We like to tell ourselves that the small decisions we make are inconsequential, and that a single compromise costs nothing and changes nothing. But they aren’t inconsequential. Each concession, however small it may seem, begins to reorient the will and weakens us until we become something we no longer recognize.

Building on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologiae that repeated acts generate dispositions in the soul. No man, he argues, becomes courageous by a single act of bravery, and no man becomes a coward by a single retreat. The habit of surrendering to the lesser renders one unwilling — or rather, incapable — of resisting the greater, and in time, this process fundamentally alters the very character of the man.

For this reason, a man becomes what he repeatedly chooses and this truth, which holds for individuals, holds with even greater force for the collective.

Civilizations rarely collapse as a result of one dramatic defeat, but gradually, through innumerable concessions made along the way. What a civilization once condemned it eventually tolerates; what it tolerates it soon normalizes; and what it normalizes it finally defends as a right until it becomes unrecognisable to the civilization that once condemned it.

These surrenders are not confined to the battlefield only.

As a civilization, we surrender when we allow the traditions and rituals of our religion to be abandoned. We surrender when we allow our ancestors and our heroes to be defamed. And finally, we surrender when we allow our language, our history, and our culture to be replaced.

You must understand that the smallest surrenders, once accumulated, fundamentally alter us until a devastating defeat becomes inevitable because we no longer have the will to defend what we once believed and resist what we once condemned.

This is why we must resist.

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The Historical Precedent

Over the course of centuries, Rome made a series of seemingly minor concessions that gradually undermined the discipline that made it invincible. Their precarious relationship with the Germanic tribes along the Rhine and Danube is the clearest illustration of this phenomenon.

At first, Rome permitted small groups of barbarian foederati to settle just beyond its frontiers, believing they could be managed as buffer states against more hostile tribes deeper in the Germanic interior and those from the Eurasian Steppe. This represented a stark but pragmatic concession from Rome’s traditional policy of maintaining hard, militarized borders. But once the empire grew accustomed to outsourcing the stability and safety of their frontier, it became easier to allow these very same barbarians to cross the pomerium — Rome’s sacred boundary — and settle within Roman territory, provided they acknowledged imperial authority.

Once this concession was normalized, the next more transgressive concession was more palpable and more consequential. Rome began recruiting these same Germanic tribes as auxiliaries in her legions, then later as regular soldiers to compensate for its declining native manpower. So, what began as a temporary measure became habitual. The legions — once the embodiment of Roman discipline and power — were increasingly filled with men whose loyalty was to their tribal leaders rather than to the Eternal City itself.

By the fifth century, Rome had become almost entirely dependent on these federated armies that when crises struck, they lacked both the will and the capacity to reassert control over the people it governed. In 410 AD, Alaric’s Visigoth army — themselves former foederati — marched on Rome and then sacked the city in a cataclysmic event from which Western empire never truly recovered.

We might ask, why couldn’t the Romans defend their city?

The truth is that the Romans were defeated the moment they surrendered their legions — the result of countless individual concessions made along the way.

The countless fathers who spared their sons from the disciplines of the legion, and instead, gave them a life of luxury.

The countless mothers who allowed their households to abandon traditional Roman virtue to the novelty of foreign fashions and customs.

The countless sons who preferred the entertainments of the amphitheater to their civic obligations.

The countless daughters who neglected the solemn religious rites that bound household and empire.

But this is not a truth confined to the pages of history, but rather, a reality we face today. Granted, we do not face the imminent violence of Germanic tribes at our gates. Our enemy is more subtle, more patient, and far more insidious — yet its aim is the same: to weaken our resolve, to erode our foundations, and ultimately to destroy our cities.

The Modern Barbarian

You must understand that unless you have an incredibly disciplined will and a strong philosophical and moral foundation, close proximity to subversive people or even entertaining subversive ideas will fundamentally alter who you are and how you perceive the world.

The harsh reality is that you are not the exception, but the rule.

Just as Rome was fundamentally altered by the ideas and habits it permitted within its sacred boundaries, we too are reformed by the ideas we allow into our cultural bloodstream.

Marxism is a radical ideology that is diametrically opposed to the Christian religion and Western Civilization itself. It is built on the philosophical premise that the human being — and by extension, human history — is defined primarily by class warfare, the abolition of private property is necessary for true liberation, that truth and morality are influenced by and subordinate to material conditions, and that this progress can only be achieved through the systematic dismantling of traditional Western cultural and religious institutions that bind us to our past.

Long ago, Marxists realized that Western Civilization could not be overthrown by frontal military or political assault. Its Greco-Roman foundations, Christianity faith, and ideas of individuality and liberty were too deep and too resilient to be overcome by force. So they shifted from revolution to infiltration, directing their efforts to social, cultural, political, and artistic subversion which they referred to as a process of demoralization and destabilization with the ultimate aim of destruction.

This victory, they believed, would be brought about by incremental elite-capture of institutions, education, and the media and entertainment industry.

Marxist understood the power of myth and symbols, the stories a people tells itself, the art it produces, and the heroes it venerates. If these could be gradually reinterpreted and subverted, then Western Civilization would lose its soul and the will to defend itself.

But it’s not that simple and straightforward. First, you are conditioned to tolerate your heroes being critiqued in academia, and then attacked openly in the arts and the public discourse. Eventually, it becomes a right to tear down the statues of our heroes and rewrite the pages of our history as an act of reparation against the so-called sins of the past.

Unlike the barbarians of old, Marxists understood that you don’t need to besiege a city to destroy it. If you can undermine the confidence of the men and women defending its walls, if you can make them hate their history, their culture, their ancestors, and their religion, they will open the gates and allow you to destroy the city themselves.

The Odyssey Controversy

In recent months, Christopher Nolan’s modern adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey has polarized audiences, drawing critical acclaim and condemnation.

Those in favor of his adaptation commend the auteur’s bold artistic choices, and his ability to transform a static text into something truly immersive for contemporary audiences. On the other hand, those who oppose the film consider it less as an entertaining appropriation but more of a subversive attack on Western history and identity itself.

In response, many have asked, “why do people care so much about The Odyssey? It’s just a film”.

Yes, it is just a film directed by one of the most accomplished directors of our age, supported by a star-studded cast. It will likely be visually striking, musically powerful, commercially successful, and showered with accolades. But what these observers fail to recognize is that the controversy is not about the film itself, but about what the film represents.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are the foundational myths of Western Civilisation, and form the basis of our literary canon. To surrender these so readily is to surrender our very identity and drift towards cultural oblivion.

Granted, criticisms of the film are trivial and indulge in the same identity politics they claim to despise. Whether the entire cast is comprised of native Greek-speakers who can trace their lineage back to ancient Attica and the Peloponnese is beside the point.

However, the more astute critic recognizes that the West has been forced to concede so much of its history already, to condemn its heroes, and to renounce its religion all in the name of tolerance. These concessions are no longer isolated, but cumulative, and all designed to bring about cultural defeat. For this reason, the film has evolved into a cultural line in the sand for those who recognize that the West has been subjected to decades of ideological subversion and have made the conscious decision to tolerate it no longer.

Our myths are not just stories, they’re formative ideas that fundamentally shape who we are and what we believe. From these we learn what is good and what is evil, what is virtuous and what is vicious, what to pursue and what to avoid. The variety of human experience is captured in these texts, and to surrender them piece by piece to ideological subversion is unacceptable.

The Roman lesson and the theological tradition converge on the same counsel: guard the small frontiers and don’t make concessions to your enemies because that is where the decisive battles are either won or lost long before the final assault arrives.

The intention of the hyperbolic statement that those who support this film are “enemies of the west” is this: you may not be assaulting the civilization yourself, but you are — either consciously or unconsciously — opening the gates for those who will sack the city one small cultural accommodation at a time.

What Must I Do?

The Odyssey begins with the infamous destruction of Troy. The Greeks, who had besieged the magnificent city on the Anatolian coast for a decade, could not breach its walls because Troy was built as an impenetrable fortress.

Even with the great heroes such as Achilles, the Greeks could win skirmishes but never overcome the Trojans. Cunning Odysseus convinced the Greeks to feign retreat and offer their enemies a gift.

We know how the story ends. The gift was a large wooden horse carefully constructed as the very symbol of their city and dedicated to their gods. The Trojans conceded by allowing something foreign into their city, and that night, the dozens of Greek soldiers emerged from inside the subversive offering, slew the Trojan guards and opened the gates allowing the Greek host to come pouring in and overwhelm the city. Within hours, Troy was in flames, its inhabitants massacred, and its glory consigned to the pages of history.

Every concession — whether disguised as a gift or presented as a harmless idea — is a Trojan Horse. To accept it is to invite the enemy into your walls. Every time you allow your family, your friendships, your church, your school, your business, your community to tolerate what is dangerous and foreign, you begin the same process that doomed Troy. And this is precisely how Marxist subversion advances — not necessarily through open assault, but through small ideological reorientations and accommodations that appear benign until it’s too late.

The Trojan Horse, rightly understood, is a symbol of tolerance, and if tolerance means the end of Western Civilization, then we must put an end to tolerance.

You cannot concede. You cannot surrender. Certain lines in the sand, certain sacred boundaries can never be crossed — ever.

Troy is gone.

The Trojans are gone.

People can be replaced, and cities can be remade, but once your civilization is gone, it’s gone forever.

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Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are of course Titans of Western literature, which have endured for thousands of years, for good reason.

Who after all could not be inspired by tales of heroes, of gods and of monsters? All in works that colourfully celebrate heroism itself, while still reflecting profound insight into grounded humanity?

Nevertheless, when Rome embraced Christianity, the epics of pagan mythology presented a slight dilemma. So around the year AD 405 one man, Prudentius, wrote a new epic. A reimagining of the Iliad, where instead of heroes, it is the personification of Christian virtues who wage war against the vices, in a series of dramatic and violent duels. The Psychomachia which resulted was one of the most popular poems of Medieval Europe, and is a powerful allegory of the victory of Christianity over Paganism.

So, in a special piece today, we explore which specific virtues our early Christian ancestors identified as the keys to our ultimate victory…

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Faith vs the Old Gods

As the two armies face each other across the plain of Man’s destiny, each Virtue marks his or her opposite number, and readies for battle. As the trumpets blast, the first Virtue to enter the fray is Faith:

“Faith first takes the field to face the doubtful chances of battle, her rough dress disordered, her shoulders bare, her hair untrimmed, her arms exposed; for the sudden glow of ambition, burning to enter fresh contests, takes no thought to gird on arms or armour, but trusting in a stout heart and unprotected limbs challenges the hazards of furious warfare, meaning to break them down”

Prudentius, Psychomachia, 21-27

Faith, of course, is the exact opposite of the Homeric image of heroism. To view her, one would never imagine her as the champion of God against the champion of the old gods who now faces her on the field. She is not bedecked in ornate armor, nor does she even carry a weapon. For her, “stout heart” is both arm and armour.

Appearances of course, can be deceiving, and just because this is a Christian poem does not mean it will be squeamish…

Lo, first Worship-of-the-Old-Gods ventures to match her strength against Faith’s challenge and strike at her. But she, rising higher, smites her foe’s head down, with its fillet-decked brows, lays in the dust that mouth that was sated with the blood of beasts, and tramples the eyes under foot, squeezing them out in death. The throat is choked and the scant breath confined by the stopping of its passage, and long gasps make a hard and agonising death.

Prudentius, Psychomachia, 28-35

The champion of the old gods, literally choking on the blood of all the beasts ever sacrificed in pagan ritual, is entirely unprepared for the knockout blow of a Faith unburdened by cruel ritual.

As the gathered hosts are shocked at how quickly this all happens, things ‘get serious’. The spirits of the thousands of Christian martyrs cheer on the Virtues, as deadlier Vices begin the charge…

Chastity vs Lust

With Faith victorious, a more violent duel beckons:

“Next to step forth ready to engage on the grassy field is the maiden Chastity, shining in beauteous armour. On her falls Lust the Sodomite, girt with the fire-brands of her country, and thrusts into her face a torch of pinewood blazing murkily with pitch and burning sulphur, attacking her modest eyes with the flames and seeking to cover them with the foul smoke”

Prudentius, Psychomachia, 40-45

Chastity, unlike Faith, is at least physically equipped for war. But Lust plays dirtier tricks. For just as the base temptations of the flesh seek to conquer us through our eyes, so too does Lust try now to scorch the gaze of Chastity.

The weak man is defeated here, for once burned by Lust he is all too easily blinded for life. But the chaste man who sees through the smoke cannot be beaten:

“But the maiden undismayed smites with a stone the inflamed fiend’s hand and the cursed whore’s burning weapon, striking the brand away from her holy face. Then with a sword-thrust she pierces the disarmed harlot’s throat, and she spews out hot fumes with clots of foul blood, and the unclean breath defiles the air near by. “A hit!” cries the triumphant princess. “This shall be thy last end; for ever shalt thou lie prostrate; no longer shalt thou dare to cast thy deadly flames against God’s man-servants or his maid-servants; the inmost fibre of their pure heart is kindled only from the torch of Christ”.

Prudentius, Psychomachia, 46-57

The heat of pagan fire and embers of burning Lust are no match for the warming flame of Christ. Whereas the godless are led astray through the flesh, when the word of Christ is united to the flesh, men are elevated to “nobler things”. The pagan man seeks his own glory. The Christian man aspires to the glory of all Man.

So with Lust now bleeding out, broken upon the battlefield, the Vices send forth a champion stronger yet…

Patience vs Wrath

A man who conquers Lust is a man who can see the horizon over the foreground. Such a man is well on his way to cultivating a higher Christian virtue — Patience.

As Saint Augustine observed, true patience is the ability to “endure evils with equanimity so as not to abandon, through a lack of equanimity, the good through which we arrive at the better” (De Patientia, 2). It is the conviction to hold true to your position in the face of adversity, and therefore the anchor of all your virtues. A patient man is in control. An impatient man has lost control.

Thus Patience now faces her sworn enemy — Wrath:

“Lo, mild Patience was standing with staid countenance, unmoved amid the battle and its confused uproar, with fixed gaze watching the wounds inflicted as the stiff javelins pierced the vital parts while she waited inactive. On her from a distance swelling Wrath, showing her teeth with rage and foaming at the mouth, darts her eyes, all shot with blood and gall, and challenges her with weapon and with speech for taking no part in the fight”

Prudentius, Psychomachia, 109-115

Unable to contain her rage, Wrath hurls a pike at Patience, taunting her as it flies:

““Here’s for thee”, she cries, “that lookest on at our warfare and takest no side. Receive the death-stroke in thy calm breast, and betray no pain, since it is dishonour in thine eyes to utter a cry of pain”, So speaks she, and the pine-shaft, launched through the yielding airs, goes hissing after her angry words. Sure-aimed, it hits the very stomach and smites hard with full force, but is struck off by the resistance of a hard cuirass, and rebounds”

Prudentius, Psychomachia, 118-124

Patience, however, is armored by Christ, and cannot be bested by mere impulse. Hence the pike strikes, yet harmlessly ricochets off. The patient man is not derailed by provocation, harsh words or rash actions. As a result Wrath, her self-control further unravelling at this revelation, is consumed by her own rage. Her “wild passion fires her to slay herself”.

A man who cannot control his emotions, ultimately, is his own worst enemy.

With Patience now victorious, the battle line of the Virtues is steadied. It will need to be, for the central duel of Christianity and Paganism is about to begin…

Read more

Even during the late Republic, the Roman Empire saw itself as the guarantor of world peace – the Pax Romana became the guiding ideology of a new order, as we can already read in the works of Cicero. Two millennia later, the Western world, led by the United States, is making a similar claim: The Pax Americana aims to secure global stability, spread freedom and facilitate economic exchange. Both orders are based on structurally comparable mechanisms: the military securing of global spheres of influence, the reinterpretation of hegemonic rule as a service to peace, and the systematic subjugation of all sources of disruption to the ideal of a universalised order. Above all, however, they also share a fundamental weakness: as long as ‘world peace’ is guaranteed by a political power characterised, by virtue of its republican system, by frequent changes in the ruling elites, this inevitably leads to a course that is inefficient in the long term, and indeed dangerous. For whilst one must never underestimate the forces of inertia exerted by the functional elite, éminences grises and geopolitical imperatives, internal political competition inevitably leads to rival clientelist systems that interlink the centre and the periphery, imperial and local elites, and which play out their rivalry in foreign policy as well – with consequences that are highly dangerous in the long term.

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Pax Romana

After decades of Italy’s territorial expansion eastwards and westwards, followed by civil war-like conflicts between rival rulers – from Marius and Sulla, through Pompey and Caesar, to Mark Antony and Octavian – the fundamental principles of Roman order lay in tatters by the end of the 1st century BC. Admittedly, Cicero – a typical representative of those philhellenic Roman elites who sought in Greek philosophy the foundations for their own imperial ethic of rule – had already made it clear that, whilst submission to Rome meant the provinces had to relinquish their foreign policy autonomy, they would in return enjoy the benefits of participating in a peaceful Mediterranean world:

‘At the same time, Asia should bear in mind that it would not have been spared the calamities of foreign war or internal strife had it not been under Roman command. However, since this protectorate could not be maintained at all without the payment of taxes, the province may, with complete composure, exchange a portion of its revenues for everlasting peace and a tranquil life.” (Cic. ad Q. fr. 1.33f.)

At the same time, however, the late Republic in particular was characterised by extensive clientelist systems, which closely interlinked powerful senatorial dynasties, wealthy investors, provincial elites and neighbouring client princes, so that changes of power in Rome were usually associated with ever-changing foreign policy directions for the provinces as well (and vice versa); and although Roman rule was, on the whole, no longer really contested – since even on the periphery every ruler knew he was linked in one way or another to the Roman elite – this situation nevertheless led to great instability, from which not only the provincials suffered, but also the Roman middle classes, which was forced, time and again, to wage all manner of wars in the name of shifting, self-serving interests.

‘For we know, after all, that back then, when vast fortunes were lost by so many people in Asia, payments in Rome ground to a halt and credit collapsed; for when many people in a state lose their money and wealth, it is inevitable that they will drag others down with them into the same ruin: may our state be spared this danger! For believe me, as you yourselves can see: the credit and monetary system in Rome, which has its centre here in the Forum, is intertwined with and dependent on Asian capital; that capital cannot collapse without the local money market, shaken by the same upheaval, falling into ruin.” (Cic. Manil. 7.18f.)

Pax Americana

It is difficult not to think of the current global situation here. This is characterised not only by the final vestiges of the ‘Pax Americana’—which is currently transitioning from the stability of unipolarity to the equilibrium of multipolarity, and is naturally marked in both cases by a wide variety of frictions on the periphery—but also by the close intertwining of the respective financial interests of individual ruling elites with their local clienteles. This becomes particularly clear in the case of the USA, given not only the extent to which Joe Biden’s inner circle had significant financial interests in Ukraine and China, but also the fact that Donald Trump’s camp is involved in a wide variety of non-American economic projects: The transition between the various geographical and ideological focal points of US foreign policy is also, and perhaps above all, shaped by the desire to strengthen the domestic power base of its own clientelist system.

Due to their territorial fragmentation, their powerlessness in foreign policy and their largely negligible economic significance, European states are only to a limited extent genuine players in this game; yet here, too, it becomes clear just how deeply individual local elites are embedded in specific foreign-policy constellations (for example, with regard to African raw materials and, of course, Middle Eastern energy sources) and how they promote or hinder corresponding political developments, right up to the highest levels of government, as evidenced, for example, by the careers of the current French Head of State and the German Head of Government, both of whom maintained very close professional ties – not to say dependencies – with various major financial and investment groups.

Yet, of course, it is not the pursuit of the economic exploitation of the ‘provinces’ that lies at the heart of the Western world’s official ideology, but rather the self-portrayal of the USA as the guarantor of a global order, whose various instruments – such as the UN, NATO or the World Bank – are intended to ensure, in a wide variety of ways, control over trade routes, the stabilisation of US-aligned liberal -democratic systems of governance, and, of course, the integration of the outside world into the US military, financial and energy systems; yet at the same time, this is understood as ‘rule-based world peace’. For, as in the case of Rome, it must be emphasised that an idealistic, a pragmatic and a cynical interpretation of the respective ‘world peace’ are by no means mutually exclusive; and indeed, for some of those affected, the economic advantages of integration into the respective hegemonic peace system do in fact outweigh the disadvantages of losing de facto freedom in foreign policy and, all too often, in domestic policy as well.

Just as in the Roman world, the increasingly brutal shifts in policy between the various US clientelist systems – and thus in foreign policy orientations – most flagrantly illustrated by the wars in Ukraine and Iran – also pose a steadily growing danger, not only to the respective allies or subjects, but also to their own citizens, who must expect ever greater deregulation in the energy sector and in everyday consumption.

World peace

This, however, once again raises the question of whether this trend will continue and to what extent it can be predicted by studying the late Roman Republic. The facts are well known: Pompey’s conquest of the eastern Mediterranean, just like the conquest of Gaul, had set a dangerous precedent, where not only the overextension of Rome’s own forces but also the excessive concentration of power in the hands of a single individual heralded the end of the Republic. At the same time, the increasingly unscrupulous treatment, since the 2nd century, of Rome’s allies and client kings – who were regarded less and less as valued friends and more and more as a disposable resource to be exploited, whose demotion to the status of subjects and provinces seemed only a matter of time – revealed just how far Rome had strayed from its original ideals. Just how dangerous such contempt, combined with territorial overextension, could become was demonstrated not only by the Greek revolt during the war against Mithridates, but also following Crassus’s defeat by the Parthians, when a large part of the East threatened to break away and Rome’s prestige had also suffered a dangerous blow. No wonder that, alongside the very real desire to be part of Rome’s project of peace and prosperity, resistance to the very idea of ‘peace’ – which, from the standpoint of absolute freedom, seemed little more than slavery – was repeatedly voiced, particularly on the periphery, as Tacitus put it into the mouths of the Britons even during the Imperial period:

‘Robbers of the world, having exhausted the lands with their ravages, they [i.e. the Romans] now plunder the sea as well – greedy when the enemy is rich, thirsty for glory when he is poor; neither the East nor the West has sated them; they alone, of all peoples, crave abundance and desolation with equal passion. They falsely call their theft, murder and plunder ‘Imperium’, and wherever they create desolation, they call it ‘peace’.” (Tac. Agr. 30.)

The endless internal and external conflicts in Rome were followed by the autocratic rule of Augustus, who exploited the general desire for order and peace on the part of both citizens and subjects to present his Principate not only as a moral rebirth of the Republic, but also as a restoration of the ‘aurea aetas’, the ‘golden age’, when gods and heroes still dwelt upon the earth and peace, harmony and abundance were the order of the day, as is particularly evident from the design of the ‘Ara pacis’, the ‘Altar of Peace’, with which Augustus had himself celebrated for having achieved ‘world peace’. The Pax Romana he created was, of course, by no means characterised by the absence of violence, but rather by its monopolisation: internally, through the Emperor’s unilateral assumption of control over the entire foreign policy and thus also over clientelistic ties, against which the last remnants of the Senate’s privileged contacts carried little weight; externally, through control over all the armies and the groundbreaking strategic decision—with a few exceptions, which were, as usual, declared to be ‘bella iusta’—to refrain from further expansion and to preserve the status quo rather than overstretch the empire’s borders.

Even the great enemy in the East, the Parthian Empire, was largely left in peace following a diplomatic arrangement which both sides could declare a ‘victory’ whilst saving face, with the result that the Roman eastern frontier—which ran across Armenia, Western Mesopotamia and the Syrian Desert—was never again truly shifted in the long term until the Arab expansion. From then on, right up until the Migration Period, minor police operations against ‘barbarian’ peoples were entirely sufficient to secure the emperor the traditional charisma of a victor and the loyalty of the troops; where this was disregarded – for instance, during the conquest of Britain or Trajan’s campaigns – the Roman state had to make heavy sacrifices in the form of tax burdens or the number of casualties. And so there indeed came that brief but still-remembered golden age of the Pax Romana, when it truly seemed to a not inconsiderable part of the world that, at least in the Mediterranean world, world peace had become a permanent reality, as Aelius Aristeides enthused:

‘Instead of vying for dominion and supremacy—which was the cause of all the wars of earlier times—some lead a most pleasant and peaceful life, akin to water flowing silently by, happy to be free from toil and suffering, and filled with regret that they once fought in vain for mere shadows. The others do not even know what dominion they once held, nor do they remember it. […] People no longer believe in wars, or even that they ever took place; mere tales of them are regarded by most as myths. But whenever fighting flared up somewhere along the borders—as is natural in an immeasurably vast empire, given the ferocity of the Dacians, the plight of the Libyans or the misery of the peoples of the Red Sea, who are incapable of enjoying the blessings of the present—then the wars quickly vanished again, just like myths, and so did the tales of them.” (Ael. Arist. Rom. (or. 14) [216] 69–71)

One may well expect that the future of the Western world, too, will exhibit some of these characteristics. Even now, the looming overstretch of US—and thus, by extension, Western—influence across the globe is becoming apparent: The withdrawal from Kabul was the first sign, visible to the outside world, that the financial and technical superiority of the USA, combined with its geostrategic position and economic clout, no longer offered a lasting guarantee of global hegemony, particularly in view of the declining popularity and credibility of the Western model of civilisation. The war in Ukraine and the intervention against Iran reinforce this impression, all the more so as this is the first time that organised resistance from Russia and China has become apparent.

At the same time, however, the long-felt disregard for America’s allies – foremost among them NATO – is also coming to light. The asymmetry between the two sides of the Atlantic had always been evident, and since the alliance’s foundation, no one had harboured any illusions that a genuine partnership of equals was even desired; rather, at best, the Europeans were expected to provide funding and secondary support forces. The presidency of Donald Trump – who, in the manner of Roman demagogues, even threatens to take away his own allies’ territory and goes so far as to portray such an annexation as an act of assistance – has torn the mask off diplomatic pretence and laid bare for all to see the sad reality of a divided, incompetent Europe that is merely despised by the US.

The Future

What lies ahead? Is there still any hope that Europe might develop into an independent Hesperialist pole within the Western world, is its provincialisation within a US-led empire a foregone conclusion, or might we even witness a ‘hot’ phase of a belated and undoubtedly futile attempt to evade US supremacy, just as the late-Republican Greeks did before their final subjugation? And what will become of the future of this ‘Pax Americana’: is it to be expected that Donald Trump will retreat to the core of the US empire, as was already hinted at in the ‘American Hemisphere’ doctrine, and accordingly extend his influence across the two Americas, as the threats against Venezuela, Canada, Mexico and Cuba so vividly illustrate; whilst otherwise (with the exception of the European states, Australia and New Zealand) respecting the spheres of influence of other civilisational powers such as Russia, India and China, and accordingly having no intention of interfering in irredentist ambitions regarding Taiwan or the Baltic states? It will undoubtedly take several more years before this fundamental question is resolved – a question to which even the erratic US President is unlikely to be able to provide a genuine answer – and so it cannot be ruled out that the US, too, may experience its own ‘Carrhae’ against China or perhaps even Russia, in order to test the limits of what is possible and definitively transition from the dynamic and ‘republican’ phase of its history to one of imperial stability and widespread stagnation. Be that as it may: the window of opportunity for European states to secure a final remnant of autonomy within this constellation is now alarmingly short.

Admittedly, alongside the purely power-political aspects, we must not overlook the civilisational ones. Even now, a general weariness has taken hold, and not only in Europe; a reluctance to look beyond the petty, day-to-day concerns of individual existence and to risk losses or sacrifices in the here and now for the sake of the common good – be it of a pragmatic or idealistic nature – not to mention that fundamental willingness, in an emergency, to risk one’s life for a cause that matters more than one’s own existence. Even the Romans of the Empire – not to mention the inhabitants of the provinces – were only too happy to retreat behind the extensive walls and fences of their global empire, leaving the defence of their civilisation against the ‘barbarians’ – whom they both despised and feared – to professional soldiers, and, when in doubt, submitting to whoever was the more powerful at the time: Where, only a few generations earlier, entire generations had sacrificed themselves for a civilisational ideal and political convictions, there now reigned only a jaded and cynical cosmopolitan class, for whom peace, prosperity and order were a right, yet very few were willing to be held to account for how these came about. It was thanks to the incredible institutional, military and logistical stability of the Roman Empire that this illusion could be sustained for several centuries; yet its downfall was a foregone conclusion from the very beginning; and so there can be little doubt that ‘post-historical’ Europe, too, if it remains incapable of ensuring its own security, will go the same way.

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We live in an age of instability.

The social and political forms that once seemed durable now tremble under the weight of accumulated crises. Age‑old institutions that once safeguarded civic virtue and tradition now struggle to maintain relevance, elites quarrel without governing effectively, and the public drifts ever further into disillusionment and fatigue.

The sense of civic coherence that sustained earlier generations has thinned, leaving behind a social and political landscape marked by fragmentation, uncertainty, and a growing suspicion that the existing order can no longer sustain. In such periods, societies begin to search — not always consciously — for a figure who can resolve what their institutions cannot.

History shows what emerges from such conditions.

When instability becomes chronic, when constitutional mechanisms fail to adapt, and when the public grows weary of procedural politics, a singular, decisive figure — a Caesar — appears.

In his Histories, Polybius observed that political orders decay in patterned cycles, noting that “all constitutions have a natural cycle of growth, maturity, and decline.” Civilizations, when they reach certain thresholds of disorder, generate the conditions for a commanding actor capable of imposing coherence where the system can no longer provide it.

Similarly, Oswald Spengler, writing with the fatalism of a cultural morphologist, argued that late civilizations inevitably produce “the Caesar‑type,” a figure who arises when the forms of republican life have become hollow and the people grow weary of — or no longer believe in — the legitimacy of their institutions.

The ten conditions that follow describe the social landscape that makes such a figure possible. These are not psychological traits of the leader or moral judgments about the people, but the structural realities that prepare the ground for the emergence of such a figure.

In the late Roman Republic and post‑revolutionary France, these conditions appeared with remarkable similarity, alternating in their intensity but converging toward the same outcome: the rise of Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Today, as instability deepens, the same structural forces gather once more.

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Systemic Political Breakdown

A Caesar emerges first from systemic political breakdown. In Rome, the Republic’s constitutional machinery could no longer translate public needs into coherent action. Yet this breakdown reflected deeper structural fault lines. A political order built for a small, unified city‑state was now straining to govern a vast, culturally diverse empire stretching from the British Isles to the frontiers of Persia.

Rome’s rapid expansion produced chronic paralysis. Magistrates with competing loyalties obstructed one another, assemblies were steered by wealthy patrons pursuing private gain, and the Senate drifted into rhetorical posturing rather than governance. Romans grew accustomed to drift, corruption, and institutional fatigue.

In such conditions, the public begins to tolerate, then entertain, and eventually welcome figures who promise decisive authority. Caesar’s rise must be understood in this light. His crossing of the Rubicon marked the moment when a stagnant system met a decisive force, and both enemies and allies sensed that in an age of paralysis, fortune favors the brave.

Elite Fragmentation and Paralysis

The second condition is elite fragmentation. Rome’s governing class, once held together by Romanitas and the Mos Maiorum, splintered into rival blocs that treated politics as a theatre for personal dominance rather than the guardianship of the res publica.

The deeper trend was the collapse of elite consensus. Senators no longer trusted one another to uphold constitutional norms or restrain private ambition, and partisan hostility replaced cooperation. The Optimates and Populares were less coherent movements than antagonistic patronage networks locked in cycles of obstruction, each more intent on frustrating its rivals than allowing the Republic to function.

So profound was this paralysis that many elites became willing to cast their support behind figures who operated extra‑judicially — outside the traditional legal framework — if such actors promised to break the deadlock and deliver progress.

This partisanship produced paralysis. Legislation stalled, magistrates vetoed one another’s initiatives, and the Senate became incapable of coordinated action or governing effectively.

Caesar rose within this landscape of stagnation. His alliance with Pompey and Crassus — the First Triumvirate — was not merely an innovation but an indictment of the political order itself. It revealed that three men could bypass institutions that no longer governed, stepping around a Senate paralyzed by factional hostility and procedural obstruction.

When elites cease to act, and even begin to tolerate extra‑legal solutions, they create the vacuum in which someone willing to act inevitably steps forward.

Socioeconomic Polarisation

The third condition is socioeconomic polarisation. In post‑revolutionary France, years of upheaval had eroded the economic foundations of society. Inflation hollowed out savings, food shortages undermined confidence, and the uneven recovery after the Terror left the middle classes anxious and the poor desperate.

At a deeper level, the Revolution had produced a more fundamental shift. The social base of republicanism had weakened, and the people no longer believed the existing order could deliver stability or fairness.

Napoleon’s appeal rested on his ability to present himself as a stabilizer. Predictable taxation, protection of property, and financial order were not abstract promises but concrete remedies for a society exhausted by chaos. His consolidation of the Bank of France and stabilization of currency addressed needs that republican institutions had failed to meet.

The pattern is all too familiar. When economic systems fail to provide security, societies become open to actors who promise to restore trust in institutions. Napoleon emerged because France needed stability more than procedure.

Collapse of Institutional Legitimacy

The fourth condition is the collapse of institutional legitimacy. In France, confidence in republican governance had eroded long before Napoleon’s ascent.

The Directory had devolved into an institution unable to govern effectively. Courts issued contradictory rulings, individual ministries became more and more compartmentalized and competed for power rather than operating as a coordinated whole, and the legislature cycled through purges, coups, and reversals that made policy unpredictable. Instead of a functioning unified state, France was governed by fragmented institutions that acted independently, with no common centre of command, and thus, no perceived legitimacy.

Napoleon entered this vacuum as the figure capable of imposing order amid institutional chaos. His Consulate promised uniform laws, stable administration, and a single executive voice after years of fragmentation. Moreover, he reanimated the Republic’s exhausted administrative framework by eliminating redundant bodies, consolidating overlapping functions, and infusing the remaining institutions with renewed administrative vigour, transforming a disordered bureaucracy into a disciplined engine of state power.

When institutions lose operational capacity — not just legitimacy — the public inevitably turns toward figures who can restore functionality. Napoleon succeeded because France needed effective governance, not another rearrangement of republican forms.

Cultural and Moral Disorientation

The fifth condition is cultural disintegration. By Caesar’s time, Rome had not only lost political stability but the moral and religious foundations that once shaped its civic identity.

The Mos Maiorum — the ancestral code of duty, piety, and public virtue — had weakened under the pressures of expansion, wealth, and factional conflict. Traditional rites were neglected, civic festivals lost their seriousness, and public life no longer reflected the virtues Romans believed had built their Republic.

As these customs faded, many Romans began to sense that their society had drifted too far from the moral order that once sustained it. The deeper trend was a growing recognition that abandoning ancestral practices had left the Republic spiritually bankrupt.

Caesar emerged as a figure capable of restoring Roman dignity, reviving public religious rituals, honoring traditional gods, and embodying the decisiveness associated with Rome’s past. The Romans longed for a restoration of traditional virtue and religiosity that had once defined them.

Militarisation of Public Life

The sixth condition is militarisation of public life. Rome’s long history of expansion had created a culture in which military success became the primary measure of legitimacy.

The deeper trend was the normalization of martial authority since decades of conflict elevated generals above civilian magistrates. Romans increasingly believed that only military leaders could safeguard the state, manage crises, or defend the empire’s interests.

Caesar’s Gallic victories elevated him because they aligned with this cultural shift. He embodied action, decisiveness, and competence — qualities Romans associated with military command rather than the senatorial class who were prone to endless deliberation and the procedural drift that had come to define late‑Republican politics. When societies become accustomed to crisis, whether foreign or domestic, they often turn toward figures associated with action rather than deliberation.

Caesar rose because decades of crisis had conditioned Romans to see generals as the only figures capable of decisive governance.

National Mythos and the Desire for Unity

The seventh condition is mythic hunger for unity. By the late 1790s, France had endured wars, revolution, terror, factional purges, and bitter ideological conflict. Years of civil strife had fractured the nation into competing visions of what France should be. The deeper force was psychological: prolonged internal division creates a cultural longing for a figure who can bind the fragments together under a renewed sense of national purpose.

Napoleon’s Consulate succeeded because it offered precisely this unifying mythos. He presented a narrative that drew on France’s mythical past — the grandeur of Charlemagne, the discipline of classical republican virtue — and fused it with a promise of present stability and future greatness. His appeal rested on the belief that France needed a symbolic centre capable of reconciling factions and ending the cycle of ideological conflict.

Modern societies, marked by extraordinary ideological factionalism and radical individualism, experience similar pressures when division becomes habitual. In such conditions, publics begin to seek figures like Napoleon who can impose unity through a revitalised national story that binds past, present, and future into a single mythos.

Heroic Cultural Archetypes

The eighth condition is heroic cultural archetypes. France possessed a long‑standing militaristic tradition that shaped how its people imagined authority and national greatness.

From the legacy of Charlemagne to the warrior‑kings of the Ancien Régime and the revolutionary cult of martial virtue, French identity had long been intertwined with the image of the soldier‑statesman. Generals, conquerors, and military reformers occupied a privileged place in the nation’s symbolic memory, creating a cultural landscape in which a military restorer felt more familiar than foreign.

Napoleon stepped into a role that French culture had already prepared. His victories, charisma, and administrative talent aligned with archetypes that resonated deeply with the public imagination. Spengler noted that civilizations in decline “dream of the hero,” and France’s martial imagination was primed to receive such a figure. Modern societies, too, carry archetypes — founders, reformers, warriors — that shape who seems plausible as a restorer during crisis.

Napoleon succeeded because he embodied the military virtues that French culture had long revered and because the nation’s imagination was conditioned to see salvation in a soldier.

Collective Psychological Exhaustion

The ninth condition is psychological exhaustion. By Caesar’s time, the Republic’s crises had ceased to be just isolated events but accelerated into a continuous cycle of instability, civil war, and political fragmentation — a pattern many Romans regarded as an existential threat to the state itself.

Prolonged instability drains a society’s ability to oppose the centralisation of power. Romans, exhausted by civil wars and political fragmentation, could no longer summon the energy to defend a republican system that offered no relief. Under such psychological strain, order and stability become not only desirable but the final measure of civic self-preservation.

Caesar’s consolidation of power succeeded because it promised relief from this exhaustion. His rule offered an end to factional violence, senatorial paralysis, and the grinding uncertainty that had defined Roman life. To this end, Polybius observed that populations worn down by turmoil “prefer even servitude to chaos,” capturing the mood of a society ready to exchange procedural politics for stability.

Caesar rose because Rome recognised that its own self‑destructive civil wars had made extraordinary authority appear not merely tolerable but necessary for survival.

Symbolic and Moral Vacuum

The final, and arguably most important condition is the symbolic and moral vacuum. When a society’s foundational symbols lose their power to unify — its civic myths, religious rituals, ancestral norms, and shared narratives — the political order becomes hollow and no longer commands the respect that once sustained it.

Rome’s republican offices, once imbued with civic sacredness, no longer inspired public reverence. Moreover, the Senate, formerly the authoritative council of Rome’s patrician aristocracy, had devolved into a chamber drained of symbolic weight and incapable of eliciting loyalty, and the old rites that once bound Romans into a common identity had faded into gestures stripped of spiritual force and cultural significance.

As the symbolic weight of republican institutions evaporated, Romans increasingly invested authority in individuals rather than offices, seeking a figure who could embody the unity their public symbols and offices could no longer provide.

Caesar’s rise was anchored in this collapse of meaning. Rather than simply filling an institutional void, he offered a new locus of civic meaning — a single authority who could concentrate the civic ideals, restore religious functions, and public legitimacy that had once been dispersed across the Republic’s constitutional forms. His role as Pontifex Maximus encapsulated this transformation, allowing him to fuse political command with the religious guardianship that had traditionally anchored Rome’s identity.

Modern societies face similar risks when foundational symbols lose credibility, creating openings for figures who promise renewal through personal authority. Caesar succeeded because Rome’s symbolic vacuum made his legitimacy necessary.

The New Caesar

In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler wrote that “the Caesar‑type appears when the soul of a people has ceased to believe in its forms.” The ten conditions described above are not relics of Rome or France, but rather, are structural patterns that recur when civilizations enter late phases of development.

Systemic political breakdown, elite fragmentation and paralysis, socioeconomic polarisation, collapse of institutional legitimacy, cultural and moral disorientation, militarisation of public life, national mythos and the desire for unity, heroic cultural archetypes, collective psychological exhaustion, and symbolic and moral vacuum are not confined to antiquity or the nineteenth century.

They are visible today in varying degrees across Western societies, revealing structural patterns that recur whenever a civilization enters a late developmental phase.

Students of history cannot predict the future, but they can recognize patterns. The same forces that once produced Caesar and Napoleon are again gathering strength. Polybius called this the “course appointed by nature,” the cycle through which constitutions decay, disappear, and return to the point from which they began — a cycle that ends, inevitably, in the rise of a commanding figure.

The question is not if such a figure will appear, but when — and what type of Caesar he will be.

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“Which way, Western man?” has become a popular meme in recent years, highlighting an often humorously obvious choice between an idyll or a dystopia.

But thousands of years ago, an ancient myth toyed with the exact same idea. A myth that enjoyed spectacular popularity in art and literature through the Renaissance and beyond, and one tied to arguably the most famous hero of classical mythology — Heracles.

Facing the crossroads of life, the son of Zeus was faced with a choice between the easy or the arduous life, while personifications of Vice and Virtue attempted to sway him to their respective paths. Their arguments, and the choice that Heracles ultimately makes, have much to teach us about the role of purpose in a fulfilling life.

So, how can we make sure that when we find ourselves at the next crossroads of life, we make the right choice?

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The Easy Path

The most famous account of the myth comes from the Socratic dialogues, or Memorabilia, of Xenophon. In it, we learn that Heracles experienced this moral crisis at a highly symbolic moment in his life. Specifically, when he “was emerging from boyhood into the bloom of youth”. In other words, at the most vulnerable moment in a young man’s life.

It is then, after all, that the forces of temptation are at their strongest, when the lure of ambition is most blinding and the thought of restraint is most unappealing. But just as the hero sits down upon a rock at the crossroads to contemplate his future, the figures of two mysterious young women appear:

“The one was fair to look upon, frank and free by gift of nature, her limbs adorned with purity and her eyes with bashfulness; sobriety set the rhythm of her gait, and she was clad in white apparel. The other was of a different type; the fleshy softness of her limbs betrayed her nurture, while the complexion of her skin was embellished that she might appear whiter and rosier than she really was, and her figure that she might seem taller than nature made her; she stared with wide-open eyes, and the raiment wherewith she was clad served but to reveal the ripeness of her bloom. With frequent glances she surveyed her person, or looked to see if others noticed her; while ever and anon she fixed her gaze upon the shadow of herself intently”

Xenophon, Memorabilia II.1.22

Before the women even open their mouths, it is clear that they are of different matter. Both are ‘young’ and ‘attractive’, but something in their bearing sets them apart. One is calm, the other clearly self-conscious. Her apparent vulnerability might be mistaken for innocence by the naive man. It is a deadly trap however. For when the moment to speak comes, she quickly asserts herself:

“Now when these two had drawn near to Heracles, she who was first named advanced at an even pace towards him, but the other, in her eagerness to outstrip her, ran forward to the youth, exclaiming, 'I see you, Heracles, in doubt and difficulty what path of life to choose; make me your friend, and I will lead you to the pleasantest road and easiest. This I promise you: you shall taste all of life's sweets and escape all bitters. In the first place, you shall not trouble your brain with war or business; other topics shall engage your mind; your only speculation, what meat or drink you shall find agreeable to your palate; what delight of ear or eye; what pleasure of smell or touch… trust me I will not lead you where you shall replenish the store by toil of body and trouble of soul. No! Others shall labour, but you shall reap the fruit of their labours; you shall withhold your hand from nought which shall bring you gain. For to all my followers I give authority and power to help themselves freely from every side.“

Xenophon, Memorabilia II.1.23-25

At once, the more ‘intense’ woman promises Heracles the fulfilment of dreams if he takes the road which falls away behind her. She is the full force of youthful vigor unleashed, barely able to contain her excitement at all the senses her path will satisfy. She is, too, youthful passion that is blinded by inexperience and deaf to wise counsel.

She bats aside any fears of consequence, assuring Heracles that he “shall taste all of life’s sweets and escape all bitters”. After all, why worry yourself with the concerns of later age when you are young? Why save for tomorrow’s rain when you can spend in today’s sun? But here too come the first deceptions. As well as overloading the hero’s base impulses, she assures him that there will be no price to pay. Fortunately for Heracles however, she is not the only woman confronting him. However, as the first concludes her pitch, he does ask her name:

“'What, O lady, is the name you bear?' To which she: 'Know that my friends call be Happiness, but they that hate me have their own nicknames for me, Vice”

Xenophon, Memorabilia II.1.26

So, what can Virtue offer instead that can compete?

The Hard Path

While Vice fawns upon Heracles and does all possible to distract him, Virtue, who has been waiting patiently throughout, now turns to the hero:

"'Heracles, I too am come to you, seeing that your parents are well known to me, and in your nurture I have gauged your nature; wherefore I entertain good hope that if you choose the path which leads to me, you shall greatly bestir yourself to be the doer of many a doughty deed of noble enterprise; and that I too shall be held in even higher honour for your sake, lit with the lustre shed by valorous deeds. I will not cheat you with preludings of pleasure, but I will relate to you the things that are according to the ordinances of God in very truth”

Xenophon, Memorabilia II.1.27-28

Virtue of course faces an uphill battle winning over the youthful demigod. Instant gratification, after all, has a marketing advantage over delayed satisfaction. But there is one word that she knows can pierce through the promise of pleasure — honor.

Heracles fixes her with his attention. As the very epitome of a hero, no word can inspire or terrify him quite like honor. To gain it is glorious, to lose it a death before death. Virtue knows this well, understanding that glory, and the perception of glory, is the single surefire way to the heart of any man. It is the perfect force to balance the selfish impulse with selfless calling. For while glory can win a man spectacular fame, all men know it cannot be won without earning it in the eyes of others. A man who aspires to martial honor on the field of battle knows full well he cannot achieve it without going to war.

Virtue, pressing her advantage, continues threading the needle of promise with healthy realism:

“Know then that among things that are lovely and of good report, not one have the gods bestowed upon mortal men apart from toil and pains. Would you obtain the favour of the gods, then must you pay these same gods service; would you be loved by your friends, you must benefit these friends; do you desire to be honoured by the state, you must give the state your aid; do you claim admiration for your virtue from all Hellas, you must strive to do some good to Hellas; do you wish earth to yield her fruits to you abundantly, to earth must you pay your court; do you seek to amass riches from your flocks and herds, on them must you bestow your labour; or is it your ambition to be potent as a warrior, able to save your friends and to subdue your foes, then must you learn the arts of war from those who have the knowledge, and practise their application in the field when learned; or would you e'en be powerful of limb and body, then must you habituate limbs and body to obey the mind, and exercise yourself with toil and sweat.'“

Xenophon, Memorabilia II.1.27-28

It is certainly a bold move on Virtue’s part to sell her path with “toil and pains”. Certainly, no rewards can be won without working for them, but calling toil “lovely and of good report” seems a perverse exaggeration. How can pain possibly be a good thing?

Indeed it is at this moment that Vice senses an opening, and seizes her chance to regain the attention of Heracles. How ever can pain compete with pleasure?

Rather easily, it turns out, when we focus not on what something promises, but what it brings…

Read more

We’re all familiar with the famous maxim: Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.

But why?

What is this qualitative force that creates strong men, and how can a civilization prevent good times creating weak men?

Modern theorists have attempted to quantify the lifespan of civilizations. Some, following Sir John Glubb’s famous essay The Fate of Empires, argue that civilizations last roughly 250 years, passing through predictable stages from pioneering vigor to commercial expansion and finally to decadence.

Oswald Spengler, more metaphysical in tone, insisted in The Decline of the West, that cultures rise from the “vitality” of a people rooted in a particular landscape, and decline when that soul becomes exhausted. Despite their differing frameworks, both converge on the same conclusion that civilizations enter a state of decline or “civilizational winter” when they abandon the virtues that made them great.

But rather than succumbing to the deterministic view that history unfolds through impersonal forces alone, historians and political theorists have long recognized that austerity is the animating force behind civilizational vitality and longevity.

Austerity is the disciplined posture that steels a people for endurance, sacrifice, and collective purpose, even when circumstances tempt them toward ease. While poverty often forces a people towards discipline while prosperity just as often dissolves it.

Whether it were the Romans or the Americans, the pages of history reveal that the greatest empires are forged in hardship. By embracing austerity, a civilization remains strong and dynamic, resisting the softening influence of abundance and preserving its vitality across centuries — and no institution has proven more effective at cultivating this posture than religion.

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The Spiritual Foundations of Political Order

In his Politics, Aristotle wrote that “the first task of the lawgiver is to make the citizens good,” and religion has historically been the lawgiver’s greatest ally in this work. Religion has always been the most reliable institution for producing austerity because it forms rather than coerces, effectively training individuals to restrain the lower appetite, accept limitations, and reorient the self toward higher and more noble ends.

Ancient religious practice made austerity habitual. To sacrifice crops or animals was to surrender immediate gain for a higher purpose. Moreover, fasting taught mastery over hunger, and ritual feasting reinforced gratitude rather than indulgence. These rhythms of denial and celebration cultivated what Xenophon in the Memorabilia called “the habit of ruling oneself,” which he considered to be the foundation of all political order.

In materially poorer societies, this habit was easier to cultivate since necessity reinforced virtue as a means to survival, but when prosperity arrives, only religion can preserve the disciplines that necessity once imposed.

The Discipline Behind Roman Power

While many think of Rome as the powerful empire that came to dominate the ancient world and reshape the course of Western history, they often overlook that the Roman Republic began as a modest agricultural settlement of citizen‑soldiers.

Inspired by the model of their legendary founder Romulus and his successor Numa Pompilius, the Romans were a warlike people who paired martial vigor with strict religious observances. Their austerity was not simply the consequence of environmental factors but was deliberately cultivated through religion, custom, and law — the way of the ancestors the Romans referred to as the Mos Maiorum.

Roman religion itself reinforced this austere posture. The gods of early Rome were not distant abstractions but guardians of the household, the fields, and civic duty. Moreover, rituals were simple, sacrifices modest, and worship centered on discipline rather than ecstatic experiences.

Moreover, the foundational virtues that constituted the Via Romana were religious obligations as much as they were civic ideals. To neglect duty was to offend the gods, and to live simply was to honor them. In short, Roman religion sanctified restraint, making austerity more than a social expectation but a sacred duty.

The citizen-soldier was the secret to the success of the Roman Republic. These men, hardened by labor and oriented toward duty were, according to the Cato the Elder, “the bravest of men and the most steadfast of citizens,” because the land taught them restraint and fortitude. Modest means kept Romans ‘grounded’ in the most literal sense of the word, producing a disciplined citizenry capable of sacrifice and loyal to their familial and civic obligations.

The same principle held true for Rome’s aristocratic families. The Roman domus served as a school of discipline, where the paterfamilias shaped the character of those under his authority and instilled habits of restraint from childhood. Although these households displayed impressive atriums filled with ancestral busts, military trophies, and public honors, their private living quarters remained deliberately austere. This was a purposeful expression of pietas, and served as a reminder to the familia that their status was not determined by wealth but by virtue and service to the Republic.

Spengler saw in this foundation the source of Rome’s civilizational vitality. “Every culture,” he wrote, “is born in the countryside and dies in the cities.” As Rome began to conquer more territory, importing more slaves to work their fields, and concentrate into urbanized centres, its civilizational spirit gave way to something more artificial.

To this end, the historian Sallust lamented that after Rome’s expansion, “ambition drove many men to become false; wealth made them greedy” and “pleasure made them soft.” Luxury increased, religious observance weakened, and the Mos Maiorum was all but abandoned.

Even as Rome became materially wealthy, it lost the strict religious observance that had once sanctified restraint. As a result, prosperity severed the link between abundance and virtue, and without religion to discipline the appetite, Rome’s austerity collapsed — and with it, the character that had sustained the Republic.

The early Republic’s austerity produced strong citizens capable of extraordinary feats, but the victories they won forged an empire inherited by sons accustomed to comfort — men whom Roman moralists condemned as soft, idle, and effeminate. Rather than plowing the fields and fighting in the legions, they frequented spas, spectacles, and the diversions of urban life.

Yet Rome’s story does not end in 476 AD. While the West succumbed to civil war and decadence, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire endured for nearly a thousand years more. Though pockets of wealth existed in the East, most Romans in the Balkans and Anatolia continued to live as smallholders, soldiers, and farmers whose labor preserved the strong civic character and austere spirit that had once defined the old Roman Republic.

This austere agrarian backbone, further reinforced by Christian monastic austerity that punctuated almost every moment of life, reinforced those conditions that made them strong men and enabled the Byzantines to withstand wave after wave of invasions when others would have surrendered.

Frontier Discipline to Modern Comfort

The United States, like Rome, began in austerity. The early republic was shaped by frontier hardship, Protestant self‑discipline, and a civic ethos that prized restraint.

In his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans possessed “habits of the heart” formed by religion and local self‑government, and these habits produced a culture of self‑command, industriousness, and civic responsibility. Moreover, material scarcity on the frontiers and the severity of the environment instilled within the settlers the fact that survival required discipline.

The American Founding Fathers also understood the necessity of austerity for civic life. George Washington warned in his Farewell Address that “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” and John Adams added that “Public virtue cannot exist without private virtue, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.” These men, well versed in the liberal arts understood that a free people must encourage those dispositions and create those conditions to ensure that strong men do not lose the civilizational vitality that made them exceptional.

For much of its early history, the United States followed the example of the early settlers and Founding Fathers in maintaining a religious and rural character. But as the nation urbanized and industrialized, its cultural foundations inevitably shifted. The agrarian austerity that once shaped American life gave way to abundance.

Moreover, the Christian religion, once the backbone of civic formation, was abandoned. Like Rome, the virtues that had been instrumental in forging the character of the American republic became harder to maintain in a rapidly changing social and political landscape defined by prosperity.

The United States today resembles Rome in its late Republican and early Imperial phases. It is wealthy, powerful, technologically advanced, but increasingly unable to restrain itself. A civilization that becomes prosperous and loses its religious foundations loses the mechanism that produces austerity, and without austerity, the virtues that build the greatest of empires begin to collapse under the weight of their own success.

The Need to Recover Religion and Austerity

Empires rarely fall because they are conquered from external enemies, but rather, fall because they surrender to the forces within. The cause is not primarily economic or political but spiritual. Prosperity without restraint produces weak men, and weak men make hard times inevitable.

If the West is to preserve its prosperity, it must recover the religious foundations that once governed appetite and formed its civilizational character. It requires the humble recognition that a return to religion is necessary for the preservation of Western Civilization since austerity creates those conditions that allow virtue to flourish, and these virtues will strengthen families, communities, and nations.

In short, it is a civilizational safeguard against weakness and effeminacy — which is the inordinate attachment to pleasures, and the pain of being deprived of them.

The task before us is clear. We must embrace austerity in our daily lives, and work to restore the religious and moral foundations that cultivate austerity to ensure that prosperity does not erode our character or the cultural landscape of our nations. The history of Rome reveals that even the mightiest of empires can fall, but austerity mitigates collapse, allowing a people to survive for a thousand years.

Hard times will still come, and when they arrive, strong men will need to rise up and restore good times — or what Spengler called the “civilizational spring” of the West.

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When speaking of virtues, we generally cite such things as patience, justice, temperance or humility. It would be unusual however if somebody remembered constancy.

So what is ‘Constancy’? In short, reliability. In a bit more depth, a constant man is a reliable man because he does not waver in the face of temptation or adversity. A constant man is resistant to systemic shocks, and adheres to certain convictions through good times and bad.

Constancy is indeed itself a constant, having been prized as a virtue throughout history by both our pagan and Christian ancestors. One man who noticed this, and understood how important constancy was to states and individuals alike, was the Florentine statesman Niccolò Machiavelli. During his Discourses on the First Ten of Livy, he indeed wrote a short essay on the subject, “That strong Republics and valiant Men preserve through every change the same Spirit and Bearing”.

In that essay, Machiavelli compared two case studies, Ancient Rome and Renaissance Venice, to analyse how constancy brought glory to one and near destruction to the other, and what we can learn as a result.

So, here is why constancy is a severely underrated virtue, why you need to cultivate it, and how to do so?

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The ‘Constant’ Man

“CONSTANCY, noun - Fixedness; a standing firm; hence, applied to God or his works, immutability; unalterable continuance; a permanent state.”

Webster’s Dictionary, 1828

As the above entry from the 1828 edition of Webster’s Dictionary reiterates, constancy has long held deep religious connotations. The reasons for this are clear. A man who anchors himself to a higher purpose and faith is far more likely to see himself as part of something bigger, and is therefore more likely to weather hardship for longer.

The constancy of God himself, and the encouragement this brings, is indeed central to Christianity:

“For I am the LORD, I do not change;
Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob”

Malachi 3:6

One can fight a battle far more readily if we believe in the cause, and it is that belief which propels us through the war. It is this truth which Machiavelli highlights in the opening of his essay, where he praises the Roman statesmen Marcus Furius Camillus:

“Among other high sayings which our historian ascribes to Camillus, as showing of what stuff a truly great man should be made, he puts in his mouth the words, “My courage came not with my dictatorship nor went with my exile;” for by these words we are taught that a great man is constantly the same through all vicissitudes of Fortune; so that although she change, now exalting, now depressing, he remains unchanged, and retains always a mind so unmoved, and in such complete accordance with his nature as declares to all that over him Fortune has no dominion”

Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten of Livy, III.31

Camillus quite simply saved Rome. In the wake of the devastating sack of the city in 386 BC, it was he who sought out and vanquished the Gauls who had all but conquered Rome, and persuaded the dejected Roman people not to abandon their burning homeland, but to stay and rebuild. The crux of his heroism in the annals of Roman history is that he recognized that Rome was about more than bricks and marble. It was an idea, and a civilization that was dawning, and one worth nurturing. He likewise understood that it would take time to nurture, and that the road would not always be smooth.

With Rome a smouldering ruin, Camillus embodied Roman virtue by not giving up, even when all others around him had. His constancy ensured the Sack of Rome was a temporary pain and not a permanent end. The Constant Man, therefore, is impregnable to Fortune. He is immune to shifts in Fortune because he recognizes that such shifts are temporary, and he is anchored to things which will outlive them.

As Machiavelli relates, however, what was once a largely personal virtue of one man would through his example become an integral virtue of Rome herself…

The Model of Rome

“The same merits and defects which I say are found in individual men, are likewise found in republics, whereof we have example in the case of Rome and of Venice. For no reverse of fortune ever broke the spirit of the Roman people, nor did any success ever unduly elate them; as we see plainly after their defeat at Cannae, and after the victory they had over Antiochus.”

Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten of Livy, III.31

While revered today as the last word in military glory, in reality Rome endured a torturous path to Empire. The early centuries of the Republic were defined by hardship, and there was rarely a war that Rome won without first suffering terrible defeats.

From the maulings she received at the hands of the Italic tribes — particularly the Samnites — on a regular basis, to her early confrontations with Carthage, Rome was tempered into shape by fire. As the most famous total war of the ancient world, the Second Punic War, indeed revealed, it was Rome’s ability to cope with defeat that truly set her apart. On the battlefield of Cannae in 216 BC, which Machiavelli references above, Rome lost over 50,000 men in a single day — numbers which would have been staggering even in the World Wars of the 20th century. Many other states would have capitulated after a disaster half that scale.

Rome however did not, because the Roman spirit was extremely resilient to ‘shock’. Of course it was, for Rome had endured countless defeats before. However terrible the losses at Cannae were, the situation was still not as bad as it had been in Camillus’ day over a century earlier, when the capital itself was occupied and sacked. Rome by now had a robust identity, one far more so than Carthage. Roman armies were filled out by Roman citizens — those of Carthage by hired mercenaries. The host of Hannibal was united by hatred of Rome and gold. Rome however was defined by a societal-wide investment in a common civilization.

As a result, to the legendary bafflement of Hannibal, Rome allowed herself only a moment’s grief before returning to the field and expanding the war. As Machiavelli emphasizes however, constancy comes into play in good times as well as bad:

“Here, therefore, we see that in times of adversity the Romans were neither cast down nor dismayed. On the other hand, no prosperity ever made them arrogant. Before fighting the battle wherein he was finally routed, Antiochus sent messengers to Scipio to treat for an accord; when Scipio offered peace on condition that he withdrew at once into Syria, leaving all his other dominions to be dealt with by the Romans as they thought fit. Antiochus refusing these terms, fought and was defeated, and again sent envoys to Scipio, enjoining them to accept whatever conditions the victor might be pleased to impose. But Scipio proposed no different terms from those he had offered before saying that “the Romans, as they lost not heart on defeat, so waxed not insolent with success””

Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten of Livy, III.31

Rome, therefore, was reliable. At her height, she was optimistic in defeat, and moderate in victory. She gained a reputation for honoring her word, be it to allies or to enemies, because there was a clear consensus among Romans that Rome stood for something that transcended the everyday, and that her word, once given, had to be honored for the sake of the honor of all Romans.

Constancy, therefore, was a central pillar of Rome’s identity, and her success. Sometimes, however, in order to better understand how important a virtue is, we need to consider what happens when it is absent.

For this, Machiavelli turns to a painful example from his own day, when Venice was almost wiped off the map by her own inconstancy…

Read more

We inhabit an age that earlier centuries could scarcely imagine — a world that has not merely drifted from Christianity but has turned decisively against it. The modern West, once shaped by the liturgy, the sacraments, and the moral imagination of Christendom, now treats its own inheritance as a superstition to be purged from public life.

Instead, public life is governed by a radically secular creed that tolerates Christianity only when it is silent, private, and politically harmless. As a result, the Church is increasingly pushed to the margins, its institutions weakened, its symbols mocked, and its moral claims dismissed as relics of an unenlightened past.

We live, unmistakably, in a post‑Christian society, and the hostility is no longer subtle.

The question presses upon us with new urgency: what are we to do, and how should Christians respond when the civilization built by their ancestors no longer recognizes them?

Two answers have emerged in our time — the Benedict Option and the Boethius Option — each founded in a different moment of civilizational crisis, and each offering a distinct vision of Christian fidelity in an age of dissolution.

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Benedict the Monk

St Benedict of Nursia lived at the twilight of the ancient world. Rome had fallen, the old civic order had collapsed, and the cultural unity of the West had broken apart into warring fragments.

Born around AD 480 in the Umbrian town of Nursia, Benedict was raised in a noble Roman family and sent to Rome for his education, only to find the city spiritually diseased and morally disordered. Disillusioned by the decadence of urban life, he abandoned his studies and fled into the hills east of the city, eventually taking refuge in a cave at Subiaco, where he lived for three years as a hermit devoted to prayer, fasting, and ascetic discipline.

In this landscape of civilizational ruin, Benedict refused to waste his strength attempting to resuscitate the dying institutions of the empire. His withdrawal was not an escape from responsibility but a deliberate act of purification, a turning away from imperial decay toward the stability of prayer, work, and communal discipline.

His example proved contagious. Others, equally disillusioned by the collapse of Roman public life, gathered around him, and together they formed the first nuclei of what would become a new monastic culture. From these early companions emerged a constellation of small communities, each shaped by the principles that Benedict would later codify in his Rule.

From this withdrawal emerged a new civilizational seed. Benedictine monasteries became islands of order amid the wreckage of Europe. They preserved Sacred Scripture, safeguarded learning, cultivated the land, and formed men whose lives were governed by the Regula Benedicti — a rule that bound the soul to obedience, humility, and stability.

Rather than conquering a fallen world, Benedict and his followers chose spiritual retreat, and in time, they became the humble architects of a perfected Roman Empire — Christendom.

The Benedict Option

The Benedict Option, as invoked today, draws inspiration from this ancient pattern. It proposes that Christians, confronted by a hostile culture, should form intentional communities where the faith can be preserved, transmitted, and lived without compromise. It is a call to rebuild the household, the parish, the school, and the local community as counter‑cultural sanctuaries — places where Christian life can flourish even as the wider society collapses into moral and spiritual dissolution.

For many, this vision is compelling. It recognizes that the modern world is not only indifferent to Christianity but antagonistic to it. It acknowledges that the formation of Christian character requires a stable environment, not the constant turbulence of a secular culture that seeks to reshape the soul. Moreover, it echoes the wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas, who wrote in his Summa Theologiae that “peace is the tranquility of order”, and that order must be cultivated deliberately and not simply assumed.

The Benedict Option thus offers a path of withdrawal for the sake of preservation — a retreat into smaller, intentional communities where the Christian faith can be lived in its fullness.

It is a noble vision, and in certain contexts, a necessary one — but it is not the only vision.

Boethius the Statesman

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius lived not in seclusion but at the very center of Roman political life. As a Roman statesman, philosopher, and Christian, he served the Ostrogothic kingdom during one of the most turbulent periods of late antiquity. When political intrigue turned against him, he was falsely accused of treason, imprisoned, and eventually executed. Yet in his confinement, Boethius produced one of the most influential works of the Western tradition: The Consolation of Philosophy.

In that dark cell, awaiting death, he wrote words that have strengthened the faithful for centuries: “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.” And again, reflecting on divine providence, he affirmed: “All fortune is good fortune, for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes.”

Boethius did not retreat from the world. He remained within its structures, fulfilled his public duties, and bore witness to the Christian faith even when fidelity demanded suffering. His example is one of steadfast endurance — a refusal to yield the public square to falsehood. He trusted that God governs history even when history appears governed by injustice.

The Boethius Option

The Boethius Option calls Christians to remain in the world, to endure persecution without despair, and to defend truth even when the institutions of society turn against them. It is the path of the statesman, the scholar, the teacher, the parent, the priest — those who cannot withdraw because their vocation binds them to the very places where the faith is contested.

Pope Leo XIII, writing in an age that already sensed the coming secular storm, insisted that Christians must not abandon the public sphere: “Christian wisdom must be allowed to exercise its saving influence in the laws and institutions of the State.” His words echo the Boethian spirit — a call to remain engaged, to labor for the common good, and to trust that divine providence governs even the darkest hours.

The Boethius Option is not a passive endurance but an active witness and fidelity. It is the steadfast readiness to speak truth in a world that punishes truth‑tellers; it is the fortitude to fulfil one’s duties even as the surrounding order collapses; and it is the unshakable conviction that all things — blessings and sufferings alike, prosperity and adversity — are governed by Divine Providence, and that in the end, Christ conquers.

Benedict or Boethius?

Both the Benedict Option and the Boethius Option arise from moments of civilizational crisis, both respond to a world that has turned against the faith, and both seek to preserve Christian truth in an age of dissolution.

Yet our age differs from theirs in one decisive respect.

Benedict withdrew into a wilderness that still existed. There were mountains to flee to, valleys to hide in, monasteries to build far from the reach of imperial decay. The world was vast, and the collapse of Rome created spaces where new forms of Christian life could take root. Moreover, those who followed him were already a people accustomed to the land — men and women who knew how to farm, to build, to endure hardship, and to sustain themselves apart from the machinery of a collapsing state. Their withdrawal, though radical, was not a departure from the skills or rhythms of life they already possessed.

We possess no such spaces, nor do we possess the habits that once made such withdrawal possible. There is no wilderness left. The modern world is global, interconnected, and totalizing. Its secular ideology reaches into every institution, every school, every corporation, every digital platform, every corner of public life. There is no Subiaco to retreat to, no Monte Cassino beyond the reach of the empire. The entire world has become the empire.

However, this does not render the Benedict Option meaningless. Those called to monastic life should embrace it with zeal, and those capable of forming intentional communities who are already accustomed to such a life should do so since the Church will always require places of refuge, formation, and stability. But for the vast majority of Christians, withdrawal is not possible.

We are parents, workers, students, and citizens. We inhabit the public square whether we wish to or not. Our children must be formed in a world that seeks to deform them. Our institutions must be engaged because they shape the lives of millions. Our culture must be contested because it will not leave us alone.

Why Our Age Demands Boethius

In such a world, the Boethius Option is not simply one path among many but the path demanded of most Christians. It calls us to remain where we are, to endure hostility without surrender, and to trust in Divine Providence even when the world appears governed by madness. Aquinas, reflecting on fortitude, taught that “the principal act of courage is to endure and withstand dangers.”

That same courage — the courage to remain steadfast when reason falters and the age descends into confusion — is what Boethius himself embodied. It summons us to speak truth with the serenity and confidence of Boethius, who asked, “If God exists, whence comes evil? If He does not exist, whence comes good?” — a question that still pierces the conscience of the modern world.

In his Sapientiae Christianae, Pope Leo XIII warned that Christians must not shrink from public duty, insisting that “to recoil before an enemy, or to keep silence when from all sides such clamors are raised against truth, is the part of a man either devoid of character or who entertains doubt as to the truth of what he professes.” And unlike Benedict’s followers, who could step away from a dying order to build anew, we inherit a civilization that our ancestors spent centuries constructing — a civilization sustained by their labor, their sacrifice, and their faith.

As Leo XIII also taught, the Christian must “strive that the State may be constituted and governed in accordance with the rules of the Gospel,” for abandoning this task is to betray both faith and heritage. To abandon it is not humility but a dereliction of duty. It is to dishonor the very inheritance we claim to defend. The Boethius Option is precisely this: the courage to endure, the courage to remain, and the courage to witness.

We live in a post‑Christian world. There is no frontier left to flee to. If you wish to choose the Benedict Option, then join a monastery.

For the rest of us, the age demands Boethius.

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‘The West has fallen’ is by now a common theme on social media. Consequently, so too are proposals on ‘How to Save the West’.

Many however remain unaware that one man was fully two centuries ahead of the curve. This man was no mere fringe thinker however. Prince Klemens von Metternich, Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, was indeed a man so influential that the entire mechanism of great power diplomacy in the early 19th century was termed the ‘Metternich System’ after him.

Having witnessed the entire arc of the French Revolution, and served as Foreign Minister to Catholic Austria at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, Metternich knew better than anyone what had been unleashed upon the world.

In 1820 however, Metternich put all of these thoughts to paper, and sent his Political Confession of Faith to Emperor Alexander I of Russia. It is an extraordinary audit of the state of the Western world, what went wrong and how to fix it.

Today, we explore this remarkable warning and advice from history, from a man who predicted the future with chilling accuracy…

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The Source of Evil

If you wish to cure illness, you must assume the role of a doctor. So too if you wish to cure a society of malaise. “Few men, however”, as Metternich states, “stop thoroughly to examine a disease which they intend to combat”.

Thus he begins with a frank diagnosis of Europe’s condition in the wake of the French Revolution:

“Kings have to calculate the chances of their very existence in the immediate future; passions are let loose, and league together to overthrow everything which society respects as the basis of its existence; religion, public morality, laws, customs, rights, and duties, all are attacked, confounded, overthrown, or called in question. The great mass of the people are tranquil spectators of these attacks and revolutions, and of the absolute want of all means of defence”

Prince Klemens von Metternich, Political Confession of Faith

Eerily prescient though his words are to anyone reading them today, they are also quite brilliant in identifying that what was happening was not the will of the majority. Most people, indeed, were “tranquil spectators” to widespread societal vandalism, whose support was claimed yet never sought by the ringleaders of these ‘revolutions’.

What we commonly call ‘revolutions’, after all, are almost never grassroots in origin. Virtually all of them have been top-down and elite-led coups d’état which are then retroactively marketed as ‘popular’. A common problem then is that people criticize the propagandized version of revolutions rather than their actual substance. Metternich then follows up with yet another observation that has aged like a fine wine:

“These are the precepts of morality, religious as well as social, and the necessities created by locality. From the time that men attempt to swerve from these bases, to become rebels against these sovereign arbiters of their destinies, society suffers from a malaise which sooner or later will lead to a state of convulsion”

Prince Klemens von Metternich, Political Confession of Faith

Man is anchored by faith, morality and place. Revolutionary leaders sought to dislocate Man from each, and society is unstable as a result. It really is as simple as that. More useful, however, is again identifying why this happened in the first place.

As per Metternich’s observation, the flourishing of Christianity was the singular thread that held European civilization together following the collapse of Rome in the West. Rome was conquered by the barbarians, yet the barbarians were conquered by Christ, and through Christ the European found common purpose, understanding and ethic. No matter his other curiosities, the resident of Atlantic Portugal shared with the Russian settler of the Siberian tundra a common allegiance to Christ. So too did the mightiest Emperor and lowliest serf.

But it would be a serious mistake to assert that the French Revolution was ‘Year 0’ of the breaking apart of this. A perfect storm of factors prepared the ground:

“The facilitation of the communication of thoughts by printing; the total change in the means of attack and defence brought about by the invention of gunpowder; the difference suddenly produced in the value of property by the quantity of metals which the discovery of America put in circulation; the spirit of adventure provoked by the chances of fortune opened in a new hemisphere; the modifications in the relations of society caused by so many and such important changes, all became more developed, and were in some sort crowned by the revolution which the Reformation worked in the moral world”

Prince Klemens von Metternich, Political Confession of Faith

More than anything else, an attitude of ‘win at all costs’ had been brewing ever since the Renaissance. The spread of the printing press allowed bad actors to whip up the populace through spreading libel which was difficult to challenge as quickly as it spread. The discovery of the New World triggered an ‘all or nothing’ global race between the great powers for resources, with elite society becoming ever more materialistic as a result.

But the true root of evil, however, was the perversion of our attitude towards knowledge…

Wisdom or Arrogance?

“The progress of the human mind has been extremely rapid in the course of the last three centuries. This progress having been accelerated more rapidly than the growth of wisdom (the only counterpoise to passions and to error)…”

Prince Klemens von Metternich, Political Confession of Faith

The advance of technology has been accompanied by a deadly two horse race in the background. That between knowledge and wisdom.

As society fragmented towards individualism, it was inevitable that knowledge would begin to flourish in fields increasingly isolated from each other. By the ‘Enlightenment’ of the 18th century, wisdom, fed by such mutilated knowledge, had morphed into a dangerous arrogance. Too many people began to view themselves as kings in their field, and therefore worthy of being kings over all fields:

“This evil may be as described in one word — presumption ; the natural effect of the rapid progression of the human mind towards the perfecting of so many things. This it is which at the present day leads so many individuals astray, for it has become an almost universal sentiment”

Prince Klemens von Metternich, Political Confession of Faith

The man sceptical of the Church, comfortable in his bubble and unaccustomed to opposition, saw fit to interpret all of society through his own narrow lens. At the same time, he considered himself above laws, customs and beliefs that he saw no way to credit himself for:

“Religion, morality, legislation, economy, politics, administration, all have become common and accessible to everyone. Knowledge seems to come by inspiration ; experience has no value for the presumptuous man; faith is nothing to him; lie substitutes for it a pretended individual conviction, and to arrive at this conviction dispenses with all inquiry and with all study; for these means appear too trivial to a mind which believes itself strong enough to embrace at one glance all questions and all facts. Laws have no value for him, because he has not contributed to make them, and it would be beneath a man of his parts to recognise the limits traced by rude and ignorant generations. Power resides in himself; why should he submit himself to that which was only useful for the man deprived of light and knowledge?”

Prince Klemens von Metternich, Political Confession of Faith

France, the eldest daughter of the Church, and therefore the kingdom which had taken Christian society for granted the most, was therefore most vulnerable to ‘presumptuous men’. Particularly in Paris, which by the 1780’s had a large number of newly wealthy men disconnected from the rural bedrock of France.

Selfish ambition, when sparked, is difficult to contain, and it was inevitable that ‘presumptuous men’ would lash out against the principal constraint upon their ‘new moral code’ — the Church. “Drag through the mud the name of God and the powers instituted by His divine decrees, and the revolution will be prepared!”, as Metternich described their plan.

Equally nefarious was the ability of the revolutionaries to hoodwink otherwise proud subjects by laundering subversive beliefs as ‘patriotic’. Especially after the revolution was marketed by ‘military glory’ under Napoleon:

“Nevertheless the revolutionary seed had penetrated into every country and spread more or less. It was greatly developed under the regime of the military despotism of Bonaparte. His conquests displaced a number of laws, institutions, and customs; broke through bonds sacred among all nations, strong enough to resist time itself ; which is more than can be said of certain benefits conferred by these innovators. From these perturbations it followed that the revolutionary spirit could in Germany, Italy, and later on in Spain, easily hide itself under the veil of patriotism”

Prince Klemens von Metternich, Political Confession of Faith

Yet Metternich did not view the situation as unsalvageable. On the contrary, knowing that revolutionary subversion is driven by elites and not the people actually makes combating this much more manageable, as long as the will exists.

As a result, Metternich devotes the remainder of his Political Confession to a clear six-point roadmap for any government that wishes to save Europe, the West, and Christendom itself…

Read more

Religion in the ancient world expressed itself through two broad modes that, while never mutually exclusive, reveal deep cultural instincts shaping the later development of Eastern and Western Christianity.

The first may be called the mystical or participatory mode, a form of religion that emphasizes direct experience of the divine, interior transformation, and the possibility of union with God. The second mode is rational or systematic, emphasizing order, doctrine, clarity, and conceptual precision. These modes are not rigid categories but tendencies that permeated the ancient Mediterranean.

Both modes of religion existed in Judaism, Hellenism, and Roman culture, yet each Christian tradition inherited and developed one more strongly. The East gravitated toward mystical participation, while the West gravitated toward systematic articulation. At the same time, both traditions preserved significant internal diversity. The East produced rigorous dogmatic definitions, and the West produced profound mystics, reminding us that these modes describe tendencies rather than strict theological divisions.

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Eastern Religion: Mystical, Theotic, and Apophatic

Before Christianity emerged, the Eastern Mediterranean world was already shaped by powerful mystical traditions that emphasized ecstatic experience, divine union, and transformative ritual.

The Dionysian mystery cults, for example, invited participants into intense rites involving music, dance, and symbolic death‑and‑rebirth. These rituals aimed not at intellectual understanding but at direct participation in the divine life of Dionysus. Initiates sought a kind of ecstatic liberation, believing that the god’s presence could be felt in the body and in the dissolution of ordinary consciousness.

Other mystery religions — such as the Eleusinian Mysteries — promised secret knowledge and personal transformation through ritual initiation. Meanwhile, Hellenistic philosophical traditions like Platonism and Neoplatonism taught that the soul could ascend toward the divine through contemplation and purification.

Plotinus, for instance, described mystical union with the One as an experience “beyond knowing,” where the soul becomes what it contemplates. Jewish apocalyptic mysticism also contributed to this atmosphere, with visions of heavenly ascent and participation in divine glory.

Together, these traditions created a cultural environment where mystical experience, symbolic transformation, and the search for union with the divine were seen as central to religious life.

Eastern Christianity emerged within this world shaped by ancient Near Eastern religiosity, Hellenistic metaphysics, and Jewish apocalyptic mysticism. Platonism and Neoplatonism taught that the soul ascends toward the One through purification and contemplation, while Jewish visionary traditions imagined heavenly ascent and participation in divine glory. These currents formed a spiritual atmosphere in which the early Eastern Fathers naturally understood salvation as transformation rather than mere pardon, as participation rather than mere instruction. The Eastern instinct was to approach God through mystery, silence, and the recognition that divine reality surpasses all conceptual grasp.

Even the structure of the Divine Liturgy reflects this instinct: the iconostasis veils the altar, signaling that the Eucharistic sacrifice unfolds within a realm of mystery into which the faithful are invited but never fully admitted. In short, the liturgical space surrounding the altar itself becomes a theological statement about divine transcendence.

This instinct reached its classical expression in the apophatic theology of Pseudo‑Dionysius the Areopagite, who taught that the soul approaches God “by the negation of all things,” since the divine is “beyond every affirmation and every denial.” His hierarchical vision of the cosmos, culminating in a union beyond intellect, shaped the Byzantine tradition profoundly.

St Maximus the Confessor deepened this mystical orientation by presenting the cosmos as a liturgy in motion, a vast ascent toward deification in which human beings serve as mediators. His doctrine of synergy — divine grace cooperating with human freedom — expresses the Eastern conviction that salvation is a dynamic participation in divine life.

Gregory Palamas, defending the hesychast monks of Mount Athos, articulated the distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies, safeguarding both God’s transcendence and the possibility of real participation in His uncreated life. For Palamas, the apostles on Mount Tabor didn’t simply behold a created symbol but the uncreated light itself.

Thus Eastern Christianity became a tradition oriented toward Theosis, mystical participation, and liturgical experience rather than conceptual system‑building. Its theology is contemplative and ascetical, shaped by the conviction that God is known primarily through unknowing. As Gregory of Nyssa observed, “Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything.”

The East does not reject reason, but it subordinates reason to the higher knowledge of union, preserving the mystery of the Divine from the reduction to human categories.

Western Religion: Systematic, Juridical, and Conceptual

Before Christianity, Roman religion was shaped by a strong concern for order, stability, and correct ritual practice. The Latin word religio itself was distinct from fides — which referred to personal faith or belief — but in the strict observance of one’s duties toward the gods in accordance with justice. The Romans believed that peace between man and the gods — which they called the Pax Deorum — was maintained only when sacred rituals were performed exactly as tradition required according to the Mos Maiorum. If a priest mispronounced a word or performed a gesture incorrectly, the entire ceremony had to be repeated.

The Pontifex Maximus, which is the greatest bridge between gods and men, oversaw the religious calendar, supervised sacrifices, and ensured that public rituals were carried out according to tradition. This office later became associated with the emperor himself as the principle of spiritual and political unity.

Roman religion was therefore highly structured, legalistic, and focused on maintaining cosmic and civic order. It did not encourage mystical union or ecstatic experience; instead, it emphasized duty, discipline, and the careful management of divine favor. These habits of mind — precision, order, and legal reasoning — formed the cultural soil into which Western Christianity was planted.

Western Christianity developed within this cultural world of Rome, where religio meant the maintenance of right order, duty, and justice, and when Christianity took root in this environment, it naturally absorbed these religious dispositions. The Western instinct was to articulate doctrine clearly, to define boundaries, and to construct systematic theological frameworks that safeguarded the integrity of the faith which is reflected in the writings of the early Western Fathers.

St Augustine stands as the principal architect of the Western theological imagination. Through the introspective brilliance of the Confessions, the sweeping historical vision of the City of God — where he claimed that the Church perfected what Rome only prefigured — and his penetrating treatments of sin, grace, and Christian doctrine forged the intellectual framework by which West would learn to understand its relationship with God, the human person, and the drama of salvation.

As the Western Church moved from Augustine’s conceptual clarity to the practical demands of governance, St Gregory the Great emerged as the figure who translated this theological vision into durable institutional form. Great, with his pastoral acuity and administrative genius, embodied the Western instinct for order, discipline, and practical governance. His Regula Pastoralis and liturgical reforms reveal a mind concerned not with speculative ascent but with shaping the moral and ecclesial life of the Christian people. Moreover, by assuming the ancient title Pontifex Maximus, he consciously styled the papacy as the new Roman principle of unity, gathering under ecclesial authority what the empire had once held together by law and power.

The medieval scholastics brought the Western mode to its fulfilment. St Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, Augustine, and the Fathers, constructed a theological system of extraordinary coherence.

Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae stood as the high point of Scholasticism, a synthesis that drew the Western intellectual inheritance into a unified and architectonic whole. His principle — “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” — encapsulated his entire theological vision as it expressed what he accomplished with the classical world: he baptized Aristotle and the Greco‑Roman philosophical tradition, receiving their insights into nature, virtue, and metaphysics, yet showing how supernatural revelation elevated and completed everything pagan reason had only partially grasped. In doing so, he argued that grace perfected Western culture itself, fulfilling rather than negating its deepest intellectual instincts.

His method was rigorously cataphatic, defining terms and distinguishing concepts, while still acknowledging the limits of human reason, and as a result, Western theology developed in the same spirit. The belief that the sacraments conferred supernatural grace ex opere operato reflected the ancient Roman instinct for legal precision, objective ritual form, and stable ecclesial order. Finally, Thomism understood the sacraments as Christ’s efficacious work in visible signs, and the Mass fulfilling rather than replicating the ancient Pax Deorum.

In this way, the West “baptized” Roman intellectual habits just as the East “baptized” Hellenistic mystical ones. Ultimately, the West’s strength lay in its clarity, coherence, and capacity for doctrinal development, and its systematic theology provided a stable framework that guarded the faith from confusion.

The Synthesis of East and West

In the modern world, Eastern Christianity continues to emphasize mysticism, liturgy, asceticism, and apophaticism. Theosis remains the goal of Christian life, and experiential knowledge of God is sought through prayer, sacrament, and the hesychastic tradition defended by Gregory Palamas. As a result, the East remains a living witness to the conviction that God is encountered more deeply in silence than in syllogism.

Western Christianity, by contrast, continues to emphasize systematic theology, moral clarity, and doctrinal precision. Its universities and seminaries cultivate analytical approaches to Scripture and doctrine. Even its mystical writers, such as Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross, articulate their experiences with conceptual rigor. This instinct has produced remarkable intellectual achievements, yet it can sometimes appear distant from the experiential depth cherished by the East.

These tensions are not merely theological but reflect different cultural and religious sensibilities. The Eastern doctrine of the essence–energies distinction seems to conflict with the Western doctrine of divine simplicity, and mystical experience appears to stand in tension with rational definition. Yet these contrasts reveal complementary strengths rather than irreconcilable oppositions.

A mature Christian theology requires both instincts. The East reminds the West that God transcends conceptual mastery, and the West reminds the East that clarity protects mystery from distortion. Such a synthesis would not erase the differences but integrate them into a fuller vision of the Christian life.

The East’s great conciliar definitions — especially in Christology — demonstrate that it, too, maintains doctrinal clarity when the integrity of the faith demands it, just as the West’s mystical tradition — from Bernard of Clairvaux to John of the Cross — shows that rational precision never excluded contemplative depth.

As St John Paul II observed, the Church needs both East and West, “the two lungs with which she breathes,” so that she may be drawn ever more deeply into the contemplation of God.

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The question of what makes nations ‘great’ is an inherently awkward one. Not necessarily because it is difficult to answer, but because answering it honestly requires facing uncomfortable truths.

One man who certainly feared no such controversy was Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor and Attorney General of England under King James I. As one of the most influential philosophers of Early Modern Britain, whose lifetime and office indeed coincided with the beginning of Britain’s rise to a global power, Bacon’s answer to this question warrants attention.

What makes Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates, written by Bacon in 1597 and revised in 1625, especially fascinating is that it also holds up a mirror to nations which already consider themselves great. Is that greatness built on rock, or sand?

So what does make a country truly great, and is your country on track to achieve greatness, or lose it?

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Does the Ruling Class Fiddle or Govern?

Bacon opens by reminding us of the Athenian admiral Themistocles, whose rise to political statesmanship involved constant struggle against the established elites of Athens, who disdained his lowly birth and his populism. In particular he recalls the admiral’s iconic retort when mocked for not being able to play the lyre:

“Thus it came about that, in after life, at entertainments of a so‑called liberal and polite nature, he was forced to defend himself rather rudely, saying that tuning the lyre and handling the harp were no accomplishments of his, but rather taking in hand a city that was small and inglorious and making it glorious and great.”

Plutarch, Life of Themistocles, II.3

This, then, sets the scene for Francis Bacon’s primary measure of a nation’s success. What kind of statesman is elevated in it? Who occupies its key decision-making roles? Men who fiddle, or men who can genuinely “make a small town a great city”?

In other words, are those who are perceived as ‘great statesmen’ simply those who are skilled at image and ‘politics’, or those who actually get things done and are prepared to do what it takes to raise the country up, regardless of popularity? It is remarkable that Bacon, who lived centuries before the advent of professional politics and before political campaigning became a multimillion dollar industry, remained so clear-sighted about this:

“For if a true survey be taken of counsellors and statesmen, there may be found (though rarely) those which can make a small state great, and yet cannot fiddle: as, on the other side, there will be found a great many that can fiddle very cunningly, but yet are so far from being able to make a small state great, as their gift lieth the other way; to bring a great and flourishing estate to ruin and decay”

Francis Bacon, Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates

If the ruling class itself openly treats the acquisition of power as a game to be played, and the public tolerates it, then the ‘greatness’ of that nation is resting on a broken staff. Especially when the ‘game’ is so drawn out and so dependent on so many conflicting interests and backroom deals that only the unscrupulous have the will to see it through, or even get involved at all. The cumulative effect, ultimately, is deeply corrosive to the public good:

“And certainly, those degenerate arts and shifts whereby many counsellors and governors gain both favour with their masters and estimation with the vulgar, deserve no better name than fiddling; being things rather pleasing for the time, and graceful to themselves only, than tending to the weal and advancement of the state which they serve”

Francis Bacon, Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates

But even if the governing cliques are corrupt, can the resources of their countries make up for it?

Size Matters Not

“An argument fit for great and mighty princes to have in their hand; to the end that neither by over-measuring their forces they lose themselves in vain enterprises: nor, on the other side, by undervaluing them they descend to fearful and pusillanimous counsels”

Francis Bacon, Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates

All countries possess resources and assets, be it in the form of economic goods or manpower. While the extent of these of course varies from one state to another, so too does the confidence of the country in them.

Excessive faith or pessimism in them are equally dangerous, as does anything which distorts the perception either the government or the governed has of their country’s true power. The country may have vast reserves of natural resources, but are they being exploited efficiently, and to the benefit of the country?

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the country’s perception of its military:

“The greatness of an estate in bulk and territory doth fall under measure ; and the greatness of finances and revenue doth fall under computation. The population may appear by musters ; and the number and greatness of cities and towns by cards and maps; but yet there is not anything amongst civil affairs more subject to error than the right valuation and true judgment concerning the power and forces of an estate.”

Francis Bacon, Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates

An army may be large on paper, but a paper tiger in war. There are many reasons for this, ranging from poor leadership and thinly stretched resources to ineffective doctrines.

A particular flaw of great powers lies in a failure to adapt after victory, as complacency leads the military establishment to continuously assume — and subconsciously hope — the next conflict will be waged like the last. This is precisely what would happen to France in the 19th century, when the French Army marched fatally unprepared against the rapidly modernized forces of Prussia in 1870. After suffering defeat after humiliating defeat, the Franco-Prussian War revealed to the traumatized French public that the ‘prestige’ of their armed forces had blinded them to the new reality of its actual wartime performance. Arguably, the country has never fully recovered its martial image from this disaster.

Bacon likewise warns against the childish notion that ‘my country is bigger so it must be better’:

“The kingdom of heaven is compared, not to any great kernel or nut, but to a grain of mustard-seed; which is one of the least grains, but hath in it a property and spirit hastily to get up and spread. So are there states great in territory, and yet not apt to enlarge or command; and some that have but a small dimension of stem, and yet apt to be the foundations of great monarchies”

Francis Bacon, Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates

Virtually all empires have been undone by powers they had once written off as insignificant. The vast and multicontinental Persian Empire, after all — the world’s first superpower — disintegrated to a single campaign launched from Macedon, a comparatively tiny kingdom that even Greeks had long considered a barbarian backwater. Alexander the Great, ultimately, like the Prussians of the 19th century, marshalled fewer resources far more effectively.

For Bacon, the martial aspect of the state is one that stands central to any discussion of a country’s ‘greatness’. However, it is not simply in the sense of ‘how good’ the country is at waging war:

“Walled towns, stored arsenals and armories, goodly races of horse, chariots of war, elephants, ordnance, artillery, and the like; all this is but a sheep in a lion’s skin, except the breed and disposition of the people be stout and warlike. Nay, number (itself) in armies importeth not much? Where the people is of weak courage; for (as Virgil saith), It never troubles a wolf how many the sheep be”

Francis Bacon, Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates

That is, when judging the greatness of states, the character of the country’s military cannot be divorced from the character of the civilian population. A house divided, after all, cannot stand.

So what is the character of a people which can truly call its nation ‘great’?

Read more

History has always invited competing interpretations, each attempting to grasp the underlying figures and forces that shape the rise and fall of civilizations.

In his Republic, Plato observed that “the beginning is the most important part of the work.” This principle can be rightfully applied to a study of history where the framing of historical inquiry determines its conclusions. Plutarch later sharpened this insight in his Life of Alexander by shifting attention from grand events to the moral feats of exceptional figures. “We are not writing histories but lives,” he insists, noting that the most spectacular deeds do not always reveal the deepest truths of character.

These ancient distinctions signal an early awareness that the individual, the elite, and the structural all contend for explanatory primacy.

Modern historians have extended this tension rather than resolved it. Will Durant, emphasising the biological substrate of human affairs, described history as “a fragment of biology,” while Oswald Spengler, taking a more deterministic view, argued that cultures unfold according to “strict necessity,” like organisms bound to destiny. Each, in his own way, inherits the ancient struggle to decide where historical explanation truly begins.

Across these traditions, three dominant readings emerge: the Great Man Theory, which sees history as the work of singular figures; Elite History, which attributes change to aristocratic minorities; and Historical Determinism, which views events as the inevitable outcome of impersonal forces.

Each offers insight, yet each alone is insufficient. Civilizations are too complex to be reduced to a single mechanism. Still, by examining these three readings, we gain a clearer sense of how human agency, social hierarchy, and structural destiny intertwine in the long arc of historical development.

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Monarchy and the Great Man Theory

The Great Man Theory rests on the conviction that history is shaped by exceptional individuals whose will, intellect, or charisma bends events toward new trajectories. Its lineage stretches from Herodotus’ portraits of kings in his Histories to Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, where the character of a single man becomes the fulcrum of an age.

In this reading, monarchy becomes the political analogue of historical agency. The king, emperor, or founder embodies the unity of the state, and his decisions carry disproportionate weight. Alexander’s conquests, Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, and Constantine’s conversion each illustrate how one individual can redirect the flow of centuries.

Will Durant, reflecting on such figures, wrote in his Story of Civilization that “the hero is the culmination of a thousand causes,” yet he insisted that the hero remains indispensable, because without him “the causes would have remained ineffective.” The Great Man is thus both product and producer, shaped by his age yet capable of transcending it.

Spengler, though more deterministic, acknowledged the potency of singular leaders within the life-cycle of cultures. He recognized in Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, a symbol of a world collapsing into the hands of one man, suggesting that in moments of civilizational crisis, the individual becomes the vessel through which destiny expresses itself. Here monarchy functions as the embodiment of destiny itself, concentrating the movement of a culture into the decisions of a single leader who becomes the pivot of history.

Critics argue that this view exaggerates the role of individuals and neglects broader historical forces. Yet the undeniable reality remains that certain men altered their worlds in ways no committee or collective movement could replicate. Their presence accelerated processes that might otherwise have unfolded slowly or not at all.

Thus, the Great Man Theory reminds us that history is not only a chronicle of structures but also of decisions, ambitions, and the unpredictable spark of individual human genius, and the ability of one man to impose their will upon the world.

Aristocracy and Elite History

If the Great Man Theory elevates the singular figure, Elite History shifts attention to the aristocratic minority that governs, administers, and directs the machinery of civilization.

In his Politics, Aristotle argued that “the best form of government is that which is administered by the best men,” capturing the ancient conviction that a small, cultivated class inevitably shapes the destiny of the many. This reading of history sees change not as the work of single heroic figures but as the cumulative action of ruling elites — senates, councils, priesthoods, merchant dynasties, and intellectual circles.

Plato’s vision of the philosopher‑kings in the Republic reflects this aristocratic ideal. He argued that only those trained in virtue and reason should guide the polis, for “the heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior.” In historical practice, elites have often fulfilled this role, whether in the Roman Senate, the Venetian patriciate, or the Oxbridge‑trained administrators who dominated the British civil service in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their decisions, alliances, and rivalries constitute the hidden hand behind major turning points in history, exerting influence that rarely appears in the official record.

Will Durant emphasized this dynamic when he wrote that “history is the biography of the community,” arguing that elites shape the moral and institutional contours of the societies they lead. Their character becomes, in time, the character of the civilization itself. Spengler, more severe in tone, argued in his The Decline of the West that every high culture develops a dominant minority whose style, values, and will‑to‑power define its epoch. For him, aristocracy is not just a political arrangement but a cultural necessity since “every culture has its own soul, and the aristocracy is its first and last expression.”

Elite History highlights the continuity of institutions and the slow, deliberate shaping of societies by those who possess education, wealth, and influence. It explains why revolutions often replace one elite with another, why bureaucracies outlast kings, and why cultural norms persist long after charismatic leaders vanish. Yet it also reveals the fragility of civilizations when their elites decay, lose confidence, or become detached from the people they govern.

Aristocracy, in this reading, is both stabilizing and perilous, capable of guiding a civilization to greatness or presiding over its decline.

Democracy and Historical Determinism

The third reading, Historical Determinism, views history as the unfolding of impersonal forces — economic pressures, demographic shifts, technological innovations, and cultural cycles.

In this interpretation, individuals and elites are swept along by currents far larger than themselves. This deterministic view aligns with the democratic sensibilities of the modern age, for it privileges the collective forces of society over the exceptional individual.

The masses, through their aggregated choices and pressures, become the true authors of historical change. From a deterministic perspective, political upheavals arise not from the actions of a single agitator — or even a coordinated revolutionary elite — but from material conditions that accumulate until they produce open conflict.

Industrialization alters economic structures and social relations, while migration patterns, climatic shifts, and technological innovations effectively reshape civilizations through pressures that far exceed the reach or influence of any single leader or elite.

Durant acknowledged this historical approach when he wrote that “civilization is a stream with banks,” suggesting that while individuals may stir the surface, the deep currents that become human history are shaped by geography, biology, and economics. Determinism thus offers a sobering reminder that history is not infinitely malleable since it imposes constraints, patterns, and necessities that no individual ruler or powerful elite can fully overcome.

Yet determinism can become overly rigid, reducing human beings to passive instruments of fate. While it explains long-term trends — whether it be the rise of cities, the spread of technologies, the cycles of empire — it struggles to account for sudden ruptures or the unpredictable emergence of transformative figures. Still, it remains indispensable for understanding the structural forces that underlie historical change, reminding us that civilizations are shaped not only by decisions but by conditions.

Spengler, too, underscored this structural dimension, insisting that cultures move through predetermined seasons of growth, maturity, and decline. For him, even the greatest leaders are “signs, not causes,” embodiments of forces already ripening within the cultural organism. Durant echoed this sentiment in a more moderate key, noting that “the laws of history are the laws of biology,” and that no society can escape the limits imposed by its material base.

Together, these perspectives reinforce the deterministic insight that history possesses a momentum of its own — a momentum that individuals may momentarily redirect but never fully command.

The Synthesis of Historical Readings

Each of the three readings—Great Man, Elite, and Determinist—captures a dimension of historical reality. The Great Man Theory reveals the potency of individual agency, Elite History uncovers the enduring influence of ruling minorities, and Historical Determinism exposes the structural forces that shape civilizations across centuries. However, none of these readings is sufficient alone since history is not a single-threaded narrative but a complex thread woven from personality, hierarchy, and necessity.

A balanced historiography recognizes that individuals act within structures, elites guide and restrain those individuals, and deeper forces set the boundaries within which both operate. Spengler’s cultural cycles, Durant’s biological metaphors, and the classical emphasis on virtue and leadership all converge on this point: history is a dialogue between freedom and fate, and civilizations rise when these elements align and collapse when they fall into disarray.

Understanding this balance allows us to appreciate the complexity of the past without surrendering to fatalism or hero-worship.

Yet even within this balanced view, one truth remains evident across the ages: we must never forget the power that one man has to radically alter the course of human history. For this reason, we make statues to men — not committees or forces.

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Poll after poll has shown, decade after decade, that the general public thoroughly rejects ‘modern’ art.

It has done so for so long that this issue could well be called the canary in the coal mine when it comes to the disconnect between governors and governed across the Western world. The ‘aesthetic’ disconnect has indeed been present for so long, however, that it has largely been taken for granted, with protest regularly shut down with the Orwellian line that ‘anything is art’.

This vagueness has an unfortunate tendency to spill across the divide, and as a result ‘Western art’ is too often defended in abstract terms that modernists quickly pounce upon to discredit criticism. If we are to truly stand up for our civilizational aesthetic therefore, it is critical we have a proper understanding of what Western art actually is, what specific qualities set it apart, and therefore why even overwhelming institutional messaging has failed to win the Western public over the modern art.

So what is Western art, how did it complement our civilization, and how can the broken aesthetic bond of our society can be remade?

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The Western Wilderness

The quality and extent of art in Ancient Rome is often overlooked, particularly as her marble sculptures tend to dominate the public’s perception of it.

But the Romans were exceptionally talented painters, as evidenced by the breathtaking frescoes which adorned both public and private buildings alike, and which still survive today. Drawing upon Etruscan and Greek traditions, the Romans achieved extraordinarily detailed depictions of people, animals and landscapes alike, and by the reach of their empire, elevated this into the first genuinely ‘Western standard’ of art.

It is clear too that Roman painters adhered to a certain cultural expectation when it came to ‘what art should be’, and that was a faithful depiction of the subject. The oldest encyclopedia in the world, the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, indeed contains a critical passage on this very subject, giving us all we need to know about what Roman elites considered tasteful or not in the visual arts:

“The painting of portraits, used to transmit through the ages extremely correct likenesses of persons, has entirely gone out… Consequently nobody's likeness lives and they leave behind them portraits that represent their money, not themselves… indolence has destroyed the arts, and since our minds cannot be portrayed, our bodily features are also neglected”

Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXV.2

We have, therefore, our first key anchor in Western art. That it should reflect nature, and that straying from this reflects a normalization of questionable morals.

With the collapse of Rome in the West however, all of this came to an abrupt end. For hundreds of years Italy and beyond were condemned to an aesthetic wilderness, defined by conflicting Germanic and Eastern influences which produced the same result — natural fidelity was out, and abstract was in. The art, therefore, was a tangible representation of Western Europe’s subjugation, and fragmented identity. At least until Italy’s reawakening…

The Return to Form

In medieval residences, art was a shadow of what it had been in Roman villas.

It tended to be extremely basic, consisting of simple geometric shape patterns. In Italian churches, it was all but indistinguishable from the icons you would see in Byzantine Greece. Scenes were rigid, two-dimensional and almost entirely devoid of emotion. Set upon brilliant gold-field backgrounds, such icons were inherently abstract.

It is clear, however, that there was no small resentment towards this situation. Giorgio Vasari, the Florentine painter and father of Art History itself, likened it to a foreign occupation. An occupation that was first truly resisted in the late 13th century by arguably the first true painter of the Italian Renaissance, Giotto. Turning his back on Byzantine tradition, from his Crucifix to the decorations of the Scrovegni Chapel Giotto dared to paint three dimensional scenes, with realistic figures and naturalistic backgrounds. Note the language Vasari used in the 16th century to describe him:

”The child not only equalled the manner of his master, but became so good an imitator of nature that he banished completely that rude Greek manner and revived the modern and good art of painting, introducing the portraying well from nature of living people, which had not been used for more than two hundred years.”

Giorgio Vasari, Life of Giotto

Vasari does not mention Pliny the Elder in the biography. But separated though they were by over a thousand years, the unity of themes across this pagan/Christian divide is as uncanny as it is unambiguous. The art natural to Italy, and by extension the West, is once again anchored to Nature. Vasari doubles down on this in the same biography:

“That very obligation which the craftsmen of painting owe to nature, who serves continually as model to those who are ever wresting the good from her best and most beautiful features and striving to counterfeit and to imitate her, should be owed, in my belief, to Giotto, painter of Florence, for the reason that, after the methods of good paintings and their outlines had lain buried for so many years under the ruins of the wars, he alone, although born among inept craftsmen, by the gift of God revived that art, which had come to a grievous pass, and brought it to such a form as could be called good.”

Giorgio Vasari, Life of Giotto

This, then was the central driving force behind the Italian Renaissance in Art. A rebirth of the classical world, portrayed in a return to Nature. Again and again, ‘natural’ appears in contemporary descriptions of Renaissance artists and their work. None more so, however, than in reference to arguably the greatest painter the Western world has ever produced — Raphael.

Raphael, ultimately, achieved the union of natural and artificial grace. He painted the human form as it was, in surroundings which elevated both the subject and the message. Consider, if nothing more, the words that were chosen for his epitaph, and which can still be read clear as day upon his tomb in the Pantheon:

“Here lies Raphael, whom Nature feared to be outdone while he lived, and when he died, Nature died with him”

Epitaph of Raphael Sanzio, Pietro Bembo, c. 1520

But upon his death in 1520, Western art stood at a crossroads. How do you improve upon something almost everybody had agreed was already perfect?

If Nature is the baseline, then there are only two paths to take. Our civilization has seen both, but only one remains rooted to the actual tradition of Western art.

Curiously, Raphael’s own words have the answer…

Read more

Long before a people codifies law, drafts a constitution or constructs a senate floor, it learns to imagine itself through the founding myths it tells — around fires, in marketplaces, and in the epic poems passed from one generation to the next.

A village that gathers each year to retell how its ancestors — whether real or imagined — crossed the seas or over mountain range is already a nation in embryo. This story grows into ritual, the ritual matures into tradition, and the tradition becomes their civilizational character.

These stories do more than recount origins, but rather articulate the virtues a community admires, the vices it wishes to restrain, and the kind of human being it hopes to produce.

In his Republic, Plato suggests that the founders of a city must be “the makers of tales.” He understood that political communities are shaped not by syllogisms but by a captivating idea. A founding myth is therefore not merely a narrative of beginnings but a template for national character, embodied in the hero who stands at its centre. Moreover, these myths explain why a land is cherished, why ancestors are honored, and why the future is worth defending.

Yet their deepest power lies in the transformational power of their stories. Geography becomes homeland, ancestry becomes inheritance, and the founding hero becomes a model of civic virtue.

Modern historiography, however, tends to treat these stories as complete fabrications — superstitious relics of the past that need to be cleared away so that the “real” history can be taught. Yet in stripping away the poetry, it strips away the animating principles that create a people.

While history reduced to a science may inform, it cannot inspire, and it is no coincidence that the nations that have endured for centuries — if not millennia — are precisely those with the strongest founding mythologies.

Myth, then, is not an escape from reality. It is the cultural framework that allows a society to interpret its reality, to endure its trials, and to realize its destiny. When citizens understand themselves as co-constructors in a long, unfolding narrative, they accept burdens and responsibilities that no policy or bureaucratic appeal could ever legislate.

However, when that foundational myth is dismissed or forgotten, the animating principle that binds civic life is slowly but surely unravelled, and the nation inevitably collapses into a loose confederation of atomized factions with nothing to bind them together.

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Romulus and Remus: The Twins Who Forged an Empire

“Go and tell the Romans that by heaven’s will, Rome shall be capital of the world. Let them learn to be soldiers. Let them know, and teach their children, that no power on earth can stand against Roman arms.” – Titus Livius (Ab Urbe Condita: The Early History of Rome)

According to Roman tradition, the origins of the eternal city lie in the survival of two infants abandoned on the banks of the Tiber River. Romulus and Remus were said to be descendants of Aeneas, the Trojan exile whose journey westward preserved both his royal lineage and the household gods of his people. They were also believed to be sons of Mars, a divine paternity that placed Rome under the patronage of the god of war from its very inception.

This connection situated Rome within a chain of continuity stretching back to the heroic age described in Homer’s Iliad, giving the city a pedigree that combined divine sanction with the memory and inheritance of a fallen civilization.

Ancient historians record that the twins were abandoned because Amulius, having usurped the throne from his brother Numitor, feared any legitimate heirs who might one day challenge his rule and therefore ordered the infants to be destroyed. Fate would have it that Romulus and Remus would survive their exposure being rescued by a she‑wolf who “gave them suck, as though she had been sent by some god to preserve the founders of Rome.”

In his Early History of Rome, Titus Livius recounts that then, raised by shepherds and ignorant of their noble past, Romulus and Remus grew into figures “of extraordinary size and strength, and as soon as they were old enough they roamed the hills hunting and engaging in contests of speed and strength”. This naturally drew men of the surrounding country to them like the gravitational pull of a celestial body.

When they resolved to establish a settlement for their people, disagreement arose over its location and leadership. The auguries they sought offered no clear resolution, and their rivalry hardened into open hostility. On the Palatine Hill, Romulus began to trace the boundary of his new city, and Remus, in an act interpreted as a challenge to the sacredness of the boundary, stepped across the unfinished wall.

Romulus withdrew his weapon and slew his brother since such a violation of his city’s honor was intolerable, and in doing so delivered the historic aphorism that would come to characterize the Roman people: “so perish whosoever shall overleap my battlements”.

In this episode, the Romans later saw the first assertion of the city’s authority and the principle that its security and preservation outweighed all other obligations. For later generations, the killing of Remus was read as the moment in which the inviolability of the pomerium — the sacred boundary that marked not merely the physical limits of the city but the sphere of its divine protection — was first established in blood.

Thus the myth concluded with fratricide, divine ancestry, and the establishment of a sacred boundary that would effectively shape Roman self‑understanding for millennia.

In the years that followed, Romulus was remembered not only as the city’s founder but as its first conqueror, subduing the neighbouring tribes of the Caeninenses, Antemnates, and Sabines, thereby demonstrating that Rome’s destiny lay in expansion from its very inception. He was also revered as a religious lawgiver, establishing sacred rites, priestly offices, and the first political assemblies — a reminder that Roman authority was always intertwined with divine sanction.

As sons of Mars, Romulus and Remus embodied a divine temperament marked by austerity, discipline, and a readiness for conflict — traits the Romans believed they inherited. Romulus’ own life reinforced this belief. He was a warrior‑king who fought, ruled, and worshiped with equal severity, and in doing so, became the archetype of the Roman man — pious, martial, and unyielding. His ascent into the heavens as Quirinus, Rome’s deified founder, further cemented the idea that Roman identity was forged through a fusion of religious duty and military prowess.

Following Romulus, the Roman people embodied an austerity of spirit that bordered on severity, a disciplined acceptance of the burdens imposed by fortuna, and a conviction that both the individual and the collective city moved within a destiny larger than themselves — a destiny they believed lesser peoples could neither imitate nor withstand.

Over time, Romans came to see in these foundational myths the earliest expression of the Mos Maiorum — not merely the “way of the ancestors” but the hard inheritance that set them apart from the softer nations they would later conquer. It became the standard by which they measured themselves and legitimized their rule.

This mythic legacy cultivated a fierce Roman exceptionalism: a people born in struggle, descended from the god of war, and consecrated by sacrifice. Convinced that the blood of Mars ran in their veins, the Romans interpreted victory as the visible working of fatum — a cosmic mandate rather than a human achievement.

In this way, the myth furnished the psychological and spiritual foundations of the relentless militarism that enabled Rome to subdue the ancient world and impose the imperium that would later be celebrated as the Pax Romana.

George Washington: The General Who Became the Republic

“The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty… is finally staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” — George Washington (First Inaugural Address)

The origins of the United States of America are inseparable from the figure of George Washington, whose life came to embody the transition from colonial dependency to national sovereignty.

Born into the provincial gentry of Virginia, Washington belonged to a society still shaped by English customs yet increasingly conscious of its distance from the imperial centre. His early military service in the French and Indian War placed him at the frontier of imperial conflict, where the limits of British authority and the ambitions of the colonies became unmistakably visible.

When tensions with Britain escalated, Washington emerged as the figure capable of uniting disparate colonial interests. His conduct during the Revolutionary War — namely, austere self‑command, political restraint, and a reputation for unwavering reliability — became the template for the American character. As he wrote to the Continental Congress in 1776, “I have no lust for power, but a sincere wish to serve my country,” a declaration that later generations would treat as the moral foundation of his leadership.

In the darkest winters of the war, he embodied a civic ideal: a leader who accepted hardship without complaint, subordinated personal ambition to the common good, and held together a fragile army through sheer moral authority.

At Valley Forge, where disease, hunger, and desertion threatened to dissolve the Continental Army, Washington’s refusal to abandon his men became a defining moment in the American imagination. During the retreat across New Jersey in 1776, when defeat seemed imminent, his calm persistence prevented the revolution from collapsing. And at Trenton and Princeton, his willingness to strike boldly when all seemed lost demonstrated that resolve, not resources, would determine the fate of the new nation.

Later generations would see in him the first assertion of a distinctly American virtue; the belief that liberty required discipline, sacrifice, and a willingness to endure trials for the sake of posterity.

Washington was also a man steeped in the classical tradition. In urging his officers to cultivate “the virtues of the ancients,” he revealed not only admiration but a deliberate effort to shape the new republic in continuity with the classical world. Educated in the histories of Greece and Rome, he and the other Founding Fathers consciously drew upon the ancient republics when drafting the Constitution.

The Roman model offered both inspiration and warning: from it they adopted the language of the Senate, the symbolism of the fasces, the ideal of the citizen‑soldier, and the conviction that public virtue was the foundation of political liberty, even as they rejected the imperial temptations that had corrupted the later Republic.

Thus, while they adopted Roman models of law, representation, and civic virtue, they carefully constructed political created checks and balances to prevent the slide into autocracy.

This contrast reached its defining moment when Washington declined the offer of kingship and voluntarily surrendered military power. In his own words, “I retire from the great theatre of action,” a renunciation that Americans interpreted as the crowning achievement of the Revolution — the decisive act that ensured the republic would be founded on consent rather than coercion.

In that renunciation, Washington became the American Cincinnatus, the patriotic citizen‑soldier who surrenders authority and returns to private life once public duty is fulfilled.

Over time, Americans came to see in Washington’s life the earliest expression of their own civilizational code — a New World analogue to the Roman Mos Maiorum. His example became the standard by which leaders were judged and distinguished the American new republic from the old monarchies of Europe.

As the United States expanded westward, asserted itself on the world stage, and came to see itself as the defender of freedom, Americans interpreted their rise as the unfolding of a national destiny. This conviction was later reinforced when the United States entered the World Wars, casting itself as the decisive power that would restore order, defend democratic ideals, and secure the peace that older empires could no longer guarantee.

In this way, the Washington myth became the republic’s foundational narrative, shaping its conviction that the United States of America possessed a singular role in history. From exceptionalism to Manifest Destiny and eventually to global hegemony, Americans came to see themselves as co-constructors of a new political order defined by liberty and sustained by their willingness to defend it.

Destroying Mythology Destroys Nations

Oswald Spengler saw the decay of the mythic imagination as the first symptom of civilizational decline since a culture that no longer believes its founding stories has already begun to exhaust its inner vitality. Like a tree severed from its roots, a people severed from its mythology withers and dies because it is the animating spirit and unifying principle of their civilization.

When a nation’s founding myths are attacked, trivialized, or discarded, the consequences are not only cultural but civilizational. A people stripped of its stories becomes disoriented, unable to understand who they are, what they honor, or why their future is worth defending.

Myth is the connective tissue between past, present, and future — the vessel of cultural memory through which a civilization recognizes itself across generations. It provides a moral framework, a model of character, and a vision of the kind of human being the nation aims to form.

Modernity’s obsession with scientific reduction empties myth of meaning and treats the past as irrelevant, but a people that abandons its founding stories is not enlightened — it is committing cultural suicide.

The destruction of mythology is therefore not enlightenment but cultural vandalism. A people that forgets its foundations forgets itself, and once that forgetting begins, the unraveling is swift, silent, and almost always irreversible. For when a nation ceases to believe the stories that once gave it purpose, it does not become rational, it becomes hollow — a civilization moving, as G. K. Chesterton put it, “with a weary and heavy heart, toward the dark house of its own extinction.”

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The modern world has done much to pollute the idea of aristocracy by conflating it with oligarchy.

What is the difference, you may ask? After all, isn’t it all just small groups of elite people who run the country?

But there is one simple difference which makes all the difference. In an oligarchy such as we know today, power lurks in the shadows. It is unwritten, unacknowledged and therefore unchecked. In an aristocracy, power is open. It is written, acknowledged and there is no plausible deniability over who is wielding it.

How power transfers in an oligarchy is never clear. In an aristocracy, it is openly and unapologetically hereditary. Modern elite thought views this manner of succession as a weakness. Our ancestors of course did not, and indeed one man who championed what hereditary nobility can do for society was an actual saint.

On September 8th 1584, Saint Charles Borromeo indeed delivered a sermon in Milan on this very topic. In it, he argued that nobility can be a powerful stimulus for public virtue, and that the hereditary element was crucial to this.

So, how can aristocracy stimulate virtue, and how therefore can you become more aristocratic?

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Nobility of Flesh, Nobility of Soul

Saint Charles Borromeo was uniquely well-qualified to speak on the subject of aristocratic virtue. As well as being a cleric who served as Archbishop of Milan, he was also a nobleman himself. Descended from the House of Borromeo, one of the older lordly families of Lombardy, he had centuries of family tradition behind him.

You may think, therefore, that it was self-serving of Charles to champion nobility as an asset to society. But he was a man who practised what he preached, and who put his money where his mouth was. In 1573, he founded a successful school in Milan, the College of Nobility, with the express purpose of educating aristocratic sons in Christian virtue, away from temptations that would lead them astray.

When a deadly plague struck Milan three years later, Charles would become renowned for his selfless dedication to the suffering. Successfully mobilising the Christian communities of the city to coordinate aid, he famously went into steep debt himself to procure food for the starving. So when he addressed the congregation of Milan on September 8th 1584 with a stirring sermon on Christian nobility, he did so with credibility.

He indeed began that sermon with a reminder that to be Christian is to already be imbued with the dignity of nobility:

“Moreover, although we are not ignorant of the fact that true nobility — the Christian nobility — is that which the Only Begotten of the Father conferred on all of us when“ as many as received Him, He gave them power to be made the sons of God” (John I:12), and that this dignity of nobility is common to all faithful Christians, nevertheless we believe that nobility according to the flesh ought not in any way be despised or rejected”

Saint Charles Borromeo, Homily of September 8th 1584

That said, “nobility according to the flesh” absolutely has a role to play in encouraging this “dignity of nobility”. First of all, in the role it plays in setting out expectations within the noble family itself:

“In the first place, the splendor of the blood and the virtue and famous deeds of the ancestors have a marvelous effect in disposing the noble, virile man to follow in the footsteps of those from whom he descended”

Saint Charles Borromeo, Homily of September 8th 1584

There is nothing, after all, quite as motivating as the example set by your own flesh and blood to inspire you to equal or surpass it. The bond of kin between the nobleman and his ancestor brings with it a certain reassurance, that within him a certain ability flows, and that he is capable of greatness.

This of course works in multiple ways. The man who is aware of his ancestors has examples both positive and negative to draw upon, and the more acquainted he is with those ancestors, the deeper the well of wisdom he has to draw upon. While the “nobility of the flesh” is by definition better placed to do this, since noble families by their nature tend to be aware of and celebrate their ancestors to a greater degree, the same logic applies to any family.

“Know Thyself”, as the inscription above the Oracle of Delphi famously said. Know your family, who has come before you and what battles they faced. Every family has a story, of which you are a chapter. Unless you know where in that story you are, your chapter will ramble, undermining the course of those that are to follow.

But how can aristocracy itself help with this?

A Stage For Elevating Virtue

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women are merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts”

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

If virtue can be cultivated by anyone, and a strong family unit can assist in the cultivation of it across generations, then there is one clear role that titled nobility can play — to serve as a stage for that virtue.

In other words, the existence of an aristocracy, whose status is known to all and whose lives are visible to all is an exceptionally powerful tool. An aristocrat, after all, is fundamentally different to a celebrity. His status and standing, after all, cannot be divorced from service to the country. Under Feudalism, this was true to an absolute degree. It was physically impossible to own the land which could beget wealth without possessing a title that carried with it clearly defined obligations in governance and military leadership.

An aristocracy therefore can provide the same ‘appeal’ as celebrity and inspire the same ‘personal investment’ from the people, while keeping said ‘aura’ anchored to productive service. Since their very status as aristocrats fluctuates according to their deeds, this in itself acts as an incentive to virtue, as does the fear of scandal. The aristocrat, therefore, has a clear interest in fostering virtue in his children:

“Whence it follows that the nobles, as if by a certain instinct of nature, seek after honor, cultivate magnanimity, despise cheap gains, and finally abhor those things deemed unworthy of their nobility”

Saint Charles Borromeo, Homily of September 8th 1584

We may laugh today at the fussiness of etiquette and the preoccupation with standing among the pre-war nobility, or perhaps smile at its quaintness, but there was of course a reason for these manners. Lesser sin, ultimately, was seen as the tip of the iceberg. A man who took a lax view of ceremony, or else indulged in gambling or infidelity, it was believed, had slipped and had opened himself to temptation that would enable graver crimes. A man in disgrace is a man unlikely to be given opportunities — opportunities that could elevate himself and his family.

Thus nobility, and above all, the culture of nobility, can act as a surprisingly self-regulating standard of conduct among the ruling elite:

“In the second place, nobility is equally a stimulus for holding fast to virtues. This differs from the first benefit we have described: the first predisposes the noble to embrace righteous works more easily; the second adds powerful stimuli to that which has been rendered easy and, as it were, is a kind of bridle that represses vices and actions unbecoming of the noble and that, should the noble fall into some fault, causes him to be overcome with an extraordinary shame so that he may, with all his strength, take care to purify himself of this stain.”

Saint Charles Borromeo, Homily of September 8th 1584

It is important to remember, too, that if we speak of hereditary nobility then the ‘stakes of conduct’ are raised for the individuals. For they risk the name not only of themselves, but their ancestors before them and descendants after them.

At the same time, if we speak of hereditary nobility, then we are also speaking of a certain prestige that a mere career bureaucracy cannot emulate, and has singularly failed to replicate. There is an innate human respect for anything that lasts, including names. Coming back to the stage, therefore, nobility has the power to reflect its own prestige onto what it does upon that public stage:

“Finally, the last benefit of nobility to consider is that, just as a precious rock glimmers more when it is set in gold than in iron, so also these virtues are more splendorous in the noble than in the common man; and nobility added to virtue is its greatest ornament.”

Saint Charles Borromeo, Homily of September 8th 1584

Virtue is pure, and nobility majestic. When the two are allied, they are greater than the sum of their parts. A virtuous nobleman makes virtue itself glamorous.

At this point, if not before, you are likely wondering if I will address the elephant in the room. ‘Yes, but not all noblemen are virtuous, indeed some have been downright scandalous, so now what?’.

Counterintuitively however, an immoral nobleman can be as much an asset to his society as his virtuous kin. For as Charles points out, aristocracy can be the stage of society. But in order to tell a compelling story from that stage, it needs villains as well as heroes…

Read more

Historians and political theorists have long noted that no society — ancient or modern — appears out of a void as drifting abstractions that later harden into institutions. Every civilization begins as a people already shaped by land, faith, and inherited culture.

And just as a household needs walls to protect the family within, a people require boundaries — physical and cultural, visible and invisible — that distinguish them from outsiders and preserve the form of life they mean to hand on.

Yet an opposing view insists the analogy is outdated: that nations are the remnants of an antiquated past, that borders are arbitrary lines drawn by history, and that humanity is better understood as a single moral community rather than distinct peoples.

This is why the question “Why do nations need borders?” predates contemporary arguments about sovereignty or immigration. It belongs to the older inquiry into how order is created and how justice survives across generations. At its center lies the more unsettling question: what is a nation?

Is it an accident, is it an idea, or is it a family?

If it is merely an accident or an idea, then borders are arbitrary lines. But if a nation is a family then borders are not optional — they are the conditions of its survival, and must be defended.

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The Classical Understanding: Borders as the Form of a People

According to the Ancients, a people did not emerge as an abstract collection of individuals but as a koinōnia — a living fellowship or extended family whose character was inseparable from the land it inhabited and the boundaries that defined it.

Rather than treating geography as an accident, the ancients saw it as the primordial architect of a people’s habits, virtues, and limits. In the Laws, Plato writes that “the habits of the citizens must be molded by the laws, and the laws must follow the nature of the place.”

Mountain ranges, rivers, coastlines, and plains were not neutral features but formed a people as much as their own parents. In this sense, their geography and subsequent borders were not imposed from without, but rather, inextricably connected to who a people, and these geographic features formed the boundaries of their society.

Plato’s reflections on the city-state (polis) presuppose this intimate bond between land and people. Rather than being an administrative unit, Plato argued that the city‑state was an extended family, a community of shared descent, shared memory, and shared culture. Its members could meaningfully know, recognize, and care for one another only within a determinate space.

Moreover, in his Republic, Plato warns that “When a state becomes many instead of one, it is no longer a state.” A city-state that extends beyond the scale of familial recognition ceased to be a unified people, because it lost the cultural and historical intimacy that made it a single people.

Aristotle sharpened this philosophical insight by grounding political life in the natural progression from household to village to city, each stage deepening and reinforcing the koinōnia. This progression was genealogical as well as political.

The city-state was the natural extension of the household whose shared history, language, religion, and customs united and formed them as a people. In his Politics, Aristotle insisted that “a state when composed of too many is no longer a state, for law has no strength when the mass of the people is too great,” and he tied this directly to geography, noting that “the character of peoples differs according to their location; for the climate has much to do with the formation of habits.” This development was always tied to place.

The virtues appropriate to a maritime people differed from those of a mountain people because the land itself disciplined their dispositions. Thus, “the state must have a definite territory, for the state is a community of families and of clans for the sake of a good life.” Borders not only preserved a people’s safety but also its civilizational character and morality.

Marcus Tullius Cicero’s conception of the people (populus) was not an accidental collection of individuals under law but the union of a people by shared customs, affections, and religious rites. This civic family was formed as a conscious reflection of its own lineage and cultural inheritance. As he wrote in De Re Publica, “a commonwealth is the property of a people; and a people is not every assemblage of men, but an assemblage united by agreement in justice and partnership in common good.”

Romanitas, the distinctive character of the Roman people, was inseparable from the city’s sacred boundaries (pomerium), the disciplined order of its agrarian landscape, and the rhythms of life shaped by the Italian peninsula. To this effect, Cicero wrote that “the walls of the city are not the ramparts of the stones, but the laws and customs of our ancestors,” which reflected the general consensus that borders were as cultural as well as physical.

To belong to the populus Romanus was to belong to a historical family whose identity had been forged by its land and its memory. However, Romanitas was adoptive as well as ancestral since those who accepted its laws, cultus, and civic virtues could be integrated into the populus without dissolving its identity. This was possible because the principles of proportionality, assimilation, and the common good were maintained since “The safety of the people was the highest law”.

The Christian Understanding: Universal Faith, Particular Peoples

Christianity entered the ancient world with a revolutionary claim. Through Christ, the Church transcended the limits of tribe and territory, announcing a community united in faith rather than descent. St Paul’s proclamation that the Gospel was for “Jew and Gentile” alike introduced a spiritual universality into human affairs, a unity that no political order could produce.

Yet this universality did not abolish the natural order of peoples and sovereignty. Paul’s own letters presuppose the legitimacy of civil authority, and the early Church never imagined that the spiritual unity of believers somehow erased the concrete distinctions of culture, law, and territorial integrity of particular peoples.

This distinction between supernatural unity and natural differentiation became foundational for Christian political thought. When St Augustine wrote The City of God, he clarified that the Church — the heavenly city — is gathered from all nations without displacing them. Earthly communities, with their laws, borders, and sovereignties, remain necessary for the preservation of order and justice in the temporal realm.

Augustine’s contrast between the two cities was not a call to abandon the earthly city but to understand its role in directing man toward one of his dual ends — temporal flourishing (eudaimonia). For Augustine, the Church is a supernatural community that transcends temporal borders without negating their political necessity.

The earthly city, shaped by history, geography, and shared civic practice, forms a people whose common life requires clear boundaries. Augustine underscores this by recalling that “God divided the nations, setting the bounds of the peoples,” a scriptural affirmation that political order presupposes territorial differentiation. Thus he could say, “The earthly city, which does not live by faith, desires an ordered concord of civic obedience,” a concord that depends on defined authority, territorial integrity, and national sovereignty.

Without such boundaries, political authority cannot fulfil its charge to restrain disorder, adjudicate competing claims, and secure the conditions for civic peace oriented toward the common good.

St Thomas Aquinas later refined this synthesis with greater philosophical precision. Drawing on Aristotle, he affirmed that political communities arise from the natural sociability of human beings and that their particular forms reflect the concrete circumstances of their land, history, and customs.

For Aquinas, this diversity is not accidental, since “Different peoples have different customs, according to the diversity of their conditions.” The common good of a people is inseparable from the order that binds them together — an order that requires defined authority, stable jurisdiction, and territorial integrity. Sovereignty is not merely a pragmatic necessity but a moral requirement: rulers must have the capacity to govern a determinate people for their flourishing.

Aquinas thus completes the classical‑Christian account: the universality of the Church pertains to grace, while the plurality of nations pertains to nature. The supernatural fellowship of believers does not erase the natural bonds that constitute a people; it presupposes them. By maintaining their borders, nations preserve the concrete cultural and religious forms through which the life of grace is transmitted across generations.

In this way, Christian thought deepens the Greco‑Roman understanding of borders as the form of a people, affirming that distinct nations, shaped by their own histories and environments, remain essential to moral and political life.

Borders, Justice, and the Preservation of a People

Unlike the ancient and medieval, the modern age is animated by a radically egalitarian impulse to level all distinctions between man and woman, parent and child, citizen and foreigner, nation and world — and in its zeal to erase hierarchy, it also erases form and identity.

What earlier ages understood as the natural foundations of civic life — the family, the community, the nation — is now treated as an arbitrary constraint to be overthrown.

Yet, recent history has shown that a society that undermines these foundations does not liberate but destroy itself. This egalitarian project inevitably turns against the family, the first and most fundamental community. It undermines sovereignty, the authority by which a people governs its own life. And it rejects borders, the visible expression of a nation’s right to exist as a distinct people shaped by its own history, land, and faith. Such gestures, however noble they appear, unsettle the natural order on which any society depends.

A family without authority breeds children conditioned to servitude, a community that cannot define itself cannot defend itself, and a people without borders becomes an inconsistent mass without identity, memory, or purpose. When everyone is welcome, no one belongs, and rather than promoting universal brotherhood, the dissolution of borders leads to new and extreme forms of tribalism which tear apart the very fabric of society.

The Greco-Roman and Christian traditions maintain that the virtue of justice requires rendering every man his due, and this includes rendering a people its due: the right to its own land, its own laws, and its own way of life. These would admit that borders are inherently exclusionary and divisive, but this is not done for hatred of the other but for preservation of the self according to the order of charity (ordo caritatis).

A house has walls so that a family may be preserved within it. The walls distinguish one household from another and make care, responsibility, and protection possible. Similarly, a nation without borders is like a house without walls: it fails in its primary duty, which is the safeguarding of its people and the common good. In attempting to help everyone, it helps no one.

A nation that refuses to defend its borders is not practicing compassion — it is preparing its own extinction. For this reason, borders exist, and a people must defend their borders, for in defending their borders they also defend their land, their history, their language, their religion, their culture and their destiny — and in extreme circumstances this defense requires force.

Disconnect between government and the governed has arguably never been more apparent across the Western world than it is now. This does not mean, however, that our ancestors were not also troubled by it, and how it happens.

One man who sought to analyze this great question was a French nobleman of the 18th century, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu, the very man who pioneered the concept of Separation of Powers.

In Part I of his seminal 1748 work The Spirit of the Law, Montesquieu considers three forms of government — republican, monarchic and despotic — and offers a surprisingly cutting insight into what uniquely makes and breaks each of these governments.

So, what should the virtue of your government be, and what is it now?

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The Principles of The Three Governments

1 - The Principle of Republics

Montesquieu proposes the intriguing idea that each form of government is ultimately defined by one driving principle. A principle which is unique to that form of government, which gives it vitality, and which — as long as it is adhered to — can mitigate any weaknesses of said form of government.

For a republican state, which Montesquieu defined as one in which sovereign power lay in either the “collective body of the people, or particular families”, that principle is Virtue itself.

At first glance, this may sound like a bland platitude, but the reasoning is not. Montesquieu prefaces his explanation by pointing out that a monarchic system can more easily ‘self-repair’ following an ineffective reign:

“Clear it is also that a monarch, who through bad advice or indolence ceases to enforce the execution of the laws, may easily repair the evil: he has only to follow other advice; or to shake off this indolence. But when in popular government, there is a suspension of the laws, as this can proceed only from the corruption of the republic, the state is certainly undone”

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, III.3

A republic, however, cannot, for the blunt truth that misrule in a republic is by definition a blight that has spread throughout a critical mass of its governing elite. The very ‘checks and balances’ which dilute power then become a direct obstacle to holding the broader decay to account. It is, as a consequence, far more difficult to ‘prune’ the evil without a wholesale and hard reset — a violent revolution.

As a result, the only meaningful counterweight to elite misrule is the intolerance of the people towards it. Ergo, Virtue is the principle that a republican system must aspire to, champion and uphold. Montesquieu develops this by listing several examples from history — from Sulla’s march on Rome to the English Civil War — of where he believed republican experiments were entirely wasted because the citizen body had been corrupted by either the same vices as the elites they had overthrown, or simply been beaten down into collective apathy. In other words, unless the citizen body loves Virtue and demands it, their elites will sooner or later betray them and their interests.

Furthermore, Montesquieu gives a remarkably prescient summary of what happens to republics that fail to take this principle seriously:

“When virtue is banished, ambition invades the hearts of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. The desires now change their objects; what they were fond of before, becomes indifferent; they were free, while under the restraint of laws, they will now be free to act against law; and as every citizen is like a slave escaped from his master's house, what was a maxim of equity, they call rigour; what was a rule of action, they call constraint; and to precaution they give the name of fear. Frugality, and not the thirst of gain, now passes for avarice. Formerly the wealth of individuals constituted the public treasure; but now the public treasure is become the patrimony of private persons. The members of the commonwealth riot on the public spoils, and its strength is only the power of some citizens, and the licentiousness of the whole community.”

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, III.3

So if Virtue is the principle of republics, what is it for monarchies and why is it different?

2 - The Principle of Monarchies

Under an executive monarchy, that is a monarchy in which the sovereign wields actual decision-making power, the calculations are different.

“In monarchies, policy makes people do great things with as little virtue as she can. Thus in the finest machines, art has contrived as few movements, springs, and wheels as possible”

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, III.3

Since power in a republic is distributed across many moving parts, even in an ideal scenario the making of sound policy faces considerable inertia. In a true monarchy, this of course is avoided, and therefore so too the need for the broader populace to be as vigilant of Virtue. There is broader no elite to hold to account, and in any case, the monarch does not depend on election to hold that power nor the cooperation of elites to wield it. But that does not mean that monarchies have no need of a principle.

So instead of Virtue, the principle of monarchy is Honor:

“Monarchical government supposeth, as we have already observed, pre-eminences, and ranks, and likewise a noble descent. Now as it is the nature of honor to aspire to preferments and distinguishing titles, it is therefore properly placed in this government.

Ambition is pernicious in a republic. But in a monarchy it has some good effects, it gives life to the government, and is attended with this advantage, that it is no way dangerous, because it may be continually checked.”

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, III.7

The system of honor, and of honors, is an effective way of harnessing individual ambition and transforming it into activity that is constructive for the kingdom itself. Men desire honors, and honor for themselves and their family, and since these are achieved by actions that are publicly perceived as wholesome, advancement in a true monarchy forces the ambitious to at least partially work for the good of the state instead of purely for power. The throne itself, after all, is off limits, and so the desire for glory is separated from the desire for power.

A system of honor, radiating out from the princely court, can be just as effective a check on misrule in a monarchy as a virtuously guided and honestly managed election in a republic. Moreover, as Montesquieu implies, monarchic Honor shifts the emphasis away from popularity and politicking and towards individual acts:

“Is it not a very great point, to oblige men to perform the most difficult actions, such as require a great degree of fortitude and spirit, without any other recompence, than the fame and reputation arising from the actions themselves?”

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, III.7

But there is a third form of government, which both of the above can mutate into…

3 - The Principle of Despotism

It is profoundly naive to believe that monarchy alone is vulnerable to despotism. A despotic government after all, Montesquieu maintains, is any in which the principle is fear:

“As virtue is necessary in a republic, and in a monarchy honor, so fear is necessary in a despotic government: with regard to virtue, there is no occasion for it, and honor would be extremely dangerous.

Here the immense power of the prince is devolved entirely upon those to whom he is pleased to intrust. Persons capable of setting a value upon themselves would be likely to create revolutions. Fear must therefore depress their spirits, and extinguish even the least sense of ambition.”

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, III.9

As the later French Revolution and beyond would reveal, fear can just as easily emanate from a government that preaches liberty as one that embodies autocracy. Quite simply because a despotic government is an illegitimate one. That is, a government which is not underpinned by clear written laws or historical and cultural roots.

As the written laws have already been violated to establish the despotic regime, the enforcement of law is by definition selective. Despotism thus occupies a grey area of confusion which requires force, and therefore fear, to perpetuate itself. Any government, republican or monarchic, which enforces laws arbitrarily is therefore despotic. The dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, which defined England’s brief republican phase and which relied on the New Model Army to enforce London’s will and Puritanical ideology, is a typical example of the former.

So, how do we know when the principle of our government is compromised, and therefore when to act?

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History is often described as the slow movement of powerful trends and forces — geography, demography, economics, and culture — shaping the destinies of peoples over centuries. This view, which is fashionable among modern historians, treats individuals as mere expressions or instantiations of these deeper currents.

Yet this interpretation, for all its analytical neatness, obscures a fundamental truth. At the decisive thresholds of history, in decisive moments when the future hangs suspended, it is not these abstract, impersonal forces that redirect the flow of events, but individual men.

Great men are undoubtedly conditioned and impacted by the trends and forces of their age, but this must never be mistaken for a submission to these very same trends and forces. The age provides the proverbial stage, but the individual man assumes the role as both director and actor and must play his part accordingly.

Spengler, like many historians, would argue that a single man, disciplined, directed, and defiant, can crystallize latent forces that would otherwise remain inert, summon them into coherence, and wield them as a weapon, thus imposing himself upon his world and redirecting the course of human history.

This is most evident in two of history’s most influential figures — Charlemagne and Napoleon Bonaparte — whose influence radiated far beyond their lifetimes. Both emerged in periods of social and political fragmentation, and both imposed form upon formlessness, reshaped political structures, cultural identities, and the imagination of Western Civilization. Rather than being products of their times, each became the architect of a new order.

While their legacies differ, their impact demonstrates the recurring truth that when a civilization reaches a moment of upheaval, it is the decisive individual — not the trend or force — who becomes the hinge upon which the future is determined.

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Charlemagne: The Great Man Who Reforged the West

When Charlemagne inherited the Frankish kingdom in 768 AD, Western Europe was less a coherent realm than a fractured social and political landscape. The shadow of Rome still stretched across the continent, but its institutions had long since disintegrated under the weight of invasions and political decay.

Local warlords partitioned the old provinces into petty dominions, long-standing trade networks were severed, and the intellectual tradition flickered dimly in the remote discipline of Catholic monasteries. Into this disordered world stepped a ruler whose imagination refused to accept the limits of his age.

Charlemagne possessed not only an instinct for consolidation but a temperament oriented toward order. His campaigns — relentless, deliberate, and often personally led — were the outward expression of an inward resolve. Frontier pressures may have shaped the context of the Saxon Wars, yet their driving force was a sovereign intent on turning a resistant borderland into a coherent Christian polity.

Einhard’s claim that Charlemagne pursued these wars “with the greatest determination” points to a personality that would not abide the centrifugal forces of his age which would have naturally drifted further towards dissolution.

Similarly, his administrative reforms bore the imprint of his character. Charlemagne divided his realm into counties governed by counts, and he dispatched the missi dominici as royal envoys to supervise them. These inspectors enforced justice, ensured fiscal discipline, and carried the king’s authority across vast distances. No structural trend demanded such a system; rather, it was the intentional design of a man who believed that power must be organized if it is to endure.

Charlemagne also understood that culture is a mode of governance. The Carolingian Renaissance — the schools, the scriptoria, the standardization of Latin — emerged as a deliberate restoration shaped by a ruler who grasped that learning had slipped toward extinction.

Alcuin of York praised him for reviving study “which had almost perished,” a judgment that mirrors the king’s conviction that civilization survives only through cultivation. His reforms reveal a mind that treated education as the very architecture of order and the scaffolding upon which a coherent political identity emerges.

The coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day in 800 AD crystallized this social and political vision. When Pope Leo III placed the imperial crown upon his head, the gesture marked the reassertion of Western imperial authority and established a political ideal that would shape Europe for a millennium.

The Holy Roman Empire emerged as the outward form of Charlemagne’s inner imagination — an imperial architecture conceived in his mind and realized through the force of his character, bearing the unmistakable imprint of the man who forged it.

Charlemagne stands among the great men of history because his personality fused audacity, administrative genius, and an almost preternatural sense of civilizational purpose. He combined the Germanic warrior’s instinct for decisive action with the Roman statesman’s capacity for long-range institutional design, enabling him to subdue fractious frontiers while simultaneously orchestrating a cultural renaissance.

Moreover, his curiosity drove him to gather scholars, reform liturgy, standardize law, and impose coherence upon a fragmented world; his charisma bound nobles, clergy, and conquered peoples into a single political imagination.

Napoleon: The Great Man Who Engineered Modernity

A thousand years after Charlemagne, Europe again entered yet another age of upheaval. The infamous French Revolution overthrew the Ancien Regime Charlemagne had established, unleashing a wave of ideological fanaticism that swept across the continent with unprecedented velocity.

Thrones wavered, revolutionary armies moved with accelerating force, and the streets of Paris became the central arena in which ambitious figures tested their claims to authority. Historians often describe this era as the natural consequence of social and economic transformation, yet such interpretations overlook the extraordinary rise of a Corsican artillery officer who advanced from obscurity to command the political imagination of Europe.

Into this unsettled world stepped a figure whose meteoric rise revealed how, in periods of civilizational rupture, the individual can emerge as the organizing principle of an entire age.

Napoleon Bonaparte possessed a clarity of mind that shaped every stage of his rise, and this intellectual steadiness allowed him to navigate the Revolution with an instinct for opportunity and a disciplined sense of its possibilities. His Italian campaigns revealed a strategic intelligence that redefined the conduct of war, for he combined speed, concentration, and psychological insight in a manner that astonished even seasoned commanders.

Claus von Clausewitz later observed that Napoleon “stood so high above all his contemporaries that he towered over them like a giant,” a judgment that captured the scale of his military imagination and the reach of his strategic vision. His victories emerged from a mind capable of discerning patterns within chaos, drawing them into coherence, and converting that coherence into decisive action.

His influence extended far beyond the battlefield. Napoleon reorganized France with a precision that reflected his administrative temperament. The Napoleonic Code, issued in 1804, established legal equality, secured property rights, and provided a rational civil framework that endured long after his empire fell, spreading across Europe and shaped legal systems on multiple continents. They emerged from a statesman who understood that institutions are the vessels through which a civilization preserves its identity and directs its future.

Napoleon also restructured education, finance, and administration. He founded the Bank of France, centralized taxation, and created a merit‑based bureaucracy that rewarded ability rather than lineage. These measures stabilized a nation exhausted by revolution and restored order to a society that had drifted toward complete dissolution.

Napoleon’s achievements resembled those of Charlemagne since he imposed order upon a fragmented Western world through purposeful administrative design, cultural renewal, and the disciplined exercise of his authority. Both men recognized that power acquires permanence only when it is organized, codified, and embodied in institutions capable of outlasting their creators.

Napoleon’s vision extended across the continent, and he sought to construct a European system unified by law, administration, and a shared political imagination. His coronation in 1804, when he lifted the imperial crown and placed it upon his own head, echoed the moment a millennium earlier when Charlemagne received the crown in Rome.

Both ceremonies revealed rulers who understood empire as a personal vocation and who treated the imperial title as the outward form of an inner civilizational purpose. Napoleon’s gesture unsettled Europe because it displayed a sovereign who claimed authority through deliberate will, assuming responsibility for the destiny of nations with the same commanding certainty that had once marked the Carolingian revival.

Napoleon occupies a singular place among the great men of history because his character combined relentless energy, strategic imagination, and an unshakable conviction that he carried the future of Europe within his grasp. He possessed a mind that could absorb complexity at a glance and convert it into action with astonishing speed, shaping events through a force of personality that few rulers have ever matched.

His will animated armies, reorganized states, and recast the political vocabulary of an entire continent, leaving institutions and ideas that endured long after his banners fell. He entered a fractured world and infused it with direction, momentum, and a new sense of political possibility, giving Europe a coherence that had eluded it since the collapse of the old regime. His life reveals how a single individual, endowed with vision and disciplined resolve, can set the trajectory of civilizations and leave an imprint that continues to shape the imagination of later ages.

Napoleon’s career also exposes the limits of the view that history unfolds through impersonal trends and forces. His ascent cannot be reduced to demographic pressures, ideological movements, or institutional decay since these elements had existed long before he appeared and persisted long after he fell. What altered the trajectory of modern Europe was the arrival of a man whose will, imagination, and administrative genius redirected energies that would otherwise have remained diffuse.

In this sense he stands beside Charlemagne since both men demonstrated that at certain civilizational thresholds, the individual does not merely participate in history but becomes the crucible through which history is forged.

The Return of the Great Man

Charlemagne and Napoleon lived in different ages, separated by a millennium, yet their lives reveal a single civilizational pattern.

Each emerged at a moment when the old order had collapsed and the future lay unclaimed. Each confronted a world drifting toward fragmentation. Each imposed structure, direction, and purpose upon societies that had lost the capacity to generate these things for themselves. Their achievements were not the mechanical outcome of geography, economics, or demography, but the expression of a single will capable of gathering the scattered energies of an age and shaping them into a coherent political form, thereby altering the trajectory of history itself.

The modern world resists this truth. It prefers to speak of systems, structures, and forces, as though history were an impersonal machine and human beings mere passengers carried along in its carriages. This view flatters our desire for detachment while excusing our reluctance to act.

It teaches that agency is an illusion, that the great man is a myth, and that the currents of history are too vast and too strong to be redirected by a single will. Yet this doctrine of inevitability is itself a symptom of civilizational fatigue and the onset of what Spengler described as the “civilizational winter.” The very figures who built the world we inhabit — saints, kings, emperors, explorers, reformers, conquerors, founders — stand as living refutations of the idea that history moves without human direction.

At decisive thresholds, it is the individual who gives the age its form. It is the individual who crystallizes diffuse forces into a single movement, and it is the individual who rallies armies to conquer foreign lands, not economics.

The lesson of Charlemagne and Napoleon is therefore unmistakable: when a civilization hangs in the precocious balance, one man will always emerge to assume responsibility for its future. What our age requires is precisely such a figure — a new Charlemagne, a new Napoleon, and perhaps, he is already here.

Concern over the direction that art and aesthetics is taking in the Western world has recently emerged as one of the most common talking points on social media.

It is a rightful clamour for beauty to return to our world, along with the deeper meaning underpinning it. Few people, however, have articulated this desire more beautifully than one of the most widely respected world leaders in living memory — Pope John Paul II.

Beyond his more famous achievements, on Easter Sunday 1999 the late Pontiff wrote one of the most extraordinary texts to emerge from the modern Vatican — the Letter to Artists.

A letter from the heart and the soul, John Paul II’s words form a moving call to arms to the world’s artists ahead of the dawning third millennium, urging them to fuse their talent with faith and realize the true potential of the visual media.

Beauty can save the soul, and here is why, from a man whose very duty it was to save souls…

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Art is More Than a Skill

John Paul II begins his letter with a stirring address indeed:

“None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands”

Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists I, April 4th 1999

Immediately, the Pope draws a direct connection between Man and God through the common wonder of the act of creation. The artist, he maintains, when surveying his completed work should evoke the opening of the Book of Genesis. For when God created the world, and populated it with grass, trees, creatures and light, “God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1). If the artist can therefore look upon his work in such a manner, he is, as the Supreme Pontiff records, “sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of all things, has wished in some way to associate you”.

In this way, any artist for whom his profession is a calling, rather than a means to achieve material reward, is already turned towards God, whether he consciously knows it or not. It is here that John Paul II states the wholesome purpose of the letter:

“In writing this Letter, I intend to follow the path of the fruitful dialogue between the Church and artists which has gone on unbroken through two thousand years of history, and which still, at the threshold of the Third Millennium, offers rich promise for the future”

Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists I, April 4th 1999

While he will expand on the course of the Church’s relationship to art later in the text, he explains in depth here why theologically it is important for the Church to have such a relationship in the first place. Put simply, as the Supreme Creator, God is the “exemplar” of any person who makes use of their creativity.

Crucially however, this is not to say that everyone or anyone can or should be an artist. Or more correctly, that not all creative art is essential art…

The Mission of the Artist

Just because the act of creation connects us to God does not mean that all acts of creation are virtuous:

“Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term… It is one thing for human beings to be the authors of their own acts, with responsibility for their moral value; it is another to be an artist, able, that is, to respond to the demands of art and faithfully to accept art’s specific dictates”

Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists II, April 4th 1999

Creativity, as the Pope asserts, consists of moral and artistic aspects, and only when both condition the other can the resulting art be a masterpiece. At the same time, a masterpiece must by definition be personal:

“In shaping a masterpiece, the artist not only summons his work into being, but also in some way reveals his own personality by means of it. For him art offers both a new dimension and an exceptional mode of expression for his spiritual growth”

Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists II, April 4th 1999

Taken together, it is clear that an artistic masterpiece does not simply seek to imitate others or follow trends, but is a sincere representation of the artist’s soul, while respecting “art’s specific dictates”. Subversion for subversion’s sake, therefore, is a perversion of the artist’s calling as it betrays both principles simultaneously.

That said, since art must be a calling to the artist, it must have a purpose. An artist who is capable of masterpieces is ultimately disregarding his calling if said masterpieces are not elevating Man. In a more mundane sense, the Pope joyfully quotes one of his compatriots, the Polish poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid, who in the Promethidion wrote that “beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up”.

Beauty enthuses, however, because it is “the visible form of the good”, and upon beholding it, man waters his taproot to Heaven, just as the artist who created is watering his own to God. If God bestowed the talent of art upon a man, he did so for a reason, and it is incumbent upon the artist to use that talent to bear good fruit. It is as if a spark were before us. We can choose to shelter and kindle it into a warming fire, or sit idly, and waste the opportunity to cast away the darkness, languishing in the cold.

The artist therefore is tasked with labor at the service of civilization. Their talent is a blessing, but so too a clear responsibility to use it for wholesome ends:

“Artists who are conscious of all this know too that they must labour without allowing themselves to be driven by the search for empty glory or the craving for cheap popularity, and still less by the calculation of some possible profit for themselves. There is therefore an ethic, even a “spirituality” of artistic service, which contributes in its way to the life and renewal of a people”

Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists 4, April 4th 1999

Arguably more groundbreaking, however, is what John Paul II said next. For it is not only that the Church needs Art, but that Art needs the Church too, and only together can the world be renewed…

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Religious revivals appear throughout history with a rhythm that suggests more than coincidence. They rise in moments when a culture senses its own exhaustion, when institutions lose vitality, and when the spiritual imagination seeks renewal.

Oswald Spengler, reflecting on the morphology of civilizations, wrote that every culture possesses a distinct soul, and that this soul periodically reasserts itself when threatened by decline. His insight clarifies why revivals do not erupt as isolated anomalies but instead follow the deep pulse of a civilization’s inner form. They arise when a people feels the weight of disorder and turns again to the sources of meaning.

Classical historians often describe these moments as restorations rather than innovations. A people looks backward in order to move forward. Warren H. Carroll, whose historical vision combined narrative precision with theological depth, argued that history cannot be understood without acknowledging the spiritual forces that animate it. In such hours, a civilization retrieves the symbols, rituals, and memories that once gave coherence to life, drawing strength from the very traditions it had neglected.

Similarly, in his Story of Civilization, Will Durant observed that “civilization is a stream with banks,” and that religion forms one of those banks, guiding the flow of the civilizational soul. When the bank of religion erodes, the stream dissipates, losing force and direction.

It is precisely in these moments of erosion — when a people confronts the fragility of its own order — that religious revivals emerge as instruments of civilizational renewal. The pattern reaches its clearest expression in the Maccabean Revolt of ancient Israel and in Fransisco Franco’s twentieth‑century institutional reform of Spain’s Catholic order.

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Insurgency: The Maccabean Revolt

The world of the Maccabees was one of cultural pressure and spiritual crisis. After the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Near East became a mosaic of competing Hellenistic kingdoms. Greek language, customs, and civic ideals spread across regions that had long maintained distinct religious traditions. For many communities, this encounter produced a creative synthesis, but for others, it threatened the very foundations of their identity — and Judea experienced the latter.

The Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV attempted to impose Hellenistic customs upon Jewish life to the extent of banning traditional Jewish practices because these were seen as forms of political resistance.

For years the Jews had watched Greek customs incrementally creep deeper into their cities — through the imposition and adoption of Greek games, fashions, festivals — but they endured them so long as the Temple remained untouched. However, when the Greeks “set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar”, forcing the sons of Judea to offer libations to a pagan god as a sign of submission, the Jews could endure it no longer.

From that desecration, restoration in the form of revolt became a necessity.

Mattathias, a respected elder of Modein, was thrust into a decisive moment. Ordered to offer sacrifice in obedience to the Seleucid decree, he instead drew his weapon and struck down the Judean who stepped forward to violate the covenant, crying out, “Let every one that is zealous for the law, and maintaineth the covenant, follow me”.

With that summons the spark of revolt was lit.

Mattathias and his sons — above all Judas Maccabeus — transformed that spark into open war against the Seleucid kingdom, fusing national liberation with religious restoration. Their cause was animated by a spiritual zeal that refused assimilation and sought to restore obedience to God rather than imperial power.

Against overwhelming odds, the Maccabees won victory after victory against the Greeks. Their forces were small, mobile, and accustomed to striking from the hills and narrow passes of Judea, using the terrain to offset the Seleucid advantage in numbers and equipment.

Judas Maccabeus rallied his fighters, “arm yourselves, and be valiant, and be ready against the morning, that you may fight with these nations that are assembled against us to destroy us and our sanctuary”, reminding them that “the battle is not ours, but God’s”. In doing so, he effectively framed each engagement as an act of faith as much as arms, turning their guerrilla tactics into a form of covenantal warfare.

The Maccabean Revolt (167–160 BC) reveals a pattern common to every true revival: renewal begins not with the many but with a steadfast remnant who refuse to yield, refuse to forget, and refuse to surrender the inheritance entrusted to them. Their campaign was not the march of a conventional army but the persistence of a small, fervent band who struck swiftly, withdrew into the hills, and returned again with renewed zeal.

Animated by faith, they challenged and even overthrew a far larger imperial power, since zeal for God introduces an unquantifiable variable into battle that no empire can calculate.

In time, the Seleucid forces — exhausted by constant ambushes, stretched supply lines, and the impossibility of extinguishing a religiously driven insurgency — were compelled to concede ground. Their withdrawal opened the way for Judas and his men to reclaim Jerusalem, drive out the occupying garrison, and restore the Temple, bringing the long‑awaited rededication that became the enduring symbol of their victory.

Warren Carroll saw in the Maccabees one of history’s clearest confrontations between faith and tyranny, calling their uprising “a miracle of fidelity in an age of compromise.” Similarly, Christopher Dawson’s insight that “the great civilizations have been the creations of religious forces” finds its proof in their victory.

In defending their faith, the Maccabees not only preserved their nation but established an enduring pattern for religious revivals. This model of a fervent few restoring religion entered the Western imagination and reappears in every age effectively shaping and reshaping the spiritual trajectory of Western civilization.

Institutional Reform: The Spanish Civil War

The modern world presents a landscape unlike that of the Maccabees — industrialized, ideologically fractured, and spiritually disoriented — yet the rhythm of revival endures, assuming new forms suited to a modern age of mass politics and cultural upheaval.

In twentieth‑century Spain, a nation strained by regional divisions, economic instability, and violent ideological currents, the return to religious tradition emerged through a deliberate act of civilizational reconstruction, a state‑directed attempt to re-anchor a people in the Christian spiritual order they had nearly abandoned.

Spain entered the century in a condition of profound cultural erosion. Anti‑clerical riots, the burning of churches, and the murder of clergy revealed a society tearing at the seams of its own inheritance.

The revolutionary factions on the Republican side — particularly the militant Communist elements — unleashed a wave of iconoclasm that recalled the French Revolution not only in violence but in its desire to sever a civilization from its religious history. In such an atmosphere, Will Durant’s observation that “when the present fails us, we return to the past” found unmistakable confirmation in the Spanish Civil War (1936—1939) as an existential battle of a nation fighting for its soul.

As the conflict deepened, Francisco Franco emerged as the unifying figure among the Nationalist forces. For many Spaniards, the war ceased to be a contest of political programs and became instead a struggle over the soul of their civilization. Following the Nationalist victory in 1939, Franco presided over an ambitious reconstruction program that not only sought to restore order but to re‑consecrate the public and political life of the nation.

Where the Maccabees revived faith through insurgent zeal, Franco coordinated the imposition of renewal from above — a conscious re‑ordering of institutions, education, ritual, and public symbolism.

Across Spain, religious instruction returned to schools, concordats re‑shaped Church‑state relations, and traditional Catholic festivals and devotions were elevated as civic expressions of national continuity. In short, Catholicism was publicly enthroned as the religious framework of Spain, serving as both a revival and an antidote to the ideological disintegration of the modern age.

In The Last Crusade, Warren H. Carroll described the Spanish Civil War as “the great ideological crusade of the twentieth century,” not to romanticize its brutality but to underscore the depth of the rupture. For Carroll, Spain’s post‑war return to Catholic tradition was the instinctive act of a civilization attempting to reclaim its spiritual center after standing on the brink of dissolution.

Christopher Dawson’s warning in Progress and Religion that “a society which has lost its religion has lost its culture” finds unmistakable confirmation here, namely, Spain’s religious revival was not an accidental political policy choice but deliberate civilizational necessity.

Spengler’s morphological reading of history further illustrates this phenomenon. Late civilizations, sensing their own exhaustion, often attempt to recover the vitality of earlier ages — not by resurrecting the past in its original form, but by reasserting the spiritual and moral depth that once animated it.

Spain’s religious reconstruction fits this pattern precisely. They were a people confronted by ideological chaos who instinctively reached for the only source capable of restoring form and order — the Catholic religion that had shaped their civilization for centuries.

What emerges from Spain’s experience is a different species of revival — a restoration imposed from above rather than ignited from below, an institutional re‑ordering rather than an insurgent return. Yet the civilizational rhythm endures: in moments of conflict and upheaval, a people instinctively seeks the religious order that once held their world together.

Why Religious Revivals Reappear Across the Ages

The pattern of religious revivals reveals a recurring truth about human societies. When cultural foundations weaken, when institutions lose coherence, and when the collective imagination becomes unsettled, a people often return to the faith, sacred symbols, and religious practices that once gave them identity.

This return is not nostalgia, but rather, an attempt to recover meaning. It is the civilizational instinct for self‑preservation — a way of arresting decline by re‑anchoring life in the sources that once gave it form. In moments of impending fracture, religious revival functions as a kind of civilizational reset, a renewal of the spiritual order that keeps a culture from dissolving into chaos.

Modern societies face their own forms of dissolution, but on a scale unknown to earlier ages. Rapid technological acceleration uproots habits faster than communities can absorb them, moral frameworks shift with such speed that meaning has collapsed, and globalization dissolves traditional boundaries of faith and community without supplying new forms of identity and cohesion. The result is a civilization that is materially powerful yet spiritually hollow, restless in its prosperity and anxious in its freedom.

In such an environment and under such conditions, spiritual revivals are not only possible but imminent.

A civilization that is spiritually exhausted eventually turns to the only sources capable of renewing its original strength. In this convergence of memory and crisis, Carroll’s claim that “history is the drama of man’s response to God” provides the final key: every spiritual revival is a reckoning — a moment when a civilization stands before its own soul and decides whether it will continue drifting toward dissolution or recover the faith that once held its world together.

It is here that a people chooses, once again, what it will worship and which religious vision it is willing to defend as the foundation of its future.

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