The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos by Sohrab Ahmari
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Fiddler on the Roof

Religious converts are almost always radically conservative. Their psychological condition is not dissimilar to that of the common soldier who has been promoted to officer rank. He or she depends upon the stability of the culture to which they have committed their identity. The convert is attracted by a tradition and wants to protect it as he or she first found it. The ‘mustang’ officer is particularly keen to ensure good order and discipline among his former colleagues, and heaven help them if he is a member of their court martial. Proving oneself worthy of one’s heritage is a dominant motivation in both cases - a sort of Whiggish spirituality..

Sohrab Ahmari is just such a convert to Christianity. He has been gripped by some aesthetic compulsion to embrace the Christian myths. Now in order to confirm his aesthetic to himself and to prove his bona fides to his fellow-believers, he wants the rest of us to understand their importance. He also, in the manner of a newly received member of the officer class, wants the rest of us to accept these traditions as the key to our own psychological and sociological well-being. Discipline and right-thinking should be restored. Tradition must be revived.

Central to Ahmari’s tradition is the idea of freedom. But for him freedom is not the absence of constraint, rather it is “freedom rooted in self-surrender, sustained by the authority of tradition and religion… ” This is an ancient Catholic idea formulated first by St. Augustine in the late 4th century CE and promoted forcefully by the Puritans and Calvinists who dominated early American society. According to Augustine freedom is not the capacity to exercise choice because we are bound to choose badly. Left to our own powers we will sin which is “the will to keep or pursue something unjustly.” According to Augustine, we live in a permanent state of “akrasia,” that is weakness of the will. This condition enslaves us. For him it made no sense to talk of free will without the power of grace from God to keep it on the right track. And only through total submission to the will of God could this grace be obtained.

Augustine is careful to avoid the Gnostic implications of an evil creation, a potential residue from his Manichaean past. But he nevertheless claims that humanity as it exists is corrupt and therefore hopelessly lost in sin and disorder. Ahmari’s argument is straight out of the Augustinian playbook. He points to the vulgar banality of present-day America with the same superior disdain Augustine held for the declining Roman Empire. And like Augustine, Ahmari blames his philosophical forbears for the mess - Ahmari the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Augustine the Platonists and Stoics who also did not respect the Christian God.

According to Ahmari, channeling the Jewish theologian Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, “The message of tradition runs counter to the fundamental credo of a utilitarian society.” Whether this is true or not, is not this utilitarian society also the product of a tradition? In fact the very Christian tradition which Ahmari adheres to? This is a tradition, fundamentally unlike that of Soloveitchik, which begins with a presumption of individual rather than communal salvation. Is not the postulate of a personal inviolate soul the foundation for the philosophy of individualism in Mills and all subsequent economists who dominate the national discourse? In this context, Ahmari’s use of Soloveitchik is obscene. Christianity itself is the origin of the problem not its solution.

Ahmari’s abuse of Soloveitchik reminds me of an apt observation by another great Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem: “Authentic tradition remains hidden; only the decaying [verfallende] tradition chances upon [verfällt auf] a subject and only in decay does its greatness become visible.” Indeed, in its time the Christian tradition has demonstrated greatness. This is probably what attracted Ahmari to it in the first place. But to suggest that it is a tradition that should be revived is the equivalent of the recent claims by old Marxists that Communism failed only because it wasn’t implemented with enough vigour. Christianity brought us to where we are today. Max Weber documented that over a century ago. What Ahmari is saying therefore is that Christianity itself has gone astray. It is his brand of Christian tradition that should replace it.

In short, Ahmari is a typical fundamentalist. Not only does he consider his interpretation of the truth definitive but he also claims the authority to promulgate that truth to the rest of us (not as a church minister, or philosopher, or theologian, but as a journalist; the irony is precious I think). But he is also, paradoxically, a sort of pan-fundamentalist who calls upon those of other traditions to adopt his point of view to form a sort of Coalition of Traditionalists. Within this coalition, the factual will be reduced to the dogmata of faith. All other reports are suspect, and, even more importantly, irrelevant.

What Ahmari really wants to promote through his coalition is apparently the idea invented by St. Paul, faith. “Faith in God,” he proclaims with Pauline certainty, “assures us that there is ultimate meaning in creation, even if we can’t always discern it.” This explains his cavalier attitude toward the contents of faith in other religions. It is faith itself which he wants accepted as the criterion of truth. Like Augustine with the Manichaeans, Ahmari doesn’t recognise the roots of his view in the Iranian Islamic faith from which he and his family fled.

It’s fairly clear that Ahmari expects that once faith is established as the criterion of truth that the Christian truth will prevail. His intellectual hope is in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas who is the poster boy for Christianity as the supreme religion. His only remaining rival, he believes (and he is probably correct), is that of modern Gnosticism. He spends a great deal of effort connecting the work of Hans Jonas and Rudolf Bultmann about Gnosticism with modern American society.

Perhaps Ahmari is viscerally aware that Harold Bloom’s assessment is accurate, namely that “Gnosticism is the American religion.” In fact it is hard to distinguish from Christianity just as Augustine had found. And Ahmari faces his greatest difficulty here in that even more than in Christianity, Gnosticism knows “the wisdom of submitting to limits.” But it does so by appreciating reality as it is not as somehow redeemed. This grates annoyingly on Ahmari. But the only thing he can do, once again, is meekly submit to what he considers divine revelation. He wants us “To relate to the Blessed Virgin Mary as an uneducated peasant might.” Ah the joys of tradition.

Postscript: I have received several emails (hate mail really) claiming that I have overstated my case regarding the Christian, particularly the Catholic, views expressed by Ahmari. I therefore think it’s necessary to supply some supplemental evidence regarding his claims about tradition.

Indeed the Catholic Church is nothing if not tradition-minded. Many pronouncements by the Church express this tradition admirably. These include the following modern encyclicals:

Mirari vos (1832) which explains that liberal democratic politics are evil. Rejection of this proposition would become known as the American heresy and was promulgated well into the 20th century.

Singulari nos (1834): went further than its predecessor and proposed that even attempts to justify liberal politics are evil, thus stifling any debate about the matter.

Quanta cura (1864): states definitively that there are no inherent civil rights, neither freedom of speech, nor freedom of conscience, nor other democratic freedoms are valid.

Aeterni patris (1879): scholastic philosophy, that is the thought of Thomas Aquinas, is the only correct mode of thinking.

Libertas praestantissimum (1888): Error has no right of freedom at all, a restatement of a doctrinal statement of the 13th century which also insists that all but baptised Catholics are doomed to Hell.

Testem benevolentiae nostrae (1899): directed explicitly at Americans, it insists that Catholics must not assimilate to the national political culture, namely that of democracy.

Pascendi dominici gregis (1907): Religious truth is a matter of authority. Only the Church may determine what constitutes the truth.

Notre charge apostolique (1910): Religious truth/power is strictly hierarchical.


According to explicit doctrine, these pronouncements are infallible and therefore cannot be altered by any subsequent pope. This is what tradition means in the Catholic Church. In addition to these official statements, numerous less formal indications of the traditions that Ahmari alludes to may be cited including:
 
”If there is a totalitarian regime, totalitarian by fact and by right, it is the regime of the Church, because Man belongs totally to the Church.” - Pius XI in a September 1939 address to a group of French Union members, essentially justifying the existence of German fascism.

“Jews are Christ killers.” - Numerous editions of the Pope’s own L'OSSERVATORE ROMANO newspaper from the loss of the Papal States in the 1870’s until well into the Holocaust in 1942. Historically, this has been the rallying cry for two thousand years of anti-Semitic persecution that really doesn’t require further documentation.

To be clear, these are precisely the traditions Ahmari is referring to. There are many more that are equally repugnant but I think the point is made. The tradition of faith in which Ahmari has immersed himself is one of ideological totalitarianism and official hatred of those to whom he reaches out to for support at least as intense as that practised in his native Iran. His is an expedient ploy for furthering his narrow political ends.

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