It is no overreaction to look at the current state of western culture, through academia and the arts alike, and to feel that Rome has fallen all over again. Whether it’s a crowd chanting in support of terrorists at Coachella, or a horrific political assassination on a university campus, cheered by some, we are witnessing something far more sinister than a mere surge in political violence. We are watching the collapse of the fundamental preconditions that make civil society possible, as a civilization tears itself apart.
Many are of the opinion that it is already too late: that the unique and unprecedented advances in western culture over the past three millennia cannot be furthered. Thus, they sigh, we must now accept that the murder is carried out, not kick up a fuss and passively allow the killers to lead us on to the anarchy and ruin that they idolize. The Golden Thread is for the people who disagree.
We are watching the collapse of the fundamental preconditions that make civil society possible
I mean this in three different senses. First, it is here the title of a new and groundbreaking two-volume history of the western tradition. Weighing in at an impressive 1,300 pages, the initial book, written by James Hankins, covers the period from the Battle of Marathon (490 bc), where a small force of Greeks faced down the mighty Persian Empire and in so doing “determined the whole later history of the West” until the close of the Italian Renaissance (c. ad 1500): that now-contentious “rebirth” which “rejuvenated European culture, driving it toward the modern age.” The second volume, by Allen C. Guelzo, will take us from 1500 until “the day before yesterday.” (It comes in at a slightly more modest 900 pages.)
These are, by any measure, large books. But it is not just their scale (both of content and of construction) that impresses. They are lavishly illustrated and beautifully compiled, and special credit should be given to the designer, Carl W. Scarborough. A bold color scheme of red and gold is used throughout to help break down a huge quantity of information into clearly navigable sections. A clever, distinctive structure turns what could be an impossible task (that of properly digesting such an epic) into something outright pleasurable. The many maps strike the perfect balance of detail and concision, while high-quality photographs of art, landscape and archaeology root the narrative in the material world, creating an immersive quality so often absent in academic works.
The second sense of this thread I refer to is the project that has birthed these books. The Golden Thread Initiative is a wider mission of cultural recovery, and through its imprint Encounter Books has already given us Wilfred M. McClay’s 2019 work Land of Hope, an astonishing and unparalleled “invitation to the great American story,” which has spawned various equally valuable companion texts and teaching aids. The initiative seeks to inspire a revolution in the zeitgeist.
In Volume I of The Golden Thread, Hankins has worked admirably to fulfill this brief. Transcending the usual academic categories, this is neither a conventional textbook nor a work of popular history, but rather a narrative chronicle of introductory cultural archaeology: a careful excavation of the intellectual and spiritual foundations upon which our entire civilization rests. In this book live thousands of years of exquisitely rendered thought, wisdom, sacrifice, beauty and adventure.
Christianity is not here presented as an inconvenient blip, or a predominantly destructive interruption of classical learning, in a way that has become fashionable in certain quarters – but, rightly, as the central core in the development of western civilization. Hankins fluently demonstrates how Christian theology, particularly in its encounter with Aristotelian philosophy, represented a deepening of the western tradition rather than its betrayal. His chapters on Augustine, Psellos and the Renaissance humanists reveal the extraordinary creativity and innovation that emerged from reconciling competing notions of faith, thought and reason.
Though unashamedly committed to this traditional, canonical narrative, Hankins is not writing hagiography. He does not fudge uncomfortable facts or gloss over negatives, but unflinchingly presents the sprawling cast of his story as full, flawed, expansive human beings, for good and for ill. This is a book unafraid of handing out criticism and condemnation alongside laurels and praise. In an age when everything is a political act and objectivity has been abandoned for righteous propaganda, to simply tell the truth, unequivocally, is radical indeed.
It is not, of course, complete. How could it be? Chaucer is excluded, the Norman Conquest of Britain is sped through pell-mell, Alfred the Great is almost entirely absent. The ancient Anglo-Saxon culture that held together the language and the law that would later found America is given considerably less space than medieval Africa. For a work of this depth, a far more thorough index is needed and important detail is often sacrificed in the interests of pace and breadth. But these are quibbles, and inevitable in such an ambitious work; the introduction itself acknowledges that much had to be excluded, and it feels churlish indeed to raise these minor criticisms.
The purpose of these books is altogether higher. As Hankins and Guelzo state in their dual-authored introduction, they seek to arrest the “malicious form of humility indistinguishable from self-hatred” that has taken hold of institutions across the West: “This is a humility that humiliates, that seeks to blind westerners to their magnificent traditions and to rub their noses, like misbehaving dogs, in their worst offenses.” The Golden Thread is a truly radical work, and the overt revival of a form that many academics (gleefully) thought dead and buried decades ago.
It is now impossible to avoid the fact that the active deconstruction and vilification of the western canon of thought, and the systematic removal of figures such as Aristotle, Socrates, Dante and Shakespeare from university curricula (or worse, their retention merely as pale, stale, cisgendered straw men to be misrepresented, demonized and attacked) has helped to create a generation that literally cannot comprehend the difference between verbal disagreement and physical violence. This is not hyperbole. As Hankins and Guelzo put it:
Without understanding the struggle in the West over millennia to preserve liberty; without understanding the uniquely rich development of the Roman law tradition; without appreciating the roles that argument, hypothesis, mathematical modeling and replicable experiment have had in western science since the Greeks, the young are more likely to acquire the frivolous state of mind, now common, that thinks great civilizational achievements can be jettisoned without loss, once found guilty of “white supremacy.”
It is this state of mind that makes so many “lose all sense of proportion about events and lack the mental resource to resist black-and-white thinking, confirmation bias and catastrophic thinking.” In light of recent events, this last warning carries with it a chilling prescience.
The Golden Thread project is a masterly attempt to right the course. And so the third sense in which I refer to our thread is in that of Ariadne – which Theseus, the Minotaur defeated, used to retrace his route through the labyrinth to safety. But it is also in the thread of fate that is measured, woven and cut by the Moirai, the Parcae, the Wyrd and the Norns; for Odysseus, for Beowulf, for Macbeth and for us all. It is in the “twitch upon a thread” that G.K. Chesterton assures us will ever draw us back to God’s grace, no matter how far we stray. It is the golden thread that will lead us home, though it may take lifetimes to arrive.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 19, 2026 World edition.
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