This summer the newspapers have been livened up by the debate as to whether it is acceptable for the European Constitution to make reference to Europe’s Christian origins. Those in favor argue the obvious fact that Europe was born under a Christian culture before the fall of the Roman Empire, from at least the time of Emperor Constantine’s edict in 313. Just as the Eastern world cannot be conceived without Buddhism, Europe cannot be conceived without recognizing the role played by the Catholic Church, by the devoutly Christian kings, by scholastic theology, and by the actions and example of its great saints.
Those who argue against such a reference invoke the secular principles on which modern democracies are based. Those in favor suggest that secularism is a recent development in Europe, a legacy of the French Revolution, nothing to do with the origins that are rooted in the monastic or Franciscan tradition. Those against it think above all about the Europe of tomorrow, which is destined to become a multiethnic continent, and where an explicit reference to Christian roots could halt the process of integration for newcomers and reduce other traditions and beliefs, some of considerable size, to the status of minority cultures and cults that are merely tolerated.
It is therefore not just a war of religion; it relates to a political project, an anthropological vision, and the decision about whether the physiognomy of Europe should be drawn on the strength of its population’s past or on the strength of its people’s future.
Let us look at the past. Has Europe developed solely on the basis of Christian culture? I’m not thinking about the benefits European culture has reaped over the centuries, starting with Indian mathematics, Arabic medicine, or contacts farther east that predate Marco Polo and go back as far as Alexander the Great. Every culture absorbs elements from cultures near and far, but then develops its own character. It’s not enough to say that we have to be grateful to the Indians or the Arabs for the number zero if it was Europe that first came up with the idea that nature is written in mathematical notation. The fact is that we’re forgetting Greco-Roman culture.
Europe absorbed Greco-Roman culture in terms of its law, its philosophical thought, and even its popular beliefs. Christianity incorporated pagan rituals and myths, often casually, and forms of polytheism can still be found in popular religion. It wasn’t only the Renaissance world that was populated with Venuses and Apollos and went on to explore the classical world, its ruins, and its manuscripts. Medieval Christianity built its theology on the thought of Aristotle, rediscovered through the Arabs, and if it ignored much of Plato it didn’t ignore Neo-Platonism, which greatly influenced the fathers of the Church. Nor could Augustine, the greatest of Christian thinkers, be imagined without the impact of Platonic thought. The very notion of empire, over which there has been a thousand-year conflict between European states, and between states and Church, is of Roman origin. Christian Europe chose the Latin of Rome as the language of its sacred rituals, its religious thought, its law, and its university disputations.
There again, a Christian tradition is inconceivable without Jewish monotheism. The text on which European culture is based, the first text that the first printer thought to print, the text whose translation by Luther practically established the German language, the principal text of the Protestant world, is the Bible. Christian Europe was born and grew up singing the psalms, quoting the prophets, meditating on Job and on Abraham. Jewish monotheism was indeed the bridge that allowed dialogue between Christian monotheism and Islamic monotheism.
But it doesn’t end there. Indeed, Greek culture, at least from the time of Pythagoras, would have been inconceivable without the influence of Egyptian culture, and one of the most significant phenomena of European culture, namely the Renaissance, was inspired by the teachings of the Egyptians and the Chaldeans, while the European image, from the first attempts to decipher the obelisks up until Champollion, from the Empire style to the modern and very Western imaginings of the New Age, were inspired by Nefertiti, the mysteries of the pyramids, the pharaoh’s curse, and the golden scarab.
So I don’t think it out of place in a constitution to make reference to the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots of our continent. Likewise, just as Rome opened its own pantheon to gods of every race and put men with black skin on the imperial throne—and we shouldn’t forget that Saint Augustine was born in Africa—Europe should declare itself ready, by virtue of these very roots, to include every other cultural and ethnic contribution, since openness is one of its most distinguished cultural features.
2003