THE marginalisation of Christianity in Western society has been relentless for at least 300 years. Those responsible, starting with the Enlightenment thinkers down to current secularists, have argued that a common religious foundation is unnecessary to uphold either moral virtues or cultural norms, proving their case by excluding Christianity from the public sphere. Yet the results of these attempts have not quite worked, the tendency being for Rousseauian ‘civil religions’ to turn liberty into a licence for vice, serving to polarise society and in turn compelling the state to impose uniformity where none can exist.
History is peppered with failed attempts to impose ostensibly universal secular principles which, far from providing moral and cultural equivalence, have resulted in pure invention and subjective selection at best and oppressive censorship at worst. When the Bolshevik poet Vladimir Kirillov declared in his 1917 poem We that ‘We’ll burn up Raphael for our Tomorrow’s sake, trample art’s flowers and destroy museums’, he was expressing a desire to replace what he saw as a socially destructive Christocentric civilisation with one devoid of any content that would impede the communist brave new world. What followed was a spectacle of unprecedented horror. Even the relatively benign attempts by the British state to impose purportedly British ideals on society have served only to heighten social divisions.
Guilty perhaps of the greatest of ironies have been the European Union’s architects in their search for historical legitimacy for their integrative process. ‘Europe is no creation. It is a rediscovery,’ remarked Walter Hallstein, the first president of the EEC Commission, as ‘[for] more than a thousand years the idea of a united Europe was never quite forgotten’. Yet by invoking Europe’s medieval past, particularly ‘the Father of Europe, Charlemagne’, while simultaneously minimising or overlooking the continent’s deep historical and cultural Christian roots, the EU’s system builders severed a key thread of the continent’s cultural fabric. By doing so, they stand accused of the kind of ideological year-zeroism usually associated with political despots. A prime example of attempting to forge a collective identity based on secular values went up in smoke when a school textbook entitled Europe: A history of its peoples by Jean-Baptist Duroselle, published in 1990 to ‘enable people to begin to rise above their nationalistic instincts’, in Duroselle’s words, ended up being likened to Soviet-like half-truths, omissions and blandness.
In her address in May 2012 in honour of the Charlemagne Prize recipient, German career politician Wolfgang Schäuble, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, likened Charlemagne’s cultural and political achievements with that of Schäuble in their quest to ‘forge a cohesive unity out of a divided western Europe’. Stranger still, she stripped Charlemagne’s ‘intellectual and cultural revival’ of any mention of the Christian basis for his Renaissance lest it undermined the secular fantasies associated with the work of the modern ‘Charlemagnes’.
While Charlemagne’s achievements were undoubtedly unparalleled, to imply that his was a secular Renaissance is to expose the vacuity of the identity formation programme which claims it does.
Charlemagne came from the Frankish barbarian tribe located along the Lower Rhine. From the third century, it began to challenge the northern Roman legions until in the eight century, when the Roman Empire was a very distant memory, it was poised to establish a new empire that would lay claim to its heritage. This, however, would be neither pagan nor secular, but wholeheartedly Christian. Although the Franks had been steadily Christianised much earlier, it was their king, Pepin, together with Pope Stephen, who laid the imperial foundations in 754, paving the way for the coronation in 800 in Rome by Pope Leo of Pepin’s son Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor. This cemented the Papacy’s alignment with Western Europe, marking a significant turning point for Western European civilisation. What followed was a period of cultural and scholarly revival, spearheaded by the Church in three medieval renaissances, so much so that Western civilisation became synonymous with Christendom which would shape Western Europe culturally and spiritually for centuries.
Christian culture of course predated all this by some eight centuries, and by the time of the takeover of Rome by the barbarians there was already a thriving Christian civilisation together with a structure of thought and a blueprint for virtuous life that blunted the harshest of edges of barbarian governance. To recognise the Church’s vital role in the advancement of civilisation is not a declaration of faith but a recognition of fact; to deny it is folly. With every facet of Western civilisation experiencing an existential crisis, what’s left are the remnants of earlier structures that once served as cornerstones of Christendom, manifested in pockets of moral virtue, academic rigour and cultural excellence.
Even doubters are increasingly coming round. The recent revival of interest in cultural Christianity, for instance, since the celebrated atheist biologist Professor Richard Dawkins reaffirmed his admiration for it a few months ago, is encouraging – at least they’re not smashing up civilisations like the Bolshevik year zeroists did. It is, however, disheartening to hear the muddled thinking behind their reasoning. ‘There’s a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian,’ Professor Dawkins declared. ‘I love the hymns and Christian carols. I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.’ So far so good. But then he added: ‘It’s true that statistically the number of people who believe in Christianity is going down. And I’m happy with that. But I won’t be happy if we lost our cathedrals and beautiful parish churches.’ Such cultural piggy-backing, or ‘cultural appropriation’ to use trendy terminology, undoubtedly gives those who do it a degree of cultural stability and fluffy feelings amidst the kitsch that increasingly surrounds them, or in Professor Dawkins’s case, a degree of cultural security against the Islamic influences that he so fears. Yet to profess enjoyment of the beautiful fruits of Christendom while simultaneously dismissing the ‘mumbo-jumbo’, to quote Clement Attlee, is not only intellectually negligent but also irrational. It’s like saying, notes the American cultural commentator Rod Dreher, that one enjoys the fruits of a farm but one is happy that farms are closing and that gardens are not being planted.
The fruits of the Christian cultural legacy were not created in a vacuum. Motivating those who produced them was a belief in the supernatural, in something beyond the material order that manifested itself in the Word made Flesh, so derided by the cultural Christians. More precisely, to understand the creative forces behind this cultural legacy is to recognise the centrality of the Catholic Mass in this process without which the bigger cultural picture is totally missed. Can Gregorian chant, for instance, be decoupled from the beatific visions of Heaven that enraptured its composers? Would El Greco, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Verdi, Mozart or the Cathedral masons have laboured to produce their treasures had they not have been drawn by spiritual forces beyond the material world? Would the van Eyck brothers have bothered with their wondrous Ghent altar piece if there was nothing to worship on the altar?
Would any of these treasures have emerged without the desire of their architects to beautify worship in the Mass and honour the majesty of Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament? An answer to this question can perhaps be glimpsed from the soulless Protestant services in the bleak surroundings of the once great Catholic cathedrals and churches that were stripped of their previous cultural glories. Geneva’s Calvinist ‘Temple to St Peter’, as it’s now called, comes to mind, with whitewashed walls replacing the ornate beauty when the Catholic Mass was abolished there in 1535. Any post-Reformation Protestant Church structure which appeals to a lost age for creative inspiration, like St Paul’s Cathedral in London, is mere imitation. Seen from this perspective, the relevance of the Catholic Mass to the development of Western civilisation is clear.
Cultural Christianity is a symptom of modernity and is set to grow as people increasingly gravitate towards what they see as virtuous and magnificent in the face of a mounting civilisational crisis. But to admire the fruits of Christianity yet to rebut the organic association between Christian culture and the mystery of the Mass, is not only to deny oneself understanding of much of the formative process of Western civilisation but also to engage in a pretence devoid of reason.
