The Quest for the True West

The True West is our homeland, Christian and European, rooted in Scripture, myth, and the great epics of Greece, Rome, Arthur, and the North.

From Crisis 

By Joseph Pearce

The quest for the true West is still possible, and it’s closer than you might think.

For the past two years, my students and I have been on the quest for the true West. We have journeyed together on a cultural pilgrimage across the vast literary landscape of Western and Christian Civilization. We have travelled in a time machine that has taken us across almost three thousand years of human history.

We have travelled through space as well as time, stopping at Troy, Ithaka, Thebes, Athens, Carthage, and Rome; and in England, Scotland, Denmark and Venice. We have been to Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and to the Garden of Eden. We have travelled in a spaceship to the heavens, spending time on Mars. We have been shipwrecked with Odysseus and with five Franciscan sisters. We have wandered through wild wastelands with Arthurian knights, modern poets, mad scientists, and maddened monsters.

Moving from poetic allusiveness to prosaic explanation, my students and I have been on the quest for the true West as part of our travels together at Rosary College, a new online Catholic undergraduate institution offering a two-year Associate of Catholic Studies (ACS) in Integrated Humanities. As a founding faculty member, I have had the privilege, along with my students, to be a pioneer as we have navigated the first two years of classes, completing the curriculum and thereby the quest.

As the school year comes to an end, my students will move on to the next stage of their own individual quests. Some will transfer to one of the Newman Guide colleges which accept the credits the students have earned at Rosary College, such as Ave Maria University, Catholic University of America, and Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts; others might move forward with the Associates Degree to pastures new within the wide world of unfathomed opportunity that awaits them.

As for me, I am looking forward to repeating the same quest with a new set of adventurous and pioneering students next year. To quote Bilbo Baggins, who can ever tire of going “there and back again”? Who would not want to visit far-off times and places to meet ageless heroes and villains and timeless saints and sinners?

We’ll leave the Shire and our own familiar homes, our hobbit holes, to relive the epic and tragic adventure of classical antiquity. We will find ourselves in war-torn Troy, the besieged city. We will live with the legacy of the adulterous lust of Paris and Helen, with the arrogance of Agamemnon, the anger of Achilles, and with Hektor’s heroic defense of hearth and home. The war over and the city destroyed, we’ll join Odysseus on his long journey home, his desires and those of his men wrecked on the rocks of their own recklessness. We’ll watch Telemachus come of age and will admire the pristine purity and loving loyalty of Penelope.

We’ll admire Antigone’s defense of religious liberty and the rights of the family against the encroachments of the tyrannical state; we’ll witness Oedipus’ hapless fall in Thebes and his glorious resurrection at Colonus; we’ll witness Aeneas as a prisoner of lust in Carthage, and we’ll pity poor Dido and her self-destructive passion; we’ll glory at the founding of Rome.

And then comes Christ, who changes everything…

And so, with the coming of Christ, we’ll move into the literary landscape of the Christian Middle Ages and will be in awe at Christ’s mighty presence.

It is Christ who empowers Beowulf, the mightiest of warriors, as he defeats demonic monsters with the supernatural sword of grace; it is Christ, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, who empowers Dante to escape the dark wood of sin and the circles of Hell and to ascend Mount Purgatory and through the very heights of Heaven. It is Christ who accompanies the holy parson on the pilgrimage to Canterbury; and it is Christ who guides Gawain to the Green Knight’s castle.

Moving into the early modern period and to the age of Shakespeare, we’ll visit the gutters of Venice with its vengeance and usury and will ascend to Belmont, the beautiful mountain, in the presence of the heavenly Portia. Thence to “something rotten” and “murder most foul” in Denmark, to a world of regicide, fratricide, homicide, and suicide; a world of espionage, lies, and betrayal in which the truth is revealed supernaturally and purgatorially and in which flights of angels sing the self-sacrificial victim to his rest. Thence to “something wicked” in Scotland and more murder most foul, and finally to the world of King Lear and its worldly wickedness and holy foolishness, its Machiavellian madness and Franciscan folly.

After descending into the puritan hell of Milton, we move to the modern period, to the age of Romanticism, neo-medievalism, and to the resurrection of Rome and the Catholic literary revival. We find ourselves in a different sort of hell from Milton’s, a manmade hell unleashed by the madness of Frankenstein; and then we ascend to heaven with St. John Henry Newman, who sings a hymn of praise to Our Lady of Walsingham, the “Pilgrim Queen,” as she returns to claim the throne of Merrie England after her centuries of exile; we find ourselves with other exiles, with five Franciscan sisters exiled from their homeland, who are destined to die in a shipwreck praising the Lord their Deliverer.

As the quest nears its end, we will find ourselves in G.K. Chesterton’s nightmare in which the forces of anarchy fight against the peace of God, and in T.S. Eliot’s wasteland in which the desert of modernity thirsts for the living waters of baptism and the renewal it promises. Finally, we will follow C.S. Lewis “out of the silent planet” to Mars, where the heavens reveal heavenly truth.

As one quest for the true West ends, the next one beckons. This is the adventure, the excitement, the exhilaration of a good Catholic education in the integrated humanities. This is what is to be found at the Catholic classical academies that are springing up across the country and at the good Catholic colleges listed in the Newman Guide.

Those wishing to go on such an adventure need look no further than these schools and colleges. Those wishing to join me specifically on next year’s adventure, beginning this fall, need look no further than the Rosary College website. Sign up. Buckle up. And enjoy the ride!