Marco Rubio: The Spirit that Created Western Civilization

Seldom does a politician deliver a speech with more historical and cultural breadth than Marco Rubio’s recent speech in Greece.

Richard Kirk | October 16, 2026

Seldom does a politician deliver a speech with more historical and cultural breadth than Marco Rubio’s recent speech in Greece, with the Acropolis standing appropriately in the background. Moving beyond the standard acknowledgment of Greek democracy, Rubio knitted together Plato and Aristotle with the theologically grounded philosophies of Augustine and Aquinas that form the intellectual and spiritual foundation for Western civilization.

But the term around which his entire talk revolved was the Greek word thumos, a concept Plato employs to speak about the spirited element of human nature that fuels, in Rubio’s words, “the fire of passion, strength, courage, [and] pride” that “is the heart of great civilizations.” Plato saw this function as allied with reason against appetite and as the source of achievements attained through competition and struggle, strivings formalized in the Greek agon which revealed excellence in various fields of endeavor. Rubio links this essential trait with the Western drive to explore, to invent, and to devote one’s efforts to a cause higher than self. This characteristic, the root of courage, has come under sustained attack both from within and from without the West.

Even during World War II, C.S. Lewis denounced philosophical schools and educational materials that viewed emotion-laden patriotic aphorisms as meaningless propaganda. In The Abolition of Man he noted that this didactic perspective was destined to create “men without chests” -- “chests” being Lewis’s word for Plato’s thumos. Today’s critique of patriotism, by contrast, comes from highly emotional, one-sided, and irrational condemnations of a country no one could be proud of.

These portraits omit everything on the positive side of the national ledger and magnify everything negative. The Pilgrims with their biblical virtues and stoic........

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