Paper The future of Christianity and the european culture. Rome October 2017.

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.”