EPILOGUE

A Cultural Basis for the European Union?

The question is arising for the European Union as to what is to be the basis for that Union.
What we might call an unreflective view is that the basis should be geographical. It is clear
though that the relation of a Europe as defined in geography will never coincide with the
Union. Thus Turkey and Marocco, Asian and African respectively, will very likely join before
the basically European Russia, while Cyprus, that pendant to Asia Minor, is already being
included, with such European lands as Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Andorra, Liechtenstein,
San Marino and Vatican City continuing to hold aloof, and how it will go with the refractory
Balkan lands, or White Russia, Moldavia and the Ukraine, to say nothing of Georgia and
Armenia, is anybody’s guess.
What this geographical view has to support it is little more than a principle of contiguous
proximity, though the contiguity is not absolute and Cyprus is rather far away. Were it not for
the historical trauma Israel would almost certainly have applied. Memories of the Roman
Empire supply a rough guide here, supplementary to the northward displacement of medieval
Christendom. More basic still of course is the origin of this unificatory movement as
occurring upon European soil, Romano-Germanic soil to be precise, to which Byzantinism
and Islam have ever been contiguous.
Reflectively, we have to demand not a geographical but a cultural basis. Political units which
are short on geographical unity are of course that much more precarious, witness the old
West-East Pakistan or the predicament of Russian Kaliningrad, to say nothing of the United
Kingdom as including Northern Ireland. For the geographical unity gives the necessary matter
supporting the formal, active constituent which is culture, as the old British Commonwealth is
forever ruefully discovering. Lack of it provides the chief explanation of the political failure
precipitating the Falklands war, while the success and stability of the American purchase of
Alaska depends still upon the goodwill, and relative impotence, of the Canadians.
Cultural division is thus always more harmful than geographical separation and presents a
more immediate threat to functional unity, as Ireland, the Basque country, the old British India
or just about anywhere else bears witness. Therefore the unity to be sought, and by which the
European Union is to be identified, should be cultural, understanding by that term whatever
goes beyond the geographical or material. For this more specific determination would entail
excluding, as a merely material or non-signifying factor, any racial basis for the union.
Monetary or economic criteria, however, which as ”formal” to human living are by no means
merely material, are as serving the stability and attractiveness of the Union essential. They in
fact participate in the cultural principles underlying the EU as a project for peace. As politics
looks to government and external relations, so economy names household management. It is
thus also cultural as having to do with the life of man as specifically human, as ”race” or
colour does not.
A cultural basis, therefore, can be at once religious, political, economic, moral and ethical. It
is also aesthetic, this being in many countries what is primarily understood under culture, for
better or worse. Still, the term is visibly connected to that of ”cult”, religion, even if religious
unity might seem the least plausible of ideals today.
Historically, it could be shown, European society’s unity as we know it was founded upon a
religious basis, i.e. not on a geographical definition.1 This holds however we evaluate the
previous period of Roman government. The merit of such a foundation is that it displaced the
racial and tribal bases which we still find in Africa and other places and which, as became
clear even to early Greeks such as Isocrates2, hinder the formation of truly political forms of
living together. The latter wrote of Athens:

Our city has left the rest of mankind so far behind in thought and expression, that
those who are her pupils have become the teachers of others. She has made the name
of Greek no longer count as that of a stock, but as that of a type of mind: she has made
it designate those who share with us in our culture, rather than those who share in a
common physical type.

An original Roman tolerance in religious matters, though it was later to persecute what it saw
as Christian intolerance, facilitated this development, although Rome, in virtue of its
enormous expansion to begin with, was already non-racial. Acceptance and enforcement of
Christianity in all Roman territory3 led quickly to a definition of Western peoples thus viewed
as against the peoples of Asia, which was of course unfortunate for an already existing Asian
Christianity. This acceptance, as Pirenne has so well described, became more easily identified
with Europe, the landmass, after the taking over of North Africa, the Middle East and the
Mediterranean Sea (no longer mare nostrum) by the Moslem power. One forgot the oriental
Christian minorities, whom it was easier to view as heretics. Thus the old Greek geographical
concept of Europe acquired the cultural emphasis so naturally assumed, but not always
correctly identified as to its character, today.
One positive corollary of this originally religious self-definition was that Europe could never
henceforth be finally limited, as thoughts of ”fortress Europe” at once suggest. Christianity at
inception was not only a but the missionary religion, though as expressing an originally
Israelite aspiration (quod olim Abrahae et semini eius promisisti, as lovers of Mozart will
recall). Thus it is thanks to it in large part that the northern Germanic and then Slav areas have
been so easily assimilated as ”European”, though other areas less geographically contiguous,
it is our argument here, have undergone, then or later, what is at bottom the same or at least an
analogous process of ”westernization”. For the Christian Europeans there was not, as for the
ancient Romans, any non plus ultra, at Gibraltar or elsewhere.
It is true that something of the fortress mentality could creep in when Europe seemed
beleaguered and hemmed in by Muslims of various kinds, racially and theologically, but the
European response was that of the Crusades, malign them how we will. They, the Europeans,
found it necessary to assert the universal mission proper to their religion and consequently
inseparable from their psychology, this leading, under people such as Prince Henry the
Navigator, to the admittedly often materialistically inspired voyages of discovery and the
spread of this European culture to the whole world in our own time.
But what of European culture? The issue of Newsweek coinciding with the expansion of the
EU to twenty-five member-states (topical in December 2002) carried a report speaking of
1
Cf. H. Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne, Paris2 1937; C. Dawson, The Making of Europe,
London 1932; Philippe Wolff, The Awakening of Europe, Pelican, Harmondsworth 1968; G.
Clark, Early Modern Europe, 1957.
2
Panegyricus (380 B.C.). This witness should remind us not to make Europe’s religious
cultural base too specific or, conversely, to enquire how far religion was interpreting from
inception insights already partly won. Cf. S. Theron, Africa, Philosophy and the Western
Tradition, Lang, Frankfurt 1995.
3
Cf. A.H.M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, Pelican Books 1972.
Europe as being about democracy and freedom, as ”everybody knows”, according to the
Algerian taxi-driver cited. He is surely right, but the reporter interprets this as meaning that
Europe is not about ”culture”, as we once thought and as Giscard d’Estaing, we are told, now
thinks. He supports a view of Europe as a ”Christian club” in which Turkey, say, would have
no business. I would contend that this attitude, whether or not it be his, is at bottom
unecumenical. It probably goes with seeing the historically Catholic states as ”better”
Europeans than are Protestant countries, this being, by the way, a standard reproach of many
French negotiators against Sweden, a country nonetheless to the fore in the cause of our
Algerian’s democracy and freedom, ”values” which the reporter cited sees as the American
alternative to the culture and faith of old Europe and towards which she is now ineluctably
headed. This fact alone, though, argues for a sureness of direction, an end of history indeed as
all concur in history’s outcome.
Against such a posing of alternatives I would urge, with Maritain, Berdyaev and others 4 that
European democracy and freedom, the growth of which, after allowing for all the reactions, is
mirrored in the history of the nations and of institutions, are a fruit and issue of European
Christianity. A corollary of this is that the United States of America (and at least some of its
neighbours) are as European culturally as any country on the continent called Europe. They
are European culturally in virtue of their democracy and freedom. What our reporter calls
values, after all, are surely and supremely cultural, and it is no accident that it is by Christian
men of the Enlightenment that they have been so firmly established in America. Thus the
separation of church and state was an option for specifically Christian men.
Going back into history again we can note that the rise of Greek philosophy represented a
certain liberation of the spirit from the routine compulsions of religious tradition, for which,
nonetheless, Plato and other philosophers retained respect, just as did Hegel for the religious
traditions of his time later on. This corresponds to the rise of science, of the scientific view,
first conscious of itself in Aristotle perhaps. This occurred less ambiguously in Greece than in
India, Egypt or anywhere else, though we need not concur in the verdict of the conservative
Christian Maritain that the Greeks were the ”chosen people of reason”, as if some kind of
divine election were involved. We know too little still of the history of Chinese science and its
philosophy, just for example.
This Greek background largely accounts for the relatively weak hold of religion and sacrality
in general experienced by the subject peoples under the Romans. Of course the state had its
gods, as did all states prior to or apart from the Christian revolution, and this was to
crystallize, at a time of profound insecurity, in the detestable emperor-worship, this same
insecurity, it is difficult not to say, leading eventually to the worship of the heavenly emperor
and basileus, Jesus Christ, as above all the Byzantines conceived him, it being chiefly in the
West that the concept of Christus rex became progressively disentangled from any worldly or
political order, however much some of the popes and others may have dragged their feet.
We have recently been exercised with thoughts of the ”end of history”, as I mentioned, and of
the definitive triumph of capitalism. Hence, with a view to understanding the history of
Europe and of the European idea, of democracy and freedom if one so will, I would like to
raise the question as to the nature of that officially Christian and hence religious Europe
which succeeded to our ancient civilization. Greek negotiators recently charged Giscard and
other enthusiasts for Charlemagne or for Theodosius and Ambrose with forgetting this ancient
background.
The Christians, anyhow, when they were first persecuted, were often accused of being atheists
and it is no secret that many theologians now make a connection between the nature of
Christianity and that of modern secularism, as we did above with democracy and freedom.
4
J. Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, London 1945; N. Berdyaev, The Meaning of
History, London 1936. Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind.
This is implicit in Hegel, perhaps in Luther and late medieval theology, and it can even find
support in the pages of Aquinas, as being a facet of what they all saw as ”the absolute and
final religion”, in that city with no temple seen by the seer of the Apocalypse.
The historical record does indeed show a progression from ancient times through the medieval
era to modern secularism, this being something more central to the development than any
legislated separation of church and state, again. For we are finding this development within
the churches, synagogues and even mosques themselves, a desacralization and an ecumenical
movement in close combination.
As far as Europe, our subject, is concerned we can say that the Patristic era and beyond, up to
the last commentators upon the commentators of Holy Scripture, one such as Cardinal Cajetan
perhaps, saw itself as the natural successor to the Greek philosophers. These, after all, had
striven after a wisdom more adult and subtle than that offered in the symbols of popular
religion but which, even for learned men, had now been fulfilled in a divine gift of the truth in
Christ, the messenger become the message, the divine made manifest. At the same time the
Moslems, on or beside European soil, continued the Greek inheritance, either in alliance with
an institutionalised monotheism (Avicenna) or in conscious separation from it (Averroes). In
Algazel we find a striking example of Cartesian fideism.
It was the conviction of Hegel that in many of its typically medieval manifestations
Christianity, which he had no doubt was the absolute religion, transcending (aufhebt) all the
religions preceding it, had not yet come fully to itself, in that freedom he, and we, find
spiritual and modern and which expresses itself politically, as it were extensionally, in
democracy, presupposing a citizenship requiring a taking of responsibility by all and each for
the whole. Hence Maritain’s later call for a civilization of love5, upon the premise that nothing
less, not mere civic friendship for example, will satisfy the collective conscience which has
known Christianity and indeed the earlier political cry (1789) stemming from it (sic Maritain)
for brotherhood beyond friendship, along with liberty and equality. The Algerian taxi-driver
knew his history better than his Newsweek reporter.
The Jews, indeed, had long ago been spoken of, by Porphyry, as a nation of philosophers, as
also any democratic nation is required to be, illustrating this at each election and through the
media generally.6 The Jews were also though7 spoken of as atheists, their God being so
invisible. This root, with its offshoot Christianity, has carried Europe into the European
American, Australian, even Japanese, Indian and Chinese modern age which we call Western
and which comes from Europe, as V.S. Naipaul has trenchantly argued. There is concurrence
in the exclusion of an earlier model felt as a progress therefrom. Mirroring the claim of the
Church, we have in this institutionalised movement, these deliberatively moving institutions,
a kind of symbol of the human race as a whole, the part for the whole indeed, but in order
finally to become the whole, the sign effecting what it signifies.
This though raises a question about Christianity, which has its own notions concerning the end
of history. It has ministered, both in Scholastic and Calvinist form, to the emergence of a
world-order as an end of history to which there seems little reason to expect an alternative
(unless and until catastrophic pressures be once more applied), particularly if the destiny of
5
J. Maritain, True Humanism, London 1938 (French orginal 1936).
6
Here the conservative Christian C.S. Lewis momentarily transcended himself, writing:
Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now... occupy
for themselves those heights... once reserved for the sages?... If so, our present
blunderings would be but growing pains.
But while very mutedly echoing Maritain’s (or Schiller’s) vision of brotherly love he
issues a warning in the negative spirit of Ortega y Gasset’s La rebelión de las masas (1930).
See C.S. Lewis, Miracles, London 1947, Fount Paperback pp.46-7.
7
Cf. Wolff, op. cit.
Europe is now forecast to be that of replicating America in important cultural respects, despite
the present great difference in demographic trends and related greater integrational
challenges, as it may seem. The Patristic writers, again, saw themselves as modern inheritors
of the philosophers, living in the last times. Nor was an interest in natural science so totally
lacking. It was overshadowed rather by grander themes, even held back by political and
economic collapse after the invasions, Germanic or Arabic. There was a confidence lasting at
least up to the Black Death (c.1348), despite growing restlessness under clerical domination.
With the Renaissance human confidence was the keynote, while the speculative system of
Nicholas of Cusa foreshadowed the whole later philosophical development.
What we call secularism, the emergence from shadows to reality, took place as an organic
development from or within the old Christendom and up to the French Revolution, so heavily
influenced in turn by the American revolution and its affirmation of the dignity of each and
every individual human being, though the reference of this idea to the people of the heath or
prairie took a century or more to grasp, as the speculative efforts of Vittoria and Las Casas
had earlier been needed for universal responsibility, of man as man for man, to be at least
acknowledged in the new Latin lands.
The Christians had originally envisaged a Second Coming of Christ the Lord, to occur within
a generation or two. So it was with hearts set on the world to come (Gregory the Great
expected the end any day) that they improved, both here and there but also in principle,
conditions in this world. The link of early capitalism with Calvinist piety is well established,
if we are now speaking of the triumph of capitalism understood as a society of free men and
women interacting with the environment in responsible and profitable creativity.
So one effect of this faith in a coming age, vita venturi saeculi, has been the birth of a new
age or milieu embracing an ever greater assemblage of peoples. There has been for centuries a
”spirit of kindness” abroad, witnessed to even by the reactions against it, which was not there
before, easily linked to men’s "looking on him whom they have pierced", in Zechariah’s
somewhat uncanny prophecy. How much we link the development with mystical or confused
prophecies depends on individual conscience, intuition and liberally enlightened speculation.
A network of connections lies open to inspection all the same.
Thus behind the opposition between Europe the sacral, the ”Christian club”, and Europe the
free, democratic and open or even potentially universal, an opposition we here argue
superficial, there is a deeper unity and historical continuity with inter alia a self-surpassing
Christianity. You will do greater things than I have done, one Gospel reports Jesus as saying,
while Mohammed in his own way attempted such a surpassing, something clearly of topical
importance in today’s European cultural situation. The ultra-conservative Belloc saw Islam as
a variant upon Christianity, calling it a heresy, compliment indeed.
So what then are the values holding the new body politic together?8 Are they in any sense
religious or meta-religious? Did the Roman Church’s authoritative Decree on Ecumenism of
forty years ago make definitive its understanding of itself as no more (but no less) than a
sacrament of an ever renewed humanity? Will these values now be moral values only? Is there
just one value, viz. freedom as expressed in democratic order? Or is that a political value and
will that insight return us to an Aristotelian vision of politics no more as an inhuman
realpolitik divorced from personal morality but as ultimate ethical expression, as in Hegel too,
called the Christian Aristotle (as Aquinas was the Christianiser of Aristotle, to make a fine but
crucial distinction).
A recent opponent of exclusive stress upon freedom and democracy to the detriment of other
values, imperatives and taboos, as he himself calls them, is the French philosopher André
8
On values as holding society together see our The End of the Law, Peeters, Louvain 1999,
Chapter One, “Ethics, Value, Welfare”, originally a lecture delivered (in Swedish) at the
annual conference of the Swedish Christian Democrat Party, 1997, Örnskjöldsvik.
Glucksmann9. He warns against value-nihilism, taking his tone from recent atrocities
committed by a "murderous Islam" or in Chechnya or by various third world independence
movements. His guiding light seems to be the ancient Greek rejection of hubris, seen as
harmful to ”norms”. He enlists Dostoyevsky here in the service of what he calls rationalist
humanism. Thus he transforms Ivan Karamazov’s dictum that if there is no God then
everything is permitted into the expression of a need for respect for such norms and even
taboos. The alternative, he thinks, is a hate-filled and murderous nihilism.
Well, there does seem to be a lot of the latter commodity around, but is it a consequence of
freedom and democracy, as Glucksmann appears to suggest? His prescription seems decidedly
Old Testamentish (in the negative sense) and backward-looking. It was maybe just the
elevation to quasi-positivist laws of these norms, requiring this ugly neologism (at least in
English) even to name them, which lost them respect in the first place. The letter kills. The
cause of hate, rather, is quite straightforwardly a lack of love, which Glucksmann does not
mention as a serious candidate for any improvement of behaviour. What counts, he thinks, is
morality, moral fibre. He exhorts us to be moral, to retreat from our dreadful freedom. This
was indeed the classical rationalism he desiderates, of ”each to count for one and none for
more than one” (Bentham). The Christian idea, also found in Dostoyevsky, is more like ”each
to count for all and none for less than all”, expressing respect for human integrity and
personality more than for norms.
Glucksmann might well have to cast the Apostle Paul as a value-nihilist, if it was he who
declared that the law was killed off (nailed to the Cross) and that we should not misuse our
consequent freedom, the consciousness that we can do whatever we like, as sons at home.
Love and do what you like.
Referring to globalisation Glucksmann says that in people’s heads an unstoppable
(unaufhaltsame) Westernisation has already taken place, but minus that responsibility for
one’s own freedom which he calls, not incorrectly, the Western ethic. But why should people
have adopted Westernisation without its ethic, like getting machines without a mentality of
maintenance? That does happen on occasion. There are always those who do not take
responsibility, and a certain tolerance of this situation is required so as not to repress those
who do.
What is needed, rather, is love, mercy, forgiveness, a general humaneness, all that in fact
belongs specifically to the Christian message upon which European unity was founded, giving
birth in time to typical Enlightenment ideals including democracy, the equality of women,
consideration for the weak, for slaves and, last but not least, that freedom Glucksmann so
mistrusts. Freedom is never ethically neutral, being itself the essence of the human power of
rational judgement. For this, unlike a law of nature, is not determined to one thing but is ad
opposita, i.e. is free.
Glucksmann anyhow forgets or ignores the main point of Dostoyevsky’s (or Ivan’s) dictum,
the negative aspect of which he portrayed in The Possessed. This point is that a religious or
transcendent foundation is needed for any civilised humanism. Dostoyevsky understood
Augustine’s ama et fac quod vis as well as anyone. In his terms it translates into saying that
God exists and therefore everything is permitted. For God is love 10 as supportive of freedom
and respect for all. The old enslaving restrictions and observances are gone.
It is therefore a free society that legislates and the laws are there to protect and even to
express such freedom. Human law must flow from and not contradict natural law, said
Aquinas, though in his hands, in view of our earlier interpretation of the development in
which he played a part, the latter might seem an equivocal notion. For why speak of a law at
all if you define it as ”a reflected divine light”? The answer is found in the theologian’s desire
9
Der Spiegel, Nr. 21, 18.5.2002, pp.178-182. “Wir müssen uns dem Bösen stellen”.
10
Cf. I Corinthians 13.
to exhibit continuity with the Old Testament, as is yet clearer in Augustine’s concept of the
eternal law.
Implicit in the Christian critique of the Law was a view of it as essentially deformed, as bound
up with a curse upon man. The true law was always the law of freedom but man could not see
it before Christ. This interpretation has forced itself upon the original myth and dialectic of an
original fall and later redemption. One asked why the New Law ”poured into our hearts by the
Holy Spirit” was not given from the beginning. In reality it was always in us, as grace is the
truth of nature, since the twofold precept, as it is represented, of love is natural (Aquinas
insists) and thus from the beginning. Thus Jesus exhorts to a return to an original ethos in
marriage, for example. We need not here try to resolve all the problems thrown up by
theologians concerning their twofold moral universe of nature and grace. Still, what is called
natural is often just what our nature itself calls on us to transcend, as Aquinas teaches that we
have a natural inclination to act according to reason even, while virtue, which is according to
reason, is also ad ardua. Thus Goethe’s angels in Faust claim to save whoever strives.
It is then at once an ethic and an ethos of freedom that marks specifically human or spiritual
life. Virtues are habits ministering to this, so justice is not an idolatrous keeping of rules but a
search after the needs of others from the touchstone of what one requires oneself. 11 Justice is
love. Love is its form, as it is of all other virtues. So there is, formally, just one virtue, which
is itself not a rule or principle but energy and life, having for its object God or infinity. So it
was called a theological virtue. No matter! The new commandment, for those having ears,
transcends the whole category of commanding. This is the mark and freedom of European or
Western humanity, in which all can participate. So it cannot be confessionally based.
Still less is our human need for legislation to be transferred to the heavens, where life and
love and glory is the rule, a rule though yet more self-surpassing than the flexible rule of
Lesbos Aristotle mentions, since it coincides entirely with freedom. This is the positive value
enshrined in what many condemn as mere secularism (no temple in that city), like the
invisible God of Israel who forbade all more particular worship so that the nations asked, in
scandalised mockery, where their God was, if anywhere. Nothing has changed much there, but
the movement spreads ever outwards, born, perhaps, upon the wings of aeroplanes, upon radio
and television waves, in the hands of friendship and humanity.
This returns us to the part standing for the whole. The battle to preserve respect for conscience
as just a small part within a more objective scheme was always destined to be lost. The reason
is that all that is in fact objective and true, the norm, existing differently from anything else, is
just man and his conscience. It is in this sense that ”every soul gets what it expects” (Thérèse
of Lisieux). It is this objectivity which enables democracy to identify its enemies, the freedom
either beyond being or itself ultimate being. God is freedom, as we find suggested in Boehme
or Eckhart that God is freedom before or rather apart from becoming the God, as divine being,
of his creation. He never merely finds himself in being. This lies behind Hegel’s view of
nature as objectified spirit. Objectification is itself a step downward, something to be
overcome. Awareness of eternity’s necessary timelessness is essential here; there is no piece
by piece duration. Eternity, furthermore, is a quality inseparable from God himself, not a prior
ambience.
The link with ecumenism is the requirement of a real (and not merely intentional) passing
over into the other. The Hegelian dialectic poses a challenge to the world of the religious
denominations. Yet anything short of this having the form of the other as other in a more than
intentional mode is just patronisation. The opponent’s truth has to be recognised and that
means harmonised in ever new syntheses. If we can cease to see it as flat denial we will not
See our “Justice: Legal and Moral Debt in Aquinas”, The Downside Review, No. 424, July
11

2003, pp.157-171, also appearing in The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2004 or
2005.
need to flatly deny it. To a certain degree this was the method of Aquinas, in that he sought to
persuade from shared premises. His written work leaves unsaid though whether he was open
to a further response from the debating partner, saying ”Now I understand you and now I can
show you how you can understand, that is receive, what I say too”, thus entering the endless
flow of life where all are friends.
The conclusion is that Europe can see itself as the bearer of modern secularism in full
consciousness that the humanism this represents is the latest, whether or not definitive
flowering of the tradition, marked by the sign under which a European identity and unity
surpassing that of ancient Rome was first forged. Thus the sign of the dollar has not replaced
the sign of the Cross, as Christopher Dawson claimed, not definitively it hasn’t, though
historians must be allowed their moods. The Western economies have, rather, flourished like
all else under the humanly inspired form of life which that sign of contradiction (dialectic)
represents.
Ancient Rome had its limits, was ready to draw back. The missionary era succeeding to it
acknowledged a duty, an inner necessity, to teach all nations, a dignity once promised to
Abraham as representing the perhaps hard-won Israelite insight into ethical universalism
within a divine unity. Today European culture cannot but spread over the earth and Islam is its
shadow, while to Islam we ought to appear as at least as much ourselves. Once again it may
be the Jews who hold the key, in this matter at least, Jews from whom salvation can come
still,12 though like Vatican City they remain aloof still from the European Union.
European culture then has created a world which needs global organs. The part has caused the
whole yet must continue in its original vitality, a body and a movement in which the farthest
flung country, as viewed from Brussels, might one day find itself at the cultural centre.

12
John 4, 22.