Valery, Paul: The European

But who, after all, is European?

by Paul Valery

[an extract] From History and Politics , transl. Denis Folliot and Jackson Mathews; Princeton
University Press; published by permission.

I SHALL NOW risk -with many reservation and the infinite scruples we must have when we wish
to make a provisional statement of something not susceptible of true accuracy- I shall risk
proposing a tentative definition. It is not a logical definition I am about to work out for you. It is a
way of seeing, a point of view which recognizes that there are many others neither more nor
less legitimate.

Well then, I shall consider as European all those peoples who in the course of history have
undergone the three influences I shall name.

The first is that of Rome. Wherever the Roman Empire has ruled and its power has asserted
itself; and further, wherever the Empire has been the object of fear, admiration, and envy;
wherever the weight of the Roman sword has been felt; wherever the majesty of Roman
institutions and laws, or the apparatus and dignity of its magistrature have been recognized or
copied, and sometimes even incongruously aped -there is something European. Rome is the
eternal model of organized and stable power.

I do not know the reasons for this great achievement; it is useless to seek them now, as it is idle
to wonder what would have become of Europe if it had not become Roman.

The fact alone matters to us, the fact of the astonishingly durable imprint that was left on so
many races and generations by this superstitious and systematic power, oddly permeated by
the spirit of law, of military discipline, religion, and formalism... the first power to impose on
conquered peoples the benefits of tolerance and good administration.

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Then came Christianity. You know how gradually spread throughout the area of the Roman
conquest. If we discount the New World )which was not so much Christianized as peopled by
Christians) and Russia (which for the greater part was unaware of Roman law and the empire of
Caesar) we see that the area covered by religion of Christ still coincides almost exactly with the
domain of the Empire's authority. These two very different conquests yet have a kind of
resemblance, and that resemblance is important to us. The policy of the Romans, growing ever
more supple and ingenious with the increasing weakness of the central power, that is to say,
with the extent and heterogeneity of the Empire, brought about a remarkable innovation in the
practice of one people dominating many.

Just as the City par excellence in the end took to its bosom practically all beliefs, naturalizing
the most distant and incongruous gods and the most diverse cults, so the imperial government,
conscious of the prestige attaching to the Roman name, did not hesitate to confer the title and
privileges of civis romanus on men of all races and all tongues. So, by the deeds of that same
Rome, the gods ceased to be associated with one tribe, and locality, one mountain, temple, or
town, and became universal and to some extent common. And moreover, race, language, and
the fact of being victor or victim, conqueror or conquered, gave way to a uniform juridical and
political status inaccessible to no one. The emperor himself could be a Gaul, a Sarmatian, a
Syrian, and could sacrifice to very strange gods. ... This was a great political innovation.

But Christianity, at St. Peter testifies, although it was one of the very few religions to be looked
on with disfavor in Rome... Christianity, born of the Jewish people, itself spread to the gentiles
of every race; through baptism it conferred on them the new dignity of Christians, as Rome
conferred its citizenship on its former enemies. It gradually spread throughout the area of
Roman power, adapting itself to the forms of the Empire, even adopting its administrative
divisions (in the fifth century, civitas meant the episcopal city). It took all it could from Rome, and
fixed its capital there rather than in Jerusalem. It borrowed Rome's language. A man born in
Bordeaux could be a Roman citizen and even a magistrate and at the same time a bishop of the
new religion. The same Gaul could be imperial prefect and in pure Latin write beautiful hymns to
the glory of the Son of God born a Jew and a subject of Herod. There, already, we have almost
a complete European. A common law, a common God; one and the same temporal judge, one
and the same Judge in eternity.

But while the Roman conquest had affected only political man and ruled the mind only in its
external habits, the Christian conquest aimed at and gradually reached the depths of
consciousness.

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I do not wish even to attempt to measure the extraordinary changes which the religion of Christ
brought into that consciousness, with the aim of making it universal. I do not wish even to show
how singularly that religion influenced the formation of the European. I must here touch merely
upon the surface of things and, in any case, the effects of Christianity are well known.

***

I SHALL DO no more than remind you of some of the features of its influence. In the first place it
introduced subjective morality, and above all it brought about the consolidation of moral thought.
This new unity took its place alongside the juridical unity contributed by Roman law; in both
cases, abstract analysis tended to make regulations uniform.

Let us go beyond that. The new religion imposed self-examination. It may be said that it
introduced Western man to that inner life which the Hindus had cultivated in their own way for
centuries, and which the mystics of Alexandria in their way had also felt, recognized, and
studied.

Christianity proposed to the mind the most subtle, the greatest, and indeed the most fruitful
problems. Whether it were a question of the value of testimony, the criticism of texts, or the
sources and guarantees of knowledge; of the distinction between faith and reason, and the
opposition that arises between them. or the antagonism between faith, deeds, and works; a
question of freedom, servitude, or grace; of spiritual and material power and their mutual
conflict, the equality of men, the status of women -and how much else- Christianity educated
and stimulated millions of minds, making them act and react, century after century.

***

HOWEVER, this is not yet a finished portrait of us Europeans. Something is still missing from
our make-up. What is missing is that marvelous transformation to which we owe, not the sense
of public order, the cult of the city and of temporal justice; nor even the depth of our
consciousness, our capacity for absolute ideality, and our sense of an eternal justice... what is
missing is rather that subtle yet powerful influence to which we owe the best of our intelligence,
the acuteness and solidity of our knowledge, as also the clarity, purity, and elegance of our arts
and literature: it is from Greece that these virtues came to us.

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In this case too, we must admire the role of the Roman Empire. It conquered only to be
conquered. Permeated by Greece and Christianity, the Empire offered to both an immense field,
pacified and organized; it prepared the site and fashioned the mold into which Greek thought
and the Christian idea were to pour and combine so curiously.

What we owe to Greece is perhaps what has most profoundly distinguished us from the rest of
humanity. To her we owe the discipline of the Mind, the extraordinary example of perfection in
everything. To her we owe the method of thought that tends to relate all things to man, the
complete man. Man became for himself the system of reference to which all things must in the
end relate. He must therefore develop all the parts of his being and maintain them in a harmony
as clear and even as evident as possible. He must develop both body and mind. As for the
mind, he must learn to defend himself against its excesses and its reveries, those of its products
which are vague and purely imaginary, by means of scrupulous criticism and minute analysis of
its judgments, the rational separation of its functions, and the regulation of its forms.

From this discipline, science was to emerge -our science, that is to say, the most characteristic
product and the surest and most personal triumph of our intellect. Europe is above all the
creator of science. There have been arts in all countries, there have been true science only in
Europe.

Of course, before the age of Greece a kind of science had existed in Egypt and Chaldea, some
of whose results may still seem noteworthy; but it was impure , being in no way different, at
times, from the technique of some trade, or, again, including extremely unscientific
considerations. There has always been such a thing as observation. Man has always practiced
reasoning. But these essential activities have no value an cannot regularly succeed unless
other factors are prevented from vitiating their use. To develop science as we have it, a
relatively perfect model had to be established, a first work had to be set up as an Ideal,
representing every form of precision, every proof, every beauty, every solidity, and which should
once for all define the very concept of science as a pure construct, free of every consideration
but the edifice itself.

Greek geometry was that incorruptible model, no only for every kind of knowledge that aims at
the state of perfection, but also and above all for those virtues most typical of the European
intellect. I never think of classical art without seeing as its ineluctable example the monument of
Greek geometry. The construction of that monument required the rarest gifts and those
ordinarily most incompatible. The men who built it were hard and astute workmen, profound

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thinkers, but also artists of great subtlety and an exquisite sense of perfection.

Think of the cunning and the persistence required for them to accomplish such a delicate, such
an improbable adaptation as that of common speech to precise reasoning; think of all their
analyses of the most complex motor and visual operations; and how they succeeded in clearly
matching those operations with linguistic and grammatical properties. They trusted words and
their combinations to lead them safely through space. Of course their space has now become a
plurality of spaces; it has been singularly enriched, and their geometry, which formerly seemed
so rigorous, has been shown to have many flaws in its crystal. We have examined it so closely
that where the Greeks saw one axiom we now count a dozen.

For each of the postulates they introduced, we know that several others may be substituted,
and the result is a coherent geometry that sometimes can be physically applied.

But think what an innovation was that almost ceremonial form, which in its general outline is so
beautiful and pure. Think of that significant division of the Mind into separate moments, that
marvelous order in which each act of reason is clearly placed, clearly distinct from the others. It
reminds us of the structure of a temple, a static assemblage whose elements are all visible and
all declare their function.

The eye considers the load, its support and distribution the bulk and its system of balance; the
eye effortlessly distinguishes and orders those well-aligned masses whose very shape and
vigor are appropriate to their role and volume. Those columns, capitals architraves, those
entablatures and their subdivisions, and the ornaments that derive from them, never protruding
beyond their proper place and fitness, all make me think of those elements of pure science as
the Greeks first conceived them: definitions, axioms, lemmas, theorems, corollaries, porisms,
problems ... that is to say, the mechanism of the mind made visible, the very architecture of
intelligence drawn to a plan -the temple erected to Space by the Word, yet a temple that can
rise to infinity.

***

These, it seems to me, are the three essential conditions that define a true European, a man in
whom the European mind can come to its full realization. Wherever the names of Caesar,

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Caius. Trajan, and Virgil, of Moses and St. Paul, and of Aristotle, Plato, and Euclid have had
simultaneous meaning and authority, there is Europe. Every race and land that has been
successively Romanized, Christianized, and , as regards the mind, disciplined by the Greeks, is
absolutely European.

Some have undergone only one or two of these influences. There is a certain trait, then, quite
distinct from race, nationality, and even language which unites the countries of the West and
Central Europe, making them alike. The number of notions and ways of thought they have in
common is much greater than the number of notions we have in common with an Arab or a
Chinese.

In short, there is a region of the globe that is profoundly distinct from all others, from the human
point of view. In power and precise knowledge, Europe still, even today, greatly outweighs the
rest of the world. Or rather, it is not so much Europe that excels, but the European Mind, and
America is its formidable creation.

Wherever that Mind prevails, there we witness the maximum of needs, the maximum of labor,
capital , and production, the maximum of ambition and power, the maximum transportation of
external Nature, the maximum of relations and exchanges.

All these taken together are Europe, or the image of Europe. Moreover, the source of this
development, this astonishing superiority, is obviously the quality of the individual man, the
average quality of Homo europaeus. It is remarkable that the European is defined not by race,
or language, or customs, but by his aims and the amplitude of his will... And so forth.

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