The Ancient Way is an online journal devoted to pursuing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This pursuit was the driving force behind the intellectual and cultural life of Western Civilization. The larger civilization, of course, was plagued by the failures, short-comings, and sins common to humanity. Yet within that civilization there was a vibrant stream of culture that managed to bring life wherever its waters flowed.
The darkness, cruelty, and filth common to man were not absent from Western Civilization but where the current of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful flowed cruelty became kindness, filth was washed away, and light shone in the darkness. The frailty of humanity gave way to the flourishing of humanity.
Within this current the Reason of Classical Philosophy found its home and its consummation within the Faith of Christian Theology. For more than a thousand years this tradition transformed the culture of the West. Yet even as we began to soar towards a golden age of power, wealth, and comfort, our forbearers began to abandon the ideas and beliefs that fueled their meteoric rise. The progress of our advancement was so astounding and so unique in human history that we began to believe it was inevitable. As is always the case, our civilization continued to coast on the momentum of the past, but eventually the bill comes due.
At the dawn of the Modern Age a tectonic shift was underway in the intellectual life of Europe. It is important to note that this change first attacked classical philosophy, and particularly Metaphysics. The rejection of classical metaphysics would eventually lead to an implosion of epistemology, and finally even language itself. First we rejected universal truths, then we rejected the ability to know, and finally even the ability to mean.
The pillars of the Faith only become vulnerable once the foundations of philosophy have been ruined. It is difficult to convince someone that their beliefs are wrong, but if you remove meaning from their world, belief falls apart of its own accord. In other words, Truth relies upon meaning. In order for something to be true, it must first have meaning.
The relentless drive of modern philosophy, whether intentional or not, has been to destroy objective meaning in reality. The result has been to create a nightmare worldview devoid of meaning and value. This worldview has gradually infected and twisted virtually every aspect of our civilization.
As a result, the culture that we have created in the modern west is distinctly anti-human. What I mean by this is that it is almost tailor-made to stifle human flourishing. It is intellectually, spiritually, and even physically toxic. It has rightly been called a “culture of death”.
The Ancient Way is about a journey of rediscovery. We are intent on recovering those elements of the ancient-medieval tradition that were never refuted or disproven, but simply discarded because they went out of style. We also want to explore what it could look like to live out those ideas in the context of the modern world.
