Sohrab Ahmari - The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos

An immigrant isnt supposed to complain about the society that gave him refuge. That is what I am: an immigrant, a radically assimilated one at thatwho nevertheless harbors fundamental doubts about the society that assimilated him.

I spent the first thirteen years of my life in Iran, a nation many in the West associate with traditional backwardness, with black chadors and dour clerics, severe sexual mores and teeming multitudes that fill the streets on Fridays to pray and to chant, God Is Great! As a boy growing up there, I had already absorbed this judgment and made it my own: I blamed all that ailed my native land, its repressiveness and the double-thinking and double-living it engendered, on our hidebound traditions.

Once I immigrated to the United States, I reveled in the chance to remake myself anew each day. My moral opinions were as interchangeable as my clothing styles and musical tastes. I could pick up and drop this ideology or that. I could be a high-school goth, a college socialist, a law-school neoconservative. I could dabble in drugs and build an identity around my dabbling. I could get a girlfriend, cheat on her, dump her willy-nilly, and build a pseudo-identity around that, too. All along, it outraged me to recall that there were people still trapped in societies that didnt permit such experiments in individual self-definition.

But lately, my mind has taken an unexpected turn. When I soberly examine the West as it really is, I find much wanting in its worldview and way of life. More than that, I have come to believe that the very modes of life and thinking that strike most people in the West as antiquated or limiting can liberate us, while the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison; that the quest to define ourselves on our own is a kind of El Dorado, driving to madness the many who seek after it; that for our best, highest selves to soar, other parts of us must be tied down, enclosed, limited, bound.

These are the paradoxical arguments at the heart of this book. To explain why I believe in them so dearly, I need to tell you about two people, both of whom happen to be named Maximilian.

The story of the first Maximilian begins in Poland before World War II and reaches its climax in 1941 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Maximilian Kolbe, a resident of that camp, ranks today among the greatest of modern Christian martyrs. The Catholic Church recognized him as a saint in 1982. Each year, thousands of pilgrims flock to the Auschwitz punishment bunker where the Nazis murdered him.

Kolbe was born in 1894 to a poor, pious family in central Poland. As a boy, he had a vision in which the Virgin Mary visited him bearing two crowns. One crown was white, signifying purity; the other red, the color of martyrdom. The mother of Jesus asked young Kolbe which of the two he would prefer. I said that I would accept them both, he later recalled. That vision would serve as Kolbes interior compass for the rest of his life, pointing his way to the two crowns.

The crown of purity, or priestly chastity, was easier to obtain. After flirting for a time with a military career, Kolbe entered the Franciscan Order as a novice at age sixteen, pouring himself into a life of rigorous study, prayer, and self-discipline. The year was 1910. Europe teetered at the precipice of a century of war and totalitarianism, though almost no one saw how close to the edge the Continent had drawn. The Europe of the great empires appeared solid.

Following doctoral studies in Rome and ordination as a priest, Kolbe returned to his homeland, head brimming with big plans. He started newspapers, a radio station, and a monastic community outside Warsaw called Niepokalanw (City of the Immaculate Mother of God). He campaigned against communist ideology, Freemasonry, and other forms of militant secularism and anticlericalism then in vogue. In between, he went on missions to far-flung places: India, China, and Japan. He endured periodic bouts of tuberculosis, but the sickness couldnt put a stop to his various projects.

The Nazis, however, succeeded where illness failed. In September 1939, the German war machine rolled into Poland from the west, while the Soviets invaded from the east. When the Luftwaffe bombed Warsaw, the printing presses at Niepokalanw temporarily ground to a halt. The Germans occupied the community, expelled most of its residents, and arrested Kolbe.

I do not know exactly what will happen in Poland, he warned his followers, but we must expect the worst. There is no corner of this world that is without the Cross. Let us not run away from it and, if necessary, let us take it upon our shoulders for the sake of the Immaculatethat is, the Virgin Mary.