Europeanity and Christianity

In the draft European Constitution being put together under Giscard d'Estaing's baton in Brussels, we get positive references in the preamble to Europe's cultural, religious and humanist inheritance, as well as to Graeco-Roman civilisation and the Enlightenment, but not to Christianity or to God.

According to a Reuters report of May 30, "opponents on the political left say a specific reference to Christianity would offend the millions of Muslims and other religious groups living in Europe, while secularists argue that politics and faith should be kept well apart".

On the other hand, according to an interview carried in Corriere della Sera with Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican Secretary of State ('foreign minister'), this omission is "an ideological manoeuvre that reveals an overbearing temptation on the part of those who thought up this text to rewrite history".

The archbishop is right. Not to recognise Christianity, if not Christendom, as an integral part in the moulding of a European history, indeed of Europeanity, is a little bit like removing Trotsky from a Soviet picture after he had fallen from grace with Stalin.

But no amount of erasing Trotsky's image by those who ended up exiling and assassinating him can change the fact that he was an intellectual and operational catalyst in making the Russian revolution happen and in winning the subsequent civil war for the Red Army.

Trotsky was just one brilliant, energetic, charismatic and erratic individual in a human lifespan, whereas the Catholic Church grew from its Near Eastern and Roman roots into a divine-bearing worldwide institution commanding the adherence or the respect of countless millions of people over the centuries, influencing beliefs, mentalities and lifestyles, not infrequently at the expense of persecution by those in power.

In other respects it has been an all too human organisation which at times erred gravely; it has been authoritarian, inhibiting, even warlike, and in the worst of times an agent of systematic persecution itself; while oft-quoted 'nemesis' passages from Genesis and other choice portions of the Old Testament, still today, may be incomprehensible, if not abhorrent, to rising generations.

As with liberty, so too with Christianity, many crimes were committed in its name, perhaps because conquistadores of different nationalities from expansionist Europe and others felt safe in the assumption that they were God's gift to humanity and could get away with plunder and murder in more esoteric settings far from home.

The legacy of identification with privilege, power, obscurantism and abuse, denounced by forces such as the Reformation and the Enlightenment, would not lend themselves dearly to any mainstream secularist, humanist Europe of the future, whether 'leftist', 'rightist', 'centrist' or any other combination.

Positive and lasting legacies

All this, however, misses a fundamental set of points. It is simply that Christianity as a religion, and Christendom as the whole body of Christians, particularly in that part of the world - read especially Europe - where it became the received religion, has contributed to our history in so many other formative and 'humanising' ways as well.

To mention the pagan Graeco-Roman heritage, seminal and dramatic though that was, without referring as well to the Judaeo-Christian one in any attempt succinctly to define Europe in time and space, is wrong. Wrong because it is untrue: it is a selective, truncated rendering of history.

If that is because Muslims now living and working on the continent would not like to hear about Europe's long-time Christian moulding and heritage (sic), this becomes a despicable act of cowardice, of misplaced tolerance, of self-deception bordering on a self-deprecating scorn: an insult to the European mind, and to the essence of a civility of which it has prided itself until, it would seem, this went overboard, hoist by its own relativistic post-modern petard.

Such would hardly constitute an act of political correctness - on which, in any case, no worthwhile vision of any human future or of anything ultimately can rest, least of all a liberal-inspired European one.

There is no doubt that millions of Muslims, mostly of Arab and Turkish stock, now inhabit European countries, especially France and Germany; and so many more would do so were Turkey to become a member of the EU (televoting has just won Turkey the Eurovision song contest); but that, if true, certainly is no reason for today's Europeans to refrain from asserting an intelligible historical truthfulness in seeking to chart a better future in the knowledge and on the strengths of a shared past.

The Christian reality ceased being theocratic long ago; it is no fundamentalist version of the Islamic law, which lumps together the civil and religious aspects of life. This by itself makes a nonsense of the other argument, in the same breath, that there should be no reference to Christianity because politics and faith should be kept well apart - let alone not offending Muslims, or atheists for that matter.

The Vatican took its time recognising united Italy as a state, but it did so more than 70 years ago and has 'cohabited' with it since. It has even apologised for condemning Galileo.

Whether some may like it or not, Christianity is not limited to a practice of creed or ritual; it is an inheritance of broader and deeper significance than one might notice at first sight. The Crusades were simply a military expression of Christendom, an expedition to the Holy Land gone wrong; but the pilgrimage, for instance, be it to Canterbury or Compostela, to Fatima or to Lourdes, was and remains to this day an affirmation of a trans-border and inter-cultural affinity.

Christian-influenced personifications of good and evil, and of the individual's right to choose between them, litter European literature. Look at the architecture; or listen to some of the music. Is Gregorian chant alien to European history?

The Renaissance was also an expression of Christian humanism; just have a look at the Sistine Chapel. If that was not European, what was? Why mention Erasmus, or Comenius, or Leonardo? They were all much influenced by Christianity, one way or the other.

It is no revelation to recall that the earliest educational institutions and indeed the oldest European universities were inspired by a Christian theology and ethos. Slavery was practised by the Church and everyone else in olden times but more recently, in the 19th century, the movement in favour of the abolition of slavery was inspired and driven largely by Christian notions of man as created in the image and likeness of God, hence of the equality among races irrespective of the colour of their skin, and so on.

The Christian European presence

Nor is such a Christian, especially Catholic, influence on Europe restricted to the West. From Russia's self-preserving 'Old Believers' and the Byzantine orthodoxy of the Balkans to the buttressing strengths of a post-war national anti-Communist, anti-atheist resistance in countries such as Hungary and Poland, there has been no want of a Catholic presence on the European continent. It is not one that may be summarily dismissed or forgotten, for whatever reason.

What has been a formative, over-reaching core value and characteristic of Europeanity (for better or worse, often in contrast to 'the other' - Orient, Ottoman or Moor) can hardly be discarded now, at what may be a defining moment of it.

There are of course many other varied constituent elements in Europe's cultural, economic and political history and in its sum identity profile, to the extent that one can be drawn. In conducting a course on European identity when I was a guest professor at Augsburg some years ago, we found ourselves delving further and further into the past: not just Greece and Rome, Charlemagne in the eighth century AD or Caesaro-papism or the later 'Holy Roman Empire', or Norman Sicily for that matter; but the burgher, capital, the market and the citizen; ports, ships and treasure; the supposed civilising missions of empire; industrialisation, urbanisation and communications; changing social classes and structures tending towards a plurality of views and interests; protest, counter-protest, revolution and critical dissent contained within what became 'democractic' representative institutions; competing nation-states and an organically evolving governance; even multiculturalism.

The quest is endless but Christianity, in its different phases and guises, has been pivotal, or at least a noteworthy factor, if only by default. Sadly, denominational and religious differences often have been directly or indirectly, by association, causes of sectarian wars or pretexts for such (and more than one genocide in the 20th century alone); but such phenomena have rarely been monocausal.

Ab initio the guided monotheistic journey itself was very largely a radical departure from antiquity, influencing morality and historiography, if not also Islam, which came later. It repeatedly inspired heroic deeds, some of the greatest musical compositions and works of art, as well as a lingering sense of spirituality and awe in relation to such rationalisation as science, faced by the mystery of life, has been unable to provide.

The Judaeo-Christian traditions have been rather more than a collection of fable and legend, myth and parable, all of which in any case have formed a part of Europe's past, starting with the mythological origins of 'Europa' herself. They have not been any less important than the Graeco-Roman ones, which generally preceded them.

While the reference to 'religious' in the existing constitutional draft, taken in a European context, already would imply mainly Christianity, it would not be amiss if this were singled out in a passing mention, as a matter of historical record, given the incorporation of such a preamble.

By the mere addition of two words, a modified draft could read: "Europe's cultural, religious and humanist inheritance, including Christianity", or some such formulation. That would not make the proposed EU Constitution any less of a secular instrument in line with contemporary sensibilities and aptitudes, while it would put paid to any accusation by the Vatican or others that in 2003 European history was being rewritten.

Apart from his other writings, Professor Frendo is the author of L-Identità Ewropea: Tezisti? (Jean Monnet seminar series, University of Malta, 2002).