SOHRAB AHMARI is a distinguished columnist and author, currently op-ed editor of the New York Post. In a previous book — his memoir, From Fire by Water — he relates how he and his mother emigrated from Iran to the United States. Disillusioned with the Iran under the rule of the Ayatollahs, he became increasingly attracted to Christianity and worshipped for a while at Holy Trinity, Brompton, before finding his way next door to the Brompton Oratory. As he threw himself into the celebration of the mass there, he describes being swept up into a sense of order, continuity, tradition, totality, and confidence.
The present book is an exploration of these themes, exploring how the wisdom of the past can feed and guide us in the present. It is written for, and addressed to, Ahmari’s son Max, and is structured round 12 big questions, six relating to God and six relating to humankind.
Fiercely intelligent and widely read, Ahmari also possesses journalistic skill as a communicator and populariser. Rather than offer an abstract discussion of each of the questions that he raises, he bases each section on a particular person whose thought can explicate and elucidate the issues. Ahmari deftly ties in the narrative of their lives with exposition of what these people wrote and thought. Although himself a Roman Catholic with somewhat socially and politically conservative convictions, his choice is wide-ranging, including not only, as we might expect, St Augustine of Hippo, Aquinas, Newman, and C. S. Lewis, but also the theologian and civil-rights leader Howard Thurman, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, and, somewhat unexpectedly, Andrea Dworkin.
Perhaps the most prominent theme is that of the nature of freedom. In the context of the life of one of his subjects, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as well as of Ahmari’s own life, freedom initially meant a wonderful sense of release from repressive regimes in the USSR and Iran respectively, and this sense of liberation has not left Ahmari. For Ahmari, however, as for St Paul, St Augustine, and St Thomas, true freedom is not simply the ability to do whatever we want, and, like Solzhenitsyn, Ahmari is sharply critical of the unrestrained libertinism of the West.
His prime example of a person who was truly free is the Polish priest and martyr St Maximilian Kolbe, as he volunteered to die in place of one of his fellow inmates of Auschwitz. “We have abandoned Kolbe’s brand of freedom,” Ahmari writes, “freedom rooted in self-surrender, sustained by the authority of tradition and religion — in favour of one that glories in the individual will.”
Bristling with ideas and insights, this is a book to engage theologians and general readers alike, as we seek deeper wisdom within which to situate contemporary questions and concerns.
The Ven. Dr Edward Dowler is Archdeacon of Hastings and Priest-in-Charge of St John’s, Crowborough, in the diocese of Chichester.
The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the wisdom of tradition in an age of chaos
Sohrab Ahmari
Hodder & Stoughton £20
(978-1-529-36450-7)
Church Times Bookshop £18