Does Christendom explain Europe?

Does Christendom explain Europe? EU424: The Idea of Europe Introduction In his three-volume epos „the Family Idiot“, French author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre claims: “We are all Christians. Even today.” (1971: 2124). It seems strange for an outspoken atheist like Sartre to argue, that Christianity was or still is the dominant component of Europe’s contemporary cultural identity. But Sartre is not alone in his assessment. Especially in a time when migration from Muslim countries is as high as in recent memory, the notion of Christianity as the cultural and moral foundation of Western civilisation is widely accepted as being almost self-evident (Malik 2011: 33). And one would be greatly mistaken to argue that only religious people claim that Christianity provided the foundations of Western civilisation, its political ideals and ethical values. In this essay however I would like to challenge the notion of Christendom being enough of an explanation to the emergence of Europe as the cultural and ideological entity we all know it today. Christianity has certainly been instrumental to the founding of intellectual and political cultures in Western Europe over the past centuries, but the claim that Christianity solely stands for “the bedrock values of Western civilisation” (Philips 2010: 339) and that the decline of Christianity inevitably means the weakening of liberal democratic values, in my mind greatly simplifies both the roots of modern democratic values, as well as the history of Christianity in Europe. In the first part of this essay I will give a short (and partial) historical account of Christianity in Europe and give arguments to justify the idea that Christendom was at the forefront if not the foundation of a common European culture. In a second part I want to express that Christendom may have forged a certain moral and ethical tradition in Europe, but that its core values were often times borrowed from the cultures out of which Christianity developed and that Christendom might not be enough to explain the Europe of today. 2 Christendom – “the Emergence of Europe”? If Christendom is to be at the root of establishing Europe it resembles the mythological Greek tale of Europa. Europa, a foreign princess from a territory known to us as Lebanon today, is abducted by a Greek prince and later serves as the eponym of a continent that she didn’t originate from or willingly migrated to. Only a millennium after Europa’s story is first written down in the Iliad of Odysseus and a few 100 miles south of where Europa was abducted, Christianity emerged as a tiny religious sect in today’s Israel and Palestine or how British theologian Jonathan Hill put it: “[F]ounded by a group of fishermen and peasants from Galilee, a rural backwater in an unimportant region of the Roman Empire. They were the followers of a relatively minor wandering prophet who had died as a condemned criminal.” (2013: 12). 2.1 The first 1200 years of Christianity – unity through conversion Christianity gained popularity in a time that saw Roman hegemony crumble bit by bit. Most of the Roman world had been divided into a variety of small states by the fifth century (Hays 1957: 16f.). Equally in the fifth century, branches of the young faith penetrated Germanic culture. The Germans according to Denys Hays “encountered [the]Christian church, […] [t]he nearer they got to the Mediterranean, the stronger they found the Roman Church […] [T]he barbarians ultimately accepted Latin Christianity, abandoned either their Arianism or their paganism.” (1957: 18) In other parts of Europe the process of conversion developed slower. Multiple invasions by “barbarians” produced setbacks in Britain, France, parts of Germany and Denmark. Saxony‘s rebellion against religious conversion culminated in the forced conversion of the Saxon leader Widukind in 785 by order of the Frankish king Charlemagne. In the subsequent centuries Scandinavia in the north and Poland, Bohemia, big parts of the Balkans, and Russia in the east, accepted Christianity as their national faith (ibid.: 19f.), so that by the thirteenth century the cross was a universal symbol “from the Black Sea to the Atlantic and from the Mediterranean to the Arctic circle” (Hays 1957: 20). With the slow extinction of the Roman Empire the new unity of the territory that we know today as Europe seemed to have been based on the church alone. Thus developing the notion that the modern world will be divided into Christians and barbarians. It is during that time, that Christendom and civilization became interchangeable terms. 2.2 Unity through the common enemy “Islam” There probably isn’t a better way to grasp a specific territorial view of Christianity than with the battles against Muslim forces between the 7th and the 10th century, when the united Caliphate broke apart. The fear of being conquered let the Christians of Europe forget their own differences and unified them against the Arab forces. In the battle of Tours in 732 AD the chronicler Isidor Pacensis coined a term for the victorious united army of Charles Martel. He called them Europeenses – Europeans (Hays 1957: 25). The self-determination of Europeans against a Muslim threat that had started in the Middle Ages continued in the time of the Crusades and after the sacking of Constantinople against the Turks. 2.3 George of Poděbrady – Father of the European Union? King George of Bohemia in 1462, fearful that the Pope might invade Bohemia proposed the “Treaty on the Establishment of Peace throughout Christendom”. The treaty would abandon the medieval idea of the universal empire that is headed by an emperor and the Vicar of Christ. Instead there would be a union of Christian, independent, and equal states in Europe (even though Europe is not explicitly mentioned). This proposed treaty was not only astonishing because it predates the modern European Union by almost half a millennium (Smith 1992: 55) but also introduces the idea of multilateral agreements – a foreign concept in the time of the Middle Ages. The “Christian European Union” much like our modern version would have bound together all parties with equal rights and responsibilities for the achieving of common goals (Kejr 1964). Ultimately the ratification of the treaty failed but the thought of a united Europe seemed to have persisted.  2.4 Partial Conclusion Between the 5th and 15th century Christianity evidently had an immense part in founding the concept of Europe. In a territorial and ideological sense the church with the cross as its symbol gave meaning and unity to the people living in Christendom. The unifying faith also made it possible for Europeans to define who and what they are not – namely Arabs, Jews, or barbarians. The way Europe geographically looked in the time of Christendom by the 15th century is still similar to how Europe is looking today. But can the democratic liberal values we came to associate with the modern Europe be traced to Christianity? In the next part of the essay I will try to challenge the notion that the bedrock values of western civilization were exclusively born out of Christian practice. 3 Challenges to Christian ideological hegemony As mentioned earlier in this essay, Christianity has certainly had a significant impact in shaping and founding the intellectual, political and ethical traditions of modern Europe. However, many of the key ideas, often ascribed exclusively to Christianity, were borrowed from predating cultures. The Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” for example, often described as uniquely Christian, has already appeared earlier in Babylonian, Egyptian Greek, Confucian and Judaic writings (Malik 2011: 34). The thought of virtue as a good in itself, the commandment to treat neighbours as brothers or the claim that belief is at least equally important to virtuous action – all were founding themes of the Greek Stoic tradition (ibid.). Early Christian thought was a combination of Jewish and Ancient Greek philosophy and scripture. But in the fourth and fifth century, during the collapse of the Roman Empire, the leaders of the church called the Greek heritage into question and became ambiguous about the merits of what in their eyes was pagan knowledge. The early Christian theologian Tertullian of Carthage even famously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (Malik 2011: 34). For the next centuries the Greek heritage in Christianity was dormant and at times even labelled as heretic. The renaissance of Greek values and thoughts in the 13th century helped to create some of the European intellectual culture we still adhere to today. 3.1 The impact of Islamic thought But this rediscovery of Greek philosophy was only possible because another religious entity kept it alive during the European Middle Ages – the Muslim Empire. During Europe’s dark ages the Muslim world created a booming intellectual tradition in which important concepts of maths, astronomy and optics were revolutionized. But even more important than the advances in the sciences was probably the study of philosophy (Malik 2014: 127ff.). Averroës or how he is better known by his Arabic name Ibn Rushd (shortened) was the first to translate Plato, Socrates but even more importantly Aristotle into Arabic. His interpretations and commentaries of Aristotle inspired religious writers from Thomas Aquinas to Maimonides. Dante honours Ibn Rushd as one of the great pagan philosophers in his Divine Comedy (Hernandez 1992: 797) and Raphael painted him among the most important Greek philosophers on his famous “The School of Athens” fresco (Malik 2011: 34). In our modern time we think of the Muslim world as hostile to reason, democracy and human rights. We often forget that lustrous Islamic thought helped to create the fertile ground for the ideas of the European Renaissance to flourish. 3.2 Enlightenment and Christian thought It is almost a consensual opinion to argue that most of the modern liberal ideas came out of the cradle of the Enlightenment era. There are some theologians and philosophers who claim that the ideas of tolerance, equality and universalism that become popular in the 17th and 18th century derived directly from Christian tradition (Malik 2011: 35). From my point of view these claims are incorrect. Equality and tolerance can equally be ascribed to Greek Stoic tradition. Furthermore I think that most of the value system humanity gained through the Enlightenment era is neither Greek nor Christian, but a development of intellectual currents of the time. Author Christopher Caldwell even goes as far as to claim that religious philosophers like Erasmus, Maimonides or Dante would be appalled at the kind of modern liberal values some want to bring in connection with Christianity (Caldwell 2009). The misconception of the Enlightenment could according to historian Jonathan Israel (2006) also stem from a misunderstanding of the Enlightenment itself. In his book “Enlightenment Contested” he claims that there are two streams within the Enlightenment movement. The mainstream Enlightenment of Hume, Kant, Locke and Voltaire on one side and the Radical Enlightenment of lesser known thinkers such as Diderot, Condorcet or Spinoza on the other – the latter much rather than the prominent group, championed modern western values like “personal freedoms, racial equality, sexual emancipation or the universal right to knowledge” (Malik 2011: 35) and widely rejected Christian tradition. 4 Conclusion The role of Christian heritage in Europe’s intellectual and territorial history is a debate, which has been going on for centuries. A little over a decade ago even the member states of the European Union took centre stage in said discourse. In an attempt to craft the 2004 European Constitution, one of the most heavily debated topics was to include the “Christian roots of Europe” (Black 2004) in the founding document. While the Southern and Eastern European countries were strongly in favour, others were more careful not to offend other believers (Woodward 2003). In the end Europe’s Christian past was not explicitly mentioned. However, the famous medieval historian Christopher Dawkins once wrote “At the centre of culture is cult” and for over a thousand years Christianity was the unrivalled cult in Europe. On that basis alone, Christendom “has a privileged place among the sources of European culture” (Woodward 2003). Europe owes large parts of its territorial and ideological identity to Christianity. What I have tried to argue in this essay on the other hand, is that the universal values and “Western thought” that we came to associate with Europe in the last three centuries could not be entirely credited to Christianity, but were largely the fruits of ideological currents of the time. To answer the title question: I think that Christendom alone is not sufficient to understand the founding of Europe, but it is certain that Europe cannot be explained without Christendom. Word count: 5 Bibliography Black, Ian (2004): Christianity bedevils talks on EU treaty. The Guardian. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/25/eu.religion [27.10.15]). Caldwell, Christopher (2009): Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. London: Allen Lane. Hay, Denys (1957): Europe: The Emergence of an Idea. Edinburgh: University Press. Hernandez, Miguel Cruz (1992): Islamic Thought in the Iberian Peninsula. In: Jayyusi, Salma Khadra (ed.): The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Leiden: E.J. Brill. p. 777-804. Hill, Jonathan (2013): Christianity: The First 400 Years. Oxford: Lion Hudson PLC. Israel, Jonathan I. (2006): Enlightenment Contested. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kejř, Josef (1964): Treaty on the Establishment of Peace throughout Christendom. 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