When I attended college in the early 1990’s, the state school I attended required every student to take two semesters of “Western Civilization.” This had been a requirement for generations of students, founded on the belief that a comprehensive education must include an understanding—and appreciation—of the enormous contributions of European culture to the world. However, during my four years in attendance I noticed a shift away from this emphasis and toward a more “multicultural” outlook. Soon after I graduated, the university dropped the Western Civ requirement. The idea that one must understand the Greek, Roman, and Israelite foundations of our culture was seen as passé; what really mattered now was praising every other culture on earth.

But the anti-Western Culture forces weren’t content with ignoring our cultural foundations; soon they began to attack it with vigor. So much so that it’s now considered offensive in many quarters to say anything positive about Western Civilization or the history of Europe. Our elites in education and media insist that our history is one of oppression, racism, and evil, and they’ve long been engaged in a propaganda campaign to brainwash our youth to embrace this outlook.

This is the environment in which newly-founded publisher Creed & Culture decided to release its first book, The Mighty Continent by Walter A. McDougall, a Professor of International Relations and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian. This book gives an overview of European history that challenges the modern contempt for the continent common among academics today. He doesn’t apologize for the greatness of Europe, yet he’s  honest about its faults, particularly its fall from grace during the 20th century and into the 21st. 

It’s impossible to fully cover the swath of European history in just 400 pages, but McDougall does an admirable job relating the most important and influential figures, events, and trends that shaped that history. After finishing the book, the reader has a basic understanding of how Europe became mighty…and how it fell from a lofty pillar to become a shell of its former greatness. 

Specifically, McDougall uses the ancient Greek concepts of techne and themis to craft his narrative. As he writes,

Techne refer[s] to those arts of survival and manipulation of nature which endow societies with power—power to manipulate the natural world and each other…Themis[is] the realm of justice, philosophy, religion, and art—in other words, cult and culture. The things of themis address the mysteries and problems common to all men and women in all times and places—such as how to love and be loved, how to cultivate virtues, how to cope with suffering and injustice, and how to escape the boredom of poverty and the boredom of riches. In sum, how to live a good life. (p. 3)

Using this techne/themis framework, McDougall argues that the downfall of Europe in the 20th century was essentially due to an imbalance between the two forces. Both forces are natural in human society, but problems arise when one becomes exalted too highly over the other. In Europe’s case, techne—the quest for power over the natural world—overwhelmed its themis—the quest to live a “good life.” This is particularly demonstrated in the insanity of World War I, in which the countries of Europe for no rational reason used their power over nature to destroy each other. If Europe is ever to return to its former glory, it must heed McDougall’s advice to bring back an appreciation of themis and moderate its obsession with techne. 

It’s impossible to fully cover the swath of European history in just 400 pages, but McDougall does an admirable job.Tweet This

While The Mighty Continent is a welcome and worthy contribution in the important work of restoring Western Civilization, it is not without its flaws. First, it has no footnotes, nor does it even give references to direct quotations found in the text. For example, at one point McDougall quotes a long testimony from an SS officer during the Nuremberg trials (p. 386), but he doesn’t say who the SS officer was, nor does he provide any reference to the quotation. So if a reader wants to explore the topics and themes of this book in more deeply, he is on his own. Perhaps this was a decision of the publisher to make the book less academic and therefore more accessible to the average reader, but even a bibliography of recommended books at the end would have been helpful.

A more serious flaw was the fact that the book contains a few serious errors—errors that I was frankly shocked a serious historian like McDougall would fall into. For example, in the chapter on the Counter Reformation (which McDougall rightly just calls the “Catholic Reformation”), he writes about the Council of Trent,

Above all, the Council of Trent endorsed justification by faith, defined faith and works as two sides of the same coin, and declared that all doctrine must rest on the authority of Scripture as well as tradition. (p. 83)

The statement that the Council of Trent “endorsed justification by faith” is the exact opposite of what occurred at the council; in reality of course it condemned that Protestant heresy. Perhaps McDougall was trying to use shorthand to explain the complicated teachings of Trent, but by wording it like this, he misleads his readers. There were a few other mistakes like this in the book, but fortunately, they were few and far between and don’t eliminate its value.

One final note about the book that can’t be overlooked: its physical design. Creed & Culture is presenting itself as a serious publisher publishing important books, and it rightly recognizes that a book’s design is vital toward achieving that goal. The Mighty Continent comes in cloth-bound hardcover, and just holding it makes you take it seriously. In an age of ebooks and cheaply-printed paperbacks, it’s nice to see a publisher realize that our physical interaction with a book matters. A reader is more likely to fully engage with a book that the publishers treated with such respect in designing it, so I highly commend Creed & Culture for swimming against the publishing trend in this regard.

All Catholics should lament the fall from grace that Europe has experienced in the last century, for Catholicism is deeply intertwined with Europe’s history. We must hope and pray that Europe will again one day be a “mighty continent,” and McDougall’s book is a helpful step towards understanding what is needed to recover that grand heritage.