interpretations of history that dominated post-Enlightenment thought, arguing instead for a view that recognizes the supernatural as essential to understanding the past. He presents history as “the great theatre where the supernatural performs,” emphasizing the transformative power of Christianity in shaping civilizations and guiding nations through Providence. Saints, martyrs, and Christ Himself emerge as central figures—not merely religious icons, but protagonists in the unfolding drama of human destiny. With a Benedictine sensitivity to liturgy and tradition, Guéranger restores the sacred dimension to historical study, making a compelling case that without the Christian lens, history remains fragmented and incomplete.
About the Author:
Prosper Louis Pascal Guéranger (1805-1875), in founding the Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, reestablished within its walls the observation of the Rule of Saint Benedict, half a century after its previous community, the Congregation of Saint Maur, had been destroyed in the French Revolution. Dom Guéranger was soon to be hailed as the restorer of the Order of Saint Benedict, not only in France, but in the British Isles as well. The remoteness of his abbatial retreat did not prevent him from making his voice heard “on the housetops”. Combining the scholarly tradition of the Maurists with a renewed sense of the liturgical life, which has had a profound influence far beyond the walls of the cloister, Dom Guéranger wrote prolifically across the disciplines of history and philosophy in defense of the Church and her traditions.
