Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill
By John A. Burtka IV
(Gateway Editions, 344 pages, $20)
The publication of Johnny Burtka’s Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill strikes as a most peculiar election-year book.
The genre, which in 2024 includes such offerings as White Rural Rage: The Heartland Threat to America; Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election; and Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House, normally consists of hastily written tomes as hastily disposed of after November. Most possess the literary value of a bumper sticker. The motivation to write involves pushing the conversation, and, especially, voters, this way or that way. The genre’s successes generally hype readers already predisposed to head in the direction the author pushes them.
Gateway to Statesmanship discusses neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden and, given the 2,300-year range of the included selections, seems as appropriate reading to prepare for November 2024 as for November 2224 (though one guesses the formats expand beyond paper, digital, and audio to include implantation and mind-meld by that point). Yet, it falls into this election-year book category. And, still, it doesn’t.
Burtka characterizes the included readings as part of the “mirror for princes” tradition. This means that the offerings targeted a limited audience, primarily the leadership class, of a time and place. Their inclusion indicates a universal, rather than parochial, quality that enabled the writings to transcend their time and place.
The book consists of an author’s introduction more than 50-pages long and selections across cultures and millennia. “They demonstrate concretely that it is possible for great men and women to live with principle in a messy and fallen world,” Burtka writes in the introduction of wise ancient leaders. “When necessary, they prudentially ‘get their hands dirty’ in order to achieve the greater good for their communities. Yet there are limits to their behavior.”
Burtka divides the book into that ancient period that includes classical Greece and Rome, Medieval times, the Renaissance, and the Modern era encompassing writings by George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, and Winston Churchill.
“The Renaissance period marked the pinnacle of the mirrors-for-princes tradition in the West,” he explains. “Scholars first rediscovered classic Roman texts like those of Cicero and Seneca, which were scattered across Europe but not widely studied. Then, with the fall of Constantinople, exiles from the East brought Greek texts by the likes of Homer and Thucydides to Italy, helping popularize them for wider audiences. This spurred the publication of new texts that built upon or, in some cases, openly challenged them.”
The universality that enables texts to time-travel across the centuries unsurprisingly enables them to journey from continent to continent as well.
“The ruler of men too has his bristling scales,” Han Fei pointed out. “Only if a speaker can avoid brushing against them will he have any hope for success.”
Five thousand miles and 750 years away in Constantinople, the deacon in the Hagia Sophia Church illustrated the wisdom of the emphasis on the sovereign rather than the citizen.
“As on a voyage, when a sailor makes a mistake, he brings little harm to those sailing with him,” Agapetus wrote. “But when the helmsman does so, he brings about the destruction of the whole ship. So too with cities: if a subject errs, he does not so much harm society as himself. But if the ruler does wrong, then he damages the whole state.”
The phrase “mirrors for princes” strikes Western readers of 2024 as arcane in the way “the education fit for a king” might. In a monarchy, the sovereign-in-training reading Aristotle’s Nicomachian Ethics and St. Augustine’s City of God seems essential to the continued prosperity of the nation. In a republic, where 335 million instead of one guy rules, the education fit for a king must become the education for the everyman. When liberal education — the instruction fit for a free man — yields to ideological indoctrination and professional training, then the everyman becomes not only not a king but a despot unfit to govern his fellow man or even his own soul.
One senses that Burtka, though writing a mirrors-for-princes book, understands this.
“Most important,” he writes in emphasizing the salience of such an education, “it’s vital for those with the courage to pursue such an arduous task to understand that this project will only succeed if the teachers, mentors, and pupils involved possess a vision for the flourishing of the whole body politic. The common good—not narrow partisan or class interests—must capture the political imagination and shape the vocabulary of the leaders produced by such an undertaking. Only then, when the totality of the people, laws, culture, and customs are lifted up and transfigured in light of the enduring and ennobling truths from the mirrors-for princes tradition, can the decline, divisions, and decadence of our present moment begin to heal and happiness spread.”
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