The Future of Christianity and European Culture. José Miguel Serrano
Ruiz-Calderón. UCM.
Christianity
and Europe.
Those of us who are believers must be
aware that Christianity is not a culture, a continent, the inspiration for this
or that artistic movement or a form of morality good for sustaining the social
order. We also know that Christianity cannot be reduced to institutions that
may historically have embodied it, let alone to those which, in spite of their
origin—the European Union, for example—set it aside and leave out its name as
though it were something ominous, thereby expressing a poorly disguised Christianophobia.
There was, of course, Christianity
before Europe, without entering into the founding Greek myths for the term
“Europe,” which eventually came to designate something concrete, geographical
and cultural, and there is unquestionably an extra-European Christianity.
My thesis is that if the future of
Christianity is uncertain without Europe, in the sense that its “cultural”
evolution would be very different from what we have seen so far, Europe’s
future without Christianity is non-existent. No predictive efforts are required
to support this thesis. In fact, all we need to do is gently project into the
future what we see today in our continent: this ancient market with a faltering
culture that calculates its appeal using well-being.
Well-being is of course attractive
above all to people who do not have any. It is certainly a relative well-being.
On the one hand, it is not the same for everyone: there are people who live
well and sectors that do not live so well. On the other hand, the economic
dimension of well-being depends on the number of people involved in the sharing
out. I am aware that economists talk about the wealth creation represented by
those who come, for example, as immigrants, and I do not doubt this, but its
numerical expansion is not unlimited in a given period.
But well-being is misleading and
comparative. It is misleading in that many may believe that well-being comes
about by itself and not through the cultural and legal conditions that sustain
it. Many of those who come here and many of those of us who are already here
might think that the conditions that facilitate well-being are given, that they
must not be cultivated, that an effort has not been required to achieve
particular political conditions for valuing personal human life and for setting
certain rules of moral behaviour. There are two problems here. One involves
those who simply do not see the political and social conditions of well-being.
Though this may be a problem particular to the most asinine, it should not be
downplayed. As the Spanish writer Baltasar Gracián said, fools are the people
who seem like fools, and also half of those who do not.
The other problem, which is one
particular to apparently more sophisticated minds, is ingenuous progressivism—
if there is no ingenuousness in all progressivism. Although hit by the events
of the twentieth century—I refer here to its two world wars and
totalitarianisms—this optimism is ingrained in progressivism. It is the idea of
the permanent acquisition of certain social structures, those described as
progress. It is the conviction that once a freedom or a right is written into a
sufficient number of legal systems, it will remain. It is what the Russian
aristocrats who saw the collapse of Tsarism’s minimal guarantees believed, or
what Nadiezhda Mandelstam and her generation stopped believing after
experiencing how what they took to be the law evaporated in the face of the
Cheka’s new administrative rules. The recollections of the great writers of the
twentieth century constantly warn of the fragility of everything human: see
Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth. We rediscovered a trait that was familiar when there
was no progressivism, at the dawn of our classical culture, when Thucydides
unceremoniously described in the History
of the Peloponnesian War the acts of the forces unleashed in the civil war.
But well-being, consumption and mere
wealth also have a serious disadvantage when they are contemplated from
outside. They may be seen only as loot, as something that is shared or
defended, losing sight of the value that sustained it, or, if you prefer, the
good that, beyond pure well-being, was what was truly valuable. It is akin to
when a beautiful piece of jewellery is melted down to leave behind just the
gold or silver that it contained, something that we Europeans have done many
times in our different pillages.
It is often said, per P. Koschaker’s
apt formulation, that Europe is the product of Greek philosophy, Roman law and
the Christian religion. Others say that it arose from the combination of classical
culture and Christianity. Athens and Jerusalem, as the Jew turned Orthodox
Christian Lev Chestov said, even if it were to place the two traditions in
opposition and lean entirely toward Jerusalem.
This cultural reality has been
radically denied in recent years, at least in official papers, in order to
integrate, it is said, other elements or to promote a “healthy secularism.” It
is my conviction that the integrating element is purely an excuse, because we
know that there is nothing more exclusionary than revolutionary discovery, than
technocratic rationality, than a law that wishes to define all our good.
Today, for example, we are witnessing
how international bureaucracies extinguish any political autonomy held by
national states when an act goes against the only admissible and imposed
discourse, sometimes by soft means, of course, but at other times by economic
sanctions or purely the use of force.
Eliminating references to Christianity
is therefore intended not to foster pluralism but to create a new monolithism.
Let us pause at this point.
The Colombian writer Nicolás Gómez
Dávila said that without classical culture and European Christianity all that
was left was a naked and pale barbarian. But what is more, without
Christianity, nothing of classical culture would be left in Europe.
There are civilizations in which
continuity has been maintained over time with a single language or more or less
indigenous features such as a polytheistic religion. Among us, it is the Church
which maintained cultural tradition, through theological and then philosophical
integration, and through Roman mythology, which was maintained in the
construction of the neo-empires of the East and West. However much it is
hidden, however much mentions of translations via Arabic or Persian are made,
the cultural continuity in Latin and Greek, and then Slavic expansion, are
linked to Christianity. Where this was suppressed or replaced, cultural
continuity did not come about. There was no Christian miracle, a remnant from
the old world that we come from.
Without Christianity, at best outsiders
would have conducted a form of archaeology similar to that which we as
outsiders apply to Egyptian culture. A few museums, a few tours and a few tales
about mummies: that’s what classical culture would be. We would not see
ourselves in them except in some lost and conveniently reworked tale, or in
some more or less snobbish name to call our offspring.
This dependence is clear, even when a
European trait has been to vilify it or deny it. It is little wonder that the
period in which heritage was preserved with the greatest risk, between the end
of antiquity and the Renaissance, received the derogatory name of the Middle
Ages, or that the Enlightenment went as far as to consider it centuries of darkness.
We had to wait for romanticism for a positive evaluation to return.
The falsification has reached an
extreme. There have been attempts to disguise a trait as traditional, Christian
and medieval as political freedom, as if the sense of freedom of the Italian
cities of the Middle Ages or of British parliamentarianism had come to them
from some Ciceronian text and not from the conjunction of Germanic customs, the
transcendent sense of Christian life and medieval institutionalization.
As in Greece or Rome, where the
absolute law of the city nevertheless allowed a lesser degree of freedom,
political freedom comes from extending the privileges held by free men to
ever-broader sectors. Formal freedoms, which are the only freedoms that
guarantee something, have not been built on universal declarations or
cosmopolitan constructs but on the specific freedom of specific political
communities.
From centuries-long practice there have
emerged elements that have not existed in other places except by imposition or
imitation. Even in the terrible failings of European history and of the
behaviour of Christians in that history, such as the wars of religion, we find
elements that served to distinguish the internal and external realms, and
morality and law, to ultimately appreciate freedom of conscience. These traits,
incidentally, are becoming lost.
This historical reflection that I have
conducted is not an attempt to exempt me from the task of discussing the future
of Christianity in Europe; it serves as an introduction to affirm what Europe
owes to Christianity and then to describe the risks that accompany its loss.
As a Thucydidean realist, I do not
venture to predict this loss, but I find a certain morbid pleasure in
describing it. It is a fleeting pleasure. If I am right, all that I will have
to show for it is to have foreseen the third act’s corpses from the first act.
And if I am mistaken, joy will make up for having come across as a spoilsport.
Post-Christian Europe does not resemble
pre-Christian Europe. It is worse. And that’s insofar as anti-Christian
currents have produced the worst elements that can be attributed to the evils
of our century. Elements with undoubtedly European roots.
Pagan Europe awaited revelation with
enormous ingenuousness. Its crypts would serve as a basis for our cathedrals.
Think of Greek paganism, exalting the Apollonian order, nothing to excess, know
thyself, and fearing the hubris of man without law or gods.
Friedrich Georg Jünger analysed the
risks that the Greeks described in the titanic myths and gives us the function
of the mandates of the gods. Without them, without Apollo, beauty yields to
monstrosity and pure technical activity usurps the place of art. Man is
launched into a repetitive and destructive titanic effort that ultimately turns
on himself. It is significant that the suppression of Christianity is
accompanied by religious elements, “Religio” being what relates us to the
world, that have been around ever since man invented or discovered gods.
In this way, Christianity goes beyond Paganism,
which cannot look within itself as though seeking an equilibrium, an
intermediate agreement. Without Christianity, what appears is a titanic abyss
where man finds no limit other than the point that technical capacity can take
him to. As this increases, it becomes more destructive.
For many of those present here,
survivors of totalitarianism, it is not necessary to explain where the titanic
dreams that built Communist society in a Gnostic attempt to implant political
religions led. And alongside false humanism, we should recall the levels of
disgrace brought by false paganism, the caricature of Nazism or fascism. Even
the ordained affection over parts of the earth itself can become titanic in
exclusive nationalism, as we can see at the moment in my homeland.
And it is worth remembering that these
phenomena are European. It is not permissible to resort to the cliché of
Russian semi-barbarism or to the fact that there were major massacres in China.
They had their origins in our thinkers, and they received their highest praise
from here. It suffices to look at the welcoming of the barbarism of the Chinese
cultural revolution. And the two most civilized, most European nations, Italy
and Germany, built their own versions of totalitarianism.
It could be said that the history of
Christian men is not a very edifying one. I accept this. But if with a loving
God we have done such things, we can imagine how history would be without Him.
In this sense, it is true that hell is history, an expression that I think
comes from Cioran.
The current fashion—for when it comes
to thought there are fashions that sometimes transcend ideological borders and
may affect the most unexpected bodies, including the Church itself—is to curb
man’s titanism through Gaea or Gaia. Environmentalism without anything as an
alternative, mother earth as our technical limit.
Europe may be rediscovering an
ancestral cult or reimporting one from native cultures that are “more
respectful of the Earth.” There’s apparently no need for the Christianity that
is even blamed for anti-Christian excesses, or even a need for the order of
Olympus, of the nomos. A man who respects nature is all that is needed.
Centuries of worshipping mother earth
and of human sacrifices should serve as a warning to us. The limit of mother
earth overlooks the dignity of man, a person who is linked to another person,
to Three in the case of Christianity.
Just as humanitarianism has not limited
the ruthless activity of one man over others, in the name of humanity, nor will
worship of the Earth allow interventions carried out in the name of
environmental salvation to be limited. In both Europe and in the world as a
whole, environmental interventions have called on many occasions for homicide,
whether in the accepted form of abortion, or in the new forms under
preparation.
If anything characterizes Europe, it is
that it has illuminated political freedom. Where this freedom is not imaginary,
it is based on Christianity. Political freedom has been extended from medieval
privileges on the conviction of human dignity. This dignity is not granted, as
things that are granted can be withdrawn. Rather, it is recognized.
No acquisition is final, as was seen in
revolutionary processes, where the rights of man were followed by genocide. The
action of a state without limits, looking for a supposedly beneficial purpose,
with worship of class or race, or the people, was what started up totalitarianism.
The conviction of human fallibility, of
risks, of limits, of the internal realm of conscience, has Christian roots. An
author that I have quoted several times told us that “our last hope is in God’s
injustice.” This is the fullest reverse of the hubris that threatens us.
So I can allow myself to give a clear
answer to the question posed. Europe’s future will be Christian. The reason for
this is clear. Without Christianity, none of Europe’s true
achievements—political freedom, the realm of the conscience, the limits on
technical barbarism—will be preserved.
I would venture to add something else.
Without Christianity, there is no human future either. Once the Christian God
has been revealed, it is difficult to think that we will find a substitute that
keeps us upright.
If man appeared by inventing God, by
forgetting Him, he will return to the condition of a beast without history or
hope.
But I want to finish my speach quoting
the words from Carton J.
H. Hayes in his work from 1940 The
novelty of totalitarianism in the History of Western civilitation.
“Yet in my
philosophy at any rate, there is nothing aboslutely inevitable. And in
conclusión I would suggest two further
antidotes for undue pessimism. First is the reflection that totalitarian
dictatrship is a novelty of the last two decades only, a mere momento in the
twenty-five centuries of Western civilization, and what has long endured is
likely to outlas any untested novelty. Second is the recognition of the
resourcefulness as well as of the inertia of the strange creature we call man.
His inertia and subdmission have repeatedly brought him some sort of
dictatorship and slavery. But his resourcefulness and rebelliousness have as
often put him in the way of liberty, equality, fraterny. So the tide of human affairs
ebbs and flows, for ma belongs no less with the angels tan with the beasts.”
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