Europe

My friend Peter Roise has repeatedly encouraged me to read the work of the Asia Times Online columnist who writes under the pseudonym "Spengler." I'm glad he has, because Spengler is well worth reading. He writes with a historical awareness and philosophical depth rarely found among newspaper columnists. Whatever his own religious commitments (and they are unclear), he understands that religion has a central place in history, including political history.

In a recent column, he calls attention to the contradictory efforts to formulate a secular European constitution, remarking (in a Bellocian vein) that a unified Christian Europe pre-dated all the particular nations of Europe and that Europe would not exist at all without the unifying faith of Christianity. A few choice quotes:

"Apropos of the debate over a European constitution, it should be remembered that Europe did not arise as an agglomeration of nations. On the contrary, Europe existed before any of its constituent nations, and the unified Europe of Church and Empire created the nations along with their languages and cultures. As individual nations, Europe's constituent countries will die on the vine."

And, "Why is there a Germany, and not merely a Brandenburg, Bavaria, Franconia, Swabia and Hanseatic League? Why is there a Spain, and not merely a Navarra, Andalusia and Castile? It is because European languages and European literature made possible a common discourse within the great national divisions. Europe's common faith and the institutions that supported it created this common culture as an expedient for worship and administration. Europe is the faith, for the faith gave birth to Europe.

"Under Church and Empire the nations owed fealty to a higher power by virtue of the authority of faith. Its common language was Latin, and its ultimate authority was pope rather than emperor. The empire was weak, but it was holy, as a series of German emperors discovered when they attempted to substitute their own secular power for the ultimate authority of faith. Henry IV stood bareheaded in the snow for three days waiting for Pope Gregory VII to reverse his excommunication in 1077; the Staufen dynasty came to a terrible end after its prolonged war with the papacy in the second half of the 13th century. Without the faith, Europe's civil society could not exist, and a challenger to the authority of faith, no matter how powerful, ultimately must fail."

The whole article can be found at http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IC13Aa01.html.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 16, 2007 at 11:21 AM

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