Angelo M. Codevilla’s “What Makes the West the West?” appears in Telos 168 (Fall 2014). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
The intellectual-moral propositions that make the West the West are particular and exclusive to our civilization. They are indefensible, incomprehensible nonsense except in terms of Jerusalem and Athens. The ideas that distinguish the West’s forma mentis follow from the Biblical teaching that God created the universe by and through logos. This beckons our reason. The charter of human equality and freedom, unique to the West, is the Biblical teaching that man is created in the image and likeness of God. The West’s distinctiveness follows as well from Parmenides of Elea’s distinction between opinions and the truth of “the things that are.” This empowered human reason to access the logos of the universe. Consequently, reason distinguished between positive law—what is right by human will—and what is right by nature—natural law.
Despite what Harold Berman claimed, the writers of the American Constitution were not inspired by strong religious convictions. On the contrary, as typical men of the Enlightenment they were severe critics of Christianity, considering it an obscurantist and intolerant tradition in all its versions. Hence their cultural battle to achieve the institutionalization of what Thomas Jefferson called “the wall of separation between State and Church” that would guarantee the greatest religious freedom. A freedom that was periodically threatened by fundamentalist movements which, in the name of Jerusalem, sought—and still seek—to establish a confessional state governed by the truth revealed in the Bible whereas the founding fathers hoped that “what Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude.” It is not true that America was born modern and progressive, as Ernest Gellner has maintained. It became so through the cultural war between Athens and Jerusalem that began in the eighteenth century and is still in progress. 
