Without its Christian capstone the European edifice will fall apart

“Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe.” David Engels, a Belgian historian of the Roman and other ancient empires, agrees with only the first part of this controversial statement of Hilaire Belloc. As Engels points out, there are many ancient Christian communities outside Europe, still flourishing, if often persecuted, today.

However, he insists that, indeed, like Belloc, the Christian faith lies at the heart of Europe and that without this faith it is likely to dissolve.

He also insists on the peculiar character of specifically Western European Christianity. Besides a concern with the unique significance and destiny of every human creature, shared with all Christian cultures, it has exhibited from the outset what Engels, following Oswald Spengler, describes as a “Faustian” bent: a desire to “go further” in either vertical or horizontal dimensions, and in either a spiritual or a material register.

There is in this respect a certain continuity between the massive Ottonian cathedrals of the German Middle Ages and the skyscrapers of today; between the complexity of Scholastic theology and the mysteries of Quantum physics.

A shared Christian sense of the unimaginable altitude of God has been combined in the West with a passionate desire nonetheless to aspire towards it – sometimes in hyperbolic humility, sometimes with arrogance, sometimes again with a tempered sense of the synergic unity of divine and created wills.

It is, for Engels, a humanist arrogance that has led to the crisis that Europe faces today.

Ever since the 16th century, Europe has gradually lost the Medieval subordination of all aspects of life to the heroic pursuit of transcendence. Without this primacy of the spiritual, the release of freedom can only achieve an increasingly sordid material expansion: money comes to dominate all and so the pursuit of the good, true and beautiful is lost sight of.

In consequence, nature is despoiled, the body is distorted, murder justified for the sake of convenience, while greed displaces honour. Equally, a chivalric respect between the sexes is replaced by mutual suspicion and sexual exploitation, resulting in the disintegration of the family.

At the political level, the loss of the influence of the faith leaves a vacuum at the heart of Europe. Everything within it, from respect for human dignity to the celebration of Romantic love and the pursuit of liberty to constitutionalism, bears the mark of the Christian inheritance.

But without the capstone of transcendence, the entire edifice falls apart. What, apart from this legacy, distinguishes Europe from everywhere else? A subscription to bland, universal, globalising values provides us with no reason for sustaining Europe’s existence. If other civilisational states were to uphold those values, why should not Europe be happy to be eventually dominated by China or Russia? Why should it matter if, internally, the influence of Islam starts severely to displace Christian tradition?

But perhaps the dynamised version of an extreme valuation of human particularity and of the practices of free association, that are specific to western Christianity, seriously do matter to us?

And perhaps by now we have realised that we have lived through what Elias José Palti calls a “second disenchantment”, whereby we can see that all the humanist substitutes for ultimate political reference to God, such as history, progress, race, the nation, sovereignty, the workers, the people, etc., are all illusory.

For they have all now been deconstructed in their supposed ideality, and shown to be contingent human constructs that therefore cannot stand outside us to judge us, like the divine height.

Europe fell from that height when it lost the spontaneous sense of our receptive participation in the divine, even if this was now a creative, dynamic participation. Subsequent absolutisations of arbitrary rights to mediate divine sublimity in the Baroque period soon rendered the divine role redundant. Was the sovereign now absolute or was it the contracted people? Worse still, in a contradictory fashion, sovereignty is justified by pact and yet the pact is not present until there is a submission to the sovereign monopolisation of violence.

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Thus, without the positing and lure of transcendence, Europe has gradually sunk into an ever more paradoxical muddle. Perhaps, it was wondered, the economic could mediate our perplexity; but then again, does the economising state come first or the market that requires the state to guarantee it? Our entire party politics are organised around arbitrarily favouring one side of the puzzling aporia or the other.

Then again, maybe history can mediate and be authoritative? But whether universal or national history, does either really obey some sort of destiny? It has become implausible to think so. And anyway, which comes first? Neither do, since once more, they assume each other. Thus, our new and equally sterile and futile contestation between globalisers and anti-globalisers.

We are consequently left today with various self-contained formal or logistical systems, lacking in purpose, which can be arbitrarily and “subjectively” instigated. Yet now that we have lost any idea of the soul or of liberty, even this “avant-garde” modernist capacity to innovate seems to be the mere product of fluctuating systems themselves – which have, conversely, lost even their structural stability. Everything is already “artificial intelligence”, unpredictably out of control.

In consequence, without the divine anchor we find that everywhere, and not just in Europe, people no longer know how to legitimate any political arrangement at all, and fatalism has overtaken us. No objective is any longer justifiable and every purpose looks like disguised violence, as everyone on social media seems to suspect each single day.

Worse still, there are no longer any obvious subjects of politics, no longer any obvious political communities to be represented. Who is European? And Who is French or Périgordian, for example? The boundaries between metropolises and provinces, between the indigenous and various ethnic groups, are becoming stronger that regional, national or European belongings.

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All these new identities come down to degree of success, fashion or trivia: to class, age, cultural style, race, gender, sexuality and so forth. Nothing here seems worth defending any longer and so indeed people have fewer and fewer babies and are less and less prepared to fight for hearth and home.

In this situation, for our contemporary Engels, a different spectre is haunting Europe. Not the proletariat, but the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. An obsession with the latter is not surprising, given Engels’ own origin in the small German-Speaking enclave of Eastern Belgium, but both obsessions are entirely cogent.

Our current state looks analogous at once to the decline of the Roman Republic and to the decline of the subsequent Roman Empire. In the latter case we are threatened from without, and in many ways penetrated within from without. In the former case, representative rule has declined into that of a detached oligarchy, increasingly overriding democratic consent in favour of expert, “scientific” advice and shadowy “consultative” agencies.

In terms of the Holy Roman Empire, which is so much more highly regarded today by historians than it once was, to Engels it is an exemplar for our future. Unlike many conservatives, he thinks that there is little future in the independent nation state, which is today in many ways a fiction, and not so much to be admired anyway.

Even European political and legal identity, never mind a cultural one, is an ancient thing, and its re-working by the EU has ensured unprecedented European peace. If Europe is to survive as a civilisation, it now requires a strengthened political and military union.

Engels certainly deplores the current EU, but does not see its secular and technocratic character as any worse than that of its component nation states. To survive into the future, for him it requires, at once – on the ancient imperial model – much more subsidiary and participatory democracy and yet also a clearer and more continuous presidential unity at the centre, linked to a more transparent popular mandate.

Indeed, if forced to choose, he would favour the Caesarian over Republican disintegration, recalling that Augustus Caesar really did remove much oligarchic corruption and benefited the plebs and the provinces.

This is, of course, controversial, and yet Engels’ point is that soon the choice may be only between better and worse Caesars – the latter being those who, like Donald Trump, are themselves oligarchs, manipulating the populace to outdo their rivals.

Yet as for the rest of Engels’ politics, this supposed “far right” apologist would surely once have been seen as a mainline Christian Democrat, and he quotes Robert Schuman, the Christian democratic political thinker and activist, at length – even if he unfairly ignores the continuation today of the genuine socialist Left and is at times too negatively Faustian in his understanding of our relationship to nature. Just as he refuses “national conservatism”, so he refuses Catholic Integralism if that means things like no longer tolerating other faiths or reversing the emancipation of women.

Certainly, Engels thinks that Europe is lost if it does not once more subordinate secular adventure to the adventure of faith. But here again he avoids nostalgic extremes: the Faustian precedes the Renaissance, and modernity since then has discovered existential and scientific truths at times precisely through its unmooring from specific faith, even if its values have always hovered in the background.

If we should now return to faith, we do so more critically and consciously, with greater rational insight into the need for discerning our participation in the the transcendent One, if all the created and creative Many are not simply to fly apart from each other in a random disorder.

His hopeful thesis can seem very implausible: surely there is no undoing of secular domination and normativity? But if Europe is undoing itself anyway and if it is now threatened by other civilisations, then our insular linear perspective shifts to one of civilisational cycles. We start to realise that, like all civilisations, we are eventually declining because we have lost our focus on our central mythos in a welter of scepticism and rationalism that ironically tends to debase us into merely manipulable material bodies.

Can, then, a different, Christian linearity escape this perennial and pagan cyclical doom?

Perhaps that is the hope of a Trinitarian and Incarnational faith (as intimated by philosophers of history like Vico, Hegel and Schelling): that it holds at its very core a greater sense of the co-belonging of the One with the Many and of Divine Omnipotence with created freedom and changing variety.

In that sense, it would seem to anticipate the possibility of a final synthesis between a naïve and a reflective civilisation, repenting of its prodigal wandering, but still unable to forget its travels upon its return to the Father.

Yet without that return, former Europeans will surely be left eating the husks of an unravelling human history.

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Photo: Detail of ‘Rape of Europa’, 1628 – 1629, oil on canvas, a copy made by Peter Paul Rubens after an original by Titian. It shows the Phoenician princess Europa after she was abducted by Zeus, who had taken on the form of a white bull. (Screenshot from Museo del Prado at museodelprado.es.)

John Milbank is a theologian, philosopher, poet and political theorist.

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