We Need a New Renaissance

By Stanley Kurtz

Monday, November 03, 2025

 

Church attendance is rising among Gen Z and Millennial men. There are even signs of a religious revival in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. What we need alongside and in harmony with any potential religious revival, however, is a Renaissance.

 

The West has had three of note. The Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries peaked under Charlemagne, who revived classical and Christian learning, rescued and reproduced many nearly lost classical works, and greatly increased public literacy. Next, the twelfth-century Renaissance emerged from the chaos that followed the Carolingian dynasty’s collapse. Classical and Christian learning were again revived, Europe’s first universities were founded, Roman law was deployed, and Gothic cathedrals soared. Finally, there was the Renaissance proper, born amidst the chaos, civil decay, and narrow university orthodoxy of the 14th century. An effort to restore the study of lost or forgotten classics sparked a cultural revival that produced Erasmus, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

 

For two generations now, the study of Western civilization at our colleges and universities has lain in disrepair. The old requirements are gone, of course, but so, increasingly, are even electives on Western history and the classics, along with faculty capable of teaching these as anything other than targets of deconstruction. Still more concerning is the caricature of a supposedly oppressive West, which has permeated society at large.

 

Demoting or neglecting our heritage was at first a way of catering to protests by the “marginalized” (who were far more deeply Western than they cared to admit). So-called multiculturalists (who in fact had little interest in non-Western cultures) feared Western history and the West’s great works not because these were hostile or unappealing but because they were profound and inspiring. Purveyors of identity politics had nothing comparable to offer, and they still don’t. In the end, however, Western elites accepted, adopted — and even came to relish — the attacks on their own civilization, turning self-hatred into a perverse form of ritual purification.

 

Although the works of our great tradition are no longer rotting away in rat-infested medieval towers and cubbyholes, waiting to be rediscovered, restored, reproduced, and disseminated to an eager public, they might as well be. Branded as sinister sexism or “white supremacy,” distorted out of all recognition, turned into the butt of what nowadays passes for scholarly attack, or plain ignored, our precious heritage is now as tattered and thinned as it was in pre-Renaissance Europe.

 

It was understood in those earlier times that a return to the source — a reform of education grounded in the classics — was the way to moral and cultural renovation. This is a lesson we need to relearn, even in an age when public illiteracy stems not from ignorance of the alphabet but from an inability to devote sustained attention to books.

 

Fortunately, we’ve just seen the publication of a book that could become a pillar in the edifice of a new Renaissance. I’m talking about The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, by Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins. This first volume, written by Hankins, which covers the ancient world and Christendom, is to be followed by a second volume covering the modern and contemporary West, written by Guelzo. The two collaborated on a lengthy and very worthwhile introduction to Volume I.

 

The appearance of The Golden Thread is something closer to a cultural event than the simple publication of a book. In the era of the modern Western Civ textbook (begun in 1902), there has never been a volume like this. Western Civ textbooks aren’t captivating reads. There’s simply too much information packed into too little space to do much more than sketch the rough outlines of history. Western Civ textbooks are really handbooks, companions to courses in which, ideally, a compelling teacher with a mature sensibility and breadth of knowledge can convey the richness and relevance of the past. The deeper learning in those classes plays out in lectures, discussions, and in-depth explorations of classic works.

 

The Golden Thread is different because it’s not a handbook but truly a book. The drama of our civilizational story comes through, as does the humanity of the great figures of history. Fundamental moral questions are explored, and the bases for historical judgment are contemplated in ways you simply don’t see in standard textbook treatments of Western history. Somehow, Hankins in Volume I manages to venture considered judgments on controversial questions while simultaneously laying out fair and open-ended accounts of classic historical debates.

 

Hankins doesn’t hesitate to draw parallels or suggest connections between figures in different eras, anticipating future developments and harking back to precedents. He truly takes up the metaphor of a “golden thread” connecting the eras and personalities of Western history. (The image comes from the thread that guided Theseus out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth.) Western Civ textbooks ordinarily avoid authorial interventions in the core narrative, whether to highlight continuities or for any other purpose. But you feel the presence of the author in this book — and he impresses. In short, Volume I of The Golden Thread is like a full Western civilization course condensed into a book. Hankins is that ideal compelling professor, capable of bringing history to life, and now freed from the standard textbook constraints.

 

The Golden Thread is also “traditional.” Cutting against the grain of the now typical focus on material and social forces, Hankins finds plenty of room for the West’s great men. The ideas and accomplishments of figures like Pericles, Alexander, Cicero, Caesar, Augustus, Augustine, Charlemagne, and Petrarch are explored at length, sometimes across chapters. Hankins also takes religion seriously, pushing back against secular condescension. This is in marked contrast to earlier Western Civ textbooks, which, despite our contemporary conservative idealization, nearly always presented Western history as a triumphant march toward secularism.

 

The Golden Thread is also graced by an incomparable collection of illustrations. This history book doubles as a coffee-table book.

 

Literally and figuratively, however, there is a price to pay for all this. At something over 1,200 pages, you’re getting at least five or six books in one, while paying for only two or three — still a tremendous bargain. But as you might imagine, the book is, shall we say, weighty. You’ll either have to buy a sturdy book stand or find a way to jury rig a stand from some pillows. Not what you’d call beach reading. Those out-of-the-box reflections from Hankins, all those magnificent paintings and maps — everything that turns this from a schoolboy’s handbook into a comprehensive and beautifully wrought history — adds to the length of the book. And this is only the first of two volumes. Yes, you actually can turn a profound and inspiring course in Western civilization into a book, but only a big one. This ain’t CliffsNotes.

 

Can a venture like this succeed in an era of fading book sales and failing attention spans? The gorgeous illustrations sweeten the deal, of course, and partly account for the length. But when you come right down to it, this is a whole lotta book. Actually, the countercultural nature of this project is part of its appeal. I’ll come back to that, but first let me show you what I mean when I talk about the unprecedented richness of The Golden Thread.

 

I ran a comparison between Volume I of The Golden Thread and three classic Western Civ textbooks, juxtaposing their treatments of Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, as well as of Saint Augustine, Cicero, and Petrarch. The first textbook I considered was the 1957 edition of Western Civilizations, by Edward McNall Burns (first edition 1941), extremely popular when required courses in Western civilization were at their height in the 1950s. Burns, for example, was the textbook used for Stanford’s then-required course in Western Civ. Although Burns would have been dismissed as glaringly “Eurocentric” by later multiculturalists, his textbook had a strong secular and internationalist sensibility for the time. For Burns, nationalism and Christianity were things to grow out of. Second, I looked at the 1986 edition of William H. McNeill’s History of Western Civilization: A Handbook (first edition 1949), a companion to the University of Chicago’s famous course in Western civilization. Finally, I looked at the most traditional (or “conservative”) recent Western civilization textbook, the eleventh edition of The Western Heritage, originally by Donald Kagan and Stephen Ozment, later joined by Frank M. Turner and Alison Frank. Kagan, a leading scholar of ancient Greece, was also a widely respected conservative intellectual.

 

Burns devotes only about three-quarters of a page to Philip’s unification of Greece and Alexander’s conquest of Asia, dismissing Alexander as immature, unjust, and “scarcely deserving of the greatness thrust upon him.” Burns also minimizes the cultural significance of Alexander’s conquests. McNeill devotes maybe triple the space to Philip and Alexander. Although McNeill is brief with Philip, he takes Alexander far more seriously than Burns does, acknowledging Alexander’s genius and pointing to the lasting cultural effects of his conquests while also noting limitations. Hankins’s textual treatment of Philip alone in The Golden Thread almost doubles the length of McNeill’s, and that isn’t counting the illustrations: a powerful bust of Philip, an extremely effective illustration of the long-pike phalanx, the military innovation that allowed Macedon to conquer the world, and a deeply captioned, exciting, multiphase map of the Battle of Chaeronea, at which Philip unified Greece.

 

Meanwhile, Hankins’s discussion of Alexander exceeds the competition in length by many times. Alexander’s exploits are legendary, but ordinary textbooks have no time for them. Why would you not tell the story of Alexander cutting the Gordian knot? Hankins does, but no one else bothers. Best of all, however, is a set-off section in which Hankins reflects on the problem of Alexander’s greatness — simultaneously rebutting the negative historical consensus represented by Burns and letting readers know that there is a worthy debate over the meaning, indeed the very possibility, of greatness. No other textbook comes close. I urge readers to have a look at Hankins’s brief but compelling thoughts on Alexander’s greatness, published separately here. This little piece conveys better than anything I could say what you will find in The Golden Thread.

 

Unsurprisingly, Kagan’s is the only treatment of Philip and Alexander that holds a candle to Hankins. It isn’t of quite the length or depth of The Golden Thread, but for a standard textbook, it is absolutely first-rate.

 

The other comparisons all tally with this one. The Golden Thread is simply levels above ordinary textbooks. It’s a comprehensive history of Western civilization that is less a standard textbook than the mature statement of an especially thoughtful scholar.

 

But will the public buy a lengthy and literally weighty book like this one, or are we too far gone to hope for such a thing? Let’s consider.

 

First, and most straightforwardly, The Golden Thread needn’t be read in its entirety or all at once to yield up its treasures. It’s easy and fun to take in the story of, say, classical Greece, or the fall of the Roman Republic, or the Renaissance, and save the rest for later. On top of that, The Golden Thread should be widely purchased for schools. After all, as I’ve argued, The Golden Thread blows away every other Western Civ textbook. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the book will be widely adopted by high schools and colleges. That’s because Western Civ is thoroughly on the outs nowadays. So, The Golden Thread won’t be widely distributed unless local school boards and state legislatures begin to restore the teaching of Western civilization. That depends on public sentiment. So, we’re back to the question of whether a Western Civ Renaissance is in the cards.

 

To some extent, a revival is already underway. Classical schools are proliferating, and with school choice having made major strides in the states last year, they’re bound to spread further. Red states are waking up, if far too slowly, to their ability to mandate more traditional curricula in K–12 and public universities. Meanwhile, conservatives in the U.K. have made a revival and defense of Western civilization part of their fight against woke. In 2023, Mark Sidwell, of the U.K.’s New Culture Forum, launched a six-part documentary called The West that included appearances from me, my EPPC colleague George Weigel, and a number of other American conservatives. (I wrote about it here, and you can see the documentary here.)

 

According to Hankins, cultural revival through a return to our heritage is how the West works. It didn’t end with the three-phased Renaissance of medieval Europe, either. There was, for example, the philhellenic movement of the early 19th century. You can even think of America’s Founding as a Renaissance of sorts. As Hankins points out, although direct democracy in Greece and republican government in Rome were each replaced by monarchy for upwards of a thousand years, the Western intellectual tradition preserved the memory of the ancients. That made possible a revival of republics, first in the Italian city states of the Renaissance and ultimately in America, thence to spread across Europe.

 

The Founders, who lived through the first of several neoclassical revivals in American architecture, saw themselves as resuscitating the ancient republican tradition and fundamentally altering it to overcome its earlier weaknesses. In the same way, the early church incorporated the best of classical learning while modifying it in light of Christianity. The American colonists adopted a classical curriculum from the start because they believed that the Renaissance revival of ancient learning had prepared the way for the Protestant Reformation. Renaissance and revival don’t mean slavish imitation of the past but rather an adaption of our tradition to developments and current circumstances.

 

A 21st-century Renaissance would go beyond the ancients to revive an interest in the long golden thread of Western history as a whole. There would be no single ideological guideline but rather an umbrella, created by liberty, under which debate between various perspectives could take place. François Guizot, perhaps the greatest theorist of the West, saw the secret of our civilization in the never quite resolved struggle of its competing traditions and power centers.

 

As an analogy, think of conservative fusionism, a perpetual pull and tug between overlapping but also competing conservative perspectives. Have a look at William Voegeli’s piece on fusionism in the 70th-anniversary issue of National Review, and you’ll see that Frank Meyer, famous as the father of conservative fusionism, actually resisted the term because he found the ideological candidates for fusion (traditionalism and libertarianism) too rigid and exclusive. His real goal, Meyer said, was to articulate “the instinctive consensus of the contemporary conservative movement which is inspired by no ideological construct, but by devotion to the fundamental understanding of the men who made Western civilization and the American republic.”

 

Here is what Hankins brings across in The Golden Thread. He allows us to see the full variety of views and traditions that made the West and thereby enables us to choose among, or fuse, them as we see fit. Here is a program for the Renaissance we need.

 

In a series of public articles, Hankins has eloquently made the case for a new Renaissance. As he sees it, such a Renaissance would be scrupulously nonpartisan. That was the theory behind the great Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries. The Renaissance humanists (by no means anti-religious in the modern “humanist” sense), were looking to cultivate virtue in society’s elites. This would reestablish the legitimacy that church and state had lost in the chaos of the plague and the endless factional warfare of the day. Renaissance humanists saw the teaching of virtue as universal and therefore neutral with regard to regime type. Petrarch famously criticized even his idol, Cicero, for his die-hard partisan defense of the Roman Republic.

 

Up to a point, such nonpartisanship makes sense. The study of Western civilization has long appealed to liberals and conservatives alike. It explains the development of the foundational assumptions within which our debates take place rather than taking one side. Yet I don’t see how a modern Renaissance within a democratic republic could be neutral with respect to regime. We rightly educate not simply for virtue but for citizenship. This, too, can and should be nonpartisan, up to a point. Yet I doubt that it’s either possible or desirable to prevent liberals and conservatives from refracting the Western tradition through lenses of their own.

 

We’ve seen that Meyer boiled down conservatism to the wisdom of the great men of the West. In contrast, 20th-century progressives, like Edward McNall Burns, thought of Western civilization as the road up and away from outdated religion and tradition. Rather than trying to discourage such interpretations, we ought to invite the argument. And of course, the left of recent decades has defined itself by hostility to the Western tradition. If fighting that view means partisanship, I’m in. That said, Hankins’s nonpartisan striving has produced a wonderful work that readers of all (well, most) stripes can admire. Although the definition of a 21st-century Renaissance remains unsettled, the conviction that we need one is sound.

 

Petrarch, the greatest scholar and poet of his day, saw a Europe in chaos and decline. We had Covid; he lived through bubonic plague. Petrarch was convinced that moral reformation by way of education was the key to societal recovery, yet he despised the narrowness of Europe’s universities. Petrarch sought a revival of classical studies at first not in the schools but among the literate public in the cities and the princely courts. It worked. Petrarch’s vision was realized, largely because of his efforts, although his triumph came only after his death. In the end, Petrarch’s vision transformed even the seemingly impregnable universities. It’s happened before; it can happen again.