Reasons to Be Proud

The Golden Thread:
A History of the Western Tradition
Volume I:
The Ancient World and Christendom
by james hankins
encounter, 1,308 pages, $120
Volume II:
The Modern and Contemporary West
by allen c. guelzo
encounter, 880 pages, $120

I was introduced to the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s after they were already over. As a teenager, I was given a copy of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon by a well-meaning family friend. It almost drove me away from the humanities. What was the point in studying these subjects when Bloom, a celebrated academic, spent hundreds of pages wallowing masochistically in their self-destruction? Less a polemic than an out-of-tune funeral dirge, The Western Canon allowed little hope for the futures of the great books that Bloom considered the central texts of world literature. What was worse, he made the act of reading seem a mere compulsive habit, like overeating or self-abuse. He viewed literature principally as a means of distracting himself from terror at the prospect of his own extinction. Perhaps I was harsh in thinking all of this repulsive. I was also disgustedby the self-absorption of the writing. Bloom made the defenders of civilization seem no less neurotic than those who sought to burn it all down.

After that demoralizing experience of The Western Canon, my faith in reading was restored by Dario Fo, the Italian actor, playwright, and communist agitator who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. He was a genius, albeit a frustrating one. Even fervent admirers will admit that Fo was more impressive as a stage performer than as a writer. But any flaws in his literary work can be forgiven for the sake of the sheer joy he inspired as a comedian. He entranced audiences even when he was speaking gibberish—an elaborate form of gibberish known as “grammelot,” which allegedly had roots in sixteenth-century Italian theater.

What could a communist clown possibly have to do with Western civilization? A great deal, as it turned out. Fo was not merely a slapstick comedian; he was a profoundly cultured man who had read deeply in classical and medieval texts, and he saw himself as a living embodiment of various ancient traditions. His 1991 book The Tricks of the Trade, which is ostensibly a guide for actors, demonstrates Fo’s eloquence and charisma as well as his vast, eclectic reading in a wide range of sources, including archival materials that he seems to have absorbed in their original languages. Of course, most of the historical elements in The Tricks of the Trade are tendentious at best, and many of Fo’s fundamental claims are demonstrably wrong, but who cares? The book is a thrilling read and ought to be in the hands of every aspiring playwright. It is far more valuable than any of his plays, not least because it makes clear how essential the achievements of our ancestors are for anyone who is driven to create art.

Fo’s work inspired me to pore over the comedies of Plautus in Latin rather than in translation, because this was the only way to allow the words to settle fully into my imagination. Fo also showed me the importance of mastering history and of using the past as a means of stimulating and nourishing original projects. If I have long since rejected almost all of Fo’s ideas and dismissed most of his dramatic writing as dated agitprop, I can never reject the man himself. He brought me back to civilization after Harold Bloom drove me away.

Can anybody love Western civilization as an abstract entity? Surely it is truer to say that an attraction to one original artistic creation—a particular book, statue, painting, building, or piece of music—eventually results in your fixating on a group of similar or related objects, so that a network of affinities begins to emerge in your mind. A greater, more generalized affection develops, until it grows to encompass an entire culture. At least this was how I developed this love. Had The Tricks of the Trade not convinced me to study Plautus, I might never have puzzled through the 1960 Italian version of the German-born philologist Eduard Fraenkel’s seminal 1922 study Plautine Elements in Plautus, or later become a pupil of one of Fraenkel’s most beloved disciples, or eventually immersed myself in the history of classical philology.

Many Catholic intellectuals will dismiss Dario Fo on account of his blasphemy, anti-clericalism, and loathing of the Church, to say nothing of his atheism, Marxism, and general iconoclasm. While I understand these suspicions, I also note that few Catholic intellectuals have enjoyed anything like Fo’s success in convincing ambitious young people to follow their example. Indeed, most of the self-appointed defenders of Western civilization have been so incompetent in recent decades that one almost suspects they wanted to lose the fight. Part of the problem may be that they never found a way of articulating the importance of this civilization in ways that could win over skeptical or indifferent bystanders.

To a Christian, Western civilization might, at its best, be a means of helping an entire society of men who were created in the image of God grow into his likeness as far as possible. Such a point of view would not satisfy a hard-left materialist like Dario Fo, for whom the ideal civilization served as a tool for enlightening and emancipating the masses, and creating a wiser, freer, happier body of citizens. Although Fo would not have identified his ideal as specifically “Western,” he knew no culture other than his own, and his affinities were more parochial than universal. Both his vision and the Christian one are rooted in the belief that there is something inherently dignifying or ennobling about civilization, whatever it might be. But those who love some version of Western civilization rarely bother to define it—they leave that job to hostile forces, which is a good way to lose the culture wars that have been rekindled in recent years.

The historians Allen Guelzo and James Hankins have clearly learned from the mistakes of unsuccessful twentieth-century culture warriors. Their new two-volume textbook The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition introduces the story of Western civilization to teenagers in a way that will fire young imaginations about 2,500 years of human achievements in politics, warfare, and law, as well as religion, the arts, and the sciences. Although these books were not created for the Association of Classical Christian Schools, Guelzo and Hankins surely sympathize with the aims of the Christian classical education movement. Their intended audience will be found among homeschooling groups, as well as institutions where “Great Books” feature in curricula. This is clear from the very first paragraph of the introduction to The Golden Thread, where Guelzo and Hankins venture a definition of civilization:

A civilization is a space, so to speak, in which people may breathe. It creates a public forum, a city square, in which they may do something other than tremble and labor for simple survival. It allows people to erect monuments of art, literature and thought alongside the everyday need to work, to produce, to exchange. It is a necessity, because the human spirit cannot be captured simply by the way we earn bread or avoid massacre; there is a natural yearning after order, after beauty, after truth. Civilization celebrates that yearning, encourages it, and provides the means by which it may flourish, and the means by which it can be protected from harm.

This might be too humanistic a definition for some readers, particularly those who have undergone a scientific education.An alternative conception of civilization might involve a process whereby a society attains a level of complexity that enables achievements of permanent value, achievements that will enjoy the admiration of people who live long after that society has disappeared. But Hankins and Guelzo want to describe civilization in a way that makes religion, the state, and the law impossible to ignore. They have refined their definition through decades of studying and teaching Greek civilization, Roman civilization, the civilization of Christianized Greco-Romans, and the European civilization that emerged from these three predecessors. They examine all four from the point of view of a fifth civilization, the postwar American one.

Many of us struggle to describe, or even recognize, American civilization as a distinct entity, simply because we live within it and are oblivious to its peculiarities. In a similar way, the Byzantines of the Middle Ages were often blind to the ways in which their attempts to maintain the traditions of the Roman Empire would have seemed foreign to someone living in Rome at the time of Constantine the Great (a.d. 306–37). Would the Byzantine Empire have looked or felt “Roman” in any sense to the poet Ovid, or the historian Livy, or any other Roman from the reign of the Emperor Augustus (27 b.c.–a.d. 14)? This is not an idle question for anyone trying to figure out our current cultural position. Is American civilization a continuation of the European one that developed from the eleventh century onward, as Guelzo and Hankins evidently believe—or might it be something new and entirely different?

This final point is contentious, and one of the many strengths of The Golden Thread lies in the authors’ refusal to sidestep controversies, not to preserve the notion of a continuous civilizational history or anything else. Over the course of the twentieth century, the idea of civilization as something intrinsically European, or Christian, or classical was increasingly contested by intellectuals, so that the very conception of civilization as inherently good is by no means taken for granted. Someone is said to have asked Mahatma Gandhi: “What do you think of Western civilization?” He replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” This quotation seems to have been invented long after Gandhi’s death, but Gandhi’s reputation as a sage has helped turn the quip into a weapon with which to shut down arguments. Guelzo and Hankins note in their introduction to The Golden Thread:

In recent times, we have seen spread through our schools and institutions an improper and uncivilized humility, a malicious form of humility indistinguishable from self-hatred. This is a humility that humiliates, that seeks to blind Westerners to their magnificent traditions, and to rub their noses, like misbehaving dogs, in their worst offenses. The effect, if not the goal, of this moment of self-humiliation, is to make Westerners ashamed of their own civilization and to take from us the very inheritance our parents and ancestors worked and fought so hard to hand down to us. It makes us reluctant to add to that inheritance and to pass it on to those who will come after us.

My own position with respect to the West may be worth mentioning here, since a fair few intellectuals would expect me to share their hostility towards civilization on purely identitarian grounds. After all, my forebears were not Westerners. Although I speak and think in English, worship in a Catholic church, hold a doctorate in Latin, can claim some expertise in the European high culture of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and have always lived in the West, my parents were born in the Punjab, in northwestern India, and my ancestors, as far as they can be traced, have all been Sikhs or Hindus. But I cannot competently read any Indian language, and I have been regarded as just another foreigner when visiting the Punjab. My mother, who left India as a child, no longer feels at home there, either. For most of her life, she has dreamt in English. Nevertheless, most members of my family have avoided the self-loathing, self-pity, and pathetic sense of resentment that give rise to an anti-Western, anti-colonial, anti-civilization point of view. Why this might be the case is a complicated question. More interesting is the psychology of those of all backgrounds who would seek to subvert, undermine, or simply destroy Western civilization.

Flaubert illuminates at least one facet of this anti-civilizational mindset in the second section of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in which he describesthe violence of a frightened mob at Alexandria: Those who cannot read tear up books; others smash up paintings, statues, and intricate objects because they cannot understand how they might be used and are exasperated by the fact. The mob seeks revenge on everything that makes its members feel inferior. Their inverted pride renders them irritable and unstable; destruction becomes the outlet for emotions that these people cannot contain.

For all his cynicism and pessimism, Flaubert understood that a rigid, repressive society is not a healthy one. A well-ordered society is one in which friction, tension, aggression, justifiable grievances, and the impulse toward anarchy find relief or release in something more productive than hysteria and violence. Modern reactionaries too often forget the complexities of human nature: Force, discipline, and appeals to authority cannot maintain a civilization by themselves. In an early chapter of Flaubert’s historical novel, Salammbô, a group of “barbarians” stare with horror at a line of crosses in the countryside near Carthage. They are dismayed to learn that the locals there always crucify lions when they capture them. What sort of people could these possibly be, the barbarians wonder, while the reader wonders who the barbarians really are here. Carthage, despite all its wealth, refinement, and ancient traditions, is not really civilized. Cruelty for its own sake has no place in a civilization.

Guelzo and Hankins’s ideas about tradition are not unlike Fo’s. They, too, regard it as a process of development and refinement, and occasionally corruption—although they are more systematic in their description. Tradition, for the authors, begins with a discovery (inventio), which is then passed down from generation to generation (traditio), usually changing (for better or for worse) over the course of this process. Two further phases are possible: A tradition can sometimes be transferred (translatio) to another culture, society, language, form, or milieu, and occasionally a waning or dormant one may be revived or renewed (renovatio). As a process, tradition is morally neutral; a single one does not necessarily encompass an entire nation, people, culture, or society.

Unlike Fo, Guelzo and Hankins cannot afford to express themselves loosely, vaguely, or in symbolic terms. Their vocations are as historians, not literary artists or stage performers. The tradition that concerns them is the teaching of history, which they see as the repository of memory for their entire culture.

Guelzo and Hankins are not merely scholars, they are also American patriots who recognize their civilization’s common inheritance with Europe, in the traditions of classical Athens, ancient Rome, and the holy city of Jerusalem. Where they differ from most British and European writers is in their sense that the American constitution is an achievement of world-historical proportions, rather than a development of strictly national importance. In this they must be correct. Political stability and freedom are surely essential to enable the creativity of a society’s most gifted citizens, whether in the sciences, technology, commerce, warfare, or the arts. And yet, as Orson Welles said in the 1949 film The Third Man:

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love—five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

This is such a memorable speech that it would be churlish to point out historical inaccuracies, although there is at least one in every phrase. Welles’s point is worth discussing, even if he makes it while playing Harry Lime, a sociopathic black marketeer. Does chaos unleash genius? History suggests the opposite, at least to those who read closely, and are familiar with how the principalities and city-states of the Italian Renaissance were managed. Harry Lime appears to be unfamiliar with what happened in Switzerland throughout the sixteenth century, especially during the Protestant Reformation. It turns out that good government is not merely a matter of ensuring security and bourgeois comfort. High culture and the life of the mind also depend on it.

The first volume of The Golden Thread was written by Hankins, whose command of classical, late-antique, ecclesiastical, and medieval history turns out to be no less formidable than his expertise in Italian Renaissance culture. His story begins with the Battle of Marathon in 490 b.c. and ends in the 1520s with a comparison of Machiavelli’s political thought to that of St. Thomas More. Hankins writes vividly about art, architecture, and literature, which are presumably what attracted him to the study of fifteenth-century Florence in the first place. The illustrations in this half of The Golden Thread are exceptionally well chosen, demonstrating a taste and discernment that are depressingly rare among American historians today. The chapters on ancient Greece and Rome are, by themselves, surely the best introduction to classical history currently available. Hankins is naturally just as insightful about the Renaissance. The most valuable sections, however, are the account of Byzantine history and the pages on the rise of Islam. These are masterly syntheses of material that would overwhelm a lesser writer. I speak as a failed Byzantinist: I know from bitter experience just how much hard work is required to achieve this clarity of exposition. For the most part, the first volume of The Golden Thread tells a familiar story, but tells it so well that even experienced historians will find it refreshing.

Guelzo, author of the second volume, begins with the Protestant Reformation and concludes at the end of the twentieth century, after America’s victory over the Soviet Union and communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War. He begins with a sympathetic account of Martin Luther and also demonstrates something of a soft spot for John Calvin. His aim for much of the book seems to be to give the reader a grounding in all the background materials needed for a full understanding of the writings of the Founding Fathers. Then, in the nineteenth century, Marx, Engels, Darwin, and Lamarck enter the scene, and civilization itself begins to disintegrate before the reader’s eyes. The final image in the book is a photograph of the New York skyline, featuring the twin towers of the World Trade Center. There is no explicit mention of September 11, 2001, since the history of the world from that day onward remains to be written.

Guelzo has written extensively about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, but he seems happiest when discussing early American intellectual history. He navigates the reader through philosophical and theological conflicts with enviable elegance; a particular highlight is his account of the influence of Pyrrhonism on Michel de Montaigne’s essays, a model of lucid exposition. His short essays on Bach, Monteverdi, and Vivaldi are also brilliantly handled. Yet the focus remains on America, as is perhaps evident from Guelzo’s excursus on Shakespeare, where the first illustration is a photograph of an 1870 sculpture of the bard by John Quincy Adams Ward of Ohio, an artist best known for his 1882 bronze statue of George Washington on Wall Street in New York.

Hankins and Guelzo have been friends for more than half a century; they have developed a productive harmony, even though their approaches to history are not entirely similar. Hankins appears to be quietly Catholic, while Guelzo is a former presbyter of the Reformed Episcopal Church. The differences in their theological and metaphysical positions have consequences in terms of how each man selects and presents his material. At least these friends are united in their commitment to an old-fashioned, American-style classical liberalism. Until recently, this form of liberalism was commonplace, if not dominant, among conservatives in the United States. But over the past decade it has come to seem almost quaint, with the perceived decline of so many public institutions and despair on all sides about the possibility of reforming any of them.

Guelzo and Hankins conceive of The Golden Thread as a restoration project, a reminder to their young readers that there is ample reason to feel proud of civilized societies—particularly their own. These two volumes serve as an essential element of civic education within a liberal democracy, by presenting vivid, lively introductions to all the historical and intellectual ingredients of the American foundation and showing examples throughout history of what healthy, orderly societies can accomplish.

It is not the authors’ fault that prominent voices on both the right and the left have latterly dismissed the idea that America is a liberal democracy. A few provocateurs even question whether liberal democracy remains a desirable system of government, or ever was one. Defenders of the United States Constitution these days have their work cut out for them.

The weakest passages in the first volume of The Golden Thread seem to have been written in a defensive crouch. Hankins sometimes responds preemptively to critics on subjects such as slavery in ancient Greece and Rome. Historical phenomena should never detract from anyone’s appreciation of Homer, or the art and architecture of the Parthenon, or classical Athenian democracy. All the same, modern academics often feel that their duty is less to teach the young than to scold and shame them and to discourage them from admiring great men and their achievements. Even so, it might be unwise for Hankins to take disingenuous criticisms so seriously. Why not simply ignore them?

The second volume of The Golden Thread runs into a different set of problems. Guelzo had the thankless task of assembling a complicated narrative that runs almost to the present day. There is a case to be made that European civilization disappeared in the Second World War, or even the First World War. Certainly, the second half of the twentieth century does not appear to have been a triumph for Western civilization, except in terms of technological innovations or advances in comfort for the citizens of rich nations. Even a triumphalist vision of American successes needs to account for the visible decline of so much of the United States over the past half-century. It might have been wiser to end The Golden Thread in the summer of 1914, or earlier, if only for the sake of a more coherent story.

These quibbles do nothing to detract from the magnitude of Guelzo and Hankins’s achievement. The Golden Thread is written throughout with a force and clarity that can only have arisen from decades of classroom experience. Yet these books are not intended merely to help teenagers pass exams in history. They are intended to preserve essential elements of our common cultural memory and transmit them to future generations. Without this memory, we would have no models of greatness to admire, study, or strive to equal—or surpass. In other words, we would have no civilization. Could the golden thread of the Western tradition ever break? We are closer to that nightmare than we want to imagine, and we should pray that it never comes true.