Students must come to know and love their own tradition.
In the 1980s Jesse Jackson helped banish “Western Civ” from Stanford with a silly chant. Many colleges and universities that had not already done so followed suit.
But in the classical counterrevolution of the 21st century, Western civilization is back. The Great Books, long thought a relic of Mortimer Adler’s Cold War-era salesmanship, now guide the curriculum at many of the over 1,000 classical schools that have been founded over the past few decades, dozens of which are publicly funded charter schools. A new Great Books college sprouts up every year or so. Dead languages like Latin seem to be very much alive again.
Whether it is humanism, the medieval liberal arts, or even just memes about the Roman Empire, it turns out that Western Civ did indeed have to go—big.
The 21st-century classical counterrevolutionaries should not get high on their own supply, though. If their project ends up being a retread of the Mortimer Adler-Robert Hutchins show, they may be greeted by an even deeper abyss of failure than the ostracism Western Civ faced in the name of diversity that occurred with the rise of racial and gender studies.
Avoiding such a future will require the efforts of everyone involved—teachers, students, parents, professors, policymakers, and activists. One of their many tasks involves apologetics, that is, giving a defense of what they are doing. Central to this project is answering a simple-seeming question: What do you mean by Western civilization? It seems obvious enough: Greece, Rome, Christianity, Europe, the New World. The history, thinking, and art stretching from Plato to NATO.
But if you’re going to base an educational system around this claim, your skeptics will have some questions:
- You include Dostoevsky and Tolstoy on your list even though Russia is obviously in the East, so what about the literature of the Islamic Golden Age? Their philosophers were reading Aristotle before Thomas Aquinas was.
- The Bible came from the Near East, not Europe. Will you then include more from the Near East—for example, Akkadian literature like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enūma Eliš? And if so, why not the Sumerians like Enheduanna and Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta? If you’re willing to do those, why not the Middle Egyptian language too? While we’re at it, let’s include all the Afro-Asiatic languages!
- On what grounds do you exclude the study of Chinese literature and history? Much of what Confucius says aligns with the greatest Western philosophers of both ancient and modern times. After all, if what you’re after is “the best that has been thought and said,” you shouldn’t narrow your study on arbitrary geographic grounds.
Maybe Western civilization is not so much a place or a people, but more of a mindset. Yes: Western civilization—just like America!—is an idea.
Suddenly, Western Civ has been boiled down to such a gassy, impermanent substance that a chant like “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” will turn out to be forceful enough to once again blow it away on a breeze, where it will dissipate forever.
This all indicates that Western civilization needs to be defended from a tendency toward extreme abstraction. Instead, it must be understood not only as a geographic but also as a concrete political, linguistic, and cultural reality—one that is worth handing down to students today.
Romanitas
To see how concrete Western civilization really is, it helps to look at some of the giants of civilization it produced. Consider, for example, one of the most paradigmatic of Western figures: Christopher Columbus. Aside, perhaps, from Julius Caesar, no mortal man did so much to determine the shape of Western civilization as Columbus did.
Columbus was a Genoese sailor, flying the flag of the Spanish Crown. His discovery of the New World prompted Pope Alexander VI, sovereign of the Papal States and head of the Catholic Church, to divide the New World between Spain and another kingdom, Portugal. They were later joined by England, France, the Netherlands, and others in colonizing and disputing the territory of the New World. Some of these states repudiated the supremacy of the papal throne in the century following Columbus’s discovery. All of them, however, had emerged from within the matrix of Latin Christendom.
Indeed, Protestantism is one of the most monumental creations of Latin Christendom. And Latin Christendom is itself the most monumental creation of the Roman Empire.
Of course, the 21st-century West, Latin Christendom, and the Roman Empire are not coterminous. For example, the southern littoral of the Roman Empire was lost to Christendom—and thus from Western civilization—in the Arab invasion. Meanwhile, much was gained in the north by the Christianization (that is, the Latinization) of the Germanic and Celtic peoples. The reconquista of Spain from the Moors—completed in the same year as Columbus’s voyage—restored Roman land to Christendom. And more importantly, the colonization of the New World by the states of Latin Christendom added lands previously only dreamt of by poets.
The city of Rome is the political reality uniting all of Western civilization, however fraught the relationship. For the West, there is no “Second Rome.” And the political unity emanating from Roma aeterna presupposes a linguistic unity, one whose origin is older than Rome herself: the Latin language.
Thousands of years ago, Latin was the tongue of a group of obscure hill-dwellers in the middle of the Italian peninsula. It then spread across the Mediterranean. After fissiparating into the endless varieties of Romanz, Latin spawned the national languages of most of Western Europe. That is how its genetic material made its way with Columbus to the New World, where it spread across an even more expansive landmass than it had before.
Not all the languages of Western civilization are Roman in origin, of course. The Germanic and Celtic language subfamilies are the other two great Western branches of Indo-European, but even they learned many words from Latin (in the case of English, the majority of its words). This should not be overstated, though. Just as Latin predated Rome, so an earlier linguistic unity predates the real, but circumscribed, Latinate unity of the West. It is to this earlier linguistic unity that the epithet “Western” most aptly applies.
Quite simply, Western civilization can be understood as that cultural complex wherein the Indo-European languages found their furthest westward spread: the territory of the Italic, Germanic, and Celtic languages.
Frontier and Cosmopolis
When Columbus crossed the Atlantic, he discovered something new, though he was also doing something very old. Where the Indo-Europeans of prehistory had crossed the steppe and colonized Europe, Columbus crossed the open steppe of the sea and colonized the New World. Western civilization is a people with a frontier, and also tends to be a piratical people as Columbus was.
Wherever the Indo-Europeans went, they brought a noble, even barbaric, warrior culture. So often it was from their surroundings that they acquired the trappings of civilization. They did not invent writing. They were not the first to build cities or organize empires. But like Westerners today, they freely borrowed from their neighbors, incorporated what they took, and synthesized it all into a new, organic reality.
This is evident in the two most decisive personages in Western civilization we have excluded so far: Homer and Jesus, or to speak more generally, the Hellenic and the Hebrew. In the popular view, the Hellenic and the Hebrew are the two constitutive streams of Western civilization, and Rome often gets downgraded by comparison. We wish to foreground Rome as the true founder of Western civilization. Obviously, the Hebrew and the Hellenic—Homer and Jesus—left profound marks on the West. But, importantly, they were ultimately mediated to the West via Rome. This is why we must speak of a broader cosmopolitan cultural unity that also contributes to defining Western civilization.
Of the two, Homer and the Greeks have the better claim to be the fountainhead of Western civilization. Homer is the common heritage of the Roman West and Byzantine East, but not himself the unique origin of a distinctly Western civilization. In fact, the Greek language’s virtual disappearance from Western Europe for nearly a millennium until the 1397 arrival of Manuel Chrysoloras in Florence is proof-positive of this thesis. Greek disappeared from the West for almost a thousand years. The West did not.
Unlike Homer, Jesus lived within Western civilization in a manner of speaking: he was a subject of Caesar in Rome. But the same power that destroyed the Temple and drove the Jews out of Jerusalem destroyed his body and drove his followers to the four corners of the empire. Yet within a few centuries, his body provided the raison d’état first for the emperor in Rome, and later for the sovereigns of Europe. Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity did create Western civilization, along with all other parts of the cosmos. However, as the incarnate Nazarene, Jesus transformed it but didn’t found it.
For you can be Christian and non-Western (the venerable churches of the East are eloquent testimony to this). The conversion of Armenia preceded that of Constantine, and while Armenia may be European, it is obviously not Western. It is the work ultimately of Providence that it is now hard to imagine the West without Christianity.
The West and the Rest
In determining what counts as Western civilization, then, these three sources of unity should be the ruling criteria: the political relation to Rome, the linguistic link to Latin and the other Western Indo-European languages, and the tendency of the West to appropriate the work of outsiders and synthesize it into its own broader cultural cosmopolis. These criteria should act as guides not merely for assessing why to include the Bible but not Akkadian literature within the parameters of Western civilization, but also as signposts for making curricular decisions more generally.
An education in Western civilization will put the history of Rome—as well as its indispensable predecessor in Greece and its successors in Europe—at the forefront of its instruction in history and literature. Shoving aside the utilitarian concern that students learn Spanish “for their careers,” the Latin language will once again enjoy pride of place as the medium of linguistic unity in the West. And students will possess the confidence to appropriate what is noble and true from other cultures—but only if they first come to know and love their own tradition, the sacred fire carried across steppe and sea by the great horsemen, pioneers, and explorers who preceded them.
