Book Review: From Plato to NATO
by A. Joseph Lynch - April 27, 2016
by A. Joseph Lynch - April 27, 2016
Since the beginning of Christianity, orientation in communal prayer has always faced east. To the east is the rising sun, a cosmic image of the Risen Son and light of the world. It is to the east – “towards the Lord” – that Christians pray in eschatological hope of the return of their King. To face west, however, was to become disoriented and face evil. It is from the west that darkness and death come. Before baptism, Christians faced the west in order to renounce Satan, his works, and his empty promises, then turn to the east towards the Lord to profess faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Today there is a civilization whose name may not have been chosen to reflect this Christian cosmic symbolism but whose actions seem increasingly of death and darkness. The idea of “Western Civilization” is indeed a modern one. Its name is derived from the Western Alliances of British-American forces in the two World Wars. Today “the West” is associated with the spread of unlimited individual rights, abortion, sexual disorientation, and secular-bureaucratic atheism. One hundred years ago, “the West” carried with it the racist overtones of the white, Caucasian-Aryan who moved continuously westward in conquest of lesser races across Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific.
In his book, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and its Opponents, author David Gress does not offer another name for the civilization called “the West” but does take issue with the liberal story surrounding “Western Civilization” in the classroom. Gress calls this story, a story that begins with Plato and ends with the western alliance of NATO, “the Grand Narrative”. The purpose of the Grand Narrative was not so much to teach history but rather to form an identity. Just as Christianity is rooted in the biblical narrative, so the liberal project sought to ground its own story on freedom, equality, secularism, individual rights, and liberal democracy by retelling history in terms of a progressing advance of these ideals.
Gress writes: “The liberal Grand Narrative produced a Western identity that was modern, secular, and liberal and that rested on an imaginary direct line connecting the modern West to the ancient Greeks, an imaginary line from Plato to NATO, in which everything in between formed an orderly sequence culminating in liberal modernity.”
The “imaginary line” within the Grand Narrative is held together by what Gress calls “Magic Moments” in history. They are events we are all rather familiar with: the birth of philosophy, democracy in Athens, the Roman Republic, the Magna Carta, the Reformation, the rise of science, and modern rights. Gress argues that, while these moments may seem to lead one from the other, the Grand Narrative does not explain the historical context in which these events took place, nor does it adequately account for periods of regression. As Gress puts it: “…as a story with a goal, the modern liberal West, its authors chose and interpreted its material in terms of how the material served that goal, and in terms of the past itself. The episodes of the Grand Narrative appeared because the narrative needed them to build its image of the West, and not in their own concrete reality.”
Most importantly, Gress believes our civilization is fundamentally rooted in Christianity and the German warrior ethos – both of which have been downplayed in our history classrooms. Here Gress speaks of a competition between what he calls the “Old West” and the “New West”. While advocates of the “New West” are those who created or taught the Grand Narrative, Gress would consider himself a proponent of the “Old West” or the “Old Western Synthesis” – a coming together of the classical world with the Christian faith and a Germanic culture. Christendom may have been the first fruits of this synthesis, but neither we nor Gress would argue that the medieval model was its end goal. The synthesis was far more dynamic than proponents of the “New West” give credit. Indeed, Gress writes that our civilization “goes off its rails if it divorces itself from its Old origins.” We must forcefully reject the notion that this old synthesis is somehow opposed to the sciences or to democracy. When a cursory look at a world map reveals how Christian the world is, what we must begin to argue for is neither “Western Civilization” nor a return to medieval Christendom, but rather Christian Civilization. Although Gress does not expressly make this argument, his book lays the foundation for such an argument.
The traditional or conservative reader will be surprised to discover that the Grand Narrative was supported through the Great Books program from the University of Chicago along with the writings of Will Durant. Indeed, anyone who has taken a “Western Civ” course in college owes the origin of such courses to the creators of the Grand Narrative. Here the Bible instead of the defining narrative of Christian nations becomes a few selections as sacred literature. As immigration to the US reached its height in the early twentieth century, and soldiers returned from world wars, the US government asked universities to help forge a liberal identity among its populace, and the Grand Narrative took off with much success. The 1960s and 1970s, however, were not good years for the Grand Narrative. In the wake of the Vietnam War and the sexual revolution, the Grand Narrative as told by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) fell out of favor in college classrooms. “Magic Moments” turned into the “Original Sins” of Western Civilization. Nevertheless, the idea of “the West” received new life following the defeat of Soviets in the Cold War. Abortion on demand, celebrations of homosexuality, atheist-secularism, and radical autonomy have now been added to “the West’s” crusade for freedom, equality, individual rights, and liberal democracy. It is in these “values” that the West has regained its sense of universal mission to humanity in the twenty-first century.
But what “the West” calls human rights, Pope Francis has called “ideological colonization.” David Gress argues that the new mission is rooted neither in the civilization’s intellectual nor its institutional history. Gress notes it is also bad geography. In his consideration of the geographic dimensions of “the West” Gress writes that the imaginary line dividing east from west has moved steadily westward in history. Where “east” referred to Persia in antiquity, the line was later moved to divide the two halves of the late Roman Empire into the medieval Byzantine and the Germanic Kingdoms. Samuel Huntington would later draw the line in terms of “the West” versus the Orthodox Christian east. We might add here to Gress and argue that, if we seek the flowering of the old synthesis in Christian civilization, then the last division we need is one that separates the two lungs of the Christian body from one another. The Iron Curtain has come down. We must not erect a new ideological barricade in its place.
Gress laments the derivative way in which the Grand Narrative treated religion, valuable only insofar as it spoke in favor of human dignity, rights, and equality. If Christianity were given any positive treatment, it would only be insofar as it supported the soft virtues of kindness and generosity and defending the rights of individuals. Proponents of the Grand Narrative generally treated religion as a hindrance to progress and therefore could not see Christianity’s contribution to the work of the Greeks and Romans. For the creators of the Grand Narrative, Greece gave the light of reason and Rome the rule of law while Christianity helped bring about the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages. The Grand Narrative failed to include the marriage of Greek philosophy with theology, the progeny of which was a deeper understanding of the Trinity and man made in the image of the Trinitarian God. Gress further notes the way in which the Grand Narrative failed to connect its great ideas to the institutions which gave them life and passed them on. Thus it was incapable of seeing Roman law living on and further developing in canon law and monastic rules. Nor could it recognize the fact that papal elections represent the oldest electoral process still in use today.
If Christianity was overlooked in the Grand Narrative, the Germanic contribution to the “Old Western Synthesis” has been forgotten altogether. For Gress, “the West” is “truly defined” by “the ancient philosopher, the Christian priest, and the Germanic warrior.” The Germanic contribution to “the West” was popular for many years, especially among the WASPs. It was even held by some that the Germano-Aryan-Caucasian warrior must have comprised the majority if Greeks and Romans and that marriages with “lesser races” brought about a loss of martial vigor and decline. The early Grand Narrative also cited Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote that the German chief and his warriors would gather in grand assemblies to discuss and vote on important matters. Thus from the Germans come both the strong warrior and the democratic statesman. Germanic tribes forged the kingdoms succeeding Rome, of which Angles and Saxons crossed the English Channel to forge a Germanic kingdom in Britain. Flash forward to the sixteenth century and we find a German, Martin Luther, along with German princes, establishing Protestantism which would spread across much of Europe and North America via the British colonies. Leaders of the American republic, from Jefferson to Roosevelt, readily recognized the Germanic contribution.
The Germanic contribution fell out of favor long before the liberal, postwar Grand Narrative was rejected in the social movements of the 1960s. Wars seen as acts of barbaric German aggression discredited any historic Germanic contribution to “Western” Civilization. The WASP narrative remained, but after World War II, it lost its emphasis on the German and the Aryan.
We agree with Gress that we must not allow the world wars to overshadow the Germanic contribution to what we would call Christian Civilization. We need not follow the path of the WASPs or the racists in order to rehabilitate the Germans. Though it may not be popular to speak of the German warrior as a contribution to the Greco-Roman-Christian synthesis, it is from the German kingdoms and their bands of kings and companions that the Christian nations would emerge. Indeed, we can see in the warrior comitatus (companions) of the king a parallel structure to priests and their bishops - priests, bishops, and citizen soldiers.
To close here are some selections praising the Germanic contribution and questioning the icon of the West:
"Montesquieu took the aristocratic doctrine of [Germanic] freedom and turned it into a liberal doctrine of general republican liberty under law... 'The [Germans], in conquering the Roman Empire, everywhere founded monarch and liberty.' Before the conquest, the inhabitants of the empire lived in misery... The Germanic invasions brought seeds of freedom, because the conquerors established monarchies based on ordered and law-governed hierarchies of nobility, security of ownership of land, and responsible administration that encouraged agriculture, commerce, and useful arts. Montesquieu's great insight... was that freedom was not opposed to order, but dependent on it. 'The political liberty of a citizen is that tranquility of spirit which stems from the idea that each has of his own safety, and in order to enjoy this liberty, the government must be such that a citizen does not have to fear another citizen.' The type of government that secured such freedom was one in which the legislative and executive powers were divided, and which consisted of representatives of the citizenry. The origins of divided, representative government were to be found, so he concluded, not in Greece or Rome, but among the Germans."
"The Enlightenment model of the Germans.... believed that the Germanic tribes contributed liberty to the West and little else... The Germanic contribution to the West was broader, richer, more significant, and more ambiguous than the model suggested... they did not bring only liberty; they also brought... the values of the warrior... The fact of the matter was that the Germanic freedoms were not distinct from the warrior ethos, something that could be daintily removed by Enlightenment ideals and placed at the head of the West as an alternative to the Christian story. Germanic freedom and the heroic ethos were two aspects of the same thing. The true early history of the Western synthesis was the story of how the Germanic warlike love of liberty married the Christian ethic of sacrifice, producing what amounted to a Western doctrine of holy war."
"By the third century [of Church history], Christians were praying for the pagan emperor and serving in his armies, although war itself was at best morally neutral... Christian theologians [in late antiquity and the early middle ages] developed the idea of militia, strenuous effort on behalf of some goal beyond itself. One could exercise militia Dei, effort for God's sake, and militia saecularis, efforts on behalf of worldly things such as king or glory. Until the tenth century, Christian doctrine in the West kept the two distinct... [During the Viking attacks of the ninth and tenth centuries] monastic writers began comparing monastic effort... [to] the martial valor of knights. Knights were assimilated to monks and given almost sacred status as defenders of the church and as persons devoting themselves to noble purposes greater than themselves... [This] produced a coherent, consistent doctrine of battle that gave it moral standing close to that of the priesthood, at the summit of social prestige. The warrior, moreover, was bound by a code of conduct that again assimilated him to the priest: to protect the weak and in particular the church. In the words of Christopher Dawson... 'the ancient barbarian motive of personal loyalty to the war leader was reinforced by higher religious motives, so that the knight finally becomes a consecrated person, pledged not only to be faithful to his lord, but to be the defender of the Church, the widow, and the orphan.' The warrior and his banner were blessed in church before he set out; his task was hallowed and drawn into the embrace of Christian doctrine. The result was the priest-warrior symbiosis of the crusader."
Today there is a civilization whose name may not have been chosen to reflect this Christian cosmic symbolism but whose actions seem increasingly of death and darkness. The idea of “Western Civilization” is indeed a modern one. Its name is derived from the Western Alliances of British-American forces in the two World Wars. Today “the West” is associated with the spread of unlimited individual rights, abortion, sexual disorientation, and secular-bureaucratic atheism. One hundred years ago, “the West” carried with it the racist overtones of the white, Caucasian-Aryan who moved continuously westward in conquest of lesser races across Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific.
In his book, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and its Opponents, author David Gress does not offer another name for the civilization called “the West” but does take issue with the liberal story surrounding “Western Civilization” in the classroom. Gress calls this story, a story that begins with Plato and ends with the western alliance of NATO, “the Grand Narrative”. The purpose of the Grand Narrative was not so much to teach history but rather to form an identity. Just as Christianity is rooted in the biblical narrative, so the liberal project sought to ground its own story on freedom, equality, secularism, individual rights, and liberal democracy by retelling history in terms of a progressing advance of these ideals.
Gress writes: “The liberal Grand Narrative produced a Western identity that was modern, secular, and liberal and that rested on an imaginary direct line connecting the modern West to the ancient Greeks, an imaginary line from Plato to NATO, in which everything in between formed an orderly sequence culminating in liberal modernity.”
The “imaginary line” within the Grand Narrative is held together by what Gress calls “Magic Moments” in history. They are events we are all rather familiar with: the birth of philosophy, democracy in Athens, the Roman Republic, the Magna Carta, the Reformation, the rise of science, and modern rights. Gress argues that, while these moments may seem to lead one from the other, the Grand Narrative does not explain the historical context in which these events took place, nor does it adequately account for periods of regression. As Gress puts it: “…as a story with a goal, the modern liberal West, its authors chose and interpreted its material in terms of how the material served that goal, and in terms of the past itself. The episodes of the Grand Narrative appeared because the narrative needed them to build its image of the West, and not in their own concrete reality.”
Most importantly, Gress believes our civilization is fundamentally rooted in Christianity and the German warrior ethos – both of which have been downplayed in our history classrooms. Here Gress speaks of a competition between what he calls the “Old West” and the “New West”. While advocates of the “New West” are those who created or taught the Grand Narrative, Gress would consider himself a proponent of the “Old West” or the “Old Western Synthesis” – a coming together of the classical world with the Christian faith and a Germanic culture. Christendom may have been the first fruits of this synthesis, but neither we nor Gress would argue that the medieval model was its end goal. The synthesis was far more dynamic than proponents of the “New West” give credit. Indeed, Gress writes that our civilization “goes off its rails if it divorces itself from its Old origins.” We must forcefully reject the notion that this old synthesis is somehow opposed to the sciences or to democracy. When a cursory look at a world map reveals how Christian the world is, what we must begin to argue for is neither “Western Civilization” nor a return to medieval Christendom, but rather Christian Civilization. Although Gress does not expressly make this argument, his book lays the foundation for such an argument.
The traditional or conservative reader will be surprised to discover that the Grand Narrative was supported through the Great Books program from the University of Chicago along with the writings of Will Durant. Indeed, anyone who has taken a “Western Civ” course in college owes the origin of such courses to the creators of the Grand Narrative. Here the Bible instead of the defining narrative of Christian nations becomes a few selections as sacred literature. As immigration to the US reached its height in the early twentieth century, and soldiers returned from world wars, the US government asked universities to help forge a liberal identity among its populace, and the Grand Narrative took off with much success. The 1960s and 1970s, however, were not good years for the Grand Narrative. In the wake of the Vietnam War and the sexual revolution, the Grand Narrative as told by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) fell out of favor in college classrooms. “Magic Moments” turned into the “Original Sins” of Western Civilization. Nevertheless, the idea of “the West” received new life following the defeat of Soviets in the Cold War. Abortion on demand, celebrations of homosexuality, atheist-secularism, and radical autonomy have now been added to “the West’s” crusade for freedom, equality, individual rights, and liberal democracy. It is in these “values” that the West has regained its sense of universal mission to humanity in the twenty-first century.
But what “the West” calls human rights, Pope Francis has called “ideological colonization.” David Gress argues that the new mission is rooted neither in the civilization’s intellectual nor its institutional history. Gress notes it is also bad geography. In his consideration of the geographic dimensions of “the West” Gress writes that the imaginary line dividing east from west has moved steadily westward in history. Where “east” referred to Persia in antiquity, the line was later moved to divide the two halves of the late Roman Empire into the medieval Byzantine and the Germanic Kingdoms. Samuel Huntington would later draw the line in terms of “the West” versus the Orthodox Christian east. We might add here to Gress and argue that, if we seek the flowering of the old synthesis in Christian civilization, then the last division we need is one that separates the two lungs of the Christian body from one another. The Iron Curtain has come down. We must not erect a new ideological barricade in its place.
Gress laments the derivative way in which the Grand Narrative treated religion, valuable only insofar as it spoke in favor of human dignity, rights, and equality. If Christianity were given any positive treatment, it would only be insofar as it supported the soft virtues of kindness and generosity and defending the rights of individuals. Proponents of the Grand Narrative generally treated religion as a hindrance to progress and therefore could not see Christianity’s contribution to the work of the Greeks and Romans. For the creators of the Grand Narrative, Greece gave the light of reason and Rome the rule of law while Christianity helped bring about the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages. The Grand Narrative failed to include the marriage of Greek philosophy with theology, the progeny of which was a deeper understanding of the Trinity and man made in the image of the Trinitarian God. Gress further notes the way in which the Grand Narrative failed to connect its great ideas to the institutions which gave them life and passed them on. Thus it was incapable of seeing Roman law living on and further developing in canon law and monastic rules. Nor could it recognize the fact that papal elections represent the oldest electoral process still in use today.
If Christianity was overlooked in the Grand Narrative, the Germanic contribution to the “Old Western Synthesis” has been forgotten altogether. For Gress, “the West” is “truly defined” by “the ancient philosopher, the Christian priest, and the Germanic warrior.” The Germanic contribution to “the West” was popular for many years, especially among the WASPs. It was even held by some that the Germano-Aryan-Caucasian warrior must have comprised the majority if Greeks and Romans and that marriages with “lesser races” brought about a loss of martial vigor and decline. The early Grand Narrative also cited Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote that the German chief and his warriors would gather in grand assemblies to discuss and vote on important matters. Thus from the Germans come both the strong warrior and the democratic statesman. Germanic tribes forged the kingdoms succeeding Rome, of which Angles and Saxons crossed the English Channel to forge a Germanic kingdom in Britain. Flash forward to the sixteenth century and we find a German, Martin Luther, along with German princes, establishing Protestantism which would spread across much of Europe and North America via the British colonies. Leaders of the American republic, from Jefferson to Roosevelt, readily recognized the Germanic contribution.
The Germanic contribution fell out of favor long before the liberal, postwar Grand Narrative was rejected in the social movements of the 1960s. Wars seen as acts of barbaric German aggression discredited any historic Germanic contribution to “Western” Civilization. The WASP narrative remained, but after World War II, it lost its emphasis on the German and the Aryan.
We agree with Gress that we must not allow the world wars to overshadow the Germanic contribution to what we would call Christian Civilization. We need not follow the path of the WASPs or the racists in order to rehabilitate the Germans. Though it may not be popular to speak of the German warrior as a contribution to the Greco-Roman-Christian synthesis, it is from the German kingdoms and their bands of kings and companions that the Christian nations would emerge. Indeed, we can see in the warrior comitatus (companions) of the king a parallel structure to priests and their bishops - priests, bishops, and citizen soldiers.
To close here are some selections praising the Germanic contribution and questioning the icon of the West:
"Montesquieu took the aristocratic doctrine of [Germanic] freedom and turned it into a liberal doctrine of general republican liberty under law... 'The [Germans], in conquering the Roman Empire, everywhere founded monarch and liberty.' Before the conquest, the inhabitants of the empire lived in misery... The Germanic invasions brought seeds of freedom, because the conquerors established monarchies based on ordered and law-governed hierarchies of nobility, security of ownership of land, and responsible administration that encouraged agriculture, commerce, and useful arts. Montesquieu's great insight... was that freedom was not opposed to order, but dependent on it. 'The political liberty of a citizen is that tranquility of spirit which stems from the idea that each has of his own safety, and in order to enjoy this liberty, the government must be such that a citizen does not have to fear another citizen.' The type of government that secured such freedom was one in which the legislative and executive powers were divided, and which consisted of representatives of the citizenry. The origins of divided, representative government were to be found, so he concluded, not in Greece or Rome, but among the Germans."
"The Enlightenment model of the Germans.... believed that the Germanic tribes contributed liberty to the West and little else... The Germanic contribution to the West was broader, richer, more significant, and more ambiguous than the model suggested... they did not bring only liberty; they also brought... the values of the warrior... The fact of the matter was that the Germanic freedoms were not distinct from the warrior ethos, something that could be daintily removed by Enlightenment ideals and placed at the head of the West as an alternative to the Christian story. Germanic freedom and the heroic ethos were two aspects of the same thing. The true early history of the Western synthesis was the story of how the Germanic warlike love of liberty married the Christian ethic of sacrifice, producing what amounted to a Western doctrine of holy war."
"By the third century [of Church history], Christians were praying for the pagan emperor and serving in his armies, although war itself was at best morally neutral... Christian theologians [in late antiquity and the early middle ages] developed the idea of militia, strenuous effort on behalf of some goal beyond itself. One could exercise militia Dei, effort for God's sake, and militia saecularis, efforts on behalf of worldly things such as king or glory. Until the tenth century, Christian doctrine in the West kept the two distinct... [During the Viking attacks of the ninth and tenth centuries] monastic writers began comparing monastic effort... [to] the martial valor of knights. Knights were assimilated to monks and given almost sacred status as defenders of the church and as persons devoting themselves to noble purposes greater than themselves... [This] produced a coherent, consistent doctrine of battle that gave it moral standing close to that of the priesthood, at the summit of social prestige. The warrior, moreover, was bound by a code of conduct that again assimilated him to the priest: to protect the weak and in particular the church. In the words of Christopher Dawson... 'the ancient barbarian motive of personal loyalty to the war leader was reinforced by higher religious motives, so that the knight finally becomes a consecrated person, pledged not only to be faithful to his lord, but to be the defender of the Church, the widow, and the orphan.' The warrior and his banner were blessed in church before he set out; his task was hallowed and drawn into the embrace of Christian doctrine. The result was the priest-warrior symbiosis of the crusader."
A. Joseph Lynch holds a Master’s degree in theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville. He works for a Catholic parish directing RCIA, Adult Education, and Confirmation programs.