The Study of "Europe" as a Culture

Outline of Lecture

1. Course Policies - Look at the Course Outline as we talk
2. What is Culture?
3. What is Europe as a Culture?
4. The Study of History as a Study of Culture
5. The Origins of Europe in the Ancient Cultures of Judaism, Greece, Rome and Christianity
6. The First Europe, 900-1350
7. The Era of Transition, 1350-1650
8. The Course Ends with a Look Back and a Look Forward

This course is about "Europe"—the culture shared first by the people living in the westernmost part of the Eurasian land mass about the middle of the eighth century A.D. and eventually by peoples living on all the continents. Although Europe has been the most dynamic culture in the history of man, it has nonetheless maintained—at least until the end of the twentieth century—a core of recurring basic ideas, values, beliefs, and aspirations:

(1) man is a being of worth and dignity;

(2) the universe is orderly and purposeful and man can rationally know it is so as well as believe it is so;

(3) there is an ethical, transcendent deity overseeing the universe and human affairs;

(4) institutions and the social order should correspond to the ideal order underlying the universe;

(5) the future can be and will be better for man than the present and the past.

Europe itself was a synthesis of elements from earlier Mediterranean cultures—the Hebraic, Greek, Roman, Christian—and Germanic influences. From each of these came important contributions which were blended into a new culture, "Europe," expressed in distinctive social structures, thought, manners, art, instruments, and skills. History 1121 examines the origins of Europe in the ancient Mediterranean, the formation of the First Europe from 900 to 1350, and the search for new authorities from 1350 to 1650. History 1122 begins with the Second Europe or Enlightenment in 1650 and shows what happens to those ideas, beliefs, and values up to the end of the 20th century.

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Culture as used in this course means values, beliefs, ideas, ideals, standards, norms shared by a given people in a given period. Using this definition, what are some everyday examples of culture? In the United States? In the southern United States?

The Study of History as a Study of Culture

An emphasis on the development of Europe as a culture—basic ideas, values, beliefs and aspirations shared by a particular people living during a specific period—is not common in survey courses, not a consistent and systematic emphasis anyway. Many courses are preoccupied instead with what culture produces: institutions and the rest. This course begins with the conviction that there is a distinction between culture and its results, an important distinction worth noting. It is also based on the premise that culture is of basic importance compared to its expressions. What peoples in the historical past did is the result, modified by circumstances, of what they thought ought to be done according to certain rules. If we identify, even incompletely, the "ought" and the rules by which it is to be effected, we have some of the most important clues to the historical behavior of people. So it follows, for example, that the developments of the modern European nation-state and European science and technology can be made intelligible only by showing them against the background of the culture which generated them out of peculiar circumstances.

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1. Do ideas drive people? What does motivate behavior?
2. Does man rule and decide his own destiny or does some outside force? Providence? Scientific determinism?
3. What makes something (an idea, institution, common practice) valid? Reason? Custom? Nature? What? Why?

By an emphasis on the importance of culture I am not intending to imply that culture is a "spirit" or a "mind" directing people in order to develop and realize itself. A culture does not have a life of its own independent of and superior to the people who share it. Culture is created by people in response to circumstances of particular times and places. Some elements of a culture may be adopted and adapted by a people who were not the originators and thus a culture may live on. Even so it does not survive independent of people and circumstances. Again, people create culture and live by it in response to their environment. They also modify culture as well as behave in accordance with it.

Since it represents an attempt toward collective agreement and action, culture may promote static conformity or diversity and change. The classic example of the first type is ancient Egyptian culture whose ideas and goals were permanence, timelessness, and changelessness. Europe belongs to the second type, drawing its vitality from diversity and tension among alternative commitments to its beliefs and values. The development of the peculiar character of that diversity and tension will be a primary concern of this course.

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Above I use the phrase "a core of recurring basic ideas..." quite deliberately. Europe as a culture possesses unity but not unanimity. What is the difference?

Think for a minute about the force of ideas, values, standards, beliefs (call them what you will) in our lives. You became aware of this the first time you said about something you did not like: “that is not fair.” What was the basis for “fair?” What is the standard for making that judgment? And do you (we) not make these assumptions daily, perhaps without thinking about them? Why, for example, do you wait for a traffic light to turn green before driving through an intersection, even when no one else is coming? You may be relying on logic—traffic laws do prevent anarchy on the roads. You may be following a moral principle—a particular “ought” has a universal quality about it so that everyone with any sense of the good of society recognizes that such principles promote the well-being of all and, when obeyed, help produce better conduct in other ways as well. The question is, where do these oughts—ideas, ideals, values, standards, norms—come from? From the past. We receive them and pass them on (hopefully intact). The most important of these elements of culture are embodied in the basics of “Europe” as defined above. In the West we get the standard for judging something “fair” or “unfair” from ancient Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Christians. The higher standard to which we appeal can be seen in the order of nature (Greek-Roman) and in the transcendent deity (Judaism-Christian) who embodies Justice and Goodness. You will understand better what this means when we have surveyed the beliefs and ideas of those peoples. You will also begin to understand why the displacement in modern times of those rational and ethical beliefs systems from the ancient world presents us with difficulties in making decisions today—without standards how can one have a clear view of what to do?

One further matter: how does one avoid subjectivity? The past cannot be recreated as it really was; the totality of any culture is so incredibly complex that it must be simplified to be comprehended and described. The historian thus filters through his own frame of mind all the raw information about a culture of which he thinks he can make sense and organizes the data in terms of his own preconceptions and judgments about what is relevant. This tendency to subjectivity should be balanced by as much objectivity as the historian can muster, but it cannot be avoided. So any historian must state his preconceptions and judgments at the outset. I have my preconceptions and judgments as you have begun to see in the last few sentences. How do I test these? By historical evidence. If the views I give you do not meet the test of the evidence, then I am cooking up a story that proves my presuppositions. Watch me to see whether this happens. I do have strong views about the importance and value of the western experience, what I call the story of “Europe.” In the next few pages I offer a brief summary of how Europe developed and changed from its ancient origins up to the 20th century. This will be an overview of History 1121 and 1122 and perhaps will be a helpful introduction for the student who is unfamiliar with the emphasis on culture in history. But question my assumptions. That is the historical outlook to which I plan to introduce you. When you disagree, cite the evidence, as I will be doing.

The Origins of Europe in the Ancient Cultures of Judaism, Greece, Rome and Christianity

Some of the roots of Europe reach back to the ancient Hebrew culture shared by a band of nomadic people who traversed much of the Near East before settling near the end of the second millennium B.C. in the area of Canaan. Developed in this culture over the period from 1200-400 B. C. were attitudes about the interaction of man, divinity, and the universe which later—through Christianity—became a substantial part of the ethical awareness of Europe.

The Hebrews' significance in the making of Europe should seem remarkable to the student who also knows something about the contemporary myth-making cultures of Egypt and the Mesopotamian river valleys. These latter peoples probably considered the Hebraic outlook alien and strange-if they were aware of it. Their own outlook—against which the Hebraic one stood out in such bold relief—stressed man's ties with the universe and especially the world of nature. Nature, full of divine presences, revealed a fundamental divine order which could only be described imaginatively and poetically and which was the model for man's personal life and for his social organizations. Once life-styles and the state were thought to correspond to the ideal divine order, they were frozen into rigid ideals. The status quo was what ought to be: men existed to be the slaves of the gods in Mesopotamia; all Egypt belonged to the god who ruled as Pharaoh. Time was nature's time in the sense that nothing essentially new had happened since the beginnings of all things and patterns of occurrences had repeated themselves as rhythmically as the four seasons.

The Hebraic outlook broke sharply with the myth-making point of view. For the Hebrew the beginning was not man's relationship with nature but with a transcendent force which was totally other than natural or human—ineffable, perfect and holy. Only as this deity revealed traces of his character and purpose could he be known. Revelation, not the natural order, was normative, and it led to radical and far reaching results in the shaping of institutions and personal behavior as well as a sense of time and history. God alone was holy; man, although a being of worth and dignity, could never attain the ideal in his own life or in society. Yet, perfection was expected of man in his dealings with his fellow man and justice was supposed to exist within social institutions. Out of the difference between man's performance and God's expectations came a moral striving and a deepening ethical awareness which eventually became part of Europe. Out of the same tendencies came a new sense of time and history. God was an ethical force acting in the world and human affairs towards a final purpose. Since he revealed himself by his deeds, it was important to remember and reflect on those deeds. The European view of time and history as a sequence of unique events leading to some end was born in Hebrew culture.

Elsewhere during the period from 1050 to 400 B.C. the Greeks were working along different lines towards other assumptions on which Europe came to be based. The major contribution of the people who lived on the Greek mainland and around the fringes of the Aegean basin was the creation of rational thinking. Considering that the Greeks also had a sense of man's littleness, their confidence in reason was astonishingly bold. Man was puny compared to the divine and natural forces at work in the world. Nevertheless, man could endure if he understood the rhythm of those forces. The intellect or mind as a reflective, analyzing process was the means of understanding. Man, although a frail creature, stood at the center of the process imposing an order, logic, and intellectual clarity on his world and human life which European man has been prone to over idealize but which still established basic premises for Europe. Of enduring quality was the new attitude towards the good life for man—balance, harmony and moderation in imitation of the rational moral order of the universe. Another permanent legacy was the view of the state as an active moral agent. The Greek polis formed and shaped its citizens in accordance with the ideal justice it was thought to manifest. Although Classical Greek culture was tied to the way of life of the polis, it could become universally attractive as the Hellenistic age (mid-fourth to first century B.C.) and the era of Roman domination proved.

While Classical Greek culture was in its most vigorous and creative stage during the fifth century B.C. the Romans were developing an outlook on life which suited their struggles against hostile neighbors and the natural environment. As Rome rose to mastery of the Mediterranean she brought her intellectual and moral qualities of solidity, inventive practicality, sobriety, patience, self-discipline, duty, and simple piety to the tasks of governing—among which perhaps the problem of coping with Greek culture was the most urgent. Greek ideas and concepts posed a threat to the Roman outlook. Yet, the Roman governing elite found them attractive. The conflict had to be resolved and the solution which was worked out from the first century B.C. into the first century A.D. was the blending of elements from the two cultures on Roman terms. Most of the ideas and concepts came from Greece; Rome drew on her own intellectual and moral qualities for the energy and willingness to organize the synthesis and to make its expansion and preservation the purpose of the empire. New possibilities opened up for exploring the themes of early Greek culture. But while imperial sponsorship enabled Greco-Roman culture to flourish-witness Vergil's Aeneid or the refinement of Roman law—it also tended to stifle creativity.

In the midst of imperial power and prosperity grew deep emotional yearnings for new dimensions of thought and feeling which Greco-Roman or classical culture could not offer: hopes that the human personality endured beyond death, that the emotions were as worthwhile as the intellect and that the individual was unique and important. Christianity provided assurances for these hopes. It offered man escape from the limitations of human nature and the natural world if he would believe—an act of the will, not the intellect—that God had become man in Jesus Christ. It promised each man that he was worthwhile and that he could be with God after death as the unique personality he had been in life. Christianity was radically different from classical ideas and concepts and contained a new view of man and the purpose of life. The orientation was otherworldly; the frame of reference, the supernatural as known by the volitional element in man. The idea of an ultimate, transcendent standard which one should strive to achieve in his own life and in his social relations with other men came from Judaism. However, Christianity gave man a new imperative and incentive for striving for the ideal. The imperative was more emotional as taught by the central myth of Christianity, the sacrificial death of God's son for all men. Moreover, the incentives were the prospects of imminent final judgment by God and everlasting life. The primacy of the new culture in the Mediterranean world was assured by its official victory in the fourth century which marked the symbolic end of the empire long before that technically occurred in the fifth century.

The Formation of the First Europe, 900 - 1350

Christianity's triumph set the stage for the creation of the first Europe which finally came into being in the eighth and ninth centuries, willed into existence by the Carolingian Franks and the papal and monastic leadership of the Church. The first phase—the fusion of Christian and classical elements—began while the Roman Empire still stood. In the late empire, Christians seemed to accept the possibility that the end of the world was not imminent and that the Church would be a continuing presence on earth, a community within a community. Accordingly, the Church adapted to its own use the organizational structure, law and art of the empire, as well as ideas and concepts from the classical tradition to articulate the faith. The synthesis of the two cultures (on Christian terms) showed great intellectual vigor as Augustine, bishop of Hippo, demonstrated in the early fifth century.

The second phase of the first Europe's creation—the assimilation of German influences into the developing Christian—classical synthesis from the fifth to the ninth century—was more difficult. The quality of thought shown by Augustine and the physical standard of living enjoyed under the empire could not be maintained. This phase, however, was also creative in that the Frankish Carolingian monarchy and the Church together were able to produce, by the eighth and ninth centuries, a new political and social order with distinctive ideals and values and a sense that the people in the west had a peculiar identity and mission—the first Europe. It may not seem credible to the modern student that the simple, crude Carolingian society could have put a distinctive stamp on the culture whose richness and creative potential was later expressed in Gothic architecture and Dante's Divine Comedy. Nevertheless, it did.

We might recall the basic recurring beliefs, ideas, values, and aspirations of Europe generally and state them as the first Europe did. Each man possessed dignity and worth as a soul whose salvation the church and state were to aid. The soul's destiny was another world, to be with God. Therefore, man was impelled to look to the future, not in this life primarily, but the next. The universe was God's universe. Its order and purpose were God's will. If one understood something of God's will, he could see the order and purpose of the universe. God's will also constituted the ideal standard for the social order. Kingship, divinely anointed by God through the church, had the mission of creating a more Christian society on earth and caring for the welfare of men's souls.

Search for New Authorities, 1350 - 1650

For six centuries the first Europe endured as a viable culture in the West showing an enormous capacity for creativity and variety in the brilliant eleven and twelve hundreds. By the middle of the fourteenth century, however, men were searching for a redefinition of Europe. This made the period from about 1350 to 1650 a confusing one with many obvious paradoxes and contradictions between older institutions, thought, manners, art and newer ones. It was a time of experimentation and diversity, but running like a thread through all the period and its events was a search for a restatement of culture, a new interpretation of the basic recurring elements of Europe, new foundations and authority to which men might give general consent. That theme applies whether one examines the rise of the modern nation-state, the growth of cities and the new economic spirit of capitalism, the appearance of humanism and Renaissance art, the cataclysmic Protestant and Catholic Reformations or the development of the modern scientific method. If most of these movements had anything else in common besides the search for new authority, perhaps it was the tendency to look for authority in the here and now.

The Second Europe, 1650 - 1789

History 1121 ends with this search for new authority up to 1650. History 1122 begins with the Second Europe or Enlightenment in 1650. By the mid-sixteen hundreds the new foundations or authority for the new Europe seemed to most men to rest most convincingly in the new scientific outlook on the world. Never before had men been presented with the possibility of knowing scientifically the logic and order of the universe in totality. Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon and, above all, Isaac Newton a little later in the century opened the prospect. Within a century the force of conviction behind the new culture was leading to revolutionary changes in art and manners, thought, skills and institutions. Historians conventionally call this the Enlightenment, as men of the time did. But it might better be called the Second Europe to indicate that it was a second phase of the culture which had been synthesized some nine centuries earlier.

The basic elements are easily summarized. Man's worth and dignity were thought to rest not on his possession of a soul but something akin to the underlying laws of the universe—reason. Both human reason and natural (rational) law had originated with God whose existence was necessary and important because he had created a perfect universe—a machine, some thinkers said, of marvelous proportion and regularity. Human reason's identity with natural law meant that man could know the basic structure of the universe. Science promised even more; man could have total knowledge of the world and solutions to all the problems which had hitherto stood in the way of perfect human happiness. One did not have to take this on mere faith; history demonstrated that there had been a progressive increase in knowledge and intelligence. There was no reason to doubt that man could know and do anything he set his mind to do. The will of God was no longer the measure of social institutions or personal human existence; in its place was natural law as understood by science. Political authority rested on the consent of free, equal, basically good men. And as for man himself, he ought to be free to define his own ultimate aims in life and pursue his own happiness.

The Impact of Revolutions on the Second Europe, 1789 - 1914

A veritable explosion of energy seems to have followed the inspiration and impetus Europeans received from the new orientation in Europe. Considering the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century alone, unparalleled changes took place as new attitudes combined with new technology to harness energy and tap natural resources—all to make the world over in a shape that was subordinate, benevolent, and profitable to man. Liberal revolutionaries found in the Second Europe a common purpose and a basis for popular support of their causes. From these democratic revolutions came changes violently upsetting political and social traditions. The same was true of the impact of Darwinian ideas on the later 1800's, another revolution in many ways.

The impact of revolutions is, in fact, an illuminating theme for the study of the period from 1789 to 1914. Revolutions issuing from the second Europe, whether of a political, social, industrial or scientific nature, shaped and were shaped by social, economic and intellectual movements. Out of this interaction of revolutions and the movements they generated issued forces which played back upon the culture, modifying it, sometimes affirming and working to strengthen it, but more often diminishing commitment to it. From both the democratic and industrial revolutions, for instance, came liberalism which sought in principle and practice to realize all the ideals of the Enlightenment in an industrial age. However, nationalism also came out of the democratic revolutions and rejected in its aims and spirit every tenet of the Second Europe. By 1914 the net effect of such movements—most of them hostile to Enlightenment ideals-had been to dim the bright hopes that the earthly millennium would eventually come. At the same time, as doubts about the vision of the Enlightenment increased, the signs of material progress grew even more numerous.

Revolt Against Europe, 1914 - Present

Even more impressive gains in technology and material progress have occurred in the twentieth century, which is testimony to a continuing vitality in the second Europe. But there is other evidence which justifies using as a theme for the period since 1914 the phrase of Christopher Dawson—"Revolt against Europe."⁽²⁾ The rise of totalitarian, militarized states; two world wars, both primarily within the group of nations which share the European heritage; the horrors of deliberate genocide which came during the second of those wars; hostility between major global powers and the prospect of mankind's annihilation if they should clash; challenges to the spirit and procedures of the democracies: all these have been assaults on the ideas, beliefs, and aspirations of the second Europe. They also illustrate a universal sense that, as William Butler Yeats put it in 1921, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"⁽³⁾ —a sense that a void had opened in the second Europe which material progress alone could not fill.

After looking at the contemporary mood of anxiety and despair, it is appropriate to raise the question, "Is there to be a Third Europe?" The question can only be answered speculatively, but it is a worthwhile effort to try to answer it. If we can glimpse the complexity of such an attempt, it will be a good reminder that at every significant stage the growth of Europe was equally complex. We should not be too quick to think that we can tie any culture up in a neat package. History 1122 ends with this attempt to look forward after such a long look backward.

But to go back to History 1121, we start with Judaism as a basis for Europe.

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1. History as Art and as Science (New York: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1965)

2. Understanding Europe (New York, 1960).

3. "The Second Coming".