The seven pillars of Western Civilization are the edifying edifices which tower over the landscape of the centuries as a fortress of faith and a beacon of reason. Islam has served throughout the centuries as an outside force which has repeatedly laid siege to the fortress, seeking its overthrow.
Several weeks ago I wrote an essay for this illustrious journal entitled “The Seven Pillars of Western Civilization” in which I listed the seven seminal tomes which form the textual foundation of the civilization of the West. These are The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Bible, The City of God, the Summa Theologica and The Divine Comedy. Collectively, these texts epitomize why Western Civilization is founded on the three civilizations of Athens, Jerusalem and Rome.
This is not the place to offer explanations with respect to the rationale for why these seven texts were selected instead of other contenders. Those interested in understanding the reason for the selection are invited to read the original essay.
What surprised me was that several readers of the original essay admonished me for failing to include the Qur’an as one of the seven pillars of wisdom on which Western Civilization is built. This seems to beg the obvious question which I thought my essay had answered implicitly. What exactly is Western Civilization? If it is anything at all, it must be something rooted in a cohesive and coherent set of common values, which are themselves the fruit of cohesive and coherent theological and philosophical principles. In brief and in sum, Western Civilization in its fullness and fruitfulness is a synonym for Christendom. It is the consummation of the mythological and philosophical musings of the Greeks and the fulfilment of the theological covenant of the Jews in the Person of Jesus Christ as made manifest in the Church He founded throughout the centuries since His Incarnation. The quest and questions of Athens and Jerusalem are fulfilled and answered in the Gospel as enunciated by the One who proclaims Himself to be the Way, the Truth and the Life. Christ incarnates the transcendental trinity of the Good, the True and the Beautiful in who He is.
If this is so, the Qur’an is not one of the foundational pillars of wisdom on which the West is built but is a subversive text which undermines those very foundations. If Christ is who He says He is, Muhammed is a false prophet. This is as logically inescapable as it is theologically obvious.
As for the fruit of the Qur’an’s influence with respect to Western Civilization, it has been bitter indeed. Islam as a military force overthrew the emerging Christian civilization in the Middle East and north Africa and would eventually overthrow Constantinople, the capital city of eastern Christendom. At the height of its military incursions into the heart of Christian Europe, it reached as far north as Tours, in northern France. Had Islam prevailed, the Christian Bible and Augustine’s City of God would have been smothered by censorship and the sands of time, which is to say, in modern parlance, that they would have been “cancelled”. There would have been no Summa Theologica of Aquinas and no Divine Comedy of Dante. There would have been no heritage of Western art, no Renaissance, no Romanesque or Gothic architecture, no Shakespeare. These icons of civilization would have been cancelled in a debauch of iconoclasm.
Irrespective of whether we accept or deny the truth claims of the Qur’an, the irrefutable fact is that civilization as we know it in the West would never have existed if Muhammed had prevailed over Christ.
The seven pillars of Western Civilization are the edifying edifices which tower over the landscape of the centuries as a fortress of faith and a beacon of reason. Islam has served throughout the centuries as an outside force which has repeatedly laid siege to the fortress, seeking its overthrow.
There are few better evocations of the real and irreconcilable differences between Christendom and Islam than Chesterton’s poem, “Lepanto”, which tells of the victory of the Christian fleet over an Islamic armada in 1571. If the Christians had been defeated in that naval battle, it is possible that Rome would have fallen as Constantinople had fallen and that Saint Peter’s basilica would have been made into a mosque as Hagia Sophia in Constantinople had been made into a mosque. It is little wonder that the holy and courageous pope, Saint Pius V, should have declared that the date of the battle, October 7, should be celebrated thereafter as the Feast of Our Lady of Victory.
Chesterton ends his poem with a vision of Miguel de Cervantes who had fought and been wounded during the battle. Had he been killed, his classic work of literature, Don Quixote, the first real novel, would never have been written. Perhaps, had he fallen or had the Christians lost the battle, the novel itself as a literary form might never have existed. With this sobering thought in mind, I will end my own defence of Western Civilization with the words that Chesterton used to end his poem:
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade….
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)
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The featured image is “Les chefs de la croisade traversant le Bosphore” (19th century) and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Although I’d agree Islam isn’t part of the West some of this feels a bit too hostile to Islam or too exaggerating of Islamic strength.
Islam did have some advantages over the paganism many Arabs then practiced even if inferior to Christianity. It also eased the spread of knowledge from the East to the West. The West did clearly learn some things, with regard to math and inventions, from Hindu and pre-Mongol-invasion Chinese civilization. It is a subversion, but it shares enough with us it’s not totally worthless.
Also I’m skeptical that the Turks could have gone as far as all that. Islam’s power is sometimes a tad overrated. And by the time of even Charles Martel there were some reasonably strong fractures within Islam. Christians remained important in Assyria for centuries with a Hunayn Ibn Ishaq, granted Nestorian, being an important optician and translator of Greek works who rebuffed efforts to convert him to Islam.
If anything, contemporary coverage of Islam’s tenets and history in battle with revealed truth is too tepid especially in secular student texts. At the same time, authentically inspired reason including Christian influences and events (i.e. The Crusades and Inquisition) are negatively distorted or exaggerated! Moreover Islam’s contributions in science, math, technology and commerce—while commendable—are often touted to the exclusion of Islam’s historic persecution of nonbelievers. They still strive to destroy the classical West which champions in the advancement of civilization in all its Truth and one’s final destiny.
Well yes in many academic or progressives circles the negatives of Islamic history are downplayed, but I’m on a conservative site right now and I think there’s some tendency in conservative circles to go in the opposite direction. (And both may make Islam more unified than it really is.)
Well, what does that have to do with Islam’s influence on Christendom? There was none.
Our weakness is their strength. The modern atheistic culture will bend to strength and will not question anything foreign in order not to appear “racist”.
Thanks for your honesty, Joseph
Are you trying to tell us that when a U.S. President assures us that Islam is a “religion of peace” that he might be off the mark a bit?
And lest we forget, the truth of the First Crusade was that Christianity was saved from oblivion by many princes who responded to the call. Not to make light of the fact that adherents to the faith throughout the years fell prey to the sword before God had to interrupt.
It’s worth mentioning that it was Islamic scholars who were largely responsible for transmitting the philosophy of Aristotle to Western Europe, which was a key ingredient in the Scholastic thought of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas himself acknowledged the contributions of Averroes and Avicenna. Thus, if it weren’t for the Muslims, one of the great bodies of Catholic thought would not exist. God sometimes works in mysterious ways.
But what does that have to do with the Koran’s influence on western civilization? The writings of the Koran did not influence any western writer.
Mr. Pearce’s essay was titled “Islam and Western Civilization.”
Without Islam, inspired by the Quran, there might not be a Western civilization as we know it.
Medieval Europe entered a period appropriately called the dark ages. Had it not been for the golden age of Islam and its contributions in art, architecture, medicine, agriculture, music, language, education, law, and technology – the Renaissance itself may never have occured. The Islamic world preserved and enhanced much of what had been lost in the West.
From the 11th to the 13th century, Europe re-discovered the classics and absorbed new knowledge from the Islamic civilization in the fields as science, philosophy, theology, literature, and aesthetics.
I too was taken aback when I saw comments that you had skipped over the Koran. The Koran has had zero influence on western civilization. Other than perhaps Thomas Aquinas, I doubt very few major figures have even read it. And even Thomas Aquinas repudiates Islam.
Two comments, here, about the Qur’an and about Dante’s Divine Comedy:
FIRST, the core distinction of the West is its rootedness in Christ, in addition (!) to the Classics (regardless of the myopic charter of the European Union!).
In radical contrast, and as a natural religion, the Qur’an and Islam remain closed to the singular event of the Incarnation…Even Christ’s reference to the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete and the Comforter (Jn 14:15-17, 14:26, and 16:12, 13, 17), is understood by Muslim scholars as referring, instead (!), to the coming of the “final prophet” Muhammad. The Greek term “Paraclete” (Holy Spirit) is substituted by Muslim commentators with their presumably correct “Periclyte,” the Greek form of Ahmad or Muhammad. (Source: see especially Abdullah Yusuf Ali, “The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary;” Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1983/1938, Qur’an surah 7:157, fn. 1127 on p. 388).
The symmetrical comparison between Christianity and Islam is NOT the between the two scriptures, the Bible and the Qur’an, but rather (!) between Christ (“the Word made flesh”) and the Qur’an (as claimed “the word made book”).
SECOND, Guillaume, the scholar who first translated the biography of Muhammad into English (very late, in 1955; 800 pages of fine print), refers to a discovery in Madrid of a love poem by Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), a predecessor of Dante who exercised a strong Muslim influence on the Florentine poet. Arabi wrote his own love song first (Dante’s Divine Comedy in 1320) and this writing was based in turn on Mohammad’s alleged ascent to Paradise as reported in the Hadiths (the supplementary sayings and actions of Muhammad).
Yours truly is not a credentialed specialist, but did run across countless interesting details in five years of researching and writing my own detailed and small-print book: BEYOND SECULARISM AND JIHAD: A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque, the Manger & Modernity,” (University Press of America, 2012; prohibitively overpriced).
Congratulations on your courage in telling the eternal truths (nowadays, it takes boldness even to remember that the grass is green).
I am stunned at the clear logic of the essay. The use of literary works as defense of the west and the clear description of Islam, not as evil or corrupt, but as a disruptive for e attempting to stunt the seeds within Christianity from fruition.