There’s a great risk that our political future will be like the film “Groundhog Day” as if it were centered around 2016. But the country is also going through some fundamental transformations, and so is Western civilization itself. Orestes Brownson once saw our country’s destiny as “continuing and completing” Rome, reiterating the idea that Rome never falls, it’s only ever born anew.
Whether we can go that far with Brownson or not, we can at least acknowledge that the United States is partly built on a memory of an older western dynamic.
When Rome was sacked by Alaric the Visigoth in 410 AD, it was also part of a larger pattern unsettling the west. It was a dramatic interruption of Rome’s self-understanding. The fifth century Bishop of Hippo, Aurelius Augustine, wrote in response to the crisis. His thousand-page epic diagnosis of the deepest causes of Rome’s decline, and his prescription for her best hope of renewal remains a touchstone for Western self-understanding. In the eighth century, legend says that Charlemagne had Augustine’s City of God read to him every night as his evening entertainment, so much did it become for him a blueprint for social and political renewal. It’s a book that we might take up as well.
Readers who want to do so are in luck: For the next 15 weeks they can read the book with me, and hundreds of others, discussing it every Thursday evening from 8-10 p.m. ET on Twitter (@ccpecknold). Or if you aren’t up for the big read, you can simply listen in by following the hashtag #CivDei.
The U.S. needs better conversations about who we understand ourselves to be. We don’t need to think we’re a recurrence of Rome. But we can break out of our Groundhog Day politics better by looking back not only to our nation’s founding, but to an older dynamic that still has a hold on us, and just may help us still.
C.C. Pecknold is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate professor of Theology at The Catholic University of America, located in Washington, D.C. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
