The West

Especially in light of recent events around the world, more discussion has focused on the idea of Western civilization. Prof. Mark C. Henrie offers some insightful thoughts on defining what we mean when we talk about the West. I met Prof. Henrie years back, he guided me and a friend through Cicero's Republic. His account here is worth taking in for consideration.

The standard nineteenth-century accounts of Western civilization understood the West to have four roots. Athens stood emblematically as the source of the West's philosophical traditions. Jerusalem was the source of the West's religious traditions. Rome was the source of the West's legal traditions. And Germany-the German forests, in which had dwelt the Gothic tribes-was the source of the peculiarly Western spirit of liberty and contract. In such an account, the West was merely an alternative term for "Western Christendom." Christianity, after all, had absorbed ancient philosophy; the Church had replaced the Roman Empire as a universal jurisdiction; and the Goths were converted. In such an account, Christianity is the primary "marker" of the West, and so Rome, the eternal city, might be understood as the main taproot among the other, lesser roots. Such an account had, and continues to have, a particular appeal for traditionalist conservatives: the West they seek to defend is Christendom.