The New American presents this new bimonthly feature, “Culture Corner,” offering a deep focus on contemporary cultural issues viewed through the prism of history, art, literature, music, and theology. The goal is to recover and reinvigorate the moral and virtuous purposes of the humanities, long forgotten and compromised by materialist pedagogues and Marxist socialist ideologues in our schools and universities. In the famous description by the Roman poet Horace in Ars Poetica (19 B.C.), the ultimate ideal of humanistic learning is prodesse et delectare (to instruct and to delight). Down through the ages of Western culture, the purpose of humane letters has been the triumph of Truth and Beauty: truth to instruct us in morality and knowledge, and beauty to delight us with joy and gratitude. The inaugural Culture Corner series features a seven-article reflection on virtue and vice, from Classical and Christian sources going back to the Bible, to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and through the Middle Ages to our own world. This is article number one of seven.

Over the last 3,000 years, Western culture has become preeminent for many reasons. At the center of its litany of successes is a rigorous dedication to intellectual development — an uncanny ability to incorporate under one cohesive banner ideas, innovations, and ways of thinking from an array of contradictory nations and peoples. The progressive attack on Western culture, accusing it of being monolithic and non-diverse, is both dishonest and insulting. Western culture is the most diverse and least insular set of cultural traditions in human history. There is little common ground, for instance, between Romans and Vikings, Hebrews and Bolsheviks, Christians and pagans, or Goths and Jacobins, and yet all still fit snugly under the aegis of Western culture. The key to uniting these disparate cultures across so many centuries has been humane letters. The humanities — history, philosophy, literature, theology, the fine arts — made one culture out of many nations, creeds, and institutions. E pluribus unum: out of many, one.

Until quite recently, the humanities across Western culture had one critical thing in common: the promotion of morality. From the beginning, the study of history was primarily about learning the lessons of right and wrong through human acts and events, and only secondarily about names, dates, and places. Since before the time of Socrates, Western philosophy has been one long dialogue about competing conceptions of the Good. And Western art was about not just celebrating physical beauty, but the search for moral and spiritual beauty beyond the body. At the core of the humanities across Western culture was the promotion of virtue, an endeavor that required educated people to study both virtue and vice from an intellectual perspective. As Aristotle wrote, “every virtue carried to the extreme is a vice.” For ancient Greeks and Romans, early Hebrews, and Catholic philosophers and Protestant reformers, the important issue was to codify, explain, and provide examples of the differences between good and evil. For many today, that ongoing discourse is most sharply delineated in the categories of the Seven Capital Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins.

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