E. Christian Kopff, The Fear of God

Despite the humorous title, David Gless in From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (1998) makes a powerful case for the validity of a grand narrative informed by the notion that what is distinctive and vital in the West derives from the assimilation and mutual interaction of Classical, Christian, and German. When great periods of creativity and freedom appear in Europe and America, they are often associated with those who value the three traditions, not as inassimilable entities, but as containing complementary elements which are essential for human fulfillment and societal greatness.

All three traditions were formative and creative in the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the American Founding. When Dante writes about his political ideas in Monarchia, for instance, he describes an empire that is Roman, Christian, and German. Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) described the Classical, Christian and German (or Common Law) traditions behind the American Revolution (though he also began the bad habit of privileging one tradition over the others, in his case, English Whig thought.) As Carl Richard noticed in The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (1994),

To the founders, there was but one worthy tradition, the tradition of liberty, and they would not have understood the modern historian’s need to distinguish between the classical and Whig traditions and to measure the influence of one against the other.

Before they were Christianized, did other tribes and nations have differing notions of freedom or liberty?