Joseph Loconte's Blog

REASON, REVELATION, AND REVOLUTION

Reclaiming John Locke from modern critics.

Joseph Loconte

Published July 18, 2025

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, colonial leaders enlisted several authoritative sources in their complaints against King George and the British Parliament: the Bible, the English constitution, and Enlightenment philosopher John Locke.

In fact, it is not too much to say that Locke’s political outlook framed nearly all of the core arguments for American independence. Some revisionist scholars, such as J.G.A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment (1975), have tried to marginalize Locke’s presence from the American story. But more recent works—including The Reception of Locke’s Politics, edited by Mark Goldie, and Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, edited by Ellis Sandoz—effectively demolish this view. Colonial assumptions about natural rights, human equality, religious liberty, government by consent, the right of revolution: Each drew heavily from Locke’s writings, which were considered mandatory reading for educated Americans.

As we’ll see, the colonists were heirs of the Lockean tradition. As a result, freedom, reason, and revelation formed a conceptual trinity in the American Revolution. The powerful alliance of these ideas helps to explain the astonishing and enduring influence of the American example.

Unfortunately, nonsense talk about the meaning and legitimacy of the American experiment is almost as ingrained in the New Right as in the progressive left. Catholic thinkers such as Patrick Deneen denounce America’s Lockean liberalism as “a catastrophe for the ideals of the West,” based upon a “false anthropology” that exalts “the unleashed ambition of individuals.” Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule claims that the Lockean philosophy of the Founders is so naturally corrosive of the institutions of family and faith that it would “betray its inner nature” if it actually respected them. Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, blames Locke for delivering a “closed system” of secular values antithetical to fundamental beliefs and loyalties. “[T]here is nothing in the liberal system,” he writes, “that requires you, or even encourages you, to also adopt a commitment to God, the Bible, family, or nation.”

To the New Right—especially the advocates of national conservatism and Catholic integralism—Locke is the serpent in the garden: the thinker who unleashed the sins of materialism, expressive individualism, and militant secularism into the West. With no sense of irony, they contribute to the progressive project of delegitimizing the American Revolution and the liberal democratic order it has brought about.  

The crisis years.

To begin to appreciate the staggering confusion of this mindset, let’s turn to the eve of the Revolution. In the 1760s, as tensions with Great Britain deepened, Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1690) was, by far, the most frequently cited source outside the Bible. According to English historian Peter Laslett, Locke established a set of principles for freedom and equality “more effective and persuasive than any before written in the English language.”

That’s no exaggeration. “The sentiments on this subject have therefore been chiefly drawn from the purer fountains of one or two of our English writers, particularly from Mr. Locke,” explained Boston attorney James Otis in his massively influential The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Written in 1764 during the Stamp Act crisis, Otis’ tract follows Locke in anchoring human freedom in the language of both natural law and religious belief.

Paraphrasing at length from Locke’s Second Treatise, Otis insists that “the natural liberty of man” is inviolable and that “this gift of God cannot be annihilated.” He then applies Lockean logic to the American situation.

I can see no reason to doubt, but that the imposition of taxes … in the colonies, is absolutely irreconcilable with rights of the Colonists, as British subjects, and as men. I say as men, for in a state of nature, no man can take my property from me, without my consent: If he does, he deprives me of my liberty, and makes me a slave.

Two years later, after the hated Stamp Act was repealed, the British crown instigated another argument over colonial rights with the Declaratory Act, asserting Britain’s prerogative to make laws binding upon the American Colonies. The act afforded Parliament complete authority over the Colonies, while pronouncing any colonial criticism or opposition “utterly null and void.”

To repudiate British claims, Locke’s authority was again invoked, not only by the colonists—who repeatedly cited the Second Treatise—but also by sympathetic Englishmen. In a speech in the House of Lords on March 7, 1766, Charles Pratt, also known as the Lord Camden, quoted from the Second Treatise to denounce parliamentary overreach:

In short, my lords, from the whole of our history, from the earliest period, you will find that taxation and representation were always united; so true are the words of that consummate reasoner and politician Mr. Locke…His principles are drawn from the heart of our constitution, which he thoroughly understood.

The Declaratory Act confronted Americans with a fundamentally Lockean question: What is the extent of the legislative power? Locke provided a morally persuasive answer: The legislature “cannot take from any man any part of his property without his consent.” Locke’s doctrine of consent is essential not only for understanding his political philosophy: His theory of political consent, of the voluntary nature of government, was reinforced by his belief in the voluntary nature of religion.

This is one of the central themes of Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), probably the most widely read and influential defense of religious freedom in colonial America.

“The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force,” Locke wrote, “but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.” Just as an individual enters a political society by his consent, so, too, does he join the church—“a free and voluntary society”—of his own choosing. “The hopes of salvation, as it was the only cause of his entrance into that communion, so it can be the only reason of his stay there,” Locke wrote.

A faith-based anthropology.

Undergirding Locke’s political philosophy is a concept of human nature that roughly agrees with the biblical view: a belief in the dignity as well as the tragedy of the human condition.

“[F]or men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business,” Locke writes in the Second Treatise. “They are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.” Locke’s audience would have recognized his allusion to the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Thus, the concept of government by consent is explicitly linked to an anthropology bound up with belief in God.

“Freedom, reason, and revelation formed a conceptual trinity in the American Revolution.”

In Locke’s defense of religious liberty, the principle of consent is crucial to authentic faith and is similarly grounded in a religious view of the human person. “It is only light and evidence that can work a change in men’s opinions, and that light can in no manner proceed from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties,” he writes in A Letter Concerning Toleration. “God himself will not save men against their wills.” Echoing the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, Locke insists that the salvation of a person’s soul cannot be left to the whims of princes or priests: It demands the conviction, choice, and faith of the individual believer. “No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed.”

In making these arguments, Locke’s conceptual breakthrough—unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas—was to combine the classical view of natural law with a doctrine of inalienable natural rights.

In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from Scripture, as well as from classical authors like Cicero, to argue that everyone possessed these rights because everyone was born “equal and independent” and shared “all in one community of Nature.” In A Letter Concerning Toler­ation, Locke called freedom of conscience a “fundamental and immu­table right,” ratified by both reason and the ethical demands of the Gospel. “Toleration of those that differ from others in Matters of Religion, is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine Reason of Mankind,” he wrote, “that it seems monstrous for Men to be so blind, as not to perceive the Necessity and Advantage of it, in so clear a Light.”

The Declaratory Act, however, threatened these fundamental rights by not recognizing any limits on the legislative power: It would extend London’s political authority “in all cases whatsoever,” potentially endangering a man’s soul as well as his estate.

Colonial rebels considered Locke to be “an indispensable ally” in their opposition to the crown, writes the political scientist Steven Dworetz, author of The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution. “They knew that the question before them was a Lockean question and that Locke had furnished the only answer consistent with liberty.” In The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America, political scientist Lee Ward observes that by 1776, the idea of popular sovereignty that the Americans had inherited from Locke and other radical Whigs “was in the process of becoming virtually the sole legitimate philosophy of governance in the colonies.”

Religion and the Republic.

In Locke’s most important writings on politics, the colonists discovered a biblical rationale for republican government. In his defense of religious liberty, they found a bracing appeal to the life and teachings of Jesus. All of this was profoundly congenial to the Protestant culture of 18th-century America.

Indeed, preachers quoted Locke as enthusiastically as politicians. In his 1744 tract defending freedom of conscience, “The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants,” Elisha Williams, rector at Yale University, combined the Puritan emphasis on congregational independence with arguments from Locke’s Second Treatise and A Letter Concerning Toleration:

Whenever the power that is put in any hands for the government of any people is applied to any other end than the preservation of their persons and properties, the securing and promoting their civil interests (the end for which power was put into their hands), I say when it is applied to any other end, then (according to the great Mr. Locke) it becomes tyranny.

Finally, colonial leaders also found in Locke a compelling argument for resisting political tyranny and “arbitrary power.” Though initially considered a radical proposition, the case for the American Revolution was ultimately embraced as the moral endpoint of the cascading logic of Locke’s philosophy.

The essential purpose of government, Locke explained, is to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens: men and women endowed with dignity because they bear the likeness of their creator. If the political authority consistently fails to safeguard these natural rights, it violates God’s moral law, forfeits its authority, and “puts itself into a state of war with the people.” Revolutions to depose an unjust regime, Locke insisted, will not occur every time government oversteps its limits, but rather:

…if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was first erected…

Given Locke’s place in the educational curricula of colonial America, most of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence would have encountered his views—directly or indirectly—on government, politics, philosophy, and religion.

In “A State of the Rights of the Colonists,” for example, drawn up by Samuel Adams and 20 other revolutionary-minded Bostonians, the Lockean language of natural law is unmistakable. “When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary Consent. … Now what Liberty can there be where Property is taken away without Consent?” Likewise, the natural rights language of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted by George Mason, was lifted nearly verbatim from Locke’s Second Treatise: “That all by nature all men are equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity.”

The “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence—that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—were echoed in most of the state declarations. Thus, the revolutionaries thoroughly embraced a Lockean vision of human equality and freedom rooted in both natural law and biblical religion. Reason, supported and constrained by revelation, produced the revolution of 1776.

God, Locke, and liberty.

As I have written elsewhere, the contrast with the revolution of 1789 could not be more extreme. The architects of the French Revolution turned reason into an idol, untethered from religion. Their rallying cry—“We will strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest!”—produced the guillotine and the Reign of Terror. Their guiding light was Jean Jacques Rousseau, not John Locke.

The last 50 years of Locke scholarship have obliterated the crude caricature of Locke as a secular hedonist, popularized by Leo Strauss in the 1950s and regurgitated more recently by the New Right. Locke’s religious commitments are evident throughout his writings, especially in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). It is largely forgotten today that Locke not only made the definitive case for government by consent; he also promoted an educational philosophy—anchored in the Bible—that would produce the kinds of citizens fit for self-government.

“As the foundation of this, there ought very early to be imprinted on his mind a true notion of God, as of the independent supreme Being, Author, and Maker, of all things, from whom we receive all our good, who loves us, and gives us all things; and, consequent to this, instill into him a love and reverence of this supreme Being.”

Unlike the cynical, disillusioned, and utopian academics of the 21st century who disparage Locke—and by extension, the American Revolution—the leaders of this political endeavor, along with their principled supporters in Great Britain, understood what Locke’s writings meant in the struggle for a more just and democratic society.

Arthur Lee, who assisted Ben Franklin in negotiating the 1778 treaty with France, viewed the entire American project in Lockean terms. “Representation being in our constitution the mode of giving consent, representation and taxation are constitutionally inseparable,” he wrote in 1772. “This is Mr. Locke’s doctrine, it is the doctrine of reason and truth, and it is, Sir, the unvarnished doctrine of the Americans.”

What other principles of government, we must ask, have made possible the greatest expansion in human freedom and human flourishing in the history of the world? The renewal—perhaps even the survival—of our republican government depends on how we, as heirs of the revolution of 1776, answer that question.

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is director of the Rivendell Center in New York City. He also serves as a presidential scholar at New College of Florida and as the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West.

A Forgotten Lesson of the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’

It has passed into history as proof of Christian America’s ‘war on science.’ Less remembered is that it’s an example of Christianity standing against eugenics.

By Joseph Loconte

August 3, 2025

A hundred years have elapsed since one of the most famous trials in America — the Scopes “Monkey Trial” — and the liberal establishment has still not understood one of its central lessons.

On July 10, 1925, 24-year-old high school teacher John Scopes was put on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution, a crime under state law. The two opposing attorneys, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, immediately became symbols of an epic battle: science and rationality vs. religion and superstition. Thus, writing recently in the New York Times, historian Michael Kazin calls the trial “a momentous clash between modern science and traditional Christianity.” Opining in the Chronicle of Higher Education, John K. Wilson insists that the event represents “the conflict between politics and academic freedom.”

Liberal commentators always fail to mention, however, an inconvenient fact about the actual textbook at the center of the trial, a fact that helps explain why Tennesseans found it so morally offensive: It presented a defense of eugenics wrapped in pseudo-science and Darwinian biology.

William Hunter’s A Civic Biology (1914) — the best-selling text in its field — argued unapologetically for eugenics as the obvious social implication of Darwinian evolution. Referring to families that produced “feeble-minded” and “criminal persons,” Hunter rendered this judgment:

Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. . . . Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. . . . If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.

A Civic Biology, in fact, reinforced a host of illiberal impulses: racism, white supremacy, and contempt for the poor and those with disabilities. The end goal, Hunter wrote, was to prevent the perpetuation of those who “take from society” but “give nothing in return.” The means: asylums, restrictive marriage laws, and the forced sterilization of undesirables.

Darwin himself had speculated about the desirability of eugenics-based social engineering. “Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind,” he complained in The Descent of Man (1871). “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” Anthropologist Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics — from the Greek for “good birth” — openly argued that scientific techniques for breeding healthier animals should be applied to human beings. Those considered to be “degenerates,” “imbeciles,” or “feebleminded” would be targeted for elimination.

And, by the 1920s, targeted they were — by academics, politicians, activists, and scientists. Indeed, the eugenic idea seized the imagination of the medical and scientific communities in the early 20th century. Premier scientific organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History, and institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, promoted sterilization laws and preached the eugenics gospel through lectures, conferences, and research papers.

Progressives led the drive for eugenic policies on all fronts, and the Democratic Party — the party of segregation and the Jim Crow South — became their chief political sponsor. By the end of the 1920s, 33 states passed eugenics laws and carried out thousands of forced sterilizations.

Tennessee never passed a compulsory sterilization law. Dennis Sewall, author of The Political Gene, acknowledges that the rural folk of Tennessee may not have had a sophisticated grasp of Darwinian evolution. “But they knew the progressives who preached Darwinism in the cities despised country people, called them ‘imbeciles’ and ‘defectives’ and would sterilize them if they got half a chance.”

The pattern of resistance to eugenics was plain: It came from those religious communities — Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish — deeply attached to the authority of the Bible. It is of course true that “Bible belt” states such as Tennessee, known for their religious conservatism, approved of segregation and other racist policies. Nevertheless, those who opposed the eugenic agenda of the social Darwinists believed the Bible was the Word of God, and that men and women were created by him and carried his divine image.

William Jennings Bryan, the prosecuting attorney at the Scopes trial, was a Democrat, a populist, and a political progressive who nonetheless considered himself a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian.

“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals,” he said. “It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.” Bryan objected to the ruthless, militant materialism — “survival of the fittest” — that the advocates of evolution and eugenics seemed to represent. “Let no one think that this acceptance of barbarism as the basic principle of evolution died with Darwin.”

In this, the defenders of the biblical story of man’s origins proved prophetic. Writing a few years before the Scopes trial, Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton predicted an unholy alliance between government and scientific elites. “Hence the tyranny has taken but a single stride to reach the secret and sacred place of personal freedom,” he wrote, “where no sane man ever dreamed of seeing it.”

An authoritarian mindset had indeed taken hold of the cultured elites. In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a progressive and committed eugenicist, wrote the infamous majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, which upheld the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he wrote. The eugenics movement was in high gear.

Twenty-first-century progressives, apparently without a twinge of conscience, ignore this side of the story. For them, the Scopes trial proved that religion is the enemy of science, rationality, and intellectual freedom. Just so today: Recent attempts to post the Ten Commandments in public schools are met with derision. “Religiosity is once again being imposed on education,” complains John K. Wilson. “When religious dogma is required in schools, creationism won’t be far behind.”

In fact, it was the attempt by government to indoctrinate children with a secular, materialist worldview that lay near the heart of the controversy. Indeed, in his companion textbook, Hunter reminded teachers that “the child is at the receptive age and is emotionally open to the serious lessons here involved.” Yes, lessons in barbarism, trumpeted in the classroom.

Nevertheless, the progressive outlook — still championed by the Democratic Party — remains stubbornly secular and contemptuous of traditional religion. Complaining about “right-wing” groups that seek to prevent new attempts at ideological indoctrination in public schools, Kazin could hardly be more condescending. He derides Bryan, and his modern counterparts, for believing that “the people” have the right to control the educational system supported by their tax dollars. “Democratic politicians will have to figure out how to work around such wrongheaded notions.”

We already have seen what happens when this suffocating ideology is given a free hand. When the United States indoctrinated its citizens in the dogma of eugenics, the results were catastrophic: a widening and deepening of institutional racism, xenophobic anti-immigration policies, and the coercive sterilization of “the unfit.” And it was all justified in the name of “progress,” supported by the scientific and academic establishments.

“Could any doctrine be more destructive of civilization?” Bryan asked. The answer arrived soon enough: The event that brought all of it to a screeching halt was the Holocaust. It is well known that the Nazis based their 1933 sterilization laws on the work of American eugenicists such as Harry Laughlin, who received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for his efforts to promote “race hygiene.” Hitler’s death camps were the horrific yet logical result of the militant rejection of the God of the Bible.

“If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene,” Bryan warned. “His teachings, and His teachings, alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.”

If the teachings of Jesus the Nazarene had prevailed against the scientific establishment a century ago, we may have been spared the greatest horrors ever unleashed upon the human race. With new and fearsome threats to humanity on the horizon, we could use more of that old time religion.

The government of the United States traces its roots back to ancient Greece, Rome and historic philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Considering their extraordinary influence on modern political systems and especially democracy, it couldn’t be timelier to reconnect and reconsider the early origins of our government. This is especially relevant now as increasingly we are seeing evidence of countries slipping towards authoritarianism, a risk that some fear for the United States.

The eyes of the world are focused on Rome right now because of the death of the pope, but they should also be directed at Italy’s increasingly influential prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

Last week, the Italian prime minister was in Washington, D.C., meeting with the president of the United States. There, Prime Minister Meloni delivered a subtle yet profound message to Donald Trump and his administration: The future of the American project is bound up with the future of Western civilization.

“When I speak about the West, I don’t speak about the geographical space,” said Prime Minister Meloni during last week’s White House meeting. “I speak about the civilization. And I want to make that civilization stronger.”

Better than any other European leader, Giorgia Meloni understands what lies at the core of the cultural legacy of the West — and of the American political order. In accepting the 2024 Global Citizen Award from the Atlantic Council, she implored her American audience to stand up for Western political ideals now under assault. “The West is a system of values in which the person is central, men and women are equal and free, and therefore the systems are democratic, life is sacred, the state is secular, and based on the rule of law,” she said. “Are these values we should be ashamed of?”

Meloni’s description of Western values, of course, is a description of American values.

Thanks to the degraded condition of primary and secondary education, however, most Americans never learn about the remarkable achievements of Western civilization in elevating the dignity and freedom of the individual. They never learn that our civilization is the product of the centuries-long interaction of Greek and Roman culture, adopted and transformed by the Jewish and Christian traditions, and transformed again by the scientific, democratic, and intellectual revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the United States.

What we call “the Western tradition” is really a story of tragedy and triumph: of oppression, exploitation, inquisitions, slavery, racism, and war — as well as a story of liberation, discovery, creativity, justice, freedom, and peace.

Surely it is no accident that Meloni — an Italian — is standing up for this cultural inheritance. For it is difficult to overstate Italy’s decisive role in the formation of Western civilization. In politics, philosophy, science, literature, art, music, religion — and food — the Italians reached heights of human achievement that laid the foundation for the most dynamic and consequential civilization in human history.

Behind many of these achievements was the Christian faith. And as a believing Catholic, Meloni is unafraid to say so.

“Above all, we need to recover awareness of who we are,” Meloni explained. She said that we are the heirs of a “synthesis born out of the meeting of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian humanism.”

In other words, take away Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Locke, and Western civilization disappears from the history books.

In this, Italy’s first female prime minister shares the outlook of the first female prime minister of Great Britain: Margaret Thatcher.

In 1988, in her first trip to communist Poland as prime minister, Thatcher challenged her hosts to reform their political system and rejoin the European democratic community. “We want to see the barriers which have divided Europe for the last 40 years dismantled,” she said, “so that Poland and other Eastern European countries can once again share fully in Europe’s culture, Europe’s freedom and Europe’s justice—treasures which sprang from Christendom, which were developed through a rule of law and found their expression in democracy.”

Thus, Meloni has been called the Margaret Thatcher of today’s Europe: a relentless advocate for the political and religious concepts that brought liberal democracy into existence. Like Thatcher, she is the leading political voice against authoritarian rule. Like Thatcher, she is the most articulate defender of European civilization, which she describes as “a civilization built over the centuries with the genius and sacrifices of many.”

The great “existential” threat to human freedom — coming from within the West — is progressivism. Meloni understands that. The cancel culture “tries to upset and remove every single beautiful, honorable and human thing that our civilization has developed,” she writes in her autobiography. “It is a nihilistic wind of unprecedented ugliness.” Meloni made it clear during her political campaign that “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am Italian, I am Christian. You can’t take this away from me!”

She has no patience for modern identity politics.

All of this sends the radical left into apoplexy. Meloni’s tough stance on illegal immigration is called xenophobic. Her defense of the traditional family and rejection of the transgender movement is denounced as a revival of fascism. Shortly before Meloni’s election as prime minister, Jason Horowitz, Rome bureau chief for the New York Times, wrote ominously of Meloni’s youthful attraction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. According to Horowitz, Meloni fraternized with “a fellowship of militants” who view Tolkien’s story as “a fertile shire for nationalists.”

In fact, Meloni’s ongoing attachment to Tolkien’s mythology reveals a moral seriousness that is wholly absent from her infantile detractors.

Two themes stand out: First, as Tolkien himself once described his book’s central message, The Lord of the Rings is “about power, exerted for domination.” Meloni has said explicitly that her view of power and its capacity to ruin the human soul was “closely tied” to Tolkien’s view. “I consider power very dangerous,” she says. “I consider it an enemy and not a friend.”

No fascist in the history of fascism would ever say or think such a thing.

Second, there is the Tolkienian emphasis on every person’s obligation, regardless of her strength or circumstances, to battle the malignant forces in our world. For Meloni, brave but ordinary people — not abstract global institutions — will determine the direction of Western civilization. As she told her New York audience: “The time we live in requires us to choose what we want to be and what path we want to take.”

As in Tolkien’s story, so in our actual lives. Resignation in the face of difficulty, evasion of individual responsibility, cowardice when moral courage is demanded — herein lies the road to perdition.

“We can continue to fuel the idea of the decline of the West, we can surrender to the idea that our civilization has nothing more to say, no more routes to chart,” said Meloni. “Or we can remember who we are, learn also from our mistakes, add our own piece of the story to this remarkable walk, and govern what happens around us, to leave our children a better world. Which is exactly my choice.”

Whether or not other democratic leaders — including those in the United States — will make the same resolute choice is a decidedly open question. In the meantime, Viva Italia!

—

Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the author of the forthcoming book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. Check out his new YouTube history channel, History and the Human Story.

This article was originally posted at The American Spectator.

The eyes of the world are focused on Rome right now because of the death of the pope, but they should also be directed at Italy’s increasingly influential prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

Last week, the Italian prime minister was in Washington, D.C., meeting with the president of the United States. There, Prime Minister Meloni delivered a subtle yet profound message to Donald Trump and his administration: The future of the American project is bound up with the future of Western civilization.

“When I speak about the West, I don’t speak about the geographical space,” said Prime Minister Meloni during last week’s White House meeting. “I speak about the civilization. And I want to make that civilization stronger.”

Better than any other European leader, Giorgia Meloni understands what lies at the core of the cultural legacy of the West — and of the American political order. In accepting the 2024 Global Citizen Award from the Atlantic Council, she implored her American audience to stand up for Western political ideals now under assault. “The West is a system of values in which the person is central, men and women are equal and free, and therefore the systems are democratic, life is sacred, the state is secular, and based on the rule of law,” she said. “Are these values we should be ashamed of?”

Meloni’s description of Western values, of course, is a description of American values.

Thanks to the degraded condition of primary and secondary education, however, most Americans never learn about the remarkable achievements of Western civilization in elevating the dignity and freedom of the individual. They never learn that our civilization is the product of the centuries-long interaction of Greek and Roman culture, adopted and transformed by the Jewish and Christian traditions, and transformed again by the scientific, democratic, and intellectual revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the United States.

What we call “the Western tradition” is really a story of tragedy and triumph: of oppression, exploitation, inquisitions, slavery, racism, and war — as well as a story of liberation, discovery, creativity, justice, freedom, and peace.

Surely it is no accident that Meloni — an Italian — is standing up for this cultural inheritance. For it is difficult to overstate Italy’s decisive role in the formation of Western civilization. In politics, philosophy, science, literature, art, music, religion — and food — the Italians reached heights of human achievement that laid the foundation for the most dynamic and consequential civilization in human history.

Behind many of these achievements was the Christian faith. And as a believing Catholic, Meloni is unafraid to say so.

“Above all, we need to recover awareness of who we are,” Meloni explained. She said that we are the heirs of a “synthesis born out of the meeting of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian humanism.”

In other words, take away Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Locke, and Western civilization disappears from the history books.

In this, Italy’s first female prime minister shares the outlook of the first female prime minister of Great Britain: Margaret Thatcher.

In 1988, in her first trip to communist Poland as prime minister, Thatcher challenged her hosts to reform their political system and rejoin the European democratic community. “We want to see the barriers which have divided Europe for the last 40 years dismantled,” she said, “so that Poland and other Eastern European countries can once again share fully in Europe’s culture, Europe’s freedom and Europe’s justice—treasures which sprang from Christendom, which were developed through a rule of law and found their expression in democracy.”

Thus, Meloni has been called the Margaret Thatcher of today’s Europe: a relentless advocate for the political and religious concepts that brought liberal democracy into existence. Like Thatcher, she is the leading political voice against authoritarian rule. Like Thatcher, she is the most articulate defender of European civilization, which she describes as “a civilization built over the centuries with the genius and sacrifices of many.”

The great “existential” threat to human freedom — coming from within the West — is progressivism. Meloni understands that. The cancel culture “tries to upset and remove every single beautiful, honorable and human thing that our civilization has developed,” she writes in her autobiography. “It is a nihilistic wind of unprecedented ugliness.” Meloni made it clear during her political campaign that “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am Italian, I am Christian. You can’t take this away from me!”

She has no patience for modern identity politics.

All of this sends the radical left into apoplexy. Meloni’s tough stance on illegal immigration is called xenophobic. Her defense of the traditional family and rejection of the transgender movement is denounced as a revival of fascism. Shortly before Meloni’s election as prime minister, Jason Horowitz, Rome bureau chief for the New York Times, wrote ominously of Meloni’s youthful attraction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. According to Horowitz, Meloni fraternized with “a fellowship of militants” who view Tolkien’s story as “a fertile shire for nationalists.”

In fact, Meloni’s ongoing attachment to Tolkien’s mythology reveals a moral seriousness that is wholly absent from her infantile detractors.

Two themes stand out: First, as Tolkien himself once described his book’s central message, The Lord of the Rings is “about power, exerted for domination.” Meloni has said explicitly that her view of power and its capacity to ruin the human soul was “closely tied” to Tolkien’s view. “I consider power very dangerous,” she says. “I consider it an enemy and not a friend.”

No fascist in the history of fascism would ever say or think such a thing.

Second, there is the Tolkienian emphasis on every person’s obligation, regardless of her strength or circumstances, to battle the malignant forces in our world. For Meloni, brave but ordinary people — not abstract global institutions — will determine the direction of Western civilization. As she told her New York audience: “The time we live in requires us to choose what we want to be and what path we want to take.”

As in Tolkien’s story, so in our actual lives. Resignation in the face of difficulty, evasion of individual responsibility, cowardice when moral courage is demanded — herein lies the road to perdition.

“We can continue to fuel the idea of the decline of the West, we can surrender to the idea that our civilization has nothing more to say, no more routes to chart,” said Meloni. “Or we can remember who we are, learn also from our mistakes, add our own piece of the story to this remarkable walk, and govern what happens around us, to leave our children a better world. Which is exactly my choice.”

Whether or not other democratic leaders — including those in the United States — will make the same resolute choice is a decidedly open question. In the meantime, Viva Italia!

—

Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the author of the forthcoming book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. Check out his new YouTube history channel, History and the Human Story.

Halfway through the Second World War, Oxford scholar J. R. R. Tolkien found himself inside a storm of discouragement and self-doubt. In 1937, shortly after the publication of his children’s novel, The Hobbit, he began writing a sequel. But by April 1942, the story had ground to a halt. His fantastic tale of the Ring of Power and the struggle for Middle-earth “was growing out of hand,” Tolkien recalled years later, “and I wanted to finish it, but the world was threatening.”

It is difficult to overstate how menacing the world looked to the British people in the spring of 1942. Great Britain had been fighting for its life since the fall of France in 1940. Within a week of the attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Japanese forces had stormed across the Pacific and Southeast Asia in a vast offensive that sent British and American troops staggering in defeat and surrender. Singapore fell after a week of intense fighting, with more than 130,000 British soldiers taken prisoner. By April 1942, the Japanese war in the Pacific was larger, and nearly as devastating, as that of the Nazis in Europe.

Meanwhile, Hitler’s Germany seemed destined to achieve the “living space” demanded by the führer. Germany controlled virtually all of Western and Central Europe, all the major capitals and ports. Following their invasion of the Soviet Union, German forces conquered Crimea and were pushing toward the Caucasus. Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Byelorussia were all in Nazi hands. Crimes against humanity were being committed on a scale for which the civilized world had no conceptual category.

This was the fate that awaited Great Britain, the United States, and their allies if they could not take the fight to the enemy and prevail.

Perhaps Tolkien had this geopolitical nightmare in mind when he wrote of the dire warning from Lady Galadriel, ruler of the Elves, to the Fellowship: “But this I will say to you. Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all.” By his own admission, The Lord of the Rings, with its portrayal of radical evil and existential dread, was not the sequel Tolkien had promised his publisher; it was no bedtime story for children.

“The war had arisen to darken all horizons,” Tolkien recalled. He was nearly certain that his epic fantasy would never be finished. Yet to his own amazement, and with little effort, Tolkien suddenly produced a short story. He simply woke up one morning, in April 1942, “with that odd thing virtually complete in my head.” He wrote it out in a few hours.

Poignant and soul-searching, “Leaf by Niggle” is the story of a painter who becomes distraught when it appears he will never complete his masterpiece: a great and beautiful tree. It was Tolkien’s self-administered remedy to every man’s fear: the fear of death. Not every painting, not every story, will be completed on this side of the veil. “Leaf by Niggle” is rightly considered the most autobiographical of all Tolkien’s writings.

Niggle is the painter — “not a very successful one” — and, like Tolkien the writer, he is a perfectionist and easily distracted and harried by his neighborly obligations. Niggle’s “garden,” which is not well tended, looks suspiciously like Tolkien’s literary career. “It would need some concentration, some work, hard uninterrupted work, to finish the picture, even at its present size,” Tolkien writes in “Leaf.” “But there came a tremendous crop of interruptions.”

Just so for Tolkien. He was asked to chair endless committee meetings to address wartime contingencies (e.g., what to do if Oxford were bombed by the Nazis). In addition to carrying a heavy teaching load, he had to create and oversee new courses for college cadets preparing to be sent into battle. Like other Oxford families, his took in evacuee children from London. He volunteered as an air-raid warden, performing duties that included all-night patrols and an emergency rescue effort when a British plane crashed near his house. Art was indeed imitating life.

With his painting unfinished, Niggle is suddenly forced to leave his home and everything else behind and take a train ride to an undisclosed destination — to face death and judgment. He is sent to a workhouse (purgatory), where he overhears two Voices evaluating his life. “Look at the time he wasted, not even amusing himself!” says the First Voice. “He never got ready for his journey.” The Second Voice agrees but offers an explanation: “But of course, he is only a little man. He was never meant to be anything very much; and he was never very strong.”

Here is a man at the age of 50 — a respected academic at one of the most prestigious universities in the world — taking humble stock of himself, his achievements, and his ambitions.

Although he had fought honorably in the First World War, Tolkien referred to himself as a man lacking in physical courage. He modeled his hobbits, he once admitted, on the humble English soldiers with whom he served in France and considered “far superior to myself.” Writing to one of his sons, then training as an antiaircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain, he observed: “You three boys all seem to have a decent share of courage and guts. You owe that to your mother.”

In some ways, Niggle is the man Tolkien hoped to become. Despite his failings, the artist makes a courageous and selfless decision before his departure. Although somewhat grudgingly, Niggle agrees to help a bothersome neighbor, Mr. Parish, who interrupts his work on the painting to implore him to fetch a doctor for his ailing wife. Niggle is willing to allow his creative life to effectively come to an end if it means helping another life in need. “It seems plain that this was a genuine sacrifice,” says the Second Voice. “Niggle guessed that he was throwing away his last chance with his picture.”

The Voices allow him to leave the workhouse and journey to the country, where he encounters his painting: completed, magnificent, sublime in its beauty. Yet it is more than that: It is a living Tree. “All the leaves he had ever labored at were there, as he had imagined them, rather than as he had made them.” Niggle is overcome with wonder. “He gazed at the Tree, and slowly lifted his arms and opened them wide. ‘It’s a gift!’ he said.”

His real journey, however, is about to begin. There is more work that can be done on the Tree than Niggle can complete on his own. He realizes that he needs the assistance of Mr. Parish, who has never appreciated his painting but knows a lot about earth, plants, and trees. “This place cannot be left just as my private park,” Niggle says. “I need help and advice: I ought to have got it sooner.”

This portion of the story suggests Tolkien’s decision, more than a decade earlier, to share with his Oxford friend C. S. Lewis a long narrative poem he had begun writing in 1925. It is considered the most personal story in all of Tolkien’s mythology: the love story between Beren, a mortal man, and Lúthien, an immortal Elvish princess. The tale of Beren and Lúthien would play an immensely important role in Tolkien’s legendarium of Middle-earth.

Lewis’s response must have appeared like an oasis in the desert. Tolkien had entrusted to his friend the story that he loved best of all his work, a story inspired by his relationship with his wife. It was a rare moment of vulnerability. In a letter to Tolkien, Lewis praised the poem in the highest terms, telling him, “I can honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight.” He proceeded to send the author 14 pages of critique, with “grumbles at individual lines,” as he put it. Tolkien incorporated many of Lewis’s proposed changes into his next draft.

Back in Niggle’s village, the local authorities talk disparagingly of their departed neighbor and his painting. His unfinished canvas, in fact, is being used to patch a neighbor’s roof. “I think he was a silly little man,” says Councillor Tompkins. “Worthless, in fact; no use to Society at all.” Painting has its usefulness, Tompkins adds, but only for those “bold young men” with new ideas and new methods. “None for this old-fashioned stuff. Private day-dreaming.”

The carping characters in the story can be read as embodiments of the utilitarian outlook of the age. Yet Tolkien also battled the “bold young men” of the Modernist movement in literature who came into vogue after the cataclysm of the First World War. Concepts such as courage, virtue, noble sacrifice, and faith seemed to vanish into the killing fields on the Western Front. From James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the old beliefs about mankind’s dignity and high moral purpose were discarded as obsolete. As literary critic Roger Sale summarized the Modernist mood, the writer who imagined a heroic destiny for his characters was considered “deceived and dangerous.”

It was precisely this outlook that Tolkien was rebelling against in his story about the war for Middle-earth. “It is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences,” he once explained, “without actual offensive action.” The Lord of the Rings was his great salvo in the struggle against the moral cynicism that had infected his generation. Like his friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien believed that imaginative literature could help reclaim the older concepts of sin, grace, and redemption for the modern mind.

“Leaf by Niggle” achieves this aim in its evocative, almost mythic conclusion. Niggle next encounters Mr. Parish, who also has arrived in the country. In the village, Parish dismissed Niggle’s painting as “Niggle’s Nonsense,” while Niggle called him “Old Earth-grubber.” But now the two men work together on a landscaping project. As they live and labor together in the country, Niggle thinks of “wonderful new flowers and plants,” and Parish knows “exactly how to set them and where they would do best.” Even more remarkable, as Niggle gazes at the Great Tree he realizes that its most exquisite and beautiful leaves — “the most perfect examples of the Niggle style” — have been created “in collaboration with Mr. Parish: there was no other way of putting it.”

Tolkien is taking to task the self-absorption of the modern artist. Creative work must not be attempted at the expense of everyday relationships: Our obligations to others do not cease when we enter the studio. Tolkien had learned how unexpected friendships can open up the artist to new sources of beauty and grace.

Writing “Leaf by Niggle” was an act of defiance: In the spring of 1942, the forces of dehumanization appeared to be on the winning side of history. For a time, it really seemed that life was absurd, that the disintegration of civilization itself was at hand. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. For Tolkien, this represented one of the purposes of imaginative literature: to help us combat the darkness. Literature of this kind could remind us that the material world, with its temporal aims, is not the sum and substance of our lives. There are such things as beauty and goodness and truth.

There is a noble purpose to the human story, Tolkien believed, and we need eyes of faith to see it. Niggle begins to see it: beautiful mountains beyond the Great Tree, which stir a sense of longing. “They did not seem to belong to the picture, or only as a link to something else, a glimpse through the trees of something different, a further stage: another picture.”

The political and ideological chaos in the aftermath of the First World War had created a maelstrom of doubt and disillusionment. “Leaf by Niggle” was part of Tolkien’s lifelong attempt to overcome it — first in himself and, ultimately, in those around him — and to re-enchant the modern mind. There is nothing escapist about imaginative literature of this quality. On the contrary, “we are brought to a deeper pondering and insight into central aspects of our actual lives,” writes novelist and historian Edmund Fuller. “Our sensitivity is whetted to honor and courage and aspiration and beauty. No one thinking on these things is escaping reality.”

Here, for Tolkien, lies the deepest purpose of the creative imagination: to give others a taste of ultimate Reality, a glimpse of life with God, of life as it was meant to be.

Although Niggle’s painting is destroyed and forgotten in his village, it becomes a source of hope and joy in the country, a refreshment for weary travelers: “Niggle’s Parish,” they call it. “It is splendid for convalescence,” explains the Second Voice. “And not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains. It works wonders in some cases. I am sending more and more there. They seldom have to come back.”

Tolkien knew what it was like to live in the Land of Shadow, at the threshold of Mordor. To produce works of such radiance and dignity, to give readers an “introduction to the Mountains” — when the world had descended into a sinkhole of darkness and degradation — seems itself a mystery of grace. Whether he believed it or not, J. R. R. Tolkien, like Niggle, was not such a little man after all.

—

Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the author of the forthcoming book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. Check out his new YouTube history channel, History and the Human Story.

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Halfway through the Second World War, Oxford scholar J. R. R. Tolkien found himself inside a storm of discouragement and self-doubt. In 1937, shortly after the publication of his children’s novel, The Hobbit, he began writing a sequel. But by April 1942, the story had ground to a halt. His fantastic tale of the Ring of Power and the struggle for Middle-earth “was growing out of hand,” Tolkien recalled years later, “and I wanted to finish it, but the world was threatening.”

It is difficult to overstate how menacing the world looked to the British people in the spring of 1942. Great Britain had been fighting for its life since the fall of France in 1940. Within a week of the attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Japanese forces had stormed across the Pacific and Southeast Asia in a vast offensive that sent British and American troops staggering in defeat and surrender. Singapore fell after a week of intense fighting, with more than 130,000 British soldiers taken prisoner. By April 1942, the Japanese war in the Pacific was larger, and nearly as devastating, as that of the Nazis in Europe.

Meanwhile, Hitler’s Germany seemed destined to achieve the “living space” demanded by the führer. Germany controlled virtually all of Western and Central Europe, all the major capitals and ports. Following their invasion of the Soviet Union, German forces conquered Crimea and were pushing toward the Caucasus. Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Byelorussia were all in Nazi hands. Crimes against humanity were being committed on a scale for which the civilized world had no conceptual category.

This was the fate that awaited Great Britain, the United States, and their allies if they could not take the fight to the enemy and prevail.

Perhaps Tolkien had this geopolitical nightmare in mind when he wrote of the dire warning from Lady Galadriel, ruler of the Elves, to the Fellowship: “But this I will say to you. Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all.” By his own admission, The Lord of the Rings, with its portrayal of radical evil and existential dread, was not the sequel Tolkien had promised his publisher; it was no bedtime story for children.

“The war had arisen to darken all horizons,” Tolkien recalled. He was nearly certain that his epic fantasy would never be finished. Yet to his own amazement, and with little effort, Tolkien suddenly produced a short story. He simply woke up one morning, in April 1942, “with that odd thing virtually complete in my head.” He wrote it out in a few hours.

Poignant and soul-searching, “Leaf by Niggle” is the story of a painter who becomes distraught when it appears he will never complete his masterpiece: a great and beautiful tree. It was Tolkien’s self-administered remedy to every man’s fear: the fear of death. Not every painting, not every story, will be completed on this side of the veil. “Leaf by Niggle” is rightly considered the most autobiographical of all Tolkien’s writings.

Niggle is the painter — “not a very successful one” — and, like Tolkien the writer, he is a perfectionist and easily distracted and harried by his neighborly obligations. Niggle’s “garden,” which is not well tended, looks suspiciously like Tolkien’s literary career. “It would need some concentration, some work, hard uninterrupted work, to finish the picture, even at its present size,” Tolkien writes in “Leaf.” “But there came a tremendous crop of interruptions.”

Just so for Tolkien. He was asked to chair endless committee meetings to address wartime contingencies (e.g., what to do if Oxford were bombed by the Nazis). In addition to carrying a heavy teaching load, he had to create and oversee new courses for college cadets preparing to be sent into battle. Like other Oxford families, his took in evacuee children from London. He volunteered as an air-raid warden, performing duties that included all-night patrols and an emergency rescue effort when a British plane crashed near his house. Art was indeed imitating life.

With his painting unfinished, Niggle is suddenly forced to leave his home and everything else behind and take a train ride to an undisclosed destination — to face death and judgment. He is sent to a workhouse (purgatory), where he overhears two Voices evaluating his life. “Look at the time he wasted, not even amusing himself!” says the First Voice. “He never got ready for his journey.” The Second Voice agrees but offers an explanation: “But of course, he is only a little man. He was never meant to be anything very much; and he was never very strong.”

Here is a man at the age of 50 — a respected academic at one of the most prestigious universities in the world — taking humble stock of himself, his achievements, and his ambitions.

Although he had fought honorably in the First World War, Tolkien referred to himself as a man lacking in physical courage. He modeled his hobbits, he once admitted, on the humble English soldiers with whom he served in France and considered “far superior to myself.” Writing to one of his sons, then training as an antiaircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain, he observed: “You three boys all seem to have a decent share of courage and guts. You owe that to your mother.”

In some ways, Niggle is the man Tolkien hoped to become. Despite his failings, the artist makes a courageous and selfless decision before his departure. Although somewhat grudgingly, Niggle agrees to help a bothersome neighbor, Mr. Parish, who interrupts his work on the painting to implore him to fetch a doctor for his ailing wife. Niggle is willing to allow his creative life to effectively come to an end if it means helping another life in need. “It seems plain that this was a genuine sacrifice,” says the Second Voice. “Niggle guessed that he was throwing away his last chance with his picture.”

The Voices allow him to leave the workhouse and journey to the country, where he encounters his painting: completed, magnificent, sublime in its beauty. Yet it is more than that: It is a living Tree. “All the leaves he had ever labored at were there, as he had imagined them, rather than as he had made them.” Niggle is overcome with wonder. “He gazed at the Tree, and slowly lifted his arms and opened them wide. ‘It’s a gift!’ he said.”

His real journey, however, is about to begin. There is more work that can be done on the Tree than Niggle can complete on his own. He realizes that he needs the assistance of Mr. Parish, who has never appreciated his painting but knows a lot about earth, plants, and trees. “This place cannot be left just as my private park,” Niggle says. “I need help and advice: I ought to have got it sooner.”

This portion of the story suggests Tolkien’s decision, more than a decade earlier, to share with his Oxford friend C. S. Lewis a long narrative poem he had begun writing in 1925. It is considered the most personal story in all of Tolkien’s mythology: the love story between Beren, a mortal man, and Lúthien, an immortal Elvish princess. The tale of Beren and Lúthien would play an immensely important role in Tolkien’s legendarium of Middle-earth.

Lewis’s response must have appeared like an oasis in the desert. Tolkien had entrusted to his friend the story that he loved best of all his work, a story inspired by his relationship with his wife. It was a rare moment of vulnerability. In a letter to Tolkien, Lewis praised the poem in the highest terms, telling him, “I can honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight.” He proceeded to send the author 14 pages of critique, with “grumbles at individual lines,” as he put it. Tolkien incorporated many of Lewis’s proposed changes into his next draft.

Back in Niggle’s village, the local authorities talk disparagingly of their departed neighbor and his painting. His unfinished canvas, in fact, is being used to patch a neighbor’s roof. “I think he was a silly little man,” says Councillor Tompkins. “Worthless, in fact; no use to Society at all.” Painting has its usefulness, Tompkins adds, but only for those “bold young men” with new ideas and new methods. “None for this old-fashioned stuff. Private day-dreaming.”

The carping characters in the story can be read as embodiments of the utilitarian outlook of the age. Yet Tolkien also battled the “bold young men” of the Modernist movement in literature who came into vogue after the cataclysm of the First World War. Concepts such as courage, virtue, noble sacrifice, and faith seemed to vanish into the killing fields on the Western Front. From James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the old beliefs about mankind’s dignity and high moral purpose were discarded as obsolete. As literary critic Roger Sale summarized the Modernist mood, the writer who imagined a heroic destiny for his characters was considered “deceived and dangerous.”

It was precisely this outlook that Tolkien was rebelling against in his story about the war for Middle-earth. “It is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences,” he once explained, “without actual offensive action.” The Lord of the Rings was his great salvo in the struggle against the moral cynicism that had infected his generation. Like his friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien believed that imaginative literature could help reclaim the older concepts of sin, grace, and redemption for the modern mind.

“Leaf by Niggle” achieves this aim in its evocative, almost mythic conclusion. Niggle next encounters Mr. Parish, who also has arrived in the country. In the village, Parish dismissed Niggle’s painting as “Niggle’s Nonsense,” while Niggle called him “Old Earth-grubber.” But now the two men work together on a landscaping project. As they live and labor together in the country, Niggle thinks of “wonderful new flowers and plants,” and Parish knows “exactly how to set them and where they would do best.” Even more remarkable, as Niggle gazes at the Great Tree he realizes that its most exquisite and beautiful leaves — “the most perfect examples of the Niggle style” — have been created “in collaboration with Mr. Parish: there was no other way of putting it.”

Tolkien is taking to task the self-absorption of the modern artist. Creative work must not be attempted at the expense of everyday relationships: Our obligations to others do not cease when we enter the studio. Tolkien had learned how unexpected friendships can open up the artist to new sources of beauty and grace.

Writing “Leaf by Niggle” was an act of defiance: In the spring of 1942, the forces of dehumanization appeared to be on the winning side of history. For a time, it really seemed that life was absurd, that the disintegration of civilization itself was at hand. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. For Tolkien, this represented one of the purposes of imaginative literature: to help us combat the darkness. Literature of this kind could remind us that the material world, with its temporal aims, is not the sum and substance of our lives. There are such things as beauty and goodness and truth.

There is a noble purpose to the human story, Tolkien believed, and we need eyes of faith to see it. Niggle begins to see it: beautiful mountains beyond the Great Tree, which stir a sense of longing. “They did not seem to belong to the picture, or only as a link to something else, a glimpse through the trees of something different, a further stage: another picture.”

The political and ideological chaos in the aftermath of the First World War had created a maelstrom of doubt and disillusionment. “Leaf by Niggle” was part of Tolkien’s lifelong attempt to overcome it — first in himself and, ultimately, in those around him — and to re-enchant the modern mind. There is nothing escapist about imaginative literature of this quality. On the contrary, “we are brought to a deeper pondering and insight into central aspects of our actual lives,” writes novelist and historian Edmund Fuller. “Our sensitivity is whetted to honor and courage and aspiration and beauty. No one thinking on these things is escaping reality.”

Here, for Tolkien, lies the deepest purpose of the creative imagination: to give others a taste of ultimate Reality, a glimpse of life with God, of life as it was meant to be.

Although Niggle’s painting is destroyed and forgotten in his village, it becomes a source of hope and joy in the country, a refreshment for weary travelers: “Niggle’s Parish,” they call it. “It is splendid for convalescence,” explains the Second Voice. “And not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains. It works wonders in some cases. I am sending more and more there. They seldom have to come back.”

Tolkien knew what it was like to live in the Land of Shadow, at the threshold of Mordor. To produce works of such radiance and dignity, to give readers an “introduction to the Mountains” — when the world had descended into a sinkhole of darkness and degradation — seems itself a mystery of grace. Whether he believed it or not, J. R. R. Tolkien, like Niggle, was not such a little man after all.

—

Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the author of the forthcoming book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. Check out his new YouTube history channel, History and the Human Story.

Barely 180 days into “the war to end all wars,” the European states were deadlocked in a conflict more destructive and dehumanizing than any previous war in the history of the world.

The death toll was already staggering. From August 1914, when hostilities broke out, until December, most of the British Expeditionary Force in France, about 160,000 men, had been wiped out. The French and German armies sustained combat losses of well over 600,000 between them. Nearly 200,000 of Austria’s best troops were dead, another half million wounded. As Christmas approached, Pope Benedict XV appealed for a temporary truce over the Christian holiday. It was soundly rejected by the warring governments and their generals.

Yet the soldiers in the trenches were moved by a force no one anticipated: an outbreak of humanity that swept through the lines across the Western Front.

Armies on both sides put down their weapons, sang Christmas hymns, and came out of their trenches to share food, drinks, and tobacco. No one ordered the now famous “Christmas truce” of 1914: It arose spontaneously, among officers as well as ordinary soldiers, along hundreds of miles of fortified defenses. It was as if some voice deep inside the human soul — long repressed — had demanded, for a moment, to be heard.

“You could never imagine such a thing,” wrote British officer Wilbert Spencer. “Both sides came out and met in the middle, shook hands, wished each other the compliments of the season and had a chat.”

Josef Wenzl, a soldier in the German infantry, wrote to his parents: “Between the trenches, the hatred and bitter opponents meet around the Christmas tree and sing Christmas carols. This once in a lifetime vision I will not forget.”

Within 24 hours the fighting resumed. Before the war was over, in November 1918, nearly 10 million young men would perish amid the trenches, the mortars, the barbed wire, and the poison gas. Whatever spirit had moved the combatants to acknowledge the Prince of Peace was dragged back into an abyss of industrialized slaughter and desolation.

Much of the courage, confidence, and decency of the West seemed to vanish with it. “Injuries were wrought to the structure of human society which a century will not efface,” wrote Winston Churchill in The World Crisis, “and which may conceivably prove fatal to the present civilization.”

The most poignant theme that appears in the letters and diaries of the young people caught up in the conflict is the sense of loss: not only the grief over friends and intimates who died in battle but also the loss of time. Richard Aldington, who fought on the Western Front, captured the mood through the character of Winterbourne in his novel, Death of a Hero. “These lost War months, now mounting to years, were a knock-out blow from which he could not possibly recover.”

J. R. R. Tolkien, who served as a second lieutenant in the BEF in France and fought at the Somme, battled the same emotional headwinds. “I was pitched into it just when I had things to learn and stuff to write,” he recalled, “but never picked it all up again.” Tolkien’s longtime friend, C. S. Lewis, was forced to interrupt his studies at Oxford University and train as a cadet before being sent to France. “Everyone you met took it for granted that the whole thing was an odious necessity, a ghastly interruption of rational life.”

The suspension of rational life, however, had just begun. Two profoundly irrational forces took flight in the ashes of the First World War. The Modernist movement in literature was a pre-war phenomenon, but the disillusionment in the aftermath of the killing fields of 1914–1918 shattered all conventional restraints.

Whatever form Modernism took — in art, theater, film, or literature — the emphasis was on exposing the chaos behind the façade of order, convention, and rationality. The effect on English literature was profound. In 1922, the appearance of James Joyce’s Ulysses — in which the concepts of human agency and morality dissolve into subjectivity — was the literary equivalent of the splitting of the atom. T. S. Eliot’s great modern poem, The Waste Land (1922), with its “heap of broken images,” signaled that the old certainties and virtues were obsolete. As one literary critic described it, a generation of authors and artists had effectively “checked themselves into a madhouse.”

This was the temper of the literary establishment as Tolkien and Lewis were launching their academic careers at Oxford in the 1920s. They both thought of themselves chiefly as poets, yet they were repulsed by the Modernist trends in literature. “They thought Eliot was infected with chaos, rather than fortifying others against it,” explains Oxford scholar Michael Ward. “Yes, many images were broken, and rightly so. But you couldn’t just live in an iconoclastic graveyard.”

In their own distinctive ways, Tolkien and Lewis launched a counterattack — a literary campaign to restore the concepts of good and evil, of the heroic ideal, yet reinvented for the modern mind. In this task they both drew inspiration from an older tradition: the classical and medieval literature, framed by the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, that had shaped and nourished Western civilization.

They faced a truly daunting challenge. The dehumanization of the individual, a process begun in the mud and blood of the Western Front, became a distinguishing feature of early 20th-century man. The artist “confronted the world without any accepted understanding of human life,” observed journalist Walter Lippmann in A Preface to Morals (1929). “In such a world the artist can work only by his recollection of an older universe in which he has ceased to believe. Of all men, the artist needs God most.”

The irrationality in modern literature, untethered from traditional religion, had a counterpart in politics. The Great War seemed to delegitimize the entire liberal democratic project, leaving a cultural vacuum. New ideologies, as virulent as the influenza epidemic, rushed to fill it. Like the literati, the leaders of these political projects, in the words of philosopher Russell Kirk, were “enemies of the permanent things.”

The 1917 Marxist revolution in Russia, waged in the name of bread, peace, and the proletariat, produced a murderous civil war, mass starvation, and political dictatorship. At its materialist core was a deep hatred of religion, “the opiate of the masses.” In Italy, Benito Mussolini, who swept his Fascist Party into power in 1922, quickly achieved a godlike status among the Italian population. “The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing,” Mussolini declared. “Outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.” In Germany, the embittered loser in the First World War, copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf first appeared in bookstores in 1925. In less than a decade, Hitler and his Nazi Party seized complete control of the German state. The militarization of Germany and the assault on the Jews as “the bacillus” of humanity began in earnest. Meanwhile, in Japan, Emperor Hirohito, revered as “a living god,” had assumed absolute command of the military and launched a brutal war of aggression against China.

Thus, by the 1930s, the most powerful states in Europe and Asia had enshrined Frederick Nietzche’s doctrine of the Will to Power. Each drew strength from their hatreds. Each imposed upon their populations utopian visions of a new world order. As political religions, they demanded the unquestioning devotion of their citizens, regarded as utensils of the State. The flight from reason was complete.

It was in the years leading up to the Second World War that Tolkien and Lewis sought each other out in friendship. Together with other like-minded authors and friends, the Inklings, they made Oxford an outpost of resistance against the forces of disintegration that threatened to overwhelm them.

The years of 1939–1945 — when Great Britain and the West faced an existential crisis — utterly transformed their lives and literary imagination. Their most beloved works — including The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ransom Trilogy, Mere Christianity, and The Chronicles of Narnia — were conceived in the shadow of this conflict. Each of their stories exalt the value of individual courage and sacrifice for a noble cause, regardless of the costs.

“My entire philosophy of history,” Lewis once told Tolkien, “hangs upon a single sentence of your own.” What sentence? It is from a passage in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf the Wizard explains to Frodo Baggins something of the ancient struggle for Middle-earth. “There was sorrow then, too, and gathering dark, but great valor, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.”

Here is an approach to history — to the terrible story of the 20th century — that invites reflection. The lives of Tolkien and Lewis were embedded in this history. They possessed a deep awareness of life’s sorrows. Yet their experience of suffering — and the temptation to cynicism — was held in check by something stronger: gratitude. Their decision to resist the shadow of evil that threatened their world was fortified by their love of “the old books.”

Like the soldiers during the Christmas truce in 1914, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis unexpectedly unleashed a force of goodness and grace in one of the blackest moments in world history. In this, they used their imagination to reclaim — for their generation and for ours — those deeds of courage and sacrifice and love that have always kept a lamp burning, even in the deepest darkness.

—

Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the author of the forthcoming book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. Check out his new YouTube history channel, History and the Human Story.

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Barely 180 days into “the war to end all wars,” the European states were deadlocked in a conflict more destructive and dehumanizing than any previous war in the history of the world.

The death toll was already staggering. From August 1914, when hostilities broke out, until December, most of the British Expeditionary Force in France, about 160,000 men, had been wiped out. The French and German armies sustained combat losses of well over 600,000 between them. Nearly 200,000 of Austria’s best troops were dead, another half million wounded. As Christmas approached, Pope Benedict XV appealed for a temporary truce over the Christian holiday. It was soundly rejected by the warring governments and their generals.

Yet the soldiers in the trenches were moved by a force no one anticipated: an outbreak of humanity that swept through the lines across the Western Front.

Armies on both sides put down their weapons, sang Christmas hymns, and came out of their trenches to share food, drinks, and tobacco. No one ordered the now famous “Christmas truce” of 1914: It arose spontaneously, among officers as well as ordinary soldiers, along hundreds of miles of fortified defenses. It was as if some voice deep inside the human soul — long repressed — had demanded, for a moment, to be heard.

“You could never imagine such a thing,” wrote British officer Wilbert Spencer. “Both sides came out and met in the middle, shook hands, wished each other the compliments of the season and had a chat.”

Josef Wenzl, a soldier in the German infantry, wrote to his parents: “Between the trenches, the hatred and bitter opponents meet around the Christmas tree and sing Christmas carols. This once in a lifetime vision I will not forget.”

Within 24 hours the fighting resumed. Before the war was over, in November 1918, nearly 10 million young men would perish amid the trenches, the mortars, the barbed wire, and the poison gas. Whatever spirit had moved the combatants to acknowledge the Prince of Peace was dragged back into an abyss of industrialized slaughter and desolation.

Much of the courage, confidence, and decency of the West seemed to vanish with it. “Injuries were wrought to the structure of human society which a century will not efface,” wrote Winston Churchill in The World Crisis, “and which may conceivably prove fatal to the present civilization.”

The most poignant theme that appears in the letters and diaries of the young people caught up in the conflict is the sense of loss: not only the grief over friends and intimates who died in battle but also the loss of time. Richard Aldington, who fought on the Western Front, captured the mood through the character of Winterbourne in his novel, Death of a Hero. “These lost War months, now mounting to years, were a knock-out blow from which he could not possibly recover.”

J. R. R. Tolkien, who served as a second lieutenant in the BEF in France and fought at the Somme, battled the same emotional headwinds. “I was pitched into it just when I had things to learn and stuff to write,” he recalled, “but never picked it all up again.” Tolkien’s longtime friend, C. S. Lewis, was forced to interrupt his studies at Oxford University and train as a cadet before being sent to France. “Everyone you met took it for granted that the whole thing was an odious necessity, a ghastly interruption of rational life.”

The suspension of rational life, however, had just begun. Two profoundly irrational forces took flight in the ashes of the First World War. The Modernist movement in literature was a pre-war phenomenon, but the disillusionment in the aftermath of the killing fields of 1914–1918 shattered all conventional restraints.

Whatever form Modernism took — in art, theater, film, or literature — the emphasis was on exposing the chaos behind the façade of order, convention, and rationality. The effect on English literature was profound. In 1922, the appearance of James Joyce’s Ulysses — in which the concepts of human agency and morality dissolve into subjectivity — was the literary equivalent of the splitting of the atom. T. S. Eliot’s great modern poem, The Waste Land (1922), with its “heap of broken images,” signaled that the old certainties and virtues were obsolete. As one literary critic described it, a generation of authors and artists had effectively “checked themselves into a madhouse.”

This was the temper of the literary establishment as Tolkien and Lewis were launching their academic careers at Oxford in the 1920s. They both thought of themselves chiefly as poets, yet they were repulsed by the Modernist trends in literature. “They thought Eliot was infected with chaos, rather than fortifying others against it,” explains Oxford scholar Michael Ward. “Yes, many images were broken, and rightly so. But you couldn’t just live in an iconoclastic graveyard.”

In their own distinctive ways, Tolkien and Lewis launched a counterattack — a literary campaign to restore the concepts of good and evil, of the heroic ideal, yet reinvented for the modern mind. In this task they both drew inspiration from an older tradition: the classical and medieval literature, framed by the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, that had shaped and nourished Western civilization.

They faced a truly daunting challenge. The dehumanization of the individual, a process begun in the mud and blood of the Western Front, became a distinguishing feature of early 20th-century man. The artist “confronted the world without any accepted understanding of human life,” observed journalist Walter Lippmann in A Preface to Morals (1929). “In such a world the artist can work only by his recollection of an older universe in which he has ceased to believe. Of all men, the artist needs God most.”

The irrationality in modern literature, untethered from traditional religion, had a counterpart in politics. The Great War seemed to delegitimize the entire liberal democratic project, leaving a cultural vacuum. New ideologies, as virulent as the influenza epidemic, rushed to fill it. Like the literati, the leaders of these political projects, in the words of philosopher Russell Kirk, were “enemies of the permanent things.”

The 1917 Marxist revolution in Russia, waged in the name of bread, peace, and the proletariat, produced a murderous civil war, mass starvation, and political dictatorship. At its materialist core was a deep hatred of religion, “the opiate of the masses.” In Italy, Benito Mussolini, who swept his Fascist Party into power in 1922, quickly achieved a godlike status among the Italian population. “The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing,” Mussolini declared. “Outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.” In Germany, the embittered loser in the First World War, copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf first appeared in bookstores in 1925. In less than a decade, Hitler and his Nazi Party seized complete control of the German state. The militarization of Germany and the assault on the Jews as “the bacillus” of humanity began in earnest. Meanwhile, in Japan, Emperor Hirohito, revered as “a living god,” had assumed absolute command of the military and launched a brutal war of aggression against China.

Thus, by the 1930s, the most powerful states in Europe and Asia had enshrined Frederick Nietzche’s doctrine of the Will to Power. Each drew strength from their hatreds. Each imposed upon their populations utopian visions of a new world order. As political religions, they demanded the unquestioning devotion of their citizens, regarded as utensils of the State. The flight from reason was complete.

It was in the years leading up to the Second World War that Tolkien and Lewis sought each other out in friendship. Together with other like-minded authors and friends, the Inklings, they made Oxford an outpost of resistance against the forces of disintegration that threatened to overwhelm them.

The years of 1939–1945 — when Great Britain and the West faced an existential crisis — utterly transformed their lives and literary imagination. Their most beloved works — including The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ransom Trilogy, Mere Christianity, and The Chronicles of Narnia — were conceived in the shadow of this conflict. Each of their stories exalt the value of individual courage and sacrifice for a noble cause, regardless of the costs.

“My entire philosophy of history,” Lewis once told Tolkien, “hangs upon a single sentence of your own.” What sentence? It is from a passage in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf the Wizard explains to Frodo Baggins something of the ancient struggle for Middle-earth. “There was sorrow then, too, and gathering dark, but great valor, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.”

Here is an approach to history — to the terrible story of the 20th century — that invites reflection. The lives of Tolkien and Lewis were embedded in this history. They possessed a deep awareness of life’s sorrows. Yet their experience of suffering — and the temptation to cynicism — was held in check by something stronger: gratitude. Their decision to resist the shadow of evil that threatened their world was fortified by their love of “the old books.”

Like the soldiers during the Christmas truce in 1914, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis unexpectedly unleashed a force of goodness and grace in one of the blackest moments in world history. In this, they used their imagination to reclaim — for their generation and for ours — those deeds of courage and sacrifice and love that have always kept a lamp burning, even in the deepest darkness.

—

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

VENICE, Italy — When Gasparo Contarini surveyed the political chaos of Italy’s city-states in the 1500s, he grew somber: “It is evident that almost every city in Italy, whether it is governed by a popular order or even by one of its own patrician citizens, eventually falls into the tyranny of some faction of its citizens.” Nevertheless, for Contarini, a lawmaker and diplomat, his beloved Republic of Venice offered an alternative: a dazzling and enduring model of self-government. “For this reason,” he said, “our ancestors decided that they had to try with all their might to prevent their Republic, splendidly organized and governed by excellent laws, from being afflicted by some such monster.”

The monster of political factions is stalking the American republic, as the Founders feared. Writing in The Federalist Papers, James Madison regarded the threat of factions — what we call tribalism — as “the mortal disease” of self-government.

Not since the era of the Vietnam War and the violence following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has the nation been so deeply and angrily divided. Never have Americans registered such levels of distrust — and disgust — with the core institutions shaping public life. “Trust in all of these institutions, all the pillars that hold up the edifice of American democracy and society, is crumbling,” writes Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker in American Breakdown. The collapse of trust, Baker observes, is fueling social unrest and political violence.

It was precisely this outcome that the Founders sought to avoid. Why do most forms of government collapse into social chaos, violence, and tyranny — and why do others endure? These were the questions that occupied the Founders in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

As Alexander Hamilton neatly framed the issue in The Federalist Papers, the American people were uniquely positioned “to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Answering that question became urgent not only because of the failings of the Articles of Confederation. In 1776, Edward Gibbon began releasing volumes of his magisterial work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The fearsome story of Rome was near the forefront of their minds.

For more than a thousand years, throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice distinguished itself as a durable and prosperous republic in an era of monarchs, despots, powerful families, and political assassinations.

No American political thinker studied the history of republics more carefully than John Adams. In Thoughts on Government, Adams notes the longevity of the Venetian republic, “longer than any other that is known in history.” He was characteristically frank about its difficult journey toward republicanism, noting that factions arose early in its development. “For a long course of years after this,” he wrote, “the Venetian history discloses scenes of tyranny, revolt, cruelty, and assassination, which excite horror.”

They avoided the kind of moral cynicism that Machiavelli later endorsed. But they confronted, with sober realism, an ancient problem: what Friedrich Nietzsche would call the Will to Power. They were pragmatists. They took stock of their difficulties and created different and distinct sources of political authority: the “mixed” constitution described by Aristotle.

Executive power resided in a single individual, the Doge, who functioned like a monarch and symbolically represented the state — most laws were published under his name. His massive palace, the Palazzo Ducale, is a breathtaking display of opulence put toward a political purpose. The courtyards, corridors, and council halls (not to mention its hidden chambers) made it the physical powerhouse of government. Nevertheless, the Doge never became an absolute monarch — or he was removed or assassinated for trying.

“There has been an uncommon solicitude all along to restrain his power,” observed Adams. Indeed, the Doge was constrained by the city’s aristocratic class, exclusively men of noble birth and of education and virtue, presumably. These patricians constituted the Senate, which included a collegio, a kind of steering committee that helped to set the legislative agenda. Senators openly debated all the major issues facing the republic, with strict rules of debate: no personal insults against political opponents. “The whole business of governing the Republic,” wrote Contarini, “belongs to the Senate.”

Yet the Doge and the Senate were also held in check by the Great Council, the sovereign assembly of the Republic. It was the Great Council that elected the Doge and members of the Senate and approved legislation. It was a republican body in that its members — open to all patricians over the age of 25 — had equal voting power. They voted in silence, a procedure described by foreign visitors as “a spectacle of majesty.”

The Great Council theoretically represented the vast majority of Venetians, the popolo, who could not directly participate in political life. Nevertheless, membership in the Council gradually expanded, and by 1300 A.D. it had more than 1,100 members — or about 1 percent of the Venetian population (compared to the U.S. government with a representation of .0002 percent of the population). Thus, the Great Council emerged as the most representative political body in the world.

“The fact is that the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity,” Aristotle wrote in Politics. “Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold.” The Venetians embraced this sober view of human nature. They designed a government whose constituent parts deliberated and determined all domestic and foreign policy issues. Yet none had absolute power, but rather were held in check by the other.

No wonder contemporary observers praised Venice for surpassing Athens, Sparta, and Rome as a model of a just and stable government. As Contarini expressed it in The Republic of Venice: “With this balance of government, our Republic has been able to achieve what none of the ancient ones did, however illustrious they were.” Adams agreed with that assessment: “Great care is taken in Venice to balance one court against another and render their powers mutual checks to each other.” As Harvard historian James Hankins summarizes it: “Venice became the prime example of the capacity of modern societies to surpass the ancients in political wisdom.”

In the stifling summer of 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention needed all the political wisdom they could get. The 13 newly independent states already were at odds over issues — including slavery, the nature of the presidency, and the power of the federal government — that threatened to extinguish their experiment in democratic freedom before it began.

They relied not only on the insights of the ancients, or the Italian city-states such as Venice. The Founders were determined to design a Constitution that enshrined the rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence: a government based upon a belief in universal, unalienable, and natural rights. And in this, like no other political revolution in history, they grounded these rights in the concept of a just and loving God. “God who gave us life gave us liberty,” Thomas Jefferson declared. “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”

It was the Doge who insisted that the body of Mark the Evangelist, smuggled into the city in 828 A.D., be placed in a chapel adjacent to his palace. Mark’s chapel became a great basilica, the Basilica di San Marco, as grand a church as any in Christendom. Its proximity to the seat of political power sent an unmistakable message: The concept of the republic — a government antithetical to despots and tyrants — had the moral authority of the Catholic Church behind it.

“We pray God the Almighty to preserve it safely for a long time,” wrote Contarini. “For, if one can believe that anything good for men derives from God the Immortal, it must be considered more certain that this has happened to the city of Venice by divine intervention.”

In the United States, however, many Americans have lost all respect for their governmental institutions. The presidency, Congress, the administrative state, and the intelligence community: Their moral authority has been decimated by their abuse of power, deception, partisanship, and contempt for the common good.

Meanwhile, like no other period in its history, the United States is putting Jefferson’s political maxim to the test. The erosion of belief in God — and in the Moral Law that originates in God — is surely one of the sources of the divisions and hatreds that threaten to tear the republic apart.

The moment is ripe to recall the vigilance of the Venetians to safeguard their political unity. “In their view,” Contarini explained, “they should fear nothing so much as an internal enemy and hostility between citizens.”

—

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.