From Antiquity to Christendom: Continuity in the Western Tradition
- May 11
- 1 min read
Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Encounter Books, the two volumes that comprise The Golden Thread have achieved a physical monumentality that we never dreamed of when Allen Guelzo and I began to write them over four years ago. Laden as they are with hundreds of color images, maps and primary sources, and printed on sturdy paper, the volumes make, quite literally, a weighty impression: the two of them together weigh nearly 12 pounds! We have hoped all along that our books would eventually be adopted for high school and college courses, but the volumes do not slip easily into student backpacks. Hence, to make them more manageable, Encounter Books plans to subdivide each of the two volumes into two parts.
Volume 1 will be released this summer in subdivided form, with each of its two major parts, Antiquity and Christendom, printed separately. For this second edition (and third printing), Encounter asked me to write a separate introduction to match Allen Guelzo’s short introduction to Volume 2.
The Western tradition is extraordinary for many reasons, but one reason surely is its sheer longevity. In these volumes we have emphasized both its immense value to the modern world and its fragility, but it is worth noting that no other civilizational tradition, apart from those of China and the Indian subcontinent, has endured for so long, approximately three millennia, into modern times. Leaving aside the rich Indic tradition for the sake of simplicity, a brief comparison between the Chinese and Western civilizational traditions will help to bring out some of the distinctive features of the West…