Western Civilization and Its Despisers

Kultur, the German Counter-Tradition, and the Counter-Canon

Detail from The Fallen Angel (L'Ange Déchu) by Alexander Cabanel. 1847.

This is the second part of a two-part essay on Western Civilization. The first can be read here.

Whatever else must be said about the concept of Western civilization — its lateness, its post-Christian origins, its historicist self-dependence — one thing resists mere construction, and it is the thing that matters most: the continuity of aesthetic form. The real continuity of Western civilization lies not in the modern concept of “Western civilization” but in the formal chain of artistic and intellectual making.

Virgil received Homer’s hexameter and rebuilt it for purposes Homer obviously could not have conceived, an epic not of heroic wrath but of imperial melancholy, the song of a man who founds an empire at the cost of everything he loves, told in a verse whose characteristic music is the falling cadence, the sense of loss at the end of the line where Homer had placed triumph. The formal inheritance is perhaps the most central fact of Western civilization: the Aeneid opens by echoing the Iliad‘s first word, a declaration of dependence and independence simultaneously — I am working in this thread, and I am doing something this thread has never done.

Dante received Virgil as “my master and my author,” the one from whom he took the fine pen, and placed him inside the Commedia as a character, a guide, and finally, and most crucially, a limit: the greatest poet of the pagan world who can lead you to the threshold of Paradise but cannot himself enter, because the form he perfected was in the service of a vision that stopped short of the one Dante had received.

Milton measured himself against all three in the invocation to Paradise Lost, announced a “higher argument” than the wrath of Achilles or the wanderings of Odysseus or the founding of Rome, and spent twelve books making good on the announcement with a poem whose architectonic ambition exceeds anything the classical epic had attempted because the theological content it carries exceeds anything the classical world possessed.

This chain is not a retrospective arrangement like most of the self-reflexive, self-contemplating discourse on Western Civ is. It is a fact about how the works were made, testified to by the makers themselves. No nineteenth-century professor invented it, and no civilizational narrative was required to sustain it. It is one of the most consequential points of distinction between how medieval Muslims and Europeans treated the Greeks, and which warrants legitimacy to the separation and distinction between them. Muslims, for the most part, had a very restricted interest in Greek rationalism and science, but never adopted the Greek poetic or dramatic forms.

The Western transmission of form was operating for more than a millennium before Guizot delivered his lectures, and it operated through the practice of making, through imitation, emulation, contestation, the slow mastery of inherited conventions, and the equally slow discovery of what those conventions could not yet do. A medieval monk elaborating a Virgilian verse participated in the chain without the concept of Western civilization. A Renaissance architect studying Greek architecture received the formal inheritance through the discipline of building, not through the discipline of self-narration.

This chain extends across every major Western art form with the same acknowledged reception and transformation. In music, the line from Gregorian plainchant through the polyphonic elaborations of Josquin through Bach’s systematization of tonal harmony through the sonata principle that governed Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven through Wagner’s expansion of harmonic language to the point of dissolution through Schoenberg’s unfortunate leap into atonality is a single formal thread conducted across centuries, each stage unintelligible without the one that preceded it, each composer working within and against what he received.

In architecture, the Roman appropriation of the Greek post-and-lintel system, the Romanesque and Gothic transformations of the Roman basilica, Brunelleschi’s recovery and reinvention of classical proportion, the Baroque dynamization of Renaissance stasis — each movement is a formal response to the previous one, a technical argument about what a building can be and do, transmitted through the practice of construction.

In painting, the recovery of volumetric form in Giotto, the Florentine mathematization of pictorial space, the Venetian counter-argument that color could accomplish what line and perspective claimed as their exclusive province, Caravaggio’s violent theatricalization of light and shadow, and the long arc from academic classicism through Impressionism’s attack on it — each is a move in an ongoing formal conversation.

This is the one component of Western civilization that has a genuine claim to pre-modern, pre-historicist reality — the one thing that exists not because someone narrated it into existence but because makers made things, and the things they made were responses to the things other makers had made before them, and the chain of response constitutes a tradition in the most unimpeachable sense of the word: something handed down through practice, not through discourse about practice.

But the chain and the awareness of the chain as a possession are two different things, and the distance between them is the distance between a living tradition and a dead one. Dante was inside the tradition, working within it as a medium of making. The Western Civilization professor teaching Dante is outside it, arranging it in a display. Dante received Virgil the way a son receives a father — through intimate proximity, through absorption so deep that the absorbed material becomes indistinguishable from one’s own voice, through the kind of knowledge that is inseparable from love. The professor receives Dante the way a curator receives an artifact — with admiration, with scholarly appreciation, with contextualizing care, but from across a glass barrier that no amount of admiration can dissolve. The relationship to the chain has changed from participation to observation, and this change, once accomplished, is irreversible in the way the Hegelian owl announces ends. Philosophy — and the civilizational curriculum is philosophy in this sense — paints its grey in grey only when a form of life has grown old.

The institutions that were built to transmit the formal inheritance accomplished the conversion. They undertook to preserve what could no longer be practiced, and by the nature of institutional preservation, they transformed it: from craft into culture, from apprenticeship into appreciation, from a tradition one worked within into a heritage one contemplated from without. This was the consequence of the post-Christian condition itself — the condition in which a culture that had largely ceased to produce works of the first order within the tradition needed some other way to maintain its relationship to what the tradition had achieved. The curriculum was that way, and it was a genuinely great invention. But it carried within it a vulnerability that would prove fatal.

The vulnerability was methodological. The pedagogical core of the Western civilization curriculum was close reading — the method that had migrated from the English department’s New Criticism into the humanities at large, and whose foundational principle was the exclusion of everything external to the text’s verbal surface: authorial intention, historical context, biographical circumstance, and — crucially, fatally — the question of whether the work’s claims about reality were true. Read the text. Attend to the language. Appreciate the formal achievement. But do not ask whether Dante actually believed that the universe is created and governed by a God whose justice structures every circle of Hell and every terrace of Purgatory and every sphere of Paradise — because that question leads out of literature and into theology, and theology is not our department but Waste Management’s.

The consequence was the systematic aestheticization of works whose every decision had been generated by theological commitments. The Commedia is not a poem that borrows Christian cosmology for dramatic atmosphere; it is a poem that is Christian cosmology rendered as narrative — the journey of a particular soul through the full topology of created and uncreated reality toward the direct vision of God, who is simultaneously the love that moves the sun and the other stars and the particular mercy that sent Beatrice to call a lost man out of the dark wood. Remove the theology, and what remains is not a secular poem with interesting scenery; what remains is nothing — a scaffolding from which the building has been extracted. But the aestheticizing method did not remove it violently; it removed it politely, by declining to take it seriously as a claim about reality, by treating it as the period furniture of a medieval imagination, as the mythological apparatus through which a great poetic intelligence happened to organize its insights about the human condition, insights that could in principle be restated in non-theological language without significant loss.

Milton’s case is much worse and much more damning because the aestheticized misreading has been more spectacularly successful.

Milton set out to justify the ways of God to men, and he meant it. The poem is a theodicy. Its Satan is not a Promethean rebel but a study in the phenomenology of evil — a portrait, drawn with the full resources of a mind steeped in scripture and in Reformed theology, of what happens when a magnificent creature prefers his own magnificence, prefers self-narration, to the source of all magnificence and progressively degrades from archangel to serpent to the thing squatting at the ear of Eve, whispering self-destructive ambition in the language of liberty.

Milton understood that evil does not announce itself as evil; it narrates itself, deeply and romantically, as injured dignity, as noble defiance, as the courage to think freely — and this is precisely why it is dangerous. That Satan’s rhetoric is seductive is exactly the point of the poem. The whole theological architecture — the war in heaven, the hierarchy of creation, the doctrine of free will, the promise of redemption — exists to give the reader the means to see through the seduction, to see through the propaganda of the solipsism of Hellish egotism, to recognize that the voice which says “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” is the voice of one who has just traded everything good and real for the sovereignty of a ruin in the dark, a sovereignty which ultimately is nothing but self-narration.

Strip away the theology, and the seduction is all that remains. Satan becomes the hero because there is no longer any meaning within which his heroism can be recognized as self-destruction. Blake’s declaration that Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it — a Romantic misreading so influential that it became the default interpretation of the liberal classroom — is precisely equivalent to saying that Dostoevsky was of Raskolnikov’s party without knowing it, which is to say, it is not a reading at all but an admission of illiteracy.

A work that has been emptied of its theological content through aestheticization is a work that has been emptied of its capacity for resistance. If the Inferno is not a map of the moral order of a universe created and governed by God but merely a literary exploration of the varieties of human suffering, then there is no principled ground on which to resist its rereading as a document of patriarchal violence, or of colonial epistemology, or of whatever interpretive radical fashion arrives next — because the only thing that could have said no, the poem means this and not that was the theological structure, and the theological structure has been set aside as not our department. If Milton’s Satan is not a portrait of the nature of evil under the aspect of Christian theology but a tragic hero, then there is no principled reason why he cannot be reread as the prototype of the subaltern, the colonized subject rising against the cosmic oppressor — because the only thing that could have resisted that reading was the doctrine of Creation and Fall, and the doctrine has been discarded as period furniture.

The radical critics who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s — the postcolonial theorists, the deconstructionists, the practitioners of the various hermeneutics of suspicion — did not need to overpower the liberal humanist custodians of the canon. They needed only to walk through a door that the custodians had left open. When they claimed that the Great Books, as they were being taught, had no real content — no ground on which to resist the imposition of whatever new framework the interpreter chose to bring — but racism and imperialism, they were not wrong. They were completing an operation that the liberal humanists had begun. The aestheticization of the canon was the first act of its destruction, and it was performed not by the tradition’s enemies but by its most devoted friends, who loved the works sincerely and not enough to take them at their word.

The formal chain — the real continuity that underlies the civilizational concept — was not destroyed by the forces that dismantled the curriculum. It was made inaccessible by the very method that claimed to be transmitting it. But in any case, now is the time to speak of the vandals.

A German World

Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in the Oakwood (1810)

The hostility toward Western civilization is as old as the concept it attacks, and it arises from the same soil. To understand how the Western Canon was dismantled it is necessary to trace a counter-tradition that begins not in the postcolonial writings of the 1970s but in the salons and lecture halls of late eighteenth-century Germany, where the very word civilisation first acquired the pejorative charge it has carried, in one form or another, ever since.

Norbert Elias, whose On the Civilizing Process (1939) remains the most penetrating sociological analysis of the concept, located the origin of the German antithesis between Kultur and Zivilisation in the social predicament of the German Bildungsbürgertum — the 18th-century cultured middle class — in the decades after 1750. The German intellectual bourgeoisie of the late eighteenth century occupied a position with no real equivalent in France or England: it was cultivated, university-trained, philosophically and aesthetically serious, and almost entirely excluded from political power. The German courts and aristocracies that held that power spoke French, adopted French manners, organized their social life around the values of politesse, (French concept for formal politeness, courteous behavior, or social etiquette. It is an elevated, elegant, or traditional term for good manners and civility) and regarded their own German-speaking subjects with the benign condescension that a metropolitan culture extends to its provincials. Frederick the Great, the Enlightened king of Prussia, wrote his philosophical works in French and famously dismissed German literature as beneath serious attention. The courts of the smaller German principalities imitated Versailles as faithfully as their budgets would permit.

The German middle-class intellectuals — Lessing, Herder, the young Goethe, the writers of the Sturm und Drang — responded by inverting the hierarchy. What the French-speaking courts called Zivilisation — the external refinement of manners, the cultivation of politesse, the smooth surface of courtly social intercourse — the German thinkers described as superficiality, as the mere polish of appearances concealing an inner emptiness. Against it they set Kultur: the authentic achievements of the spirit, the inner life of thought, art, philosophy, music, moral seriousness, the cultivation of depth as against the cultivation of surfaces. To be zivilisiert was to know how to behave at a French dinner; to possess Kultur was to have read Kant, to have heard Bach, to have wrestled with the deepest questions of human existence. The distinction was, at its origin, a weapon of class warfare — the excluded German bourgeois intellectual’s revenge upon his own Francophone aristocracy — and the values it installed as supreme were precisely those the bourgeois intellectual could claim to possess, like yours truly, and the courtier could not: learning, interiority, philosophical depth, creative genius.

The German intellectuals did not arrive at this inversion entirely on their own. They received decisive assistance from the most celebrated rebel within French culture itself. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750), which argued that the progress of civilization had corrupted rather than improved human morals, and his Second Discourse (1755), which located authentic humanity in the natural condition that civilization had systematically destroyed, were received in Germany with an enthusiasm bordering on ecstasy — the enthusiasm of men who heard one of France’s most formidable minds confirm, from inside the citadel, everything they had been saying from outside it. Here was a Frenchman, and not merely any Frenchman but the most dangerously gifted writer in Europe, declaring that the polished surface of French civilized life was a mask concealing moral ruin, that what civilization called progress was in truth a progressive alienation from everything authentic and good. The Germans had been making this argument against their own Francophone courts as a class grievance; Rousseau made it against civilization as such, and made it in French, from Paris, with an authority the German professor could never have claimed on his own.

But what was Kultur if not science and art? Wissenschaft und Kunst? How can we agree with Rousseau that they are corrupt? The Germans did not adopt Rousseau’s specific conclusions — they had no intention of abandoning philosophy or science or music (the quintessential German art), which were for them the very substance of Kultur and the proof of their spiritual superiority. What they adopted was his structure: the formal conviction that the outer surface of civilized achievement conceals and corrupts an inner reality of greater depth and greater moral weight. Rousseau had directed this view against civilization as such, and had located the concealed depth in nature. The Germans redirected it against French, soon to become Western, civilization specifically, and located the concealed depth in Kultur — in precisely the arts, sciences, and philosophy that Rousseau had included in his indictment but that the Germans reclassified, with considerable ingenuity, as belonging not to the corrupted surface but to the authentic interior.

The consequences for German thought were immeasurable, and not only in the obvious channels of the privileging of feeling over reason. Kant, whose daily walk in Königsberg was so regular that the townspeople set their clocks by it, is reported to have missed that walk only once in his life: when he was reading Rousseau’s Émile. He kept a portrait of Rousseau in his study — the only ornament in an otherwise bare room of an austere Prussian moralist — and wrote in his private notes that “Rousseau set me right”: before Rousseau, Kant had believed that the pursuit of knowledge was the highest purpose of human life; after Rousseau, he understood that the moral dignity internal to the person, which no amount of learning could produce and no amount of civilization could replace, was the foundation on which everything else rested.

The structure of the Kultur-Zivilisation antithesis — the conviction that the outer surface of civilized achievement conceals, and may in fact betray, an inner reality of greater depth and greater moral weight — passed through the Rousseau reception into the very architecture of German philosophy. When Kant distinguished between phenomena and noumena — between the world as it appears to us, structured by the categories of our understanding, and the thing-in-itself that lies behind appearances, real but inaccessible to empirical investigation — he was not merely solving a technical problem in epistemology. He was installing at the foundations of modern philosophy the same structure that the Bildungsbürgertum had articulated as a social complaint and that Rousseau had universalized as a diagnosis of civilization: that the surface is not the depth, that appearances are not reality, that what presents itself to observation — the civilized, the empirical, the phenomenal — is underlaid by something more real that the surface simultaneously depends upon and conceals.

From Kant through Schopenhauer’s will behind representation, through Hegel’s Spirit working behind the appearances of history, through Marx’s base beneath the superstructure, through Nietzsche’s Dionysian beneath the Apollonian, through Freud’s unconscious beneath the conscious, through Heidegger’s Being concealed by beings — the structure persists, varied endlessly in content, identical in form: there is always a depth that the surface hides, an inside that the outside betrays, a reality that civilization, or reason, or language, or metaphysics has covered over and that the German thinker’s vocation is to recover or to mourn. The entire tradition of German thought, in its most characteristic and most world-shaping expressions, is an elaboration of the distinction that began as the resentment of Prussian intellectuals against their prince’s French-speaking court. Inwardness became Germany’s alpha and omega.

This is the sociological root of a distinction that would later reshape the intellectual history of the world. It persists long after the social conditions that produced it have vanished and was inherited, internalized, and became formative to, most consequentially, modern Islam.

In the last analysis, the Kultur-Zivilisation antithesis is, at bottom, a claim about the relationship between inside and outside, depth and surface, substance and form. Zivilisation names the external: institutions, manners, laws, material comfort, the organized surface of social life. Kultur names the internal: the spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual achievements that give a people its distinctive character, its depth, its claim upon the respect of the ages.

The claim is that the external can exist without the internal — that a society can be civilized without possessing culture, polished without being deep — and that when this happens, the civilization is a sham, a decorated emptiness, a mechanism running on nothing. This claim will recur in every subsequent critique of Western civilization down to the present day, always in the same structure: the accusation that the West’s external achievements — its prosperity, its technology, its political forms — conceal an inner void, or worse, monstrosity.

The French Revolution transformed the distinction from a domestic class grievance into a national and civilizational antithesis.