Classical and Medieval History

The history and literature of the classics of our distant past, both pagan and Christian, are in need of proper reappropriation for our time, as their memory has been obfuscated and dimmed in the popular imagination. The classics offers lessons from history, moral ideas, insights, and examples of the virtues most conducive to good government and the civil society.

Classics is the discipline that studies the language, literature, history, and civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, two cultures that bequeathed to the West the greater part of its intellectual, political, and artistic heritage. For centuries Western education comprised the study of Greek and Latin and their surviving literary monuments. A familiarity with classics provided an understanding of the roots of Western culture, the key ideals, ideas, characters, stories, images, categories, and concepts that in turn made up a liberal education, or the training of the mind to exercise the independent, critical awareness necessary for a free citizen in a free republic. Times of course have changed, and the study of Greek. 1

As George Carey notes, "Conservatives have long accepted the teachings of the classics that underscore the need for regimes to cultivate and perpetuate the virtues appropriate for their character, if they are to endure." 2 Therefore, the true conservative is very much a student of the classics. Instinctively, the conservative recognizes that the present exists in continuity with the past. As Edmund Burke proclaimed, "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors." Gary L. Gregg, II, makes this erudite observation:

Cultures are organic. Fed by the humus of many ages and many nations, they grow and develop in ways the human mind can never truly develop. Attempts to do so have often led the philosopher down dangerous paths of abstraction and tyranny.3

There is no such thing as making a clean break with the past as utopians would have us believe, and schemes to do so have only proven tyrannical.

In his perennial classic, the Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk helped us remember that our present is deeply rooted in continuity with the past—and traces its roots to the history of five cities: namely Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. The American founding fathers were very much students of the classics. However, it should underscored, that the founders, whether Federalists or Republicans, were by no means conscious in an attempt to resurrect ancient political structures or the ancien regime. Russell Kirk distinguished the American polity and her institutions from the legacy of classical political thought:

In truth America's political institutions owe next to nothing to the ancient world—although American modes of thinking about politics indeed were influenced, two centuries ago, by Greek and Roman philosophers long dead. One learns much about constitutions from reading Plato and Aristotle and Polybius... But from such study the American leaders... learned, by their own account, chiefly what political blunders of ancient times ought to be avoided... The American Framers and the early statesmen of the Republic, whether Federalists or Republicans, were no admirers of ancient political structures.... Nor did ancient political theory, as distinct from instititutions, often from American approbation. 4

The founding generation were keenly aware of the valuable historical lessons to be offered. They saw virtue for example in Roman pastoral and republican thought. The demagoguery, civil war, corruption and centralization that afflicted Greco-Roman civilization was to be avoided not emulated. More often than not, the classics like the Bible offered lessons of what not to do. As George Santayana said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Nonetheless, in the divine drama of unfolding history, it seems the echoes of the past reverbrate in the present.

1. 1. Thornton, Bruce. A Student's Guide to Classics. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003,) pp. 1-2
2. 2. Freedom and Virtue: The Libertarian-Conservative Debate. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1998,) p. xi.
3. 3. Vital Remnants: America's Founding and the Western Tradition. Gary L. Gregg, II, ed., (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), pp. xx.
4. 4. Knopf, E. Christian, “Open Shutters to the Past,” Vital Remnants: America's Founding and the Western Tradition. Gary L. Gregg, II, ed., (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), pp. 72.