Review and Reflection

Outline of Lecture

I. Review of Europe as a Culture
II. The Sources of Europe and Its Development to 1650
III. Preview of the Next Course
IV. Reflection: What does Europe Mean? Its Impact for Good or Bad?

We began this course with a summary of Europe as a culture. As we end, I want to remind you of what I said at the beginning. I said in the first session that "Europe" as a culture (at least into the 20^th century) has consisted of 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.

I stated as a premise for this course that it was important to understand the basic elements of Europe, know how they originated in earlier cultures, and know how they combined to form Europe. I also said that Europe has been a dynamic culture, changing over the centuries, even into our own age. The course has presented evidence that my premise is valid.

From ancient Judaism came four of Europe's basic elements: (1) the worth and dignity of man (3) the concept of an ethical, transcendent deity (4) the conviction that social institutions should reflect the order underlying the world; and (5) the view of the future as better than the present or the past. Breaking with the myth-making outlook of Egypt and Mesopotamia, ancient Jews believed it important to remember and learn from history because God revealed Himself in historical events. Thus they also believed the future would be unlike the past or present as this deity continued to show Himself in mighty acts on behalf of His people to achieve His purpose. When that purpose had been realized, history would come to an end. This deity they affirmed as transcendent, wholly other, and yet still a personality of ethical perfection and holiness. They believed the world to be God's creation, given to man for his use and mastery. Further, they believed that society should reflect God's character and purpose: injustice and tyranny are offensive to God. Finally, Jews asserted the dignity of man as God's last and greatest creation, made by God little lower than Himself.

Ancient Greece contributed to three of Europe's basic beliefs and values: (1) the worth and dignity of man; (2) the universe as orderly and purposeful, intelligible to man because it obeyed laws his mind could understand; and (4) institutions and the social order become valid once they reflect the ideal order of the universe. The Greek achievement was first to conceive of the world as governed by an eternal, perfect order, intelligible to man because his mind worked according to the same principles as the universe. Because they had faith in the coherence of all things and in man's ability to know this basic order, they displayed an extraordinary confidence in reason's power to know. They invented logic and virtually all other facets of philosophy, and they tended to look for logical, natural explanations of the world and life. They also created in the polis one of the most ambitious attempts ever to shape human nature and human behavior. They believed the polis to be the right way to live because they thought it mirrored in its laws the laws and principles underlying the world. Finally, in their confidence in man's ability to know, they gave a new dimension to the idea of the worth and dignity of man. Man had not the individual worth he had in Judaism but human life was still worthwhile.

The Roman achievement was to adopt Greek culture, spread it throughout the ancient Mediterranean world and also provide a seedbed within which Christianity might flourish. Romans contributed nothing directly to the beliefs and values of Europe, but, drawing on their values and qualities of character, they preserved Greek culture and provided a framework within which Christianity could thrive and incorporate Greco-Roman culture for later transmission to Europe.

Christianity succeeded in becoming the formative force uniting Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian beliefs into a new synthesis because it best answered some of the vexing questions, doubts, and issues in Roman imperial life in the first two centuries A.D. 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.

Christianity's triumph set the stage for the creation of the First Europe which finally came into being under the Carolingian monarchy in the West in the eighth and ninth centuries. The first phase--the fusion of Christian and classical elements--began before the Roman empire fell. 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, the 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 the most difficult part. Still, 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. The simple, crude Carolingian society brought together the culture whose richness and creative potential was later expressed in Gothic architecture and Dante's Divine Comedy.

According to the new outlook, each man possessed dignity and worth as a soul whose salvation the church and state were to aid. The future for which man waited expectantly lay in the next world, not this one. The universe was God's universe. Understanding God's will was the key to understanding the order and purpose of the universe, although most thinkers boldly affirmed that all knowledge led ultimately to God. 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.

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, as we saw, 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.

In the sequel to this course, or at least my sequel to the course, we take up what happened as the search for new authority finally came to rest in the suppositions of the Second Europe. After looking closely at several aspects of this outlook, also called the Enlightenment, we turn to considering what happened as the Second Europe was modified, challenged, and shaped by major revolutions of the 19^th century. Then we examine the 20^th century as a "Revolt Against Europe" and conclude with questions about the future, such as "Will there be a Third Europe?" or "Has the remarkable history of Europe come to an end?"

Perhaps I should say something else before concluding this course. If I have sounded like a cheerleader for Europe as a culture, I do not apologize. To be sure, those espousing European values have committed a lot of evils against people of other cultures. And that basically is what we hear today from the detractors and disparagers of Europe. Part of the dynamic quality of Europe has been its ability to transform itself and to transcend its failures.

A brilliant writer of an earlier century, G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), had this to say about the self-renewing power of Europe:

The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume. All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life: it could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilization ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration of our estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life -- it is not too much to say that it has had the jumps -- ever since. (Orthodoxy)

Does it matter that Chesterton was speaking of Europe as Christendom, that entity we called the First Europe? No. Europe's dynamic quality comes from its beginnings, regardless of the distance from its roots it may have strayed in recent times.

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In the introductory lecture I cited some comments made by John Killinger about the impact of Christianity on Europe. Let's recall them and see whether you have any different reaction now.
Killinger spoke of Jesus' breath as a creative force:

Our word “inspiration,” you know, comes from the old Latin words in spirare, “to breathe into.” Jesus was inspiring the disciples by breathing his own breath into them. It's a wonder this didn't become a sacrament of the church, because it set into motion one of the most powerful forces the human spirit has ever known. Jesus breathed on the disciples and started a revolution of creativity that has never stopped. It formed the early church, which by the fourth century became the most powerful influence in the world. It shaped the art and thought of the Middle Ages. It led to the founding of the great universities. Our culture in America grew out of the Christian Reformation. Even when the world began to look more secular, the basic impetuses of art and education and medicine and philanthropy all came from Christianity. The creativity Jesus released in that little room in Jerusalem when he breathed on his disciples shaped and reshaped the world for centuries. We can't imagine our culture without it. The great cathedrals, our legal and judicial systems, our whole understanding of morality, our arts, Dante, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, the modern university system, the healing professions, social services, the idea of a United Nations, world service organizations – none of them would have happened without the enduring breath of Christ. And that heritage keeps being renewed. This is why there's a resurgence of religious interest in our own time. The creative power is still there. It's still at work in our lives and culture. (John Killinger, “The Everlasting Breath of Jesus”)
After going through this course, do you have a different reaction to his remarks?

Another part of Europe's dynamic quality has also been its capacity to adapt and transform itself as new peoples around the world adopt this or the other of its cultural elements. Almost all peoples around the globe embrace the European view of the future and the technology and science growing out of the European view of the world. Even the most virulent anti-European or anti-western revolutionaries act on ideas which have their roots in the European tradition, ideas about human nature, the fundamental order underlying this world, and the future as something to be expectantly awaited. (As Jacques Barzun notes, both ideas and technology of modern terrorism have their roots in the European tradition. "Even the terrorist who drives a car filled with dynamite toward a building in some hated nation is part of what he would destroy: his weapon is the work of Alfred Nobel and the inventors of the internal combustion engine. His very cause has been argued for him by such proponents of national self-determination as President Wilson and such rationalizers of violence as Georges Sorel and Bakunin, the Russian anarchist.") Revolution itself as a modern phenomenon grows out of the conviction that the powerful, the corrupt, the evil stand in the way of achieving the brotherhood of man and heaven on earth within a more natural, just, or righteous society. If only these unnatural forces or powers can be defeated, so runs the revolutionary ethos, men will be liberated to realize their true potential in a new society on earth. So the Marxist believes that once capitalists are removed a true brotherhood of mankind will be realized. And the religious fundamentalist (Christian or Moslem) believes that by destroying atheism, secularism, or the Great Satan he creates the conditions in which mankind can truly live as God wills. No other culture has been so malleable, so dynamic as Europe. It has been the only culture so far to achieve truly universal status. And whatever evils it has wrought, it has also brought to mankind great good in the science, technology, and economic progress it has nurtured, along with the great ideals and ideas it has espoused.

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1. The preceding paragraph is based on my conviction that one can only criticize Europeans (those sharing Europe as a culture) for their supposed domination and victimization of the rest of the world if one accepts the assumptions of Europe as a culture. You've got to have a basis for making such moral judgments. That basis is the fundamental outlook of Europe about human nature and a just society. A strict Buddhist or Confucian will never have the sense of moral outrage about injustice that someone sharing the European heritage has. The whole outlook is different. You've got to be within the tradition of Europe to criticize it. And if you are part of the tradition of Europe as a culture, why the venomous hatred of Europe? Your thoughts?
2. My comments about the revolutionary tradition as revolting against Europe, but growing out of it?

3. Consider another principle growing within the Western tradition and nowhere else: freedom of expression. “The ability to stand outside your own political system, your own culture, and your religion, to criticize your own society and to pursue the truth, is something we today take so much for granted that it is almost part of the air we breathe. Without it, our idea of freedom of expression would not exist. We should recognize, however, that this is a distinctly Western phenomenon, that is, it is part of the cultural heritage of those countries—in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia—that evolved out of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Christianity. This idea was never produced by either Confucian or Hindu culture. Under Islam it had a brief life in the fourteenth century but was never heard of again. “ (Keith Windschuttle, “The Journalism of Warfare,” The New Criterion Vol. 23, No. 10, June 2005). Your view?

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