If “The Golden Thread,” the new two-volume history of the Western tradition, landed with a thud, it’s a matter of sheer weight.
Altogether, about 12 pounds of book and 1,968 pages of text, “The Golden Thread” is a prodigious product — and an even more prodigious achievement.
At a time when Western civilization has been successfully “de-centered” in academia, and Western civ classes relegated to the dustbin of history, the book is a countercultural act. It is devoted to the idea that learning about our own civilization should take priority over learning about others, and that we won’t realize why it’s so vital to defend our tradition without first understanding it.
“It should come as no surprise,” the co-authors Allen Guelzo and James Hankins write in the introduction, “that the recent generations of Westerners who believe that the West is uniquely evil have been taught nothing at all about it.”
“The Golden Thread” is a textbook, but accessible to the general reader. Usually, such large surveys are too general to include compelling details and too conventional to make arresting conclusions — in other words, they fall down as books. In contrast, every page of “The Golden Thread” is highly readable and brims with insight.
On top of this, the work is lavishly illustrated with gorgeous maps and reproductions of art, and layered with timelines, excerpts from primary sources and mini-essays on key figures and trends. The book’s beauty as a physical object matches its emphasis on Western achievement, not least in the arts.
Hankins, a longtime Harvard professor who left the school over its abandonment of instruction in Western civilization, wrote the first volume, covering the ancient world and Christendom. The Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo picks up the baton in the second volume about the modern and contemporary West.
One theme of “The Golden Thread” is how deep our roots go. The Greeks provided us the ideal of self-government, the love of beauty, a belief in the importance of eloquence and a commitment to reason as a means to uncover truth. The Romans gave us the example of the republic and of a relatively well-realized system based on the rule of law.
The barbarians destroyed the Western Empire, but were converted to Roman Catholicism, and Europe came to share a robust cultural and educational tradition. Whatever the failings of the ensuing so-called confessional states, Christendom created the predicate for the modern understanding of human dignity and rights. “It was the fourteen centuries dominated by the Christian confessional state,” Hankins writes, “that impressed these noble human values on the conscience of the modern West.”
Accident and contingency are part of the tale. It was the failure of attempts to reconstitute versions of the Western Roman empire that made possible the system of competing European states that drove so much innovation and allowed the space for renewed experiments in republican government in Italian city-states and in Northern European free cities. It was the medieval papacy’s over-reaching that discredited theocracy and holy war in the West. It was the isolation of the European states bordering the Atlantic Ocean that prompted the exploration that utterly transformed the world, and created the predicate for the eventual ascendancy of Britain and the United States.
The goal is nothing less than a revival of instruction in Western Civ, a project perhaps worthy of the great 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch, who did so much to renew interest in classical culture.
With this splendid book, Hankins and Guelzo have done more than their part.
Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.
