Monument of Unaging Intellect
If I could write a book like this, I would die a happy man. The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, is a massive undertaking in many ways—a mighty intellectual work and no less impressive an object of physical loveliness. The full project is a two-volume testament to the enduring power of the broadly and deeply cultivated mind.
A review of a few hundred words cannot do much to convey the book’s achievement, so I will have to pick my spots. Suffice it to say that what its authors, Professor Allen Guelzo and Professor James Hankins, have done is somehow to capture the richness and the splendor of the Western tradition of history, philosophy, politics, art, literature, science, and culture in a single place. The book will serve as a superb introduction, as well as a lasting companion of the mind, to generations of young (especially) as well as older students for many years to come. It could be read as a textbook, or even a reference work, but I think it is better approached as the story of a civilization and best appreciated in sequential increments: bit by grand, chronological bit.
I discuss here only the first volume, authored principally by Professor Hankins, which covers the periods of antiquity through Christendom, terminating in roughly the early sixteenth century. The volume is divided into ten chapters, beginning with the archaic and classical ages of Greece; proceeding through the Roman monarchy, republic, and empire; and concluding with the rise of Christianity, the era of political Christianity, the barbarian invasions, the high medieval period, and (naturally, in light of Hankins’s own unique expertise) the Renaissance. The last substantive portions of Volume I are devoted to Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More. Each chapter spans somewhere between one hundred and one hundred fifty pages, and the whole splendid beast weighs in at 1,258 pages (and a correspondingly hefty actual tonnage). So it covers a fair bit of ground.
Interspersed within the chapters are sets of chronologies, providing summary timelines of the periods to be covered, as well as biographies of notable figures: Themistocles, Socrates, Cicero, Jesus, Pope Sylvester II, and scores more. The book contains stunning illustrations, primary source documents presented in evocative and accessible fashion, and a host of striking maps reproducing original cartographic material. It is a feast for the eyes as well as the mind—a work that is itself a performative exercise in what it sets out to describe. Finally, the book connects the periods it discusses with what the authors call “threads,” “key dimensions of Western literature, philosophy, architecture, music, and spiritual insight” that give the work coherence as a comprehensive account of the Western tradition.
As an example of these threads, consider one from my own field, law. The final thread, “Magna Carta and the English Common Law,” explains in brief the difference between the more bottom-up, precedential system of the common law that arose in England and the more top-down continental legal system with its heavier reliance on Roman law and the exercise of authority by the powerful and the brilliant. After reading this thread, one can refer back with profit and a greater sense of illumination of the whole to some of the earlier discussions of law in Athenian courts and the conflict between elites and the people in the stripping of judicial power from the Areopagus; the “Twelve Tables,” Rome’s first written law code, which consolidated earlier customary law; the threads in Chapters 3 and 4 on the “Roman Magistrates and the Cursus Honorum”; the Augustan-era “Julian Laws,” designed to restore the mos maiorum and to stimulate the Roman population to pick up the pace of, well, repopulating within proper marital structures; the Mosaic covenant and the Ten Commandments; sixth-century Byzantine law in Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis, especially the “Digest,” which “taught the essence of legal reasoning to the West for well over a thousand years, and … is still taught to first-year students in many law schools today” (a footnote: would that this were true); and the Scholastic, “system building” theological and legal minds of the high medieval period.
The microconnections among these subparts are interspersed unobtrusively. They are not meant to suggest a unified, monolithic narrative, but instead complex thematic relationships that bind the project without reducing it to a simple just-so story. Nor is the book all high praise. Hankins relates the dishonorable as well as the honorable, the exploitative and inhumane together with the altruistic and high-minded, the dark and the light. What comes through overall is a lightness of touch, a depth of intellect at once airy as well as serious. Professor Hankins is learned, of course, perhaps as broadly learned as any human being living today, but one cannot help but sense that he is having a good time. One feels his pleasure flowing out of the pages. He is enjoying himself in telling the long tale of the West. For those of us who have had the good fortune to meet Professor Hankins, one has the impression in reading the book simply of listening to him merrily discuss over dinner and a bottle of wine any one of the hundreds of subjects in its pages.
Civilization
I want to probe some of the premises of a book like this. What is the cast of mind, and what the dispositional outlook, that would inspire a person to write it? I am of course assuming that such a person actually could write it. In addition, that is, to the requisite store of vast erudition, it seems to me that what Robert Nisbet once described as the “academic dogma” would be necessary. That dogma, Nisbet believed, is the unshakable and possibly unprovable conviction that knowledge and truth are precious—more precious than almost anything else—and that this precious thing is now threatened, perhaps as it has never been before. In the “Introduction,” the authors list four concepts around which the book is organized, the first of which is “civilization.” Civilization, they write, is a “complex system of customs, practices, and beliefs that bind a society or a family of societies together over long periods of time.” Civilization is the means by which human beings satisfy their “natural yearning after order, after beauty, after truth.” What interests Guelzo and Hankins is the civilization of “the West,” which begins in Greco-Roman antiquity and ends in Euro-American modernity, and which they invite their readers to admire, as fellow heirs to and participants in it. But what motivates them is something like the academic dogma. True knowledge about Western civilization is, for them, of enormous worth, even sacred.
They are aware, of course, that even to speak in these terms will provoke outrage in many quarters, because their claims run hard against the grain of fashionable academic and cultural investments. Indeed, those investments are now so powerful that one might wonder what all the fuss could possibly be about in a book like this. “Decentering” the West is hardly transgressive any longer. It is utterly conventional, bordering on the banal. This book should, in consequence, feel fresh, even thrilling, almost like (with apologies to Yeats) sailing to Byzantium for the first time.
Very few people today among the ostensibly educated will know even a fraction of the history in its pages. I know that I did not. The book issues them and its other prospective readers a challenge: “There is a knowledge out there, of which you are largely unaware, and that would enrich you and make you into something more than you are now. The first pathway into that larger world is here, in these pages. Do you wish to know?” It may be that many people would decline that offer, having either no interest in Western civilization or believing it to be altogether wicked: “recent generations of Westerners who believe that the West is uniquely evil have been taught nothing at all about it.” And yet even if many would not accept the challenge, I dare say that there may be more excitement for a book of this kind today than there has been for quite some years.
Tradition
Another of the book’s binding concepts is tradition, a subject I have also thought a little bit about, and so I found it striking to see its prominence in the authors’ catalogue of themes. Tradition is, strange to say, a hot topic today. For the authors, “the story of a tradition falls into four basic moments, for which we can use the Latin terms inventio, traditio, translatio, and renovatio.” Each of these moments—finding, passing down, transferral (as when the medieval University of Paris claimed that it had effectuated a “translatio studiorum” of the arts and sciences of ancient Rome), and revival or rejuvenation after a lapse of time and memory—has a role in stitching together and perpetuating a tradition.
Consider the university itself, where the authors of this book have spent most of their lives acquiring the learning that has made the work possible. As the authors write in the section of the book concerning the emergence of the university, “the universities came into existence only after 1190, in the context of the high medieval papacy’s concern with the eradication of heresy.” From their beginnings, universities have been institutions that demanded submission to hierarchy and authority. People in them were required to show the institution and the knowledge housed in it a proper attitude of deference and respect, as they received the university’s inheritance and passed it down. Tradition, as Josef Pieper has said, “is not a conversation among co-equals.” It is a handing-down, a one-way exchange, by the older and greater to the younger and lesser, because it is thought that this is the way the younger and lesser become older and greater.
A book like this, which so beautifully articulates and so ambitiously aspires to impart the Western tradition, confronts head-on a basic social problem. First, as a society, we lack a common sense of what is authoritatively good and authoritatively bad. Second, and perhaps worse, we sometimes even lack that sense as individuals. The very idea of individual submission to the higher, to the nobler, to the elevated, to what and who is superior to oneself, is regarded by many as anathema. Even institutions that are themselves dependent on this type of distinction drawing—especially the university and its once rigorous standards of discrimination for what was of high scholarly quality and what was not—have come to question the premises on which they were founded and have come under great strain through the pressure of the democratic egalitarian spirit so common in America.
The university was once not merely a meritocratic institution. It was an aristocratic institution, even as late as the Humboldtian period in Germany, whose universities are often taken to be the model for the contemporary American version. And yet submission to what is better than you are does not sit well in this country. There are some understandable reasons for this view, but there are significant costs as well. Submission to tradition allows people to transcend themselves, to become better or greater or somehow more than they could otherwise have been.
This book is a reflection not only of its authors’ considerable erudition but also of their steadfast submission, over decades of tireless work and study, to the university’s most salubrious, formative properties. What tradition does is to form us, and what the traditional university did was to form academics like the authors. University academics were molded by the enduring form of the university, a shaping that constrained their choices, structured them, but also empowered them and gave them the freedom to perform certain discrete functions. University professors were made into a particular kind of person. “We, too,” they write, “as people who aspire to civility—to goodness, truth, and beauty that our tradition, like a river, bears down to us from the civilizations of the past—have a duty to study and cherish what we have been given by our ancestors and to preserve it for our children.” It is plain to this grateful reader that the tradition of the university has deeply formed Professor Hankins and Professor Guelzo into the kind of people capable of bringing to fruition the Herculean labor of love and learning that is The Golden Thread.