While on the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart didn’t command from a tent — he was at the front of his army with a weapon in hand. And at Agincourt, Henry V literally stood over the body of his wounded brother, fending off French knights with a sword.

Now, imagine a modern president or world leader doing that today.

It feels entirely absurd. Because today, leadership often means sitting in an air-conditioned room, making calls and doing press conferences, divorced from the consequences of your decisions. But back then, leadership meant having absolute skin in the game – your own life often depended on the decisions you made.

Though we’re far removed from the medieval era, there are some lessons on leadership that medieval lords can still teach us. I’m not advocating that the president should go grab a gun and fight in the trenches, but the medieval expectations of leadership contain a lot of valuable insights for us today.

So If you want to become a truly elite leader, you need to stop copying modern politicians and CEOs. You need to start thinking like a medieval feudal lord. Here are 5 timeless, medieval leadership strategies that modern society forgot about — and how to apply them today.

Lead From the Front

The first strategy that we can learn from the medieval leadership style is to lead from the front. In the Middle Ages, the idea of leadership was deeply tied to martial duty — the responsibility to lead an army and risk one’s life in battle to inspire one’s men.

In fact, the willingness to fight was basically a prerequisite to have any leadership opportunity at all due to Feudal duties and obligations. So what were these duties and obligations?

Just as a brief background, Feudal society was structured around the relationship between a lord and a vassal. A lord was a noble who owned land; while a vassal was someone the lord granted possession of land in exchange for service to the lord. Vassals would get land and protection, while the lord would get a vassal he could call upon for military service — this was the “feudal relationship.”

The key here is that lords owed their vassals protection — when armies were sallied for defense, the lord was obligated to lead the armies into battle. Of course he called on his vassals to help him fight, but he was expected to be the one organizing and leading it in person.

We see this play out in famous battles throughout the period. Many kings personally fought in battles, emboldening their men and shaping the course of history.

William the conqueror led his army in many campaigns, most notably the battle of Hastings in 1066 to contest the English throne. After a shaky start, William rallied troops and eventually crushed his foe, Harold Godwinson, winning England for the Normans and becoming a national hero still remembered today. .

Likewise, another national hero, Robert the Bruce of Scotland, is well-remembered for his bravery during the war against England’s Edward I. As an outlaw king, Robert fought a guerrilla warfare campaign against the English invaders. But his greatest achievement was the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, where Robertd defeated the English forces to win Scottish independence.

His personal bravery became legendary, as Robert is recorded to have slammed his battle axe into the skull of an English knight, setting the tone for the battle and giving his men a boost in morale. Robert’s bravery in battle and willingness to lead his men from the front has solidified him as the classic warrior-king archetype.

An important fact that the medievals understood is that, in order to get “buy in” from followers, a leader must display some willingness to tackle problems head on rather than pass these difficulties on to their subordinates. No one would willingly charge into battle if they knew that their lord was going to run at the first sight of danger, expecting his men to hold their ground.

Today, leading from the front most likely won’t involve pitched combat, but we can still learn something from this feudal mindset. True leadership is shown when a leader is highly visible, not just when there are wins, but when things go wrong — when battle and confrontation arise. To lead from the front, a leader owns the challenge personally. The leader charges into the fray first and makes the team’s problem his problem.

Generational Mindset

Another important leadership strategy that the medievals mastered is long term thinking. This was a direct result of the aristocratic systems of governance that prevailed during the Middle Ages, and it forced leaders to think generationally rather than in terms of short election cycles.

Rulers knew that their children and grandchildren would inherit their positions of power, so it was important to leave them a stable fief and also train them to be effective future leaders. Lords thus heavily invested in the education of their successors from a young age.

Often this meant fostering — sending sons or daughters off to allied courts to learn courtly manners, horsemanship, and martial skills from their hosts. This solidified feudal allegiances and provided essential political networks for the young nobles.In this way, rulers ensured that the next generation was already prepared to take the lead when the time came to pass the torch.

Another way medieval nobles ensured the long term success of their family was by setting up strategic alliances via marriage. Perhaps no medieval dynasty was as skilled at securing marriage alliances as the Habsburgs….

Dating back the 11th century , the Habsburgs thrived for 1000 years, dominating European politics and shaping history, living by the famous maxim:

“Let others wage wars, but you, happy Austria, marry”.

The Habsburgs frequently arranged for their young archdukes and archduchesses to be married off as children to members of other dynasties to increase their lands. In the 15th century, Emperor Maximilian I secured a hugely consequential series of marriages that increased his lands from a regional power into a global empire.

He married the daughter of Charles the Bold, Mary of Burgundy, himself, gaining parts of modern day Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. And the marriages he arranged for his son and grandson acquired his dynasty the lands of Spain, Bohemia, and Hungary.

This long term strategic thinking was essential for dynasties to stay in power. Those that failed to think beyond their own immediate plans are now forgotten to history, but the Habsurgs and other families with a similar mindset still have power in European politics today.

In modern times, we organize our society around quarterly profits or weekend plans, often failing to develop long term strategies for our families and organizations. But thinking generationally — dynastically — is what any great head of household or leader needs to do in order to keep what they’ve built running for more than just a short time.

We don’t have the aristocratic system like in the Middle Ages, but we can still prepare our children to be caretakers of our homesteads or family business. And if we haven’t yet built anything, we can simply focus on not getting lost in the cyclical trends and short term highs of the modern world. Focus on the lasting: skillsets, relationships, and projects that will bear fruit in the future. Start building something worth passing down.

Moral Obligation

A third medieval approach to leadership is that the elite have a moral duty toward the lower classes. In medieval times, positions of power were understood as moral obligations. Nobles knew their subjects and the peasantry looked to them as physical representations of order, justice, and Christian virtue. Concepts like chivalry and noblesse oblige (the idea that the rich had an obligation to the poor) served as reminders to the upper class of their duties.

Perhaps the most influential king to take on this role was King Louis IX of France. He believed his position as king was a sacred duty that bound him to provide a moral example for his subjects. He is well known for his personal penance and works of charity: regularly washing the feet of the poor, feeding beggars at his own table, and building hospitals. He also dressed in plain, humble clothing rather than rich fabrics to model humility.

One of his most prominent acts of public justice was holding court under a large oak tree at Vincennes. Here he heard grievances directly from subjects of all walks of life — lord and peasant alike — ensuring that justice was not confined to just the rich but to the humblest subjects too.

Beyond individual rulers, medieval society used the code of chivalry to instill in their leaders this moral responsibility. Ramon Llull’s popular Book of the Order of Chivalry alongwith Geoffroi de Charny’s Book of Chivalry laid out expectations for nobles to live upright and moral lives.

For example, Charny gave practical advice to nobles on how to grow in virtue. He writes:

Read more

As a child, you lived in an enchanted world. You were sure that superheroes were real. Maybe you waited for your letter from Hogwarts long after it was due. Or you wondered when you might wake up one day where you really belong, in a hobbit hole in the Shire — somewhere that inexplicably felt more real than your world.

Then, gradually, education and ordinary experience weakened our senses of the miraculous, the mysterious, and the enchanted. Mechanism and probability give us a tidier but somehow diminished picture of reality. The world became ordinary, and everything suddenly has a reductive explanation.

C.S. Lewis noticed something about that loss in his work The Discarded Image, his study of the medieval mind. When the modern person looks at the night sky, Lewis observed, he feels he is looking out into a void that has no interest in him.

The medieval person, in contrast, felt he was looking in, toward something ordered and inhabited. The medieval man believed himself inside an ordered cosmos, whereas the modern man sees himself adrift in a random universe.

Max Weber identified this change in 1917, in a lecture that has haunted Western thought since. He called it Entzauberung — disenchantment. He wrote “There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.” He was wrong, but the counter-enchantment would arise from unlikely places…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

What “Enchanted” Actually Meant

Chesterton captured the enchanted worldview better than anyone else in his book Orthodoxy, where he wrote “The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature, are the terms used in the fairy books — ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.”

This sounds like typical whimsical Chesterton — and it is, but behind his wit, Chesterton always had a real metaphysical point. The fact that water runs downhill is not self-explanatory. Yes, we have gravity, but the forces of nature at the formation of the universe may well have made gravity a repulsive instead of attractive force. The fact that the sun rises is not inevitable if Earth were to adopt the rotation and orbit of some other far-off planets we’ve since discovered.

These things happen because the idea of causality first exists at all — the hand of God — keeping them in motion through the continuation of existence itself. The enchanted mind might understand probability, but doesn’t see it as the only ruling decision-maker in the universe. It leaves room for a story, a Creator, or at least an acknowledgement that there is still a great deal of mystery in the world, and these all allow the enchanted mind to maintain a sense of wonder and curiosity. A world experienced as intentional and storied generates the question why in a way a purely mechanical world eventually must ignore. If everything reduces to a blind process, the question “why” never really gets answered.

In the medieval world, belief in an enchanted world manifested in many ways: in a sure understanding of humanity’s place in the universe, in the Church’s teaching on spiritual truths, in fables, legends, and folklore, but also in less edifying forms as in village healers, snake-oil salesmen, and those believed to really be meddling in dark arts. The Church was not the source of all enchantment in medieval life, but it was the institution that discerned between what was holy, what was harmless superstition, and what was genuinely dangerous. But what really begins to poke holes in our modern disenchantment is the idea of miracles.

Discerning Miracles

Despite common accusations, the Church has always been its most rigorous skeptic when it comes to the miraculous.

The medieval Catholic Church built an entire apparatus — canonical investigations, medical examination boards, waiting periods measured in decades or longer — specifically to separate genuine miracles from wishful thinking, psychological episodes, mere coincidence, and fraud. The tradition of discernment of spirits, codified in the Rituale Romanum and refined across centuries of theological debate, was designed to distinguish authentic supernatural events from natural ones and, when necessary, from demonic counterfeits. Sacramentals like holy water, blessed medals, and relics gave ordinary Catholics a regular reminder of the ordinary infused with the extraordinary — that the world is more than mere matter. The proper Catholic sense of enchantment was disciplined, not a free-for-all of overactive imaginations.

The evidence it produced deserves at least a brief look — even for the nonreligious — to appreciate that miracles are not simply believed without evidence. The public miracle at Fátima, Portugal in October 1917 operated on a scale difficult to explain naturally. Three peasant children had predicted, months in advance, that a public miracle would occur on a specific date at a specific location. Approximately 70,000 people gathered in heavy rain — among them Avelino de Almeida, a senior correspondent for Portugal’s largest secular newspaper, who had mocked the predictions in print beforehand. He filed an eyewitness account describing the sun spinning, changing color, and plunging toward the earth. The article ran on the front page. The editorial staff of an actively anti-clerical publication had no interest in confirming a Catholic miracle. They simply reported what their correspondent saw.

There are many more such miraculous cases we could look at — the strange life of Padre Pio, the hundreds of thousands of miraculous healings associated with holy sites and Marian apparitions, or the many Eucharistic miracles like that of Lanciano. The point isn’t an apologetic one, though that’s certainly something to think about. These are things that happened, were reviewed by professionals, and found wanting for ordinary explanations. There still is a sense of an enchanted world in light of these. Maybe you could chalk it up to our still defective understanding of how the universe works — but that will always be the case. We’ll never understand everything.

The world keeps behaving as though it were enchanted, and so maybe there really is still a story to humanity that we shouldn’t have cast aside in the Enlightenment. But how did we go from an entire society believing that enchantment lay behind every corner to a society where that view is mocked and scoffed at?

Breaking Enchantment

Disenchantment didn’t arrive overnight. Our sense of enchantment was deconstructed piece by piece over several centuries.

The Reformation’s iconoclasm was perhaps the most visible starting point for the disenchantment of the West. The revolutionary spirit of the Reformers removed statues, relics, and much of Catholicism’s physical mementos from churches, schools, and common places. This wasn’t just the natural result of any religious revolution, however. The Reformers operated on a theological stance that matter carries no sacredness and that images risk idol worship. Whether you agree or disagree with the Reformation’s intent, the practical effect was to strip the physical world of spiritual weight. It began a process of de-spiritualizing the physical signs of Christianity — and this was the first major step in disenchanting the medieval world.

Once the physical marks were removed of their spiritual significance, the philosophers and scientists entered the picture to further drive a wedge between mechanistic and spiritual views of the world.

Descartes proposed a methodical approach to doubt and knowing, by essentially throwing away sure knowledge of anything that he couldn’t reduce to indisputable fact. This left him with just one thing: Cogito, ergo sum — I think therefore I am. The problem lies in the fact that Descartes assumes the only way to knowledge is by deduction — if it is not grounded logically, it cannot be known. But this entirely casts aside the reality of perception as a way of knowing. While Descartes rightly believed perception can be unreliable, we all know there are some things we know to be true because we perceive them first. Virtually all the forces of nature were understood by perception before we understood them by deducing physical principles. Gravity was felt long before Newton could describe its effects on objects.

The doubt of Descartes about perception threw into question all things related to an enchanted world; if it could not be deduced on logical grounds, we have reason for disbelief in even what we perceive directly. This was a huge blow to the common understanding of life and the world as fundamentally charged with mystery and miracles.

As the Enlightenment unfolded, advances in mathematics and formalized logic furthered the view of a mechanistic world — the planetary motions were accurately predicted by this point, chemistry was slowly emerging out of alchemy, Newton could describe gravity’s mysterious pull, and the mathematics of calculus was transforming our ability to capture nature on paper. All this pointed toward a universe guided by mathematics, leaving little room for explanations that defy descriptions by formula.

Weber watched the process reach its conclusion at the turn of the twentieth century and wasn’t pleased about it. His “iron cage” was indeed a trap — the condition of people who had rationalized every source of meaning out of existence and were left a cold, inert world.

And yet at the point where rationalism’s conclusions had been fully drawn out early in the century — giving voice to Nietzsche and foundation to Communism — the enchanted world mounted a comeback…

Read more

Imagine the unthinkable: The United States, after a brutal, exhausting war with China, suffers the single worst defeat in American history.

Just a few miles outside Washington D.C., the final remnant of the US armed forces — tens of thousands soldiers — are wiped out in a single afternoon. But it gets worse. The President, the Vice President, and hundreds of congressmen are all killed in the chaos, too.

The military is gone. The government is completely decapitated. There is no resistance left, and no logical way to keep fighting. Faced with total annihilation, the only rational choice left is to surrender, finally putting a stop to the bloodshed to save civilian lives, right?

Well, this exact apocalyptic scenario actually did happen. But not in America — it happened to ancient Rome. Their response shocked the known world, and forces us to contemplate how our modern society might respond to a similar situation.

In 216 BC, Rome faced its own ultimate doomsday scenario: The Battle of Cannae. Hannibal, one of history’s greatest generals and sworn enemy of Rome, encircled and slaughtered 50,000 Roman soldiers in a single day. Rome also lost its leaders — a third of its entire governing senate as well as a consul were killed.

Hannibal soon sent a delegation to Rome offering terms. Rome would surely surrender right? But Rome refused to play ball.

Instead of negotiating, Rome did something that seemed to defy logic. They banned the idea of peace. They made it illegal to ransom prisoners. And with no military left, they looked at their most formidable enemy and said: We are going to fight you to the absolute death.

To us in the modern West, this level of raw grit feels completely alien. We live in comfort, sheltered from existential threats, never forced to choose between total surrender or fighting to the last man.

But Rome’s example forces an unsettling question: How does a society develop that kind of unbreakable willpower? Why was surrender a psychological impossibility for a Roman?

The answer lies in a rare cultural code that made Rome entirely unique — and it reveals a powerful truth about our own declining collective willpower today….

When the Unthinkable Happened

After the Battle of Cannae, the general state of Rome can only be described as chaotic: Rome’s major armies were destroyed, and their only surviving consul was completely discredited because of his poor decision making and failure to fight to the death alongside his men.

The people of Rome were horrified since so many of their countrymen had been killed. A national day of mourning was declared as there was apparently not a single person not either related to or acquainted with a soldier who had died. Some estimates show Rome lost one-fifth of its male citizens over the age of 17 during the few years of fighting the Carthaginians.

General panic flooded the city, and the population was desperate. Some blamed the gods, while others blamed a lack of piety on Rome’s part. There were even some gruesome attempts to get right with the gods, such as human sacrifice, where two Gauls were buried alive at the Forum Boarium. On another occasion, a baby was abandoned in the Adriatic Sea.

Politically, Rome’s allies jumped ship. To them, the once powerful city was now a lost cause. Portions of southern Italy even switched sides, like the Hellenic provinces of Arpi, Salapia, and Uzentum. These non-Latin regions pledged their loyalty to Hannibal and the Carthaginians instead.

The historian Livy sums up the conditions of Rome at the time, and shows his amazement that Rome did not give up, as any other nation surely would have:

“Never when the city was in safety was there so great a panic and confusion within the walls of Rome. I shall therefore shrink from the task, and not attempt to relate what in describing I must make less than the reality. The consul and his army having been lost at the Trasimenus the year before, it was not one wound upon another which was announced, but a multiplied disaster, the loss of two consular armies, together with the two consuls: and that now there was neither any Roman camp, nor general nor soldiery: that Apulia and Samnium, and now almost the whole of Italy, were in the possession of Hannibal. No other nation surely would not have been overwhelmed by such an accumulation of misfortune.”

As Livy indicated, Rome never considered formal surrender despite the turmoil. There are some practical reasons why they didn’t that we will touch on, but these are downstream from two more fundamental characteristics of Rome at the time.

These two reasons were crucially intertwined, and they created a social, political, and military framework that made waving the white flag unthinkable to Romans.

The Unwritten Code That Built Rome

The first reason has to do with Roman civic duty, and the cultural traditions that governed its citizenry. Rome was famous for its legal code — the 12 tables which served as the formal body of laws for the city — but at the root of these was an unwritten code that was imprinted upon every Roman child from a young age.

This unwritten code was ancient, and can only be described as an ancestral memory that the people of Rome shared — it was part of their DNA. This deep-seated memory was known as the mos maiorum, or “way of the ancestors.” It was the time-honoured principles and social practices that influenced everything from how Romans interacted with each other in the Forum to how military decisions were made.

Breaking of tradition was greatly frowned upon, and attempted changes to the “code” were generally met with resistance. Suetonius wrote in the 2nd century that:

“All new that is done contrary to the usage and customs of our ancestors, seems not to be right.”

So what were the ways of the ancestors? How did they contribute to a cultural ethos that rejected surrender?

The mos mairoum encompassed several virtues. Some of them dealt with piety toward the gods and faithfulness toward others in a legal and social sense, but there were a few that specifically impacted the upbringing of military and political leaders — the very men who had to make tough decisions in the aftermath of Cannae.

For example the virtue of disciplina related to education and training as well as maintaining an orderly way of life, especially in a military context.

The virtue of constantia was “steadiness or perseverance”. In the face of adversity, Romans were expected to display an unperturbed façade. Nothing should cause a good Roman to flinch – not even a catastrophic defeat.

The legend of Gaius Mucius Cordus was often recounted to reinforce this virtue. According to the tale, in 508 BC Mucius snuck into an invading Etruscan camp to kill the rival king, who was leading the siege against Rome. He was unfortunately captured before reaching his target, but showed his unyielding resolve during the interrogation. He declared to the Etruscans:

“I am a Roman citizen, men call me Gaius Mucius. I came here as an enemy to kill my enemy, and I am as ready to die as I am to kill. We Romans act bravely and, when adversity strikes, we suffer bravely. Watch so that you know how cheap the body is to men who have their eye on great glory”.

To back up his claims, Mucius then thrust his right hand into a fire and held it there without giving any indication of pain.

Another important Roman virtue was virtus, which is where we get the word “virtue” today. Virtus was the ideal of the true Roman male. It informed a man what was good, what was evil, useless, shameful or dishonorable. Importantly, it encompassed a refusal to be dominated and instilled a conquest mentality within Roman men.

Finally the concept of dignitas encompassed these other virtues and directed them toward the Roman state. Dignitas meant displaying disciplina, gravitas, and virtus in service to Rome. Simply mastering the virtues was not enough; the virtues needed to be aimed at something higher — the well being of the city.

It was this milieu of virtues that was instilled in every young Roman until they became second nature. Apprenticeships, ceremonies, and customs all reinforced these values constantly.

One particular custom stands out, and it underscores the idea that Romans should never abandon the customs of their ancestors. This is the practice of housing the imagines, or wax masks of the dead, inside the home. The atrium of every noble Roman house was lined with these masks of deceased family members who had achieved high status either through political office or military achievement.

Young Romans who viewed them were constantly reminded: Your ancestors are watching, and you must prove yourself worthy of their legacy.

The Psychology of Roman Leadership

The mos maiorum essentially created a highly unified and capable leadership class among the Roman people. Every young aristocrat had a shared understanding of his duties and the sacrifices he was expected to make for his people.

Thus when exploring a chaotic period of Rome’s history like the aftermath of Cannae, we have a better understanding just who the Roman leaders were. The senators who rallied the citizenry were forged in ancient traditions aimed at creating strong men who would deliver when it mattered.

And this is where the second piece of the puzzle falls into place. Because of the mos maiorum, Rome’s elite were second to none. They were prepared to make tough, creative decisions when confronted with a seemingly impossible uphill battle.

The resolve of Rome’s leadership was evident immediately after Cannae. The young Scipio, who would later defeat Hanniball at the battle of Zama and earn a place as one of the greatest Romans of all time, inspired some wavering tribunes and reminded them of their duty by saying:

“I swear with all the passion in my heart that I will never desert our homeland, or permit any other citizen of Rome to leave her in the lurch. If I willfully break my oath may Jupiter, Greatest and Best, bring me to a shameful death, with my house, my family, and all I possess!”

The courageous, impassioned attitude is nice, but what decisions did Rome’s leaders actually make that reinvigorated the city and altered the course of history?

Read more

The most popular stories of the last generation were quest narratives for a reason.

The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher — all retell the hero’s journey in their own ways. These fantasy books, movies, and role-playing games follow a hero who receives a call, leaves the familiar, endures trials, is transformed, and returns changed.

As children, we dreamed of living inside these stories, imagining ourselves as the main protagonist. You wanted to be more than a consumer of it, and secretly — maybe even unconsciously — you saw yourself as the hero.

Millennials, Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha are the generations plagued worst by short attention spans and passive scrolling; but they are also the generations engaged in some of the most immersive and participatory quest narratives in history, found in video games. The number of hours logged, the enormity of the worlds explored, and the depth of characters defined speak to two facts: 1) that these generations don’t have real-life “quests”, but 2) they want a mission, badly.

Though media and tech may have accelerated the desire for a real-life quest, this is nothing new. In the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer illustrated the need for a quest in his tale of pilgrimage: knight, miller, prioress and pardoner, (every social rank traveling together) set out from a London inn toward the shrine of Thomas Beckett at Canterbury. They told stories along the way, competed, argued, laughed, and prayed. Pilgrimages like these were the real versions of many quests found in our modern fantasy literature, movies, and games.

These medieval pilgrims understood that humans don’t need unlimited freedom or comfort, but they do need quests. You need a quest, too, because a life without a quest quickly becomes empty and directionless…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

What a Quest Was and Why It Worked

The medieval pilgrimage was a well-defined but unpredictable experience of transformation. The departure required real commitments (much more so than simply a long vacation), often involving months of preparation, the settling of debts, and the writing of a will. The travel itself was of course challenging, as the routes to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela were long, dangerous, and physically demanding. But the journey’s end was acknowledged as much more than simply a visit to a far-off place. It was a personal and spiritual journey that would transform the pilgrim in a radical way.

The later idea of vaguely “finding yourself” through free travel and exploration might sound similar, but the two ideas are very different. Both seek change, but the latter is really seeking a new identity to be found somewhere in the world. On the other hand, the pilgrim knows his fundamental identity as a Christian, and to go deeper in that identity is what motivates his quest. There is also a distinction in the fact that the pilgrim or any adventurer with a goal brings his will in the journey. It’s not a passive experience of a place or people, but rather a mission that pushes him or her to act. The aimless wanderer isn’t rooted in any identity at the outset and thus sets off with an equally undefined quest (maybe one without an end) and a certain passivity in attitudes. Who knows what meaning you’ll adopt if you wander, hoping it will find you?

A basic sense of destination must be known for any meaningful quest. Bilbo and the dwarves had a map and a plan. Certainly, there were many unexpected twists and turns from that plan, but these surprises tested their will toward the quest’s end. The aimless wanderer might latch onto these diversions as a new path in their search for meaning. But for the pilgrim, rather than diverting your aims, these trials merely strain your resolve for the goal. This is how the quest works to reveal those great qualities you couldn’t have discovered by staying in your hobbit-hole.

Much like The Hobbit, the itinerarium, a pilgrimage journal, documented the transformation of the pilgrim throughout the quest. Pilgrims recorded distances and landmarks of course, but more importantly their interior movements: moments of doubt, breakthrough, understanding, and spiritual consolation. The journey was written down because spiritual growth was the expected result.

Anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, drawing on the medieval pilgrimage tradition, described this middle state as liminality — a threshold condition in which the traveler is neither who he was nor yet who he will become. He has left his old identity behind and hasn’t yet arrived at the new one. The pilgrim was between worlds — stripped of his social role, his familiar surroundings, and his ordinary comforts precisely so that something new could take shape in him.

The pilgrimage worked because it provided a tangible solution to man’s desire for purpose. Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that every living thing has a telos — a proper end toward which it moves, and in the movement toward which it becomes most fully itself. A human without a telos is a failure of being. St. Augustine identified the same truth but identified the telos of man in knowing God: the heart is inherently restless, oriented naturally toward an ultimate destination, which is God. The pilgrimage externalized and ritualized that interior condition, giving the restless heart a direction to pursue.

Seeking Quests in Careers

For most, the only “quest” of the modern era is the path of earning of living. This, our culture teaches, is the aim of life: to perform a job, make money, and if we’d made enough money in our working lives, to retire.

Aside from the question of meaning, however, this end in itself satisfies nothing of the need of humanity for a true quest. As we become adults, we all recognize that the working world is much duller than life in stories. And even though most of life’s real quests may fall short in our perception of their significance, the typical career falls farther still — particularly the modern career, because it is more open-ended, less foreseeable than ever before.

The medieval world offered a clearer path to most people. Religious life had been shaped and structured for centuries already, offering young men respected paths into priesthood or monastic life. Women too were offered sensible paths in convents for a more structured participation within the Church. But even outside of the dominant institution of the Church, secular career paths were quite clear.

The guild system offered a young man entering a trade a path with clearly defined stages in apprentice, journeyman, and master. You knew where you were in the world, your career, and what was required to advance. At the least, the son typically knew he had a real path in the work of his father. The career outlook was reasonably predictable.

But modern life has replaced structured journeys with open systems, such as education without a career path and a career without clear milestones for advancement. This ambiguity in the working world is the natural result of a freer world (a good in itself), but not without the cost of clarity. Some thrive in this fog of war, but many others struggle with restlessness when presented with endless choice and no direction. They need a defined quest, but there is no quest-giver. In the grand scheme of things, a career is only a side-quest…

Read more

You’ve seen the ads: sports betting apps, online casinos, and prediction markets. Your favorite podcaster is probably promoting them, and they’re plastered across supposedly family-friendly TV networks during prime time.

Gambling is absolutely everywhere, and it’s completely hijacking our culture.

At first glance, the rise in gambling looks like it’s simply the result of technological advancement — the internet and instant news updates make betting on sports, politics, and world events easier than ever. But widespread gambling is really a symptom of a much darker reality: whenever a civilization embraces extreme risk as a legitimate way to get rich, it’s a clear sign that society is desperate.

We are seeing this exact desperation play out right now, especially among young people who feel that the traditional paths of success have been permanently blocked — and many are turning to risky behaviors like online betting or crypto speculation in lieu of safe career opportunities.

So what happens to a society when its people stop investing in the future and start betting on it instead? To understand where we are headed, we have to look at what happens when power structures become so stifling that vice becomes the only plausible path for the disaffected.

Two thousand years ago, a similar gambling mania exploded across the dying Roman Republic. The powerful figures who took advantage of that desperation ended up plunging civilization into civil war and political chaos. Let’s see how it played out back then and why we need to be vigilant about this concerning trend today…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Gambling Mania in the Late Republic

In the first century BC, right around the time the Roman Republic collapsed, the poet Horace made a surprising observation about the youth of his day. He noted that the upper class youth no longer cared for virtuous interests, like horseback riding and hunting, but were instead enthralled by games of chance, like gambling and dice. Horace writes:

“Now the noble’s first-born shuns the perilous chase, nor learns to sit his steed: Set him to the unlawful dice, or Grecian hoop, how skillfully he plays.”

To Horace, this abandonment of traditional, “manly” activities was a sure sign of decline. The youth of any civilization are the future after all, so what happens when an entire generation abandons the traditions that built society?

Horace was not the only one who observed this disturbing trend. Later, the 4th century Roman historian Marcellinus reflected on the last days of the Republic, describing a gambling mania that spread across all Roman social classes, and especially the wealthy.

These upper class gamblers called themselves tesserarii, meaning “dicer”, as the more common word for gambler, aleator, carried a somewhat negative connotation. Gambling, to them, wasn’t a major vice — but Marcellinus thought differently.

Marcellinus believed that the gambling mania that overtook Rome in the late Republic was a major factor in its fall. He claimed that the elite’s obsession with gambling prevented “anything memorable or serious from being done in Rome.” Rome’s upper classes were too busy squandering their wealth and time to actually address the serious matters of the day.

Horace’s and Marcellinus’ caution against gambling was nothing new, though. Romans had long been weary of the dangers of decadence. In 200 BC, long before the Roman Republic fell, the senate enacted a statewide ban on gambling, called the Lex Alearia. It had exceptions for certain holidays and was likely not enforced very heavily, but it served as a symbol that Roman citizens should follow the social customs and traditions of their virtuous ancestors — the mos maiorum — which taught discipline and temperance.

But roughly 100 years after the Lex Alearia was implemented, it was obvious to everyone that the traditional values of Rome were nothing more than an aspiration. So what was going on in Rome at the time that caused people to abandon social traditions and embrace degeneracy?

Oligarchs Vs. The People

Numerous historians have written about the general moral decay of the Late Republic, but perhaps what best exemplifies the cultural and economic issues of this period was the battle between the Optimates and Populares. Once we understand the fundamental divide of Roman politics in the Late Republic, we’ll realize why massive risk-taking became the only option for some….

The Optimates and Populares were two factions of the Roman political class that were mortal enemies. The Optimates were the conservative elite who aimed to keep power in the senate and protect aristocratic wealth. They valued tradition, bureaucratic means, and the continued oligarchy that those ensured.

Opposing them were the Populares who appealed to the needs of the people, like debt relief and expanded citizenship.They often tried to bypass the senate and took matters directly to the Plebeian Assembly to win the masses — while also securing personal influence, of course.

The major issue at the time was land reform for small farmers and dispossessed veterans. As Rome had expanded, it incorporated a large population of cheap labor — namely slaves. The increased slave populations could be used by wealthy citizens (generally supporters of the Optimates) to undercut their competition. Small farmers and land owners couldn’t compete with the wealthy oligarchs who could afford many slaves.

Likewise, veterans who had given up their farms to serve in long campaigns came back to nothing — they couldn’t afford to upkeep their estates while gone, and there were limited options when they finished their service. The Populares like Caesar sought to remedy this situation by giving plots of land to veterans and limiting the influx of slaves to Italy, but the Optimates opposed any reform.

A dangerous scenario emerged from these conditions: massive wealth disparity between the upper class, who benefited from the cheap labor of slaves, and the dispossessed soldiers, who had been stripped of their farms after while serving in the military. The sheer amount of these dispossessed soldiers was becoming a serious threat to stability, and tensions among the classes were heating up.

For the upper class, they felt untouchable — they were doing better than ever, and the vast wealth they were accumulating was leading to the vice and licentiousness we talked about earlier. They gambled and debauched out of sheer frivolity, but in increasingly reckless amounts.

On the other end of the spectrum, soldiers and farmers who had sacrificed for Rome now had no clear path to reclaim their livelihoods. They were becoming desperate, and surely more than a few made foolish gambles to recover their lost wealth.

Will and Ariel Durant in their work Lessons of History write of the economic desperation:

“Rome was full of men who had lost their economic footing and their moral stability: soldiers who had tasted adventure and had learned to kill; citizens who had seen their savings consumed in the taxes and inflation caused by war…”

With economic pressures reaching such high levels, traditional moral codes were brushed aside. “Why obey the cultural codes of our ancestors if we don’t have a future?” they asked. “Why sacrifice more for a Republic that will give us nothing? Radical change must be the only option.”

This is the desperate attitude that Caesar capitalized upon — and what would plunge the Republic into a full fledged civil war, ultimately ending it for good. It’s quite ironic that Caesar’s famous words before crossing the Rubicon, “the die is cast,” are a reference to the dice games that were so representative of the collapsing moral and economic framework of Rome.

The gambling and moral degeneracy of the late Republic was the outlet of a desperate people, frustrated that cold economic self-interest had become more important to the Roman elite than the well-being of their fellow citizens.

This pattern of monetary obsession morphing into political and moral chaos is a pattern that repeats throughout history. Elites abandon tradition for degeneracy due to a weakening of their moral constitution, while lower classes attempt novel political solutions to solve their economic woes out of sheer desperation. The root of the problem always lies in what the culture prioritizes above all else. Specifically, money….

Read more

In our modern culture, the word “progress” is viewed as an inherent good. Anything done for the sake of progress is automatically assumed to be beneficial for humanity. It’s often the excuse to plunge head first into untrammeled territory.

Artifiical Intelligence, for example, is a field where we’ve abandoned caution in the anodyne name of progress. Many AI researchers are not guided by a well-developed philosophical or cultural tradition, but rather the vague platitude of “changing the world” — of progress for progress’ sake. For some people, that seems to be a good enough reason as any.

But what if we’re viewing true progress all wrong? What if, in order to advance as a civilization, we need to be looking backwards just as much as we are towards the next best thing?

Throughout history, some societies have actually been revitalized and pushed forward only because they drew inspiration and expertise from tradition. They didn’t outright reject what was old, but built upon previous foundations and used them as the basis for new development — for progress.

From the early medieval period to the founding of America, true Western progress has always been informed by a healthy respect — and even awe — of the past. So I’d like to share three periods of history where we advanced by drawing inspiration from our ancestors — and it’ll help us understand today why we need to be thinking about tradition whenever we try something new.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Carolingian Renaissance

The first period of history I’d like to discuss is one that is often overlooked, sandwiched between the fall of Rome and the medieval period, but it was a great leap forward in cultural and organizational development for the Western world. In many ways, it was when the West finally gained its identity.

This is the period known as the Carolingian Renaissance — when Charlemagne gave birth to the first post-Roman Empire in the West. To understand how Charlemagne revitalized his empire by looking to the past, we first need to understand the landscape of the empire at the time…

In the late 8th and early 9th century, Charlemagne ruled vast lands from Northern Spain to the North Sea. He was a skilled administrator, but his newfound empire had problems. Though the empire was flourishing economically, the centuries since Rome’s fall took a toll on the cultural development of the West.

In particular, Latin literacy was falling, a blow to the administrative and scholarly classes since Latin was essential for empire-wide communication. Because of this, an uneducated clergy had difficulty interpreting and preaching on the Vulgate Bible, the universal biblical translation of the time.

And on an aesthetic level, there were no cohesive architectural or artistic styles that marked Charlemagne’s lands as a bonafide empire — empires need grand building projects and beautiful art, after all.

In short, the Frankish Kingdom wasn’t the beacon of culture that Charlemagne wanted it to be.

Charlemagne thus devised a plan to create a “cultural rebirth” and he did so by looking to ages past — to the high cultures of Greece and Rome — as models. Specifically, Charlemagne hoped to revive the Western Roman Empire, which he held as the ideal model of a Christian Empire. His coronation as the “Emperor of the Romans” showed his admiration for the ancient culture.

One of the main ways he hoped to return to the golden age of Rome was by promoting latin as the language of the intellectual class. By making latin widely understood again, ancient texts could be revisited and an educational revival would follow. It seems like an inconsequential move, but this shift in language jumpstarted a civilizational rebirth…

As antique manuscripts and religious texts were made more accessible, literature and law flourished, and newly established schools became effective centers of education as new editions of classic works were produced.

One of the ancient manuscripts that emerged was Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture, called The Ten Books on Architecture, which contained information about how the Romans built their massive structures. This provided the Carolingians with a template for lost stone-building techniques, and large stone structures were built in northern Europe for the first time since Rome’s occupation.

Between 768 and 855, an impressive 27 new cathedrals, 417 monastic buildings and 100 royal residences were built. And these Carolingian cathedrals and palaces still stand today as tributes to Vituvius’ influence.

Charlemagne created a bridge to the ancient past — the latin language — resulting in rediscoveries in literature, philosophy, and architecture, shaping Western culture in a new direction. Looking backwards actually progressed the Carolingian Empire.

I often question whether our modern teaching methods are creating similar bridges to the past, or are they actually putting up barriers? What rediscoveries could we make today if we insisted on studying the ancient works and figures with the idea of civilizational rebirth in mind?

Italian Renaissance

Interestingly enough, the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius was also a key figure in another rebirth that came a few centuries later, as artists and engineers looked back to the classical world for inspiration once again. This was the Italian Renaissance.

Artists like Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and da Vinci were all inspired by the classical world, and in particular, the architect Vitruvius.The 16th-century architect Andrea Palladio even considered the ancient roman his “master and guide.”

In 1416 Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture was repopularized by Florentine scholar Poggio Bracciolini after he republished it. The work soon prompted a rebirth of classical architecture, art, science, and engineering.

Brunelleschi, for example, was inspired to invent a new type of hoist to lift large stones for the dome of the cathedral in Florence. Da Vinci, deeply inspired by classical writings on math and science, dedicated one of his most famous works to Vitruvius. His drawing, aptly titled “the Vitruvian Man,” is based on the principles of body proportions developed by Vitruvius.

More consequentially, though, Palladio — whom many would consider the greatest architect of all time — drew inspiration from Vitruvius He was motivated to write his own treatise on the subject, The Four Books of Architecture, which pulled from and built upon Vitruvius’ methods. Palladio’s work is considered a seminal work in architectural history, offering a comprehensive guide to classical design principles, including the five classical orders which were first developed by Vitruvius.

His work is still studied in architectural programs today, a legacy that can be traced back to Vitruvius and the Renaissance’s obsession with the classical world. Thus Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical architectural styles all have roots in Vitruvius’ work.

But most of all, the rediscovery of Vitruvius’ works and the cultural rebirth they helped fuel underscores an important lesson:

Read more

Thomas Carlyle argued that the history of the world is the biography of great men. But his critics replied instead that great men are products of their age — fulfillments of a cultural expectation.

However, the disagreement between them misses the more important point that great men and the movement of history are inextricably tied.

What I will side with Carlyle’s critics on is that the type of hero for each age appears formed by society. No civilization spawns heroes at random. A society’s laws reveal what it wishes were true, and its philosophy reveals what should be true. But the hero archetypes that emerge express what is true of their society. The hero — whether mythological or historical — represents what a civilization actually believes.

Let’s look at that belief across the centuries, specifically how the idea of the hero changed throughout Greek, barbarian, and Roman cultures, but dramatically shifted with the rise of Christianity, where the ideals of the hero reached their zenith. But as modern culture began a turn away from Christianity with the onset of the Enlightenment, we’ll also see how the heights of our modern hero archetypes have fallen with it…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

The Ancient World

Homer gave the Greeks their first and most enduring heroic template in Achilles — the prevailing warrior in the Trojan War against Hector. The Iliad is an extended meditation on what the early Greek imagination considered the highest human type: the man of excellence — of arete — in skill, physicality, courage, and loyalty.

But by the classical period, Athens had produced a different (but real) hero in Socrates. Plato’s works Apology, Crito, and Phaedo describe to us a man who dies for the sake of his philosophy. Socrates remains both loyal to his values and the law in his refusal to escape from prison and willingly accepts death with a composure that shamed his weeping friends. The heroic ideal had migrated from the body to the soul. Socrates and his student Plato launched the brightest era of Greek philosophy, as schools were begun and followed by droves of young, curious Greek minds. The culture was fading in its worship of the de facto Greek pantheon, and a groundswell of philosophic spirit was taking hold of wider Greece.

Rome’s ideal was in many ways itself, or rather specifically that of civic virtue. Plutarch’s Lives — the most influential collection of heroic biography in Western history — held up figures like Cincinnatus, who left his farm to save Rome and returned to it immediately after, as the Roman summit. Virgil’s Aeneas was defined by pietas: dutiful devotion to gods, family, and city. The Roman hero was the man who subordinates himself entirely to the purposes of the empire, much like John F. Kennedy’s proposal to Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

The Medieval World

In the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the influences of barbarian warrior culture, Roman civic duty, and Christianity merged to create one the of most impactful heroic archetypes in world imagination — the knight, along with his chivalric ideal. In the knight, the warrior’s strength was directed by Christian virtue and placed in service of the local lords. The Song of Roland gives us one of its earliest expressions still extend today, with Roland dying at Roncevaux not merely as a brave soldier but as a Christian warrior. The Arthurian cycle refined the ideal further in the adventures of Lancelot, Gawain, and Galahad.

What the chivalric tradition understood was that the knight’s dignity depended not only his will and strength, but more acutely on his faith and moral uprightness. A knight who fought for glory alone was simply Achilles with a cross on his shield. The chivalric ideal demanded more in the adoption of a monastic-like attitude to martial excellence: placing it in service of the weak, the common good, and the Church.

By the late medieval period the knight had become a figure of self-serving vanity, confirmed by the misadventures of Don Quixote. Knighthood, though a lasting heroic ideal even through today, still lacked something in the highest hero archetype ever achieved.

The Modern Turn

The early American republic produced heroes in the mold of Plutarch’s Romans. Washington was like a Cincinnatus — the idealized farmer-soldier who saved the republic yet desired a return to his farm. Parson Weems’s hagiographic Life of Washington is essentially a secular saint’s life written in the Plutarchan mode. The heroic template was still recognizably classical, self-sacrificing statesmen, still oriented toward something beyond the self: the republic, the common good, the unprecedented experiment in self-governance. The Founding Fathers were flawed men, as all men are, but the heroic tradition they inhabited pointed toward an idea of ordered liberty that transcended any individual.

The 19th and 20th centuries gradually displaced the civic hero with the ideological one. The hero became the figure who advanced a cause — liberation, equality, justice, solidarity. These are genuine goods, and many of the figures elevated in their name were genuinely self-sacrificial, genuinely courageous, genuinely admirable. Martin Luther King Jr. is the most instructive modern example: a man of real moral seriousness and evident personal courage, elevated to a status of near-inviolable veneration in American culture. He is effectively a secular saint — a figure whose image confers moral authority and whose criticism is treated as a kind of sacrilege.

The theological difficulty lies in the structure of the veneration, and what that structure reveals about the culture doing the venerating. Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris — rightly ordered love — holds that goods must be loved in proportion to their proximity to God, the highest good. Racial equality is a genuine good, rooted in the conviction that every human person bears the image of God. But when racial equality becomes the ultimate good — the summit of the moral hierarchy, the standard against which all other values are measured — it’s been elevated beyond its proper place. The religious impulse doesn’t disappear when God recedes, but instead resettles on whatever is next in line.

When it comes to heroes, the main result of this shifting of values is that our heroes narrow in their virtues. We make heroes out of individuals for smaller and smaller reasons. For example, the American Founding Fathers became heroes to us (on the tail of the Enlightenment) not because they were deemed heroic in a broad sense, but specifically in terms of a bravery and self-sacrifice that won political freedom for early America.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the hero archetype shrink further to one of political action — those actors who won us racial equality, or victory over the U.S.S.R, or some other specific political accomplishment rose to become the newest generation of secular saints. They are not saints in the personal sense in terms of exemplifying moral virtue; they’re secular saints for what they enacted, repealed, signed into law, marched in protest for, etc. While many of these ends may have been good, the idea of “hero” in the modern sense shrunk significantly to mean those who led this or that political action.

This is the modern heroic predicament: that our heroes continue to shrink in moral stature. The causes they serve may be real and important, but the grandness of the hero has been diminished, because the ruler by which we measure them has shrunk. They are not bigger in the minds of us today because they aimed at bigger things, but because we expect so much less.

Our culture’s heroic imagination has descended to merely global maxima — the best among what we can see simply with our own eyes. But there was a time when heroes really were measured by the highest things — and those heroes have been with us the entire time…

Read more

You’ve probably heard it said: “it doesn’t matter what you read, just read something.” It’s a popular sentiment among teachers and librarians who earnestly want to inspire a life-long literary habit among the younger generations.

They have a noble aim, but there’s just one problem: their advice is dead wrong.

In actuality, what you read is extremely important. And if you’re reading in order to better understand the world, reading a bad book vs. a good one is the difference between believing outright falsehoods and seeing the world as it really is. The act of reading a book doesn’t shield you from the nonsense that’s present in any other form of media. Bad information is bad information, regardless of the source.

If you look at the bookshelves of any bookstore today or browse the trending category of online sellers, you’ll see a constant influx of new, enticing covers that promise you life-changing information. New tricks and techniques that have only just been discovered recently. You might think you’re missing out by not reading these books, but in most cases you’re better off completely ignoring them.

Your best bet of finding anything worth reading — information that is actually life-changing — is by looking back to books that were written long before you were born. You’ll learn that most new books aren’t really telling us anything new at all. At best they’re repeating watered down versions of what the ancients already told us, and at worst, spouting complete nonsense.

Here are three reasons why old books are where you should focus your time— and I’ll even give you some recommendations to get started.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Survivorship Bias

The first reason that you should read old books over new ones is for the very fact that we still have them around at all.

What do I mean?

If a book is worthless, it doesn’t stay in circulation for more than a few years. You don’t remember all the forgettable books you read when you were younger for the very reason that they were forgettable. They were useless or didn’t provide any real insight. You read them, but you didn’t retain anything from them, and you certainly didn’t recommend them to others..

Now imagine the flip side. Good books have staying power. They stay in circulation a long time, and are passed down for generations. If you read a good book as a child, it stays with you. You might even remember the cover, the illustrations, and the characters. You also remember how the book made you feel, and maybe have suggested it to others or plan on letting your children or future children read it.

Now imagine how useful or important a book has to be to be remembered hundreds or even thousands of years after it was written. So many people have read it and recommended it that it has been preserved for generations.

This is called survivorship bias. We only have the very best of the ancient books (in general) because they were the very best. They are not good because they are old. They are old because they are good. Something about them speaks to the human spirit or shed light on a vital topic that remains relevant generation after generation.

Shakespeare is still taught 400 years after his death because his characters embody human nature. We still read Machiavelli because his formula to obtain power remains relevant for leaders today. And we keep coming back to Aristotle and Plato after two millennia because they took on the big questions that we still wrestle with.

This is a humbling realization when you understand that even the great historical figures were reading the ancients, and those ancients were reaching back even further in time to read authors long before them. The same books have been shaping our civilization throughout its existence — generations have been reading and building upon the same canon of literature until only recently.

For example, Napoleon was obsessed with the work of Plutarch, Alfred the Great personally translated Boethius, and George Washington had a massive library of over 900 books, many of them historic works of the ancients. We’re continuously looking back to the same works because they’re timeless – they’ve stuck around so long for good reason.

I’d say it’s a good idea to continue this tradition and read what the greats did before us. Let’s reclaim this literary lineage. If a book has been around for a long time, it’s probably for a good reason.

Time Gives You a Wider Perspective Than Distance

The second reason you need to focus on old books is that the authors back then will give you a wider perspective on the world. Why?

The older an author is, the more likely it is that he or she will have had a life experience vastly different than yours or any other modern person. This means by reading them, you will gain a more exotic viewpoint than by reading someone similar to yourself.

Think of an ancient like Herodotus, whom Cicero called the “Father of History”. Instead of being an armchair historian, conducting his research via the internet, he personally travelled all over the Mediterranean world to collect first-hand accounts. His travels included Egypt, Persia, Syria, Babylon, and the Black Sea region.

Keep in mind this was a time when travel was extremely difficult and meant encountering dangerous situations like stormy seas, bandits, hunger, or disease — you couldn’t just hop a plane and arrive at your destination in a few hours. This breadth of experience made his writing much more in tune with his subject matter, and represents a worldview shaped by an environment vastly different than today.

A modern historian can’t relate to a classical Athenian, but Herodotus could — so by reading him you’ll gain an authentic classical Athenian perspective. That’s more valuable for understanding the human condition than just another modern attempt at making the ancients sound relatable.

Contrast this with the uniformity of thought today:

Read more

We don’t talk about death in a meaningful way anymore — and this is historically strange.

For most of Western Civilization, death was out in the open, visible to peasant, prince, and child alike. It was deliberately exposed to society as a means of teaching and wisdom. The skull on the philosopher’s desk, the hourglass on the painter’s table, and the ashes pressed into the forehead on Ash Wednesday were not expressions of a culture simply obsessed with the macabre. Instead, they were reminders of our limitations, our natural mortality.

The tradition that produced them was convinced that a life lived in awareness of its own ending was a better life than one lived in denial of it. Memento mori — remember your death — was actually an invitation to live with clarity and purpose…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

The Stoics

The phrase itself is Latin, and its origins are curiously institutional rather than philosophical. In accounts of the Roman triumph (a military victory parade), a slave would stand behind the successful general during the procession and remind him, from time to time, of his own mortality. At the height of his glory, surrounded by cheering crowds and the spectacle of conquest, the most powerful man in Rome was made to hear the words: remember, you will die. The reminder was built into the ceremony itself, because the Romans understood that a man is most tempted to forget his limits when on the heels of a great victory.

The Stoic philosophers habitualized what the Roman army acted out post-victory. Seneca, writing to his friend Lucilius, urged:

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day.”

Similarly, Marcus Aurelius, running an empire from a military camp on the Danube, wrote to himself in private:

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

For Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the daily contemplation of death wasn’t pessimism. Regular contemplation of mortality was an antidote to procrastination and a motivation to action. If you believe death may fall upon you in the night, you would be wise not to waste the afternoon. You’ll also find yourself concerned with meaningful action, careful speech, and guarded thoughts.

Because the mind naturally drifts away from uncomfortable truths toward distraction, the Stoics viewed the contemplation of death as an act of the will, a discipline requiring daily effort. The memento mori corrects the passive slide into vices, especially sloth and pride. It compelled the Stoics to consider each day as potentially their last, giving them an urgency to live virtuously.

Memento Mori in Art

It should come with little surprise that when Renaissance artists looked back to the Romans, they picked up on the theme of the memento mori. The Renaissance welcomed death as a visual contemplation on our mortality for nearly three centuries.

But the memento mori first made its way into Medieval art through the Danse Macabre where Death appeared as a skeleton and danced with popes, emperors, merchants, peasants — even children. The imagery appeared on church walls across Europe, largely spurred by the grim events of the Black Death. The Grim Reaper, the hooded scythe-wielding figure of Death in, developed out of a darker 19th century take on Danse Macabre art.

The memento mori gained great popularity with the Renaissance artists, who, with centuries of Medieval backdrop to draw from, settled the skull naturally into scenes of learning and sanctity. The skull wasn’t used as a symbol for horror and fear as it is today, but rather as the philosopher’s or the saint’s companion, as the more piercing symbol of life’s finiteness than the benign hourglass.

St. Jerome, the great scholar of the early Church who translated the Bible into Latin, was among the most painted saints of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and he often appeared with a skull nearby. Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing places the skull directly on the saint’s desk, its profile deliberately counterbalancing Jerome’s own aged head. Beyond it reflecting merely the holy disposition of St. Jerome, however, it also reminds us of the gravity and longevity of his work — translation of the Latin Vulgate — that would long outlast himself.

In 1521, Dürer painted St. Jerome in his study surrounded by objects symbolizing transience — the skull, a snuffed-out candle, and a piece of paper tacked to the wall reading Respice Finem: consider the end. The painting was a sensation, and the type became a specialty of local workshops, spawning dozens of versions across Northern Europe.

St. Francis of Assisi was treated similarly across generations of painters, from Zurbarán to Guido Reni. The skull in Franciscan iconography carried specific theological weight because Francis himself called death his “sister,” and Franciscan sources consistently described death as the doorway to life. The skull on his desk reflected the Christian belief that death was not an end but rather a passage.

With the Enlightenment’s detraction from Christianity, Dutch painters of the seventeenth century took this further by removing the saints and letting the objects speak for themselves. A sputtering candle, half-eaten food, an hourglass — all gentle reminders of finitude. But somewhere among these objects would still rest the skull. Often these still paintings contrasted the beauty of fine tables and trinkets against the naked skull, emphasizing the futility of worldly possessions.

Holbein made a similar argument with particular brilliance in The Ambassadors, where a distorted skull stretches across the bottom of the canvas, visible only when viewed from an oblique angle. Death was in plain sight, but only comprehensible from the right angle, or in my own interpretation, the right theology.

The Church’s Reminder

No institution in Western history has done more to keep death visible than the Catholic Church. And it did so for theology rather than morbidity, because a faith hinging on death and resurrection can’t hide death away.

Christianity’s early history was naturally close to death. Aside from the obvious death and resurrection of Jesus, the early Christians were persecuted and killed for their Christian faith at certain junctures in their first four centuries. Often, to skirt death above, Christians worshiped among the dead below — in the catacombs surrounded by images of resurrection — fish, bread, the raising of Lazarus.

To many outsiders, the Christians likely appeared obsessed with death in a strange way. They eventually took up a method of Roman execution — the cross — as the central symbol of their faith, while their liturgies were full of the language of sacrifice. Christianity thus bears a duality of attitudes: a solemn knowledge of death but joyous hope in resurrection.

The liturgical calendar encoded this conviction into the rhythms of ordinary life. Once a year, on a Wednesday at the start of Lent, Christians come forward to receive ashes on the forehead and hear the words drawn from Genesis: “Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” All receive the same public mark, as far back as the 13th century. The Bishop of Rome — the most powerful figure in Western Christendom — bowed his head to receive the same ashes and hear the same words as every peasant in every parish. It became a tradition for the popes to receive ashes at the Basilica of Santa Sabina on Aventine Hill. The Ash Wednesday form of memento mori flattened Church hierarchy for a moment, reminding all that death and judgement were impartial.

The Church’s treatment of death runs still deeper in its liturgical imagination: whenever it celebrates a saint’s feast day, it celebrates the dies natalis — the day of their birth into heaven, which is to say, the day they died. In this inversion lies a fundamental Christian theology: death is not the end of the story but its decisive turning point, the threshold of Heaven.

Among written works, the Ars Moriendi — the art of dying well — was among the most widely circulated texts of the medieval period. It was a practical guide to preparing for death that was read by ordinary Christians who understood that dying well required preparation and practice. St. Alphonsus Liguori extended this tradition into the 18th century with his Preparation for Death, a sustained meditation on mortality as a spiritual discipline.

The overarching premise of these saints, liturgies, and practices was that the person who has thought seriously about death is more capable of living well than the person who has not. Ecclesiastes recognized long ago the urgency that death forces upon life:

“Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, . . . before the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (Eccl. 12:1-7)

But much of what we used to know, we have since forgotten, especially on subject of death…

Read more

It’s popular now to say that the West is in decline — and it’s certainly something I’ve written about many times. The signs are all too apparent: a crushing cost of living, plummeting birthrates, and increasing political instability.

But most people make a huge mistake when they think about decline. They imagine it and feel a sense of impending doom. They think it means the end of their personal story.

History shows us a paradox, though. When Rome crumbled, there were certain groups of people who didn’t merely survive — they actually ascended. While the world spiraled into chaos, these groups built foundations that lasted for centuries, seemingly immune from the decline around them.

How did they do it? And what can we learn from them?

By examining history’s most chaotic periods, I’ve uncovered three principles that make an individual — and their lineage — truly resilient. These are the pillars that allowed the survivors of history’s dying empires to weather the storm and plant the seeds of new civilizations.

If you master these three things, you’ll be following in the footsteps of history’s greatest overcomers — those who didn’t let their environment slow them down. Like them, you also can ascend amidst the decline around you.

Faith First

The first pillar that allows individuals to transcend the chaos is an unflinching religious faith. At first this might sound like a cliché, but from a historical perspective, faith is the bedrock of every great civilization. There is no such thing as a great culture that is not, at its core, a religious culture.

Historian Will Durant claimed a culture’s success was intrinsically tied to its religiosity. Strong nations were born out of faithful people, but when religion dwindled, things started to fall apart. Durant, who had studied dozens of civilizations and wrote the classic work The Story of Civilization, claimed that cultures always begin with religious fervor which gives a nation strength to overcome great difficulty.

It’s their faith in a higher power that allows them to bear the initial “growth pains” that precede prosperity. In Greece and Rome, for example, mythologies told of heroes who battled overwhelming adversity to accomplish their goals. These myths inspired their peoples to overcome struggles while offering an ideal to strive for.

It’s also of note that a people’s religion is actually strengthened by hardship. Durant writes that “...a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it.” Durant believed tough times were actually essential to building the character and faith of a nation.

And the reverse means the downfall of a civilization and its religion: once success and abundance are eventually attained, the seeds of a culture’s downfall has already been planted. Durant writes:

“If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows… toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude…”

When there are no great struggles left, people tend to lose their religiosity, and an analytical yet nihilistic ethos dominates the culture. Sound familiar? This certainly sounds like where we are today.

Durant was far from the only thinker to link a culture’s religiosity with its success. English historian Arnold Toynbee pointed toward religious faith as a key way for people to transcend decline. He used the early Christian saints and martyrs as examples of this overcoming. Though they faced hardship and persecution, their suffering was actually instrumental in reinforcing their faith and helping to spread Christianity. This religious foundation eventually forged Western civilization. Instead of hardship being an obstacle, it was directed in a new, creative way. Toynbee writes:

“It is not, then, by seeking to escape suffering, but by embracing and responding to it, that the soul born into a disintegrating society can win release and regain…the path of growth from which his society has strayed…”

So if religion is what allows cultures to overcome suffering and hardship, it follows that faith must be embraced by those who wish to flourish during the decline of a dying civilization. Only through true belief can one find the strength to carry on during hard times and help right the course of a wandering ship.

Think Like a Dynasty

The second pillar necessary to transcend the decay of modern culture is what I call a dynastic mindset. To ensure your efforts actually outlast the current instability, you need to start thinking generationally.

All of the great civilizations throughout history were built on the idea of family and dynasty — why build anything at all if it will simply disappear after you’re gone? Longevity requires thinking beyond mere lifespans and embracing a generational approach.

For example, there were families in ancient Rome who lasted throughout all of its political turmoil, wars of succession, and changes in government — dynasties that lasted centuries. They proved that family was more powerful than institutions.

You may have heard of the Julii clan who gave us Julius Caesar. This clan was one of the original patrician families that were present when Rome was still a kingdom. Some legends even connect them to the time of Rome’s founder Romulus. Despite their legendary origins, they sunk into relative obscurity for a century and a half. For a time, they didn’t have any notable members even though they were still an elite family who held considerable political power.

But this shows us how resilient generational thinking is. They reemerged in full force in the late republic, and once Julius Caesar burst on the scene, they became part of the Julio-Claudian dynasty which gave us Rome’s first imperial dynasty.

Families outlive institutions and governments when approached with a generational and deliberate mindset. Decades or even centuries of unassuming groundwork can shape entire societies. And some families can even outlive empires…

Read more

What are you doing with your mind? Ancient thinkers have been concerned with that question long before the advent of mindless scrolling on social media.

For most of Western history, how the mind was being used was central to the philosophy on living a good life. The quality of your attention was not incidental to who you were, but rather a reflection of your discipline and character.

Past thinkers recognized a duty to exercise your mind, seeing the sin of Sloth as applying equally to the mind and the body. The ancient world built entire disciplines around this conviction. We have built an entire economy — the attention economy — around destroying it.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Wisdom of the Philosophers

Plato recognized the impact of what we think about and how it affects our soul in Book VI of The Republic:

“The soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about.”

Typical of Plato, this is a metaphysical claim — that the inner life is not a fixed thing but a dynamic one, continuously shaped by whatever it is allowed to dwell upon. The soul, for Plato and for virtually all subsequent Western ideas, was something being formed, moment by moment, by the direction of its own gaze.

This wasn’t simply an abstract conviction confined to the circles of the philosophers, either. Instead, it shaped how the Greeks organized education. The paideia, the classical formation of the young, was built on the premise that what a child was exposed to, what stories he heard, what music he absorbed, what images surrounded him, would form him at a deeper level than instruction. Plato famously wanted certain poets (not all of them) censored from his ideal city because he thought Homer’s gods, quarrelsome and petty, were shaping the souls of Athenian boys in the wrong direction. Even the enemies of Socrates argued for his condemnation on allegations of poisoning the minds of the youth with his ideas. The Greeks were particularly sensitive to the intellectual influences on their youth, because they recognized their power in shaping whole generations.

Marcus Aurelius returned to the same conviction in the Meditations, a private journal never intended for publication, written while campaigning on the Danube frontier:

“Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts; for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”

Marcus was reminding himself, in the midst of war and administration, that the interior life required its own discipline.

Aristotle went further, arguing in the Nicomachean Ethics that contemplation was not merely a useful habit but the highest activity available to a human being, the one most fully expressing what we are. To be chronically distracted, in this framework, was not merely to be inefficient in the modern sense that everyone believes they have ADHD. It was to fail at being human in the most fundamental sense — a failure to truly live.

Engineered Attention

Against this classical backdrop, we question (to Aristotle’s point) whether modern man is really living at all. Our attention today is ruled by screens, apps, and social media feeds. The last is a comical term, as we’re clearly being fed content, like hogs to grain.

The attention economy is not a neutral development or an inevitable consequence of technological progress. It is an engineered system, built around human attention as a finite resource, and whoever captures it can monetize it. Every feed, notification, and algorithmically-optimized scroll is the product of huge investments and some of the sharpest technical minds of a generation, all directed toward one end: to keep you from leaving.

The mechanisms are now well documented. Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s founding presidents, admitted in 2017 that the platform was deliberately designed to consume as much of users’ time and attention as possible — exploiting the dopamine hit that comes with someone liking or commenting on their post. Intermittent variable rewards like these (the same structure that makes slot machines effective) keep our fingers scrolling instead of powering off our phones. Further, content engineered for outrage and anxiety are privileged in our feeds because these topics hold attention longer than uplifting content. The infinite scroll was designed without a stopping point because stopping points allow people to leave.

While these highly addictive apps have earned plenty of criticism over the years, the bigger questions are typically never asked. The wasting of hours a day in a virtual town center is one thing. But a larger concern of mine is how the constant consumption of short, viral media degrades the capacity for the kind of attention that the ancient world considered essential to a fully human life. Sustained focus, the ability to stay with a difficult text, a long argument, a moment of silence: these skills all atrophy without practice. Older generations raised without these addictive technologies but getting sucked into them later is one thing — they may become rusty on such skill they had in their youth. But what happens when generations are now raised that never attained these skills in the first place? All the later generations will know is an 8 second attention span. A mind trained from childhood to expect constant stimulation might not simply be delayed in the skills of contemplation: I fear they may lose the capability of deep thought altogether.

A New Era of Soft Minds

The losses are harder to see because they are interior.

Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, produced across decades of sustained intellectual labor, was a teaching document. It assumed students who could hold an intricate argument in mind across sessions, return to it, dispute it, and be changed by it. The letters of Erasmus, Thomas More, of later figures like Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke often contained careful arguments, sometimes running to thousands of words. That organization of the mind has not disappeared because people devolved naturally. It has been dismantled by an environment that rewards speed and punishes depth.

John Cassian, writing in the fifth century, described the wandering of the mind during prayer (what he called logismoi) as the central spiritual struggle of the interior life and prescribed specific disciplines for it. The Desert Fathers, the Benedictine lectio divina, the hesychast tradition of the Eastern Church all built their practice around the same premise that inner quiet was not a natural state but a victory for the contemplative, prayerful soul. The modern person has not escaped that struggle. We have simply lost the disciplines and multiplied the distractions.

Two decades of the attention economy softened the mind’s tolerance for difficulty itself. The capacity to sit with a hard question, to read against resistance, to follow a long argument without relief, quietly eroded through the accumulated habit of always reaching for the easier thing. By the time AI arrived, the ground had already been long prepared by smart phones, social media, and video games.

While AI didn’t cause the crisis of attention, it arrived at precisely the moment when the mind, already softened, was most vulnerable to the offer it presents: hand over the hard work of thinking. The friction that once forced the mind to slow down and actually engage with difficulty has been engineered away. The temptation is no longer merely distraction, but rather complete abdication from challenging thought.

Aristotle’s claim was not that contemplation produces good results, or (by extension) that it will ever outperform AI in terms of efficiency, speed, and completeness. He posed instead that contemplation is a fundamentally human activity. A person who permanently outsources that activity then becomes in many ways less human and more vegetative.

Read more

There is something in the Western soul that can’t sit still. Other civilizations built empires, yes — but they built them to stabilize rather than to expand. The West built empires and then kept going. It crossed oceans not merely to trade but to discover. It mapped the stars not merely to navigate but to understand. The West asked not just “how do we survive?” but “what lies beyond that horizon?”.

But this Western ethos is not simply ambition. It is something praiseworthy in moral judgement until it gets polluted into ambition — that is a central danger the West is wrestling with which we will return to.

Christopher Dawson, the great Catholic historian of culture, identified what he called the “missionary character” of Western civilization: a compulsion to transform the world. The West, uniquely among civilizations, has always exported itself. Its ideas, faith, institutions, and art were not made for itself, but for the whole world. There was always another people to convert, another land to civilize, another problem to solve, another frontier to push.

Similarly, Oswald Spengler, writing from a more aloof vantage point, said much the same thing. The defining symbol of Western culture, he argued, was not the Greek temple or any other tangible figure but the infinite plane. The West, in his mind, is Faustian: always reaching, always expanding, oriented not toward harmony or stillness like in the East but toward the unlimited. Its mathematics invented calculus — the mathematics of infinitesimal change and limits to infinity. Its architecture built cathedrals that pointed to heaven. Its music reached for ever greater grandeur.

Both men were describing the same energy. The question neither fully answered was: what happens to that energy when it has nowhere transcendent to go?

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

When the Hunger Turns Inward

The frontier, in every meaningful sense, has closed. The age of earthly discovery is over. The entire world is not only just mapped, but constantly photographed by satellites orbiting above and displayed to anyone via Google. But more importantly, the inner frontier that once gave Western expansion its moral weight has also receded. The idea that the West carried something worth giving — a faith, a civilization, a vision of human dignity — has been largely abandoned by the West itself, hollowed out by self-doubt and historical guilt.

What remains is the West’s quest for the infinite, with nothing big enough left to accommodate it. Stripped of its orientation toward something beyond itself, the old Faustian drive simply turned inward, resulting in a practice of extraction rather than transformation.

Look at where the bulk of our best Western minds now direct their energy. They don’t seek to build institutions that outlast them, nor complete the kinds of civilizational projects that once consumed the best of a generation. Instead, an enormous portion of Western intellectual horsepower is devoted to a single obsessive question: how do I make money without making anything? The ideal is no longer the explorer or the builder or even the industrialist. The idea for many early 20-30 year olds is the man who has found the algorithm, the loophole, or the pattern in the market that will make him rich beyond imagination. Entire subcultures are organized around decoding the stock market not as a mechanism for allocating capital toward productive ends, but as a puzzle to be solved before the next man beats can. The vocabulary is telling, too: plays, positions, edges. That is a language of strategy without purpose.

This is not an attack on capitalism. Capitalism, at its best, was itself a Faustian enterprise — building, risking, creating. What we are describing is something more parasitic: the Faustian drive fully unmoored, seeking infinite return for minimal creation. It searches for expansion without exploration and gain without effort.

The Destroyer of Just Society

The ancient Greeks had identified this pathology long before it became civilizational.

They called it pleonexia, the desire to have more than one’s share. Aristotle placed it at the center of his political philosophy as the great destroyer of just communities. It was not merely greed in the vulgar sense; it was the disposition of the soul that could never be satisfied, that measured its own worth entirely in terms of accumulation relative to others. The pleonektes (the one afflicted with this desire) was not simply rich, but actually incapable of the kind of self-control that makes friendship, justice, and genuine community possible.

What Aristotle understood, and what we have largely forgotten, is that unchecked desire is both a personal failing and a political one. A civilization biased toward pleonexia does not merely produce unhappy individuals; it produces institutions, cultures, and incentive structures that systematically reward the wrong things and punish the right ones. It elevates the schemer above the builder, the extractor above the creator, the man who found the shortcut above the man who did the work.

The West’s aimless hunger also mirrors how personal self-focus relates to depression. As the renowned psychologist Jordan Peterson has said, “There’s a direct relationship between how much you’re thinking about yourself and how miserable you are.” Likewise, when a civilization with an inherently outward-facing character turns its focus to its interior, it loses the vitality that made it great in the first place.

The Greeks did not think this was inevitable. They thought it was a choice made collectively, over time, through cultural habits and the virtues a people chooses to honor. If enough people choose to put their energy into building, exploring, and creating a healthy culture, they become the proof of a civilization once again looking outward rather than inward.

Read more

We live in an age of pure convenience — an age where human effort has, in some sense, been conquered. But what feels effortless to us as end consumers belies an extraordinarily complex underbelly. Every one of our comforts rests on immense networks of human beings: systems built, maintained, and advanced by millions of minds working in coordination.

This complexity has a cost, too. As civilizations grow, they do not simply become more advanced; they also become more dependent. More people build more infrastructure. More infrastructure enables more comfort and interdependence. That interdependence allows for further specialization, and specialization produces still greater complexity.

But there is a second half to this equation.

As civilizations become more complex, they require more people to sustain them. A small society can remain simple, but a large one can’t. Modern life is not something a small group could recreate or even maintain. Then, every leap in technology requires a critical population to achieve it. For example, the modern semiconductor fab could never be built by a thousand-person village. Ninety percent or more of that village would be farmers or hunters simply to survive. Only sufficient scale can advance civilization.

And that raises a question we have only recently begun to recognize: what happens when the number of people begins to fall?

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

The Scaling of Civilization

The smaller the society, the more self-sufficient it tends to be. The earliest human groups — small, nomadic bands — lived close to the edge of survival. Most members contributed directly to food, water, shelter, and defense. There was little room for specialization because survival demanded nearly everyone’s full attention.

These societies were resilient in the sense that they were insular. Their smallness allowed them to move and adapt to local crises, but it also limited their ability to develop complex systems. There were no spare hands to build them. Even today, the pattern holds: the more isolated a family becomes, the more its time must be devoted to survival.

As populations grew into the thousands, agriculture emerged (or perhaps more accurately, enabled that growth). This was not merely a dietary change, but a civilizational one. Farming required permanence, and permanence demanded coordination. In the Nile River Valley, irrigation cycles required shared labor and timing; in Mesopotamia, early cities like Ur depended on grain storage and redistribution to function.

Most importantly, agriculture introduced surplus, and surplus introduced specialization. Not everyone needed to farm anymore. A portion of the population could instead craft tools, organize governance, conduct trade, or shape religious life. For the first time, societies could sustain roles dedicated to advancement over mere survival. Complex civilizations required numbers.

Classical Civilizations

This trend toward increasing non-survival labor reached new heights in the classical world.

The early Greek city-states (not forgetting the Mycenaeans as a critical precedent), some numbering in the hundreds of thousands, developed systems of governance, philosophy, and military organization that still shape the world today. Their scale allowed for many thinkers, soldiers, artisans, and administrators, each of these categories with their own slew of subcategories. They reached a societal complexity that no single individual could fully comprehend in all its moving parts.

Rome only brought that complexity to new heights, to awe the world not only in its complexity but most acutely in applying that complexity across such a vast territory: a true pan-continental empire.

At its height, Rome governed tens of millions. Its roads stretched over 250,000 miles. Its aqueducts delivered running water into cities like Rome itself, which likely exceeded one million inhabitants. Grain shipments from Egypt fed the capital, while legions secured borders from Britain to the Near East.

None of this was accidental, nor natural, because the building and shaping of our environment in ways never before seen is a hallmark of humanity. Humans question, imagine, and create — not merely repeat patterns as other creatures do.

Back to Rome, it took generations of engineers, laborers, soldiers, and administrators all operating within a system so vast that its stability depended on constant maintenance. Food could not stop being produced while aqueducts were being built. The soldiers could not stop defending the Roman borders while the Colosseum was constructed.

All parts of the society were intertwined, and if just one thread were pulled loose, even a civilization as mighty as Rome could — and did — collapse. The belief that Rome was invincible was no different than the claim that the Titanic was unsinkable: there is no true law of “too big to fail.”

In its later days, populations declined, trade networks fractured, and infrastructure deteriorated. Without the maintainers of a complex society, a civilization reverses into simpler modes of existence. The “dark ages” were not primarily the result of religious backwardness, but of fragmentation: political, cultural, and demographic. As unity dissolved, so too did the ability to sustain large-scale systems.

Complexity is contingent; it exists only so long as there are enough unified people to sustain it…

Read more

Your choice of heroes is the most important decision you’ll ever make.

Why? Because Napoleon spent his entire life trying to be Caesar. Caesar idolized Alexander the Great, and Alexander imagined himself as the next Achilles. Who you idolize shapes who you become.

From a historical perspective, focusing on “the greats” can force us to wrestle with difficult yet vital questions on a societal level: Who should we hold up as exemplary figures in our society? Who should we teach our young men and women to emulate?

The framing of history that addresses these questions head on is the Great Man Theory of history. It’s a controversial idea proposed by 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle, who argued that “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

Carlyle believed that history isn’t shaped by the masses, but by the will of heroes — elite figures who should be followed and revered for their inherent genius. But this isn’t simply a history lesson. If Carlyle is right, it means your choice of who to follow is the single most important factor in who you will become.

So let’s uncover the secrets of the Great Man Theory — how you can use it to unlock your full potential, and also, why you’ve probably never been taught it in your school’s history class….

The Driving Force of History

So first, where did Great Man Theory come from, and just what exactly does it say?

Thomas Carlyle first gave a series of lectures on the topic of heroism in 1840. These lectures were later published into a book entitled On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History. One of the book’s main theses was the Great Man Theory of history.

Carlyle argued that heroes shape history through both their personal attributes and “divine inspiration” — the world essentially turns on the ideas and decisions of elite men. Carlyle writes:

“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain…the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”

But how do these great men emerge? Where do they come from? And what makes one great in the first place?

Carlyle based his theory on a couple assumptions. The first assumption is that great leaders are born, not made — Carlyle emphasized nature over nurture. Heroes inherently possess the traits that enable them to rise to the occasion and lead on instinct. Therefore, those who rise to power usually deserve to lead because of their abilities.

The second assumption is that great men rise only when a unique set of circumstances plays out — they don’t emerge in a vacuum. Though every aspect of history isn’t necessarily dependent on great men, heroes are the decisive factor in solving the problems of societies. They’re the weight that tips the scales one way or another.

What Defines a Great Man?

Carlyle’s heroes are utterly unique and possess a certain creative genius that can’t be made up for with any amount of raw manpower. How many Roman legions are the equivalent to a Julius Caesar? How many minor poets will give us a Shakespeare? The hero is unquantifiable.

Carlyle’s hero is somewhat similar to Aristotle’s conception of the magnanimous, or “great-souled,” man. The great-souled man is a man who possesses archetypal human virtue in the active sense, meaning he acts upon the world as opposed to having a more contemplative nature. The magnanimous man is a person of action.

In Carlyle’s conception, the hero isn’t perfect, though. The world is filled with contradictions that the hero has to deal with. Thus, all heroes will be flawed.

But here’s the key…

It’s precisely because they aren’t perfect that they can serve as a pattern for others to imitate. This imitation is the force that moves history forward. For example, Alexander the Great and his phalanxes set the template for ancient warfare. It would be hundreds of years before his methods were defeated. Likewise, Napoleon used artillery in an overwhelming fashion in a way no one had done before. Future generals took note and copied his tactics.

But Carlyle’s heroes aren’t just military or political figures. He identified six types of hero, encompassing all facets of human life:

1. the divine hero (like Odin)

2. the prophet (like Muhammad)

3. the poet (like Shakespeare)

4. he priest (like Martin Luther)

5. the man of letters (like Rousseau) and

6. the king (like Napoleon)

Thus there is a hero for every interest one can have. And this is where it gets personal, because Carlyle believed that who our heroes are shapes us…

Read more

We often assume our world of technology and relative peace is the default state of human affairs — but it isn’t.

For most of history, life was brutal and short. Civilization is not a guarantee. As Kenneth Clark lamented in his acclaimed 1969 television series Civilisation, “however complex and solid it seems, [civilization] is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed.”

Civilization, then, is a delicate achievement that requires constant maintenance. When that maintenance fails — as it did during the fall of Rome or the Bronze Age collapse — the darkness of illiteracy and violence becomes the historical norm once again.

So that means that in order to maintain a civilization, each generation must do its part. Fathers and mothers must pass on accumulated wisdom to their children, and when those children grow up, they must do the same in turn. Now today, Gen Z is the next generation to take the mantle. If you’re in this group, you’re beginning to have an impact on society at large. This is a great responsibility, and also a great challenge because our civilization is seemingly in such a fragile state.

With this in mind, I want to show you why, even as a seemingly advanced society, collapse is never far off. And it is only by understanding history that we can predict our future and arm ourselves with the tools to become great men and women of consequence who will stave off civilizational decline and build a better future.

So here are 3 ways that understanding history will change the way you see the world — and hopefully help you play a part in solving the challenges we face today.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

A Warning System For Decline

We can only understand the state of our current civilization in light of the cycles of history. To the casual observer, we are wealthy, well-fed, and entertained. Life is good right?

But to the historical mind, cracks are everywhere. One only needs to read a classic like Edwards Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to see them.

Gibbon basically performed a “civilizational autopsy.” He posited that Rome didn’t necessarily suffer a sudden death from a single powerful blow. Rather, it eroded over centuries. The warning signs — currency debasement, reliance on mercenaries, political instability, a widening gap between rich and poor, and plummeting birth rates— were all present long before Rome officially collapsed. Yet, most Romans failed to notice as they continued their daily lives nearly uninterrupted.

Gibbon called this the “natural effect of immoderate greatness.” Success bred a complacency that made self-correction impossible. Why sacrifice for the common good when prosperity feels guaranteed? This is precisely how decline arrives unannounced through the path of least resistance.

This pattern is not unique to antiquity, of course, and the symptoms Gibbon identified probably ring a bell to you. Other cultures have undergone the same cycle, and the signs are present in our own civilization. Rampant inflation, a faltering middle class, and plummeting birth rates are all too common news items in the West today.

Historical literacy serves as an early-warning system for these symptoms, though.

The person who has studied Gibbon or the collapse of the Weimar Republic possesses a pattern recognition that others lack. They realize that we are not fundamentally different from the Romans. They, too, assumed that because their world had always endured, it always would.

They were wrong.

A Blueprint For Survival

Ok, so history provides a detection system for failure, but it also offers a blueprint for survival, which is the second reason you need to understand history

History shows us how civilizations endure. Only when they treat their survival as a serious problem to be solved each and every day do societies make it through the many “great filters” that stand in their way.

One example is the long-lasting Byzantine Empire. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the East thrived for another thousand years. The Byzantines survived because they understood that civilization requires active maintenance…

Read more

What we know about history is an illusion. We often speak about ancient peoples as “primitive” and “unsophisticated”, but these broad characterizations really only reveal our own simplicity.

Our “modernity bias” presupposes that we are the most intelligent generation to ever exist, and human intelligence is a declining metric as we peer backward in time. This leaves us with the assumption that cavemen were stupid, we are smart, and everyone in between was, well, in between.

But what serious historians know (and rarely tell us) is that history, anthropology, archaeology, and its sisters are inherently limited. They study the scattered writings, ruins, and tools that haven’t been given quite enough time to return to dust before being pulled into a museum

Hence, what we know of the past is not merely based on what existed, but instead of the much smaller category of what survived.

Our picture of the past, then, is not only incomplete, but naturally biased toward incompleteness — and that inherent incompleteness means that modern historians (and the public alike) will always underestimate the intelligence, capabilities, and complexities of past humanity.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

The Problem of Survivorship

Most human activity leaves no trace: conversations, daily habits, clothing, and local knowledge can fade away in merely a generation. Some artifacts may last many generations with careful storage, things like letters, paper, various heirlooms, wooden tools, and the like. But fewer items can last beyond a millennium: coins, weapons, armor, jewelry, etc. Of things that last several millennia, we are typically only left with what is large and therefore slow to return to dust: megalithic structures, buried cities, and deep engravings in stone.

As we look back into recent history, what survives is largely accidental, perhaps simply those knickknacks left by a grandparent in a chest in the attic. But as we look back farther into history, we find relatively fewer artifacts as a result of mere accident and more as a result of past peoples to create permanence. While this is stating the obvious, the implication then is that our knowledge of peoples further back in history is proportionally overinfluenced by the grand structures (aimed at permanence) that have survived. It’s no surprise, then, that we tend to think of “primitive” peoples as dominated culturally by purely religious or superstitious belief and cartoonishly void of practical, political, and personal qualities.

As an example, when we think of the pyramids at Giza, we assume they were the central focus of Egyptian society, ignoring the probable idea that it was very likely only one (admittedly impressive) feature of an ancient city. We are very likely to see the pyramids as a holy and serious site, and very unlikely to see that the children of the surrounding town probably enjoyed bouncing balls off its faces. This particular fact is conjecture, of course, but it’s entirely more reasonable to assume past humans did human things than to assert past humans only did what we can know from the dirt.

The survivorship bias will always result in an inadequate picture of past human society; alone, survivorship bias will lead us to the conclusion that more ancient humans must be dumber humans. Entire domains of intelligence (practical skills, social complexity, moral reasoning) are largely invisible archaeologically. Drawing conclusions about the intelligence of past mankind from merely what is found in the dirt risks judging a civilization by its trash heap or a handful of ruins.

Misreading the Evidence

Archaeologists and historians often interpret artifacts as representative of a whole culture. G.K. Chesterton noted in The Everlasting Man that the historians of his day assigned deep religious significance to some crude cave drawings. But Chesterton scoffed at these assumptions that limited the sophistication of prehistoric man to these drawings, offering that the sketches could equally well have been the drawings of a prehistoric child. The danger here is that we project meaning (or lack of it) onto ambiguous evidence. When we look for meaning in prehistoric doodles, we might equally wonder what our grandchildren might think of us if the only thing they inherit is our drawings made in boredom.

The sophistication of the caveman must surpass our understanding of them based on the limited drawings, tools, and other random artifacts we have discovered. What if the more sophisticated aspects of ancient societies simply didn’t survive?

Then, we also might realize that what cavemen had in their heads might not be represented by the physical evidence, even if all of it were well-preserved. The mind of the caveman was likely no lesser to ours. Perhaps we have merely been afforded the luxury to think about it, while they were using their minds constantly for survival. Few modern men would even survive the world of the cavemen (at least our understanding of it). Most today can’t make a fire without a lighter, forage the local flora, skin an animal, or construct even simple tools from purely natural products. But the caveman could — and probably could do much more that we can say.

Read more

In 1787 Alexander Hamilton argued that the United States should resemble an elective monarchy, featuring a strong national leader elected for life. It might sound like heresy to modern Americans, but his idea had some merit — and exposes a shortcoming of modern democracy.

Although Hamilton enjoys pride of place among historical figures as a founding father of the United States, his support for centralized government and a powerful executive has tarnished his image today. This isn’t surprising considering he referred to the British governmental system — which America fought a war to disentangle itself from — as the “best in the world.”

Despite his blemished reputation, Hamilton advocated for “good government” which pursued longevity and stability. And his original plan for America sheds light on the weaknesses of today’s political systems…

Hamilton’s King

Hamilton gave an impassioned, six-hour-long speech at the constitutional convention laying out his plan for the government and a powerful executive head. Despite his zeal, though, it was resoundingly voted down in favor of the system the U.S. has today. But what did Hamilton advocate for exactly?

Sympathetic to Britain’s strong monarchy, Hamilton proposed a system that was similar to his former allegiance’s government. But unlike the British monarchy, where power was transferred via bloodline, Hamilton’s leader — referred to as the national “governor” — would be an elected figure.

Hamilton lays out his vision for the executive during his speech:

“The supreme Executive authority of the United States to be vested in a Governor, to be elected to serve during good behavior; the election to be made by Electors chosen by the people in the Election Districts aforesaid.”

Essentially, the governor would retain power for life as long as misconduct did not force an impeachment by congress i.e. “to serve during good behavior.” And he would have a broad swathe of powers, including the ability to veto any law, make treaties, and appoint all chief officers of the Departments of Finance, War, Foreign Affairs, etc. Notably, the executive would also appoint state governors, giving him more power than today’s president.

Hamilton’s monarch-like governor would wield enough power domestically to resist foreign influence, while the possibility of impeachment prevented tyranny. It was a balance of incentives, Hamilton envisioned, that ensured a functional, yet limited rule.

Historical Precedent

As a well-educated man, Hamilton drew from history for much of his worldview. Like other founding fathers, he admired the Roman Republic specifically, calling it the “utmost height of human greatness” in the Federalist Papers. But before Rome was a republic, it was a kingdom with an elective monarch…

After the first legendary king of Rome Romulus, who took power by killing his brother Remus, monarchs were elected by the Roman people via the Curiate Assembly, who voted on candidates pre-selected by the senate. Though it was ultimately up to the Roman citizenry who became king, the senate held much of the power during the process.

Touted as the successor of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire (HRE), likewise had an elective monarchy. In the HRE the emperor was appointed by a small body of the most powerful princes, or “prince-electors.” Once a leader was selected, the coronation of the emperor took place in either Aachen or Frankfurt, whereupon the prince would become monarch.

The longevity of the Holy Roman Empire, spanning hundreds of years, was a testament to the strength of the system. In fact, it was still intact during the time of the constitutional convention. Though Hamilton critiqued the HRE’s fractured structure, he clearly had no qualms with its monarchical system.

Another contemporary elective monarchy to Hamilton was that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Poles held “free elections” upon the death of a monarch, where any Catholic nobleman might be considered for the position. The Polish system was not as successful as the HRE’s, though, as infighting and even full on battle often occurred between candidates. Historian Norman Davies recorded that “in 1764, when only thirteen electors were killed, it was said that the Election was unusually quiet.”

Though uncommon today, elective monarchies were not unheard of when Hamilton made his speech to the constitutional convention in 1787.

So why specifically did Hamilton want a monarch-like system? And could it work in America today?

Read more

Every great civilization eventually reaches a point where its power remains visible, but its foundations begin to erode.

Fiscal strain, social fragmentation, and declining confidence in leadership signal that the empire’s contraction has arrived. The military commander and writer John Glubb argued that empires often pass through predictable stages: from expansion and confidence to wealth, complacency, and eventual decline.

But history also offers another lesson. Sometimes decline is not the end. Occasionally, a leader emerges that manages to stabilize things — sometimes even reverse the downward trend. Figures like Augustus and Alfred the Great inherited power facing real crises. Yet through a mix of discipline and reform, they managed to buy their civilizations decades (or even centuries) more life.

Here’s how a leader facing a failing empire can reverse the decline…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Restore Virtue

To save an empire, it first needs to be worth saving. That comes by instilling a sense of virtue in the culture again. At the point that the empire is crumbling already, it’s well into the Age of Decadence according to Glubb, where there is wealth without sacrifice, rights without duty, and spectacle in place of achievement.

If we look back to Rome, Augustus inherited a world exhausted by civil war. At the root of the issue was moral and civic decay. In response, August promoted the formation of families, a religious revival, a rededication to public duty, and military discipline. All fronts worked to remake the culture of Rome into one of decency, respect, and order. The result was the famed Pax Romana — an era of general peace in the empire.

But on this point, it’s much easier to say virtue should be restored than to actually do it. Ultimately, virtue is something chosen by each individual. A leader can’t force anyone to be a good person, especially if there’s disagreement on what good even is. But, a leader can provide the breeding ground on which virtue is better fostered, by establishing a common law across the land, enforcing laws equally, and by communicating a common moral framework.

The latter has most effectively been accomplished through organized religion. This has worked well historically because a religion that stands apart from a government separates the enforcement arm of a society from the moral authority, increasing the trust of everyone in a common moral understanding. So, the leader concerned with the decline of his empire can do nothing better than to restore organized religion’s high standing in society.

Lastly, a people will not turn to virtue if their leader shows extreme vices. Thus, the leader, if he truly wants to restore virtue to his empire, must reflect the attitudes and behaviors that will inspire his people to right action. He can’t be a hypocrite; the best rulers lead from the front.

Rebuild Institutions

Another sign of an empire in decay is the weakening of its institutions. When its legal, religious, and civic institutions lose credibility to the public, the gears that make an empire work stop turning. Part of the problem is bureaucratic: large empires usually require more labor and infrastructure to manage its many moving parts, but every level of control adds friction — slowing progress and diverting public funds away from other places where it might be more useful. Another part of the problem is that these weakened institutions no longer attract the best, brightest, and rightly motivated individuals. The institutions become filled with people who simply want a position of status or ease. Bulky institutions increasingly tax their populations to support the infrastructure, and people begin to view the institutions not as movers and shakers in the empire, but rather as roadblocks to its success.

Looking back to Rome again, Diocletian was a successful reformer. He wasn’t afraid to rethink Roman organization from the ground up. The emperor restructured many of the provinces, stabilized taxation, reordered the military, and reformed the administration as a whole to better serve the empire.

But institutions extend beyond government. The establishment of a strong religion is infinitely more important than the establishment of a provincial tax administration. As we said earlier, the institutions of religion provide a common moral framework for a people. They provide trust, community, and a long-lasting bond between generations. So, a leader must support strong religious communities if he wishes to have a strong empire.

Further, an empire thrives on the health of its most fundamental unit cell: the family. In its latter days, wealthy Romans were reluctant to marry and start families, preferring decadence and freedom from responsibility to a life of domestic purpose and meaning. But that meant civilizational suicide, as Rome’s old families dwindled among crowds of newcomers in the empire. Cultural cohesion eroded quickly, and political instability driven by cultural nihilism took over the Roman town square. An empire needs a strong base of patriotic families, not only to provide for a future citizenry, but also to instill a generational mindset in the culture. Mothers and fathers naturally care for where their society is headed, because their children have to inherit that world. So, an emperor should encourage marriage and families to ensure that patriotism is inherently tied to love for their families.

The successful empire needs strong institutions to make it work; these fundamental institutions of law, executive government, religion, marriage, and family are critical to renew a faltering empire. However, institutions need protection to function…

Read more

When did Western Civilization peak, exactly? A subscriber recently asked this very question. At first an answer came quickly, but the more I think about it, the more difficult the question reveals itself to be.

The meaning of a “peak” of civilization is ambiguous. By which metric do we judge? My first instinct, as a traditionally minded thinker, is to suggest a moral or spiritual metric: when was the bulk of society aligned in a common moral understanding or religion? That quickly takes us farther back in history.

Or, by “peak”, do we mean an intellectual summit, perhaps in achievement or at least in literary, artistic, or scientific activity?

Another metric we might judge civilization by is for its peacefulness. When did the West avoid conflict for an extended period of time? Or similarly, do we judge the pinnacle of a society to be when average living conditions rise above an established norm?

And, lastly, perhaps the “peak” of a civilization lies where its essence was most clearly defined. What time period most embodies the characteristics of the West?

All appear as valid metrics. Let’s now look at which time periods stand out when filtering by these metrics of religious unity, intellectual activity, peace, living conditions, and essence.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Peak of the Western Religion

The “Western religion” is undoubtedly Catholicism. While we may extend the title to all Christianity, it is hard to imagine a “peak” of a religion in times where it is so divided, as Christianity has become so fragmented since the Protestant Reformation. We might fairly point to the East/West Schism of the 11th century as another division (into Orthodox vs Catholic), but as we are only concerned with “Western Civilization”, Catholicism has remained undivided in the West proper for its entire history.

While any careful study of history reveals cracks and signs of disunity in every age, Catholicism stood taller and stronger in some periods than others. The 1200s were a high point, as it was this century that the intellectual foundations of Catholicism were best summarized, synthesized with Aristotelian thought, and born out in the many writings of the Scholastics. St. Albertus Magnus, his student St. Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus were Catholic intellectual giants of the era.

Further, society itself was wholly organized around the Church at this point. The Popes has gained power not only over the spiritual leadership Western Europe, but also over many of the temporal matters later only held by kings. While kings and popes did come to blows at some points, still nearly every king acknowledged the legitimacy of the papal power and thought long before challenging it.

Cathedrals and monasteries were central to the landscapes; the Franciscans and Dominicans both emerged to revitalize the Church’s mission; and pilgrimages were common to the Holy Land still under some protection from late Crusaders.

It was during this century that Western Europe was Catholic through and through.

Peak of the Intellect

A peak period of intellectual life is more challenging to determine, as we are not looking for the time period which has the most information available (obviously today) but the one in which the most relative progress or activity was made. A few periods stand out: 1) the Scholastic period of the 1200s, but only really for the intellectual life of the Church, 2) the late Renaissance period of the 1600s, 3) the late 1800s with the spread of steam engines and electricity, or 4) the late 1900s with the advent of the internet and computer.

Comparing these diverse periods is difficult because the kinds of advances made in each are so different. The 1200s reconciled theology with secular philosophy. The Renaissance adopted and applied the “new” methods of rationalism to science and philosophy, while simultaneously exploding in artistic vigor. The 1800s witnessed built the great machines that multiplied human labor tenfold and hundredfold. But the late 1900s began the project of building man’s most cherished gift, his intellect, into a machine of its own.

Then, in terms of scientific achievement, I must defer to our most recent advent of the computer and internet, which are now being transformed by AI, as the most revolutionary in human development. In artistic intellect, however, I would point instead to the Renaissance; in theological intellect, to the 1200s. And, I will add, that in literary intellect, I personally hold the early 20th century as a high point because of its perfect balance of artistic language and clarity.

Peak of Peace

The high point of peace in Western Civilization is much less contested than that of the intellect. Generally, 1800s Europe was known as a time of relative peace across the continent. The United States may have thought differently with the War of 1812 and the Civil War, but overall, Western Civilization was relatively content during this period. The chaos of the French Revolution had subsided, and the British Empire continued to rule the seas. Further, the Industrial Revolution was propelling economies to new heights — why wage war when technology could accelerate the European economies?

Next, let’s take a look at living conditions and what we’ll call the “Western character”.

Read more

The Church may be in crisis. Without diving into all the political forces at play, Christianity has undoubtedly experienced a sharp decline in participation over the last 60 years — but maybe this challenging era of Christianity at hand is part of something bigger. Just as there are political and social cycles of highs and lows, so too are there rhythms in the life of Christianity.

The Greeks, like Polybius and Plato, recognized patterns of evolution between the many forms of government in what they called the kyklos. Later thinkers would apply the same concepts of a “cycle” to other aspects of historical development, too. Sir John Glubb believes empires to exhibit a six-stage lifecycle lasting approximately 250 years. Authors Howe and Strauss applied this cyclical thinking to social history, noting the rise and inevitable crisis experienced by American society every 85 years in four stages: a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling, and a Crisis.

In a similar vein of thought, we can think of the life of the Church as a progression of highs and lows across its history. The Church has, as perhaps all complex institutions have, a lifecycle, too. Historian Christopher Dawson proposed six ages in the life of the Catholic Church, each lasting between 250 and 500 years long and marked by a period of ascendancy and ending with a major crisis.

Dawson’s ages of the Church are a break with typical historical organization of Church history into ancient, medieval, and modern eras, and he explains why thinking of Church history in these six stages is more useful:

“One of the main reasons why I dissent from the current threefold division or periodization of Church history as ancient, medieval, and modern is that it is apt to make us lose sight of the multiplicity and variety of the life of the Church, and of the inexhaustible fecundity with which God continually calls new peoples into the divine society.”

Dawson doesn’t just divide Church history merely into periods of its organizational, philosophical, or relational aspects. Rather, Dawson views Church history by its periods of ascent or decline — when was the Church growing in power, prestige, spirituality, and philosophy?

Each age has its period of waxing ascendancy, peak in the vibrancy or prestige of the Church, and finally a waning due to internal spiritual decline or external crisis. Just as Christ died and rose again, many believe this dying and rising is a sequence the Church itself must experience. Let’s look at Dawson’s six ages and where our current age might be heading…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive of content: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

First Age: Early Church

30 - 300 AD: The First Age of the Church begins with Christ and the arrival of the Holy Spirit upon the early church at Pentecost. It’s from this point onward that the Church began its first wave of ascendancy, converting Romans, Jews, and other Gentiles across the Mediterranean. While it would be difficult to name a “high point” of the Church between its beginning and endpoint, the First Age, according to Dawson, ends in crisis with the heavy persecutions of the third and fourth centuries, particularly the persecution of Diocletian.

Second Age: A Christian Empire

300 - 650 AD: The next age of the Church kicks off with the victory of Constantine at Milvian Bridge. The Roman Emperor then granted religious freedom to the growing number of Christianity via the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, leading to an acceleration of conversions throughout the empire. Further this age reaches new heights through the many spiritual and theological writings of many Church Fathers, such as St. Augustine. This age declines with the political decline of the Western Roman Empire by the many invasions of barbarian tribes and culminates in the conquest of Jerusalem in 643 AD.

Third Age: Carolingian Era

650 - 1000 AD: The Third Age of the Church began with the conversion of formerly pagan tribes of central and western Europe, most notably the Franks. Clovis I became a greater defender of Catholicism and aided its spread in the region, as did his descendants in the Merovingian dynasty. The age climaxed with the rise of Charlemagne in central Europe, who oversaw the Carolingian Renaissance and formed the basis of the Holy Roman Empire. Church and State ruled together in this age. After his death, the age entered a period of decline due to external threats (e.g. the Magyars to the East, Vikings to the North), and the empire for a time appeared finished.

Fourth Age: Medieval Reign

1000-1500 AD: The next age began with the humble monasteries, particularly the renewal of monasticism forged at Cluny in 910. Reforms swept through the Church under the papacy of Gregory VII in 1073. Then, the 1200s saw the pinnacle of Medieval spirituality, thought, and culture with the rise of Scholasticism, the synthesis of Christian and Aristotelian thought. Further, the well-known mendicant orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans were birthed, and many of the great Catholic universities emerged. Unfortunately, the greatness of the age stagnated in the face of increasingly difficult political realities, the Black Death, and finally the winds of change in the Protestant Reformation.

Fifth Age: Reformation & Rationalism

1500 - 1750 AD: Out of the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, a great renewal of the Church began to take shape. The Catholic Reformation addressed many of the grievances that spurred the Protestant Reformation and brought many back to the fold. Additionally, orders like the Jesuits were founded to help in the efforts of re-conversion. However, the heights of this era were never near those of the previous age. The effects of rationalism and the Enlightenment spelled dark times for the Church (and all Christianity) ahead. Philosophically, politically, spiritually, the Church entered a new low point in the latter 18th century.

Now, we turn to our age, the sixth age of the Church, where modernity is reconciled or conquered with Christianity…

Read more