Special Reports 07 by Modern Diplomacy

Special Report 07 | January 2015 Christianity and the European Identity by Emanuel L. Paparella

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Emanuel L. Paparella is a former professor of Italian language and literature at the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Central Florida. He is the author of various books: Hermeneutics in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Mellen Press, New York, 1993), A New Europe in Search of its Soul (Authorhouse, 2005), Europa: an Idea and a Journey (Exlibris, 2012), Tre Novelle Rusticane di Giovanni Verga (ed. 1975, Florentia Publisher), as well as innumerable articles on Italian literature and philosophy. He holds a BA from St. Francis College in Brooklyn, N.Y., an MA from Middlebury College in Italian Literature, a M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in Italian Humanism from Yale University. He has also studied Comparative Literature at New York University, is a former Fulbright scholar and has directed for five summers the study abroad program of the University of Central Florida snd Broward College at the University of Urbino. He has published for Italian journals and newspapers, the latest for Libro Aperto (April-June 2012) with an article commemorating the anniversary of the death of Benedetto Croce titled "Una rivalutazione della Filosofia di Benedetto Croce" (pp.186190) which was reviewd in La Repubblica (July 28, 2012). He has done a major translation: Vittorio Possenti's Philosophy and Revelation (Ashgate Publishing, 2001), Since 2000 he has actively participated in the debate on the European Union while lecturing and teaching humanities and philosophy at Barry University in Miami and Broward College in Davie, Florida. Over the last ten years or so he has published some 400 articles of a philosophical-literary nature in the on-line international magazine Ovi. He lives in Sunrise, Florida, with his wife Cathy of forty six years. He has three daughters: Cristina, Alessandra and Francesca and three grandchildren Sophia, Nicholas and Adriana. A fourth is on its way.

CONTENTS 10. Western Civilization at the Crossroads 16. A Revolutionary New View of History and Humanity 22. Vico’s Hermaneutical “Understanding” of Humanity 26.“Man is his own History” Leads to Self-Knowledge 30. Christianity: a Private Aﬀair or Part of the European Heritage and Identity? 36. Alcide De Gasperi”s Humanistic Vision of the European Union 42. Klaus Held on Religion, Science and Democracy in European Culture 46.The Tragic Loss of the European Spiritual Identity 56. The Return of the Gods and the EU Constitution transformed into a Treaty 62. The EU Constitution: The Cart before the Horse?

72. Danteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Vision of a United Europe 74. Vaclav Havel: Authentic Humanist and Cultural Hero for our Troubled Times 82. Jurgen Habermas on the Vision of a Post-Secular Europe 86. Christianity and Europe: Tony Blair at Yale University 92. Christopher Dawson and the Making of Europe 98. Europa Quo Vadis?

“If the religious and Christian substratum of this continent is marginalized in its role as inspiration of ethical and social efficacy, we would be negating not only the past heritage of Europe but a future worthy of European Man—and by that I mean every European Man, be he a believer or a non believer.” Pope John-Paul II (from a speech at the EU Parliament on 10/11/1988)

etween the years 2005 and 2012 I published three books on the European Union. They are titled A New Europe in Search of its Soul: Essays on the European Union’s Cultural Identity and the Transatlantic Dialogue (Authorhouse, 2005), and Europa: an Idea and a Journey: Essays on the Origins of the EU’s Cultural Identity and its Present Economic-Political Crisis (Ex Libris, 2012), and Europe beyond the Euro (Ovi magazine e-book). The titles and even the illustrations of the goddess Europa embarking on a journey straddling Zeus disguised as a bull, give the readers a preliminary idea of what those books are all about. In analyzing the present thorny geopolitical economic problems of the EU, those essays

attempt to identify the root causes of those problems which ultimately are found to be integral part of the wider problematic of cultural identity, beyond mere political and economic considerations. The three books contain a minimum of 60 essay on a variety of topics, out of which I have carefully selected 16 conforming to the theme of this article, slightly changing their titles at times. Several of those essays have been published already in Ovi magazine. It is instructive that when Italian national unification was finally accomplished in 1860 Massimo D’Azeglio, an Italian patriot, proverbially quipped that “now that we have made Italy, we need to make the Italians” which, in my opinion is a perfect exemplification of placing the cart before the horse.

Similarly, now that we have made a united Europe we need to ask the crucial question: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Do we know who exactly is a European and what is the best cultural glue that can hold such a union together?â&#x20AC;? How many Europes are there? The questions are crucial given the ominous signs indicating that the union envisioned as based on solidarity by its founding fathers, is now not holding very well and that good old ugly nationalism and xenophobia may be on their way back. The writing is already on the wall as the divide and conquer strategy of Vladimir Putin would suggest. We now have Euro-parlamentarians siding with a virtual dictator and jeopardizing democracy itself. Such a disaster can only happen when a whole people forget the lessons of their own history and are seized by the loss of collective cultural identity and self-knowledge.

The loss of the self and identity always implies a loss of memory. Nietzsche used to quip that we only remember what we wish to remember. That question is at the core of the 15 selected essays which examine and analyze the history of the EU but not only at an historical level but at the philosophical level, at the level of ideas leading to Europe as an idea; an idea that can be traced back to Dante and even the ancient Greeks who identify a civilization that is Western as distinct from the Eastern. Which is to say, they attempt to place the horse before the cart. To help us do that we have brought to the fore certain luminaries of European culture which have envisioned a European Union: first and foremost the founding fathersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; ideals and vision (the Italian statesman De Gasperi is dealt with extensively), then Dante, Havel, Habermas, Blair, Dawson, Held, Benedict XVI.

At the philosophical level there are three essays dedicated to the philosophy of history of Giambattista Vico which constitute the philosophical underpinning of this critical analysis. They all seem to have something in common: the insight that it is highly misguided to throw the baby out with the dirty bath water; that is to say to discard religion outright as impeding progress. The dirty bath-water is the corruption that is present in any institution built by man, the baby is the traditional faith, i.e., Christianity, that used to inform Europe and provide a cultural glue at one time and is now been reduced to a passing mention of “spiritual tradition” in the EU constitution which does not even mention God as 90% of the world’s constitution do. It is argued in those essays that no amount of economic, political, Machiavellian power-play considerations will substitute for the hastily discarded cultural glue that is religion. Habermas certainly makes a persuasive case for the need for a post-secular Europe, and so does Pope Benedict XVI. All I ask of the readers is to phenomenologically suspend their “pre-judgments” for a while as regards the issue of religion and progress and ponder those sundry essays placed on the table, so to speak, in order to arrive at a reasonably sound judgment on the issue.

Western Civilization at the Crossroads

hat will future historians and cultural anthropologists have to say about Western Civilization at the turn of the new millennium? If history has already ended, as Fukuyama has asserted, they will of course have precious little to say. However, given the fact that, for better or for worse, we are still living within time and space, “the end of history” remains a dubious proposition and I dare say that it will remain such even a thousand years from now. Future historians will indeed attempt to define our era in some fashion. The Neapolitan philosopher of history Giambattista Vico would have had no hesitation in situating it within the third of his recurring cycles of history and civilizations (the cycles of gods, heroes and men): that is to say, an era of extreme rationalism in tandem with relativism vis-‡-vis the concept of Truth, what he dubs “the barbarism of the intellect.”

But more specifically, we may ask: which will be the outstanding symptomatic phenomena that future historians will identify as characteristic of our age? I would venture two: 1) the speed of communication coupled with its banality, 2) thinking in the closet and herd thinking. Let us explore them briefly. The first one is the more visible and pervasive. It is the kind of phenomenon that would have a great novelist begin his recounting of our times with “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” We now possess a near miraculous ability to communicate instantaneously across oceans and continents; to forward entire texts in seconds and have them published within days. But there is a snake in this utopia come of age and it is this: there seems to be an inverse proportion within this phenomenon, the faster the means of communication, the more trivial and banal the communication seems to get and the less authentic the dialogue. That applies to at least 90% of what passes for dialogue.

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It has become increasingly diﬃcult to discern the authentic from the bogus. Whether the exoterism of what is published on-line will compensate the former esoterism of wonderful insightful articles languishing in academic libraries, remains to be seen. But of course this is a symptom of a deeper malaise (that a Kierkegaard might even call “the sickness unto death”) which has to do with the inability of people to really dialogue and commune (diﬀerent from merely communicating) with each other, and which may point to the real underlying problem: the loss of meaning in life; what philosophers define as nihilism. The second above mentioned phenomenon is less visible and therefore, like radiation, much more dangerous. It is in the very cultural air we breathe and goes by the name of extreme rationalism. It is an attempt to reduce the whole of experience to purely abstract rational categories to the exclusion of imagination, the mystical and transcendent, the emotive and the intuitive within reality; in short, to the near exclusion of the poetical. The poetical is reduced to frosting on the cake, to mere poetry to delight oneself or others at a wedding party. In ancient times this mind-set begins with Plato banishing the poets from his Republic.

In modern times it begins philosophically with Descartes’ famous “Cogito ergo sum,” continues with Hegel historicism declaring that the synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis at the end of a process is always necessarily the best of all possible outcomes, and is underpinned by scientific positivism, the industrial revolution and the advent of Machiavellian real politik in the relations between nations wherein the end always justifies the means. It is in short a mindset that believes itself “enlightened”, and therefore doubts everything except one thing: that it itself may need enlightenment. It begins with the so called “age of reason,” which believes that it can easily dispense with what is childish: the fables and myths spun by poets and visionaries, the whole of the humanistic world based on the poetic. It believes that adults endowed with reason must preoccupy themselves primarily with issues relating to the economic and the political and leave the rest to the Don Quixotes of this world, i.e., the losers. It is a mind-set unable to conceive that the poetical may well be complementary to the rational; that one does not have to choose between one or the other; that both are indeed desirable and possible within a holistic view of Man. And so we get to the point that each individual that perceives itself thinking is convinced that he/she possesses the truth or can arrive at it individually beginning with the tabula rasa that is Descartes’“cogito.” The slogan “everyone is entitled to his/her opinion” really means “to each his/her truth as he/she sees it.”

Paradoxically, rather than the Cartesian “clear and distinct” ideas we have ended with the tower of Babel and herd thinking. To each his own version of the truth. Everyone has an opinion in this regard, and the sum of all opinions is the truth. One cannot but wonder on how we arrived at this sad state of aﬀairs in the age of full-fledged rationality and science. At first glance, Vichian paradoxical thinking (the both/and) seems to defy the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction (the either/or). The various rationalists and mysologists of our era often parade as classical thinkers above the fray of the existential vicissitudes of the "unwashed masses" with their common sense, beyond the clouds, on Olympus; they present us with an isolated reason that gives no ground to the poetical and the pure intuitive promptitude of the mind as a mode of reasoning (as even a Plato did with his myths…despite his protestations against poetry).

They seem to have no inkling whatsoever that such an operation is dangerous, sterile at best. How so? Because it can conveniently prove anything with its complete impartiality, it can in fact choose any hypothesis to work from and then say “nothing personal,” I am presenting you with reality. That is why madmen’s arguments are so unassailable on the level of logic; it is their pride and joy. Hitler for one was proud of his talent for presenting logical iron-clad, unassailable arguments. It would appear that the more vigorously logic prosecutes its own internal pursuit, the greater is the danger of its turning away from direct experience and fact. Its arguments may be perfect, but it is a narrow and circular perfection; that of the snake eating its own tail. The rationalists who defend an absolute idealism are using the madman’s detailed reasoning; no contradictions or exceptions intrude into this perfect circle, because direct experience of diﬀerent levels of reality is not taken as its own test.

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Is it time to think paradoxically: of the new as the old and of the old as the new: novantiqua. It is time to go back to the future. Time is fast running out.

The above begs the question: why cannot reason meet its own test? Vico teaches us that it is not because the intellect is a useless tool, far from it. In fact he comes to its defense when he insists that pure reason is irrational reason, i.e., the use of an instrument against its proper aim. The mind is constructive, as those medieval thinkers well understood when they called logic an art as well as a science. Syllogisms are pieces of architecture; the mind must take the materials for this manufacturing process from life, through man’s entire perceptive apparatus. When reason takes upon itself the task of entire discovery and construction, it makes discovery impossible. That is the point where mythology is confused for children's fairy tales superseded by full-fledged reason, in fact, for this rationalistic mind-set, to call a story a myth is equivalent to calling it a lie. They would even expunge myths from Plato's philosophy.

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Logical consistency is more important to rationalists than the immediate reality of fact. They may even deny that if they bang their head hard enough against a tree it will bleed. At that point, to disprove their point, all one can do is in fact bang their head against a tree.

A sculptor who wants all the credit for his work is a bit vain if he only jealous of his rivals or teachers (recognize the type?), or his predecessors, and will inevitably end up in the futility of re-inventing the wheel. But if he is jealous of the marble and refuses any help from it, no statue will ever receive his proud care. This applies to the mind as well. When pure reason asserts that it will accept nothing which it cannot justify on its own terms, it proceeds to destroy itself. If Vico had taught us nothing but this he would have been a great European philosopher. Descartes, on the other hand, wrote “Cogito ergo sum,” beginning his journey in the chamber of his own intellect, literally in a closet. Because he did not look out from that closet but at it, his journey never got under way; and the man is still sitting inside a narrow room cogitating on cogitation. If we are only because we think, then logically we are what we think, and all things are what we think or do not think them. Indeed, the lunatic is God for whom thinking and doing are one and the same. The diﬀerence is that God is sane the lunatic is insane. Rationalism’s attack on faith becomes also an attack on reason. The more astute rationalists (such as Leo Strauss, to mention one) will of course make a nice dichotomy between the two, even asserting that the reasoning in Plato’s Euthyphro is not a natural theology.

Vico teaches us that there is a higher dialectic: not that of the mind with mind but of mind with fact (the particular and the contingent) where men remember once again, via the poetical, that conclusions are made to follow but not to be. This is the fallacy of those who transfer the rules of the mind to external processes discerning necessity where there is none. But there are diďŹ&#x20AC;erent degree of exhaustion by which a rationalist will re-invent the wheel. Another is pure volition which usually will take Nietzschean-existential forms, but because this was merely an escape from Cartesian intellection, it remained a reflection of it, opposed only as things are when reversed in a mirror. Rationalism is the ally of all unreason. In his motion of mere escape from reason, Nietzsche had to deny all perceptive tests and fixed norms of facts; but this takes away the point of the will, the grip and exclusion, the creative and destructive choices. It is a Dionysian worship of will, simple ecstasy and expenditure in the void leading to nihilism. It gives the will no goal, it carries the will nowhere: pure self-destruction. Dionysius is after all the god of dissolution.

Because the sun comes up every morning the mind assumes that it must do so. But repetition is not proof of necessity and it merely dulls our sense of wonder with which philosophy began. As St. Augustine aptly points out, the birth of any baby is more miraculous than the resurrection of Lazarus. To discern that the mind must first admit that it is not dealing with a fact that it did not invent but simply found. This is the wonder of being, of pure existence. When the mind so admits, then sanity returns. In conclusion, Western Civilization as a whole needs to heed Vico who is the culmination of Humanism and return to its origins. Is it time to think paradoxically: of the new as the old and of the old as the new: novantiqua. It is time to go back to the future. Time is fast running out.

A Revolutionary New View of History and Humanity

ico’s New Science (1725) is a watershed to modern historicism. He was however too far ahead of his contemporaries to have any direct impact on them. They had already embarked on a Cartesian paradigm of reality which now pervades modern culture. We modern men can hear Vico’s wake up bell much more clearly in the wake of what rampant rationalism has wrought on us. For all the modernity of his philosophy, Descartes shared with the ancient Greeks a bias against history which held that history is not the proper subject of science; that it represents a dimension of being in which the question of truth has neither purpose nor answer. Within this historical tradition searching for absolute certainty there is no place for any knowledge based on the particularity of sensory experience and contingent historical events. Tradition and the senses are seen as sources of permanent deception and truth is not found in them.

Descartes was convinced that he had found the final basis of certainty in his thinking “I” (the famous “cogito ergo sum”) which is beyond history and all its contingencies and delusions. The only way this “I” and its related ideas can get back to the physical world is with the help of mathematical ideas that determine it. There the true language of nature is to be discovered. In other words, truth is to be found in nature, not in history. This ancient Greek tradition was now living under the cover of the Christian West. Descartes was trapped within it. The Greek world could not, and in fact never produced any kind of philosophy of history. It could not since it held that the contingency of historical events did not yield truth and could not therefore be the content of authentic philosophical reflection. When truth was sought in the empirical world, it was derived from the calculability and rationality of nature.

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a mathematical relation (based on timeless laws) governs the relation between gods and humans

Moreover, this drive to see truth only in what is uniform and not in what is contingent and changing (well symbolized by Plato’s world of timeless unchanging ideas, the transcendent forms) led Greek historians to look for laws and continuities in history and to treat them as analogies to the uniformities of nature. Herodotus finds in history the “law” that human hubris brings down divine punishment. This is analogous to the idea that there are limits within nature beyond which no man dare venture beyond. Thucydides, on the other hand, is even more radical in his pursuit of uniformity. He finds the historical process dominated not only by objective factors in politics and economics but also by impulses and passions driven by subjective psychological emotions. Thus the movement of history is subsumed to the movement of cosmic occurrences. The driving forces for both is the same. Here Plato’s remarks in Georgias is relevant. There he proclaims that a mathematical relation (based on timeless laws) governs the relation between gods and humans. Thus Thucydides also believed that regard for the timeless laws of historical movement gives a better view of what happens and what will happen, for it will always be in accord with human nature. In other words, to see the timeless in time makes prognosis possible and enables us humans to plan for our future.

The above, broadly outlined, was the classical view of history that greatly influenced Descartes. On one hand it holds that history is contingent, that it cannot be part of the orderly course of the cosmos and thus it is ultimately irrelevant to the question of truth. On the other hand, it also holds that history may be integrated into the cosmos but has to be seen in mere analogy to processes that are controlled by natural laws. Either way history per se is robbed of its driving force and is discredited scientifically. The geniality of Vico’s conception of history is that he turns the above upside-down. He calls his philosophy of history a science since for him history is not only a possible, but also a privileged object of science. In fact, for a noetic standpoint, he sees the natural sciences as burdened by a lack of truth. At least in the West, this is indeed a reversal of the usual movement in the search for truth. It has taken us modern and post-modern men some three centuries to realize that it is truly revolutionary. Not that Vico rejects everything that preceded him. He accepts much that is normative in tradition, borrows from what is universally acknowledged and then makes new unexpected inferences. His beginning point is an idea for which he can formally appeal to Aristotle. Simply put, the ideas is that real knowledge of something is present only when that something is understood to be caused and its causes and origins are known.

From this idea Vico draws a revolutionary conclusion and it is this: if knowledge is knowledge of causes and we can speak of truth only in as much as we can establish those causes, then properly speaking we may know fully only what we ourselves have made. That is to say, we can only do justice to the Aristotelian equation of truth and knowledge of causes when we ourselves are the cause of something. Therefore, since history is the sphere of human achievements wherein we function as causes, we can attain there to true knowledge as in no other sphere. In this concern of Vico, to demonstrate that even the shadows of the most distant past may prove to have more truth than the exact sciences, we begin to sense the far reaching implications of his speculation. Let us explore briefly the most important of these implications. In the first place it is worth noticing that after Vico the very facticity despised by the Greek world is worth knowing and can in fact be accorded the privilege of truth.

For Anselm, the cosmos that God conceived and made (one and the same operation for God) was the object of truth. In other words, the truth consists of knowing the logos content of the world. Its content are not facts but their reference to the Logos. As we have observed, for Descartes the ontic givenness of the thinking I is truth of the first order, while deduced truths are secondary. So, in both Anselm and Descartes a form of being is the truth. In the former being as a conceived and made totality; in the latter being focused on the existing subject of thought. Something is true because it has a share in being. With Vico it is otherwise: historical facticity is privileged to be the content of possible truth. We know this truth and its causes because we ourselves are causes. Here the thesis is this: something is true as, and because, it is made by us. Secondly, Vico dares to light up even mythical prehistory with the torch of truth, despite the fact that objective knowledge of events is largely ungraspable in this sphere.

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He can do so because he is convinced that he has found a new and modern form of knowledge; a form of knowledge by now familiar to us as hermeneutics, a truth that is disclosed in the grasping of causes; a truth of “understanding” which is present when something that is related to us reveals itself to us. For example, when we encounter another personal life that aﬀects our own personality. Admittedly it is rare but it constitutes the essence of true friendship hardly graspable in a cold objective fashion. That is what Vico means when he says that we may find the principles of the prehistoric world within the modifications of our own human spirit. In other words, there is an analogy between prehistory and us that makes it intelligible. This should intimate that properly speaking Vico is the grandfather of modern hermeneutics even if little or no credit is accorded to him in courses on mythology or history of religions. It is on the basis of Vico’s speculation that Bultman attempts later the feat of demythologization and Jung that of the interpretation of myths and the archetypes of the human mind. Even if Vico does not use the term “understanding,” it is obvious that he has entered the field of hermeneutics to break through to new modern aspects of human experience: humanity can comprehend history because history derives from it.

Vico’s speculation is nothing less than the proclamation of the historicizing of the understanding of reality. The modern age is the story of the implications deriving from such a view of reality. This view was so novel that it went largely ignored. Later on we shall explore more thoroughly Vico’s concept of Providence already broached above. Here we should take notice that throughout his speculation Vico’s anthropology remains always anchored to a theological base. That such is the case can be gathered from his restriction of the human knowledge of truth to the knowledge of history.

A corollary to the above view is Vico’s rejection of a conclusion that one may be tempted to draw from his anthropological outlook, namely that within modernity philosophy can replace theology as the representative of the human spirit. Vico expressly opposes the notion of the rationalistic philosopher of history Polybius (second century B.C.) that religion becomes unnecessary when philosophers undertake the explanation of the world. Vico argues that philosophers did not suddenly fall from heaven but emerged from an intellectual tradition rooted in religion.

The world of nature remains accessible only to the divine insight, since God created nature, not us, and therefore only God can see it as his work. Even when Vic asserts that we may know history as “spirit of our spirit,” he never means to say that history can be regarded wholly as our own creation. On the contrary, he says that treating the historical past as a kind of objectification and echo of our own spirit is possible only because our spirit is privileged to have a part in the divine Spirit and is thus put in a position to see in history the providence of God and the thoughts of his divine spirit. In other words, the meaning of history is manifest to our spirit to the degree that we look to providence.

By taking an anti-Cartesian stance Vico is basically saying only a belief in providence can relate us to the orders of family, tribe, and nation. It is only when these institutions are transparent and let the divine planning that is operating in them shine through that they can bind us together. The very semantic meaning of the word religio in Latin is “to bind together.” So, despite Vico’s important principle that things are true and perceptible only for those who cause them, humanity is never for him the wholly autonomous lord of the history that it creates. His concept of providence give things a diﬀerent aspect: humanity meets itself in history because it is built into it as the agent of providence and therefore it can perceive the earlier self-manifestation of providence.

Vico's Hermeneutical “understanding” of our Humanity

ico’s most important hermeneutical insight is that human beings cannot be explained objectively, they can only be “understood.” The element of freedom in human nature resists the reduction to object of observation. Indeed, understanding is radically diﬀerent from explaining. I can only understand and empathize with the personal life of another only because I have the same personal structure of being. Since I have a responsible relation to the meaning of my existence (i.e., to its logos), I am able to understand others in a similar relation. I can be aﬀected by the boredom and emptiness, the failure or success of others and can understand that other beings are also called, like myself, to grasp their own destiny (in theological language, their salvation) with the same fear and risk of failure, the same hope of success. This solidarity is underpinned by the same life-agenda, the same human journey from cradle to tomb.

Moreover, the ability to understand rests on a relationship or analogy between those who understand and those who are understood. In more literary terms, this idea of congeniality is the psychological superstructure of the basic Vichian literary, anthropological insight that readers and/or commentators are in solidarity with an author. Simply put, this is the solidarity of a common humanity. Both reader and author are bearers of personal life and marked by the gift and fear of freedom. The most basic Vichian principle that we can derive from this hermeneutics is that people, being intrinsically free, cannot be explained, they can only be understood. In turn this means that in practice I first need to understand myself if I am to understand others. How can I possibly speak seriously about the guilt of others if I loath to face my own? So the question becomes: how do I get to know myself?

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How can I possibly speak seriously about the guilt of others if I loath to face my own? So the question becomes: how do I get to know myself?

As per the above outlined Vichian hermeneutical principle, self-knowledge cannot be reached by mere self-analysis focusing obsessively and narcissistically on my self (as much self-help literature would suggest), rather I will begin to discover it in as much as I get to know the world in me and myself in the world. Sadly, the me-generation of the seventies and eighties and beyond, so concerned with its “life-style,” has yet to discover that Christianity is psychologically much more sophisticated in its insistence that paradoxically one finds oneself when one loses oneself, and that narcissism inevitably leads to selfish egotism. As I encounter others, they become mirrors for me in which I may more clearly see myself. Medieval and Renaissance Man had no problem understanding that we know ourselves only in humanity, and life teaches us what that is. Action is needed to aﬀect the world and in turn let the world affect us. In other words, we can never know ourselves directly by contemplating our navel in a lotus position. The process of selfknowledge begins with a detour, via and encounter with history. The basic reason for this detour is that we are never “objects” of knowledge, not even of self-knowledge.

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Only free beings can understand other free beings. We understand ourselves only in as much as we attempt to understand others. Which is to say, the world is a macrocosmic reflection of me and I am a microcosmic reflection of the world; the inner and the outer are analogous. I receive self-awareness by encounter with the world. This is particularly true of the world of history which as the human sphere is my direct analogue. Even more simply expressed, my life-history reflects the history of human-kind. Only thus can the Bible or others’ autobiographies have anything to say to me personally. Vico for one wrote his autobiography with such an hermeneutical principle in mind. It should be stressed here that this Vichian understanding of one’s humanity as grounded in historical reality is very important in the writing of a human history, i.e., in the writing of what Man has achieved in the world, be it the history of science, or of art, or of law, or of any other cultural artifact. In other words, when an author writes such a history he has to keep in mind that in relation to history Man cannot document himself as a mere object. As an historical being I am constantly included in my understanding of history.

We experience ourselves only by the detour of encounter with history, but the opposite is also true: we experience history only by the detour of self-understanding. That is the Vichian hermeneutical circle. As Vico himself aptly puts it: while it is true that Man makes history, it is also true that history makes Man. The way I see myself is influenced by the course of history. Such a course may produce a Hegel with the vision of Man as a spiritual being, or a Marx with the vision of Man as constituted by economics. These pre-judgments are practically inevitable for they are directed by Man’s understanding of himself. The understanding of history can never be “presuppositionless.” When the historian claims that he has broken free from the presuppositions of his self-awareness, he is no longer viewing human history but a degenerated form of pseudo-nature. Only as a bearer of freedom can the historian understand history as the sphere of freedom. But that freedom ought not be understood as an abstract kind of “choice.”“Pro choice” by itself is a meaningless statement, for choice always implies commitment to something. Choice without responsibility and commitment transforms freedom into license. Confusion about this important distinction abounds in so called free democratic societies, but calling ourselves free ought to mean an ability to pursue a goal, to actualize ourselves by grasping our destiny as humans, for in the final analysis, what we know or don’t know of our nature and the goals of such a nature inevitably aﬀects the way we view and interpret other people and even history as a whole.

As an historical being the author of a human history has to bring himself to the understanding of history. Many scientists find this kind of Vichian hermeneutics uncongenial. They shun it since their pride and joy is Cartesian rationalism in tandem with a condescending attitude toward what is alleged to be a “retrograde and primitive” mytho-poetic mentality steeped in magic (usually understood as mere superstition) and religion. They have no use for authors such as Nikolai Berdyaev who always keep in mind the nonobjectifiable element of freedom in history and present myth as a deeper reconstruction of life; for indeed myth grasps a dimension of human life that is simply inaccessible to an objective scientific study. An exclusively objective kind of history is inconceivable, for there will always be a need for mystification, a longing for worlds beyond that secretively direct things. That longing derives from the fact that the subjects are included in the history they seek to know and, unless they are mere robots with no feelings and emotions, they are bound to feel and disclose the historical in themselves. Berdyaev for one points out that penetrating the depths of the ages means to penetrate the depths of the self.

As Vico has well taught us, history presents itself from within by recollection of the origin, goal and meaning of our existence. He was the very first philosopher in the West to understand, way ahead of Cassirer, that myth forms an element in all historical interpretation, and that it a nefarious intellectual habit to pose the dichotomy of poetic myth and “objective” history. It is that false dichotomy that renders many modern history textbooks distasteful to most young students. They have intuited that those texts which present themselves as “scientific” fail to grasp the understanding subjects share non-objectively in historical understanding; that the author and the students of history too are integral part of history; that behind the illusion of complete unbiased documentation there is a human being who is also concerned at some level with actualizing meaning of some kind. The mere writing of a history text points to it. And meaning relates to the totality of being.

Indeed, in all historical understanding of details a preliminary attempt is made to grasp the whole of history and its meaning. Willy nilly, these subjects who choose what they deem important out of the millennial vortex of history, are involved in an “act of faith” which cannot be objectively explained as is the case in science. We will return to the exploration of this bottom rock “act of faith” on the part of science. For the moment we can confidently assert that since Vico’s speculation on history the investigation of human existence and its history in the sense of objective science is no longer feasible and that moreover human existence as a whole is subject to the Vichian hermeneutical law of understanding. In other words, from Vico on human existence has to be disclosed by way of understanding rather than by way of explanation. It is here that historicism touches the circle of science. Science, on the other hand, in touching the circle of history has to grasp that we can understand humanity and its history only in a venture. Individually, this courage for venturing on a journey of selfknowledge and actualization of meaning can be drawn from the basic realization that the secret of humanity is also our own secret.

“Man is his own History” leads to Self-knowledge

n 1976 A. Robert Caponigri of Notre Dame University published an essay in honor of the great Yale Dante and Vico scholar Thomas Bergin (in Italian Literature: Roots and Branches, Yale University Press) in which he stated that “In the ‘Scienza Nuova’ Vico anticipates by two centuries contemporary man’s most profound discovery concerning himself: the fact that he has a history, because by creating history man discovers and actualizes his own humanity.” That statement alerts us to the fact that Vico is well within the Italian humanistic tradition. He is, in fact, nothing short of its culmination. A tradition this which is interrupted by Descartes’ anti-humanistic stance and now waiting, like ambers under the ashes of a technocratic rationalistic society, for a new rebirth. I am not suggesting that the concept of history is a special privilege of Western Man. Non Westerns too have a history. However, it is only in 18th century Europe that Man becomes aware of the far reaching implications of that fact.

While Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Muslims had chronicles and archives, they were not intellectually conscious of the astonishing fact peculiar to Western Man, that the history that man makes expresses his freedom vis à vis events, nature and social life; which is to say, that when Man creates history out of nothing (as a sort of creation ex nihilo), he creates an eminently human factum, a sort of artifact, which is then knowable to the human mind that created it. In short, the awareness that Man has, is, and makes history is a paradigm, or a myth of reality if you will, which is unique to Western thinking and is intimately related to the idea of freedom. Carl Marx for one utilized this paradigm of Man as his own history, but he was not its discoverer as some surmise. Its discoverer was Giambattista Vico who first proposed it to his contemporaries as a sort of antidote to the then rampant abstract, rationalistic philosophy of Renè Descartes. In fact, I suggest that to perceive Vico’s originality one needs to explore this peculiar Cartesian rationalistic background of our culture.

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Only in contrast to the thought of Descartes, which has shaped the modern mind-set, can we grasp the relevancy of Vico’s thought. In the first place, it should be noted that ahistorical thinking, a tendency to emphasize and privilege the universal and abstract aspects of thought, at the expense of the particular and the contingent, has been around in the West since Plato. But Descartes believed that he had reached the end of his epistemological ventures with what he considered the final solution to the problem of human knowledge. He accomplishes it by deemphasizing the humanities and claiming that the main criterion of truth for man is that the judgments asserting it must consist of “clear and distinct ideas.” In his Principles of Philosophy Descartes states that “I term that clear which is present and apparent to an attentive mind, in the same way as we assert that we see objects clearly when, being present to the regarding eye, they operate upon it with suﬃcient strength. But the distinct is that which is so precise and diﬀerent from all other objects that it contains within itself nothing but what is clear.” Obviously, within this kind of epistemology symbols related to seeing predominate over those related to hearing. The insistence throughout is on clarity and mathematical knowledge. Mathematics is in fact specifically mentioned in Descartes’ Discourse on Method where he states that “Most of all I was delighted with Mathematics because of the certainty of its demonstrations and the evidence of its reasoning.”

And what exactly is Descartes’ true foundation for his theory of knowledge? His renowned “Cogito, ergo sum,” that is, thought in the act of thinking or reflecting upon itself. In other words, if I think, I exist or at least perceive myself as existing. This first certitude of one’s existence is characterized by the evidence thought has of itself with no other unclear elements. Therefore, Descartes concludes, the criterion of truth must be evidence accompanied by clarity and distinctness. What is dismissed out of hand are all “unclear” ideas upon which history rests: memories, inner psychic states, motives, images, symbols, myths, imaginative fairy tales, works of art with their ambiguous possibilities of meaning. In fact, the vast realm of personal and inter-personal knowledge, defined by Martin Buber as the realm of the “I-Thou,” is summarily rejected. Now, it does not take much intellectual acumen to realize that since Descartes Western thought has been dominated by a rampant rationalism which, with the possible exception of Nietzschean romantic anti-rationalism culminating with existentialism, has a peculiar view of the relationship existing between a knowing experiencing subject (the self ) and the objects and events around it (the observable world) which it perceives and knows. Since the seventeenth century this has been the almost exclusive domain within which the nature of reality has been considered in the West. It is a mode of thought wherein all of reality consists of “external” objects and events which are responsible for the perceptual experience of an observing subject.

This is the realm of “I-it” as also defined by Buber; a realm concerned with the world of things and objectified events. It reaches its most restrictive form with modern science which, by its very nature, is exclusively concerned with observable objects and events. Vico’s peculiar genius lies in the fact that he was the first thinker within Western culture to clearly perceive that Descartes left no room for history; that on this road Man would end up dehumanizing himself. In contrast, he proposed a theory of knowledge which emphasizes and demonstrates the importance and validity of historical thinking. His opus spanned fifteen years (1710-1725) and culminated with the publication of his New Science (the second edition appeared in 1730 and the third edition in 1744). Vico’s initial attack on the Cartesian paradigm begins with his inaugural lecture at the University of Naples in 1710 titled De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia. There he inquires as to what it is that makes mathematical ideas, the prime example of Descartes’ “clear and distinct ideas,” so irrefutable? His answer is that such clarity and irrefutability derive from the fact that we ourselves have made them. In geometry we are able to demonstrate truth because we ourselves have created it.

Vico employs a Latin formula to explain this idea: Verum et Factum convertuntur, which basically means that we can only fully create, and hence fully know, the things that we design and make out of nothing. In other words, the privileged position of mathematical propositions, as regards clarity and persuasiveness, rests upon the fact that they are arbitrary creations. Vico then proceeds to qualify Descartes’ position before setting out the theoretical basis for historical knowledge proper. His basic insight is that truth is a dimension of the subject and it is a fallacy to think with Descartes that it can be conceived as a property of objects themselves. In other words, truth is the mode of presence of the subject to itself as mediated by the objects it observes. This circularity establishes the integrity of the mind as total presence to itself. Within it the dualism subject/object is mediated. To say it in even more simple terms Vico, as the consummate humanist that he is, proposes that besides metaphysics (rational intuition), mathematics (deductive knowledge), and natural science (empirical knowledge), there is a fourth, very important kind of knowledge: self-knowledge.

Christianity: A Private Affair or Part of the European Heritage and Identity?

n his book A Christian Europe? Europe and Christianity: Rules of Commitment first published in Italy as Un’Europa Cristiana, professor JHH Weiler, of New York University, who has studied the process of European integration for more than twentyfive years, speaks of a European Christian ghetto. Such a provocative statement is of course a mere metaphor rooted in a sad reality used purposefully by Dr. Weiler to jolt people out of their complacency. It should also be prefaced at the outset that Professor Weiler is neither a Christian nor a Catholic but a practicing Jew. This is important because in his knowledge of the history of the Church and its importance for the EU’s identity, he puts many Christians to shame. Weiler writes that the manifestations of the external walls of this ghetto are very much in evidence in the refusal to include in the Preamble to the European Union Charter of Rights even a modest reference to Europe’s religious heritage, completely ignoring the request of the former Pope John Paul II.

In the recent draft Constitution there is still no reference to Europe’s Christian heritage– but a generic allusion to its religious inheritance tucked between the cultural and the humanist…! What exactly does Dr. Weiler mean by the internal walls of the European Christian ghetto? The reason he calls them “internal” is that these are walls created by Christians themselves. This fact for Weiler is even more striking than the refusal of the Conventions to make any explicit reference to Christianity. He points out that despite the explicit Catholic orientation of the founding fathers of the European construct, there isn’t one major work, in any language, that explores in depth the Christian heritage and the Christian meaning of European integration. While writing his book Weiler pulled out from the library of his university 79 books published in the previous three years on the general phenomenon of European integration.None of them had a single allusion in the index to Christianity and its values.

There is the naĂ&#x201D;ve belief that for the State to be assiduously secular it needs to practice religious neutrality. Weiler considers this false on two counts: first, there is no neutral position in a binary option. For the State to abstain from any religious symbolism is no more neutral than for the state to espouse some forms of religious symbolism. The religiosity of large segments of the population and the religious dimension of the culture are objective data. Denying these facts simply means favoring one worldview over the other, masking it as neutrality. Weiler then writes that we ought not be surprised that the Convention failed to make a reference to the Christian heritage of European integration, if that Christian heritage has not been proclaimed, explored, debated, and made an integral part of the discourse of European integration by Christian scholars themselves. This is puzzling indeed. Weiler has three possible explanations for the phenomenon. The first is a puzzling internalization of the false philosophical and constitutional premise of the most extreme forms of laicitâ&#x20AC;Ą (secularity) as practiced, for example, in France. Freedom of religion is of course guaranteed and rightly so is freedom from religious coercion. But on top of that there is the steadfast conviction that there can be no allusion or reference to religion in the oďŹ&#x192;cial public space of the State, that such allusions are considered a transgression. A transgression of what exactly?

The second explanation is that to accept that view of the relationship between State and religion is also to accept a secular (basically 18th-century) definition of what religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are. It is a vision that derives from the culture of rights which treats religion as a private matter by equating freedom of religion with freedom of speech, of belief, and of association. But then Weiler asks this crucial question: can one accept that Christianity be consigned to the realm of the private by the secular authorities of the State? That question is not to imply that Weiler does not believe in the liberal constitutional order with its guarantees of democracy and freedom. He does indeed, but he also believes in a vigorous and articulate religious voice and viewpoint in the public spaces guaranteed by constitutional democracies.

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The lives of those touched by faith cannot, once they exit the sphere of home and family, become identical with those not touched by faith. This is true for the shopkeeper in the market, for the conductor on the train, for a minister of the republic, as well as for those whose work is in one way or another a reflection on the public policies of public authorities. One is led by the above reflections to inquire as to what is the relevance of Christianity and Christian teaching to the narrative of European integration. Weiler finds it laughable not to recognize Christianity as being a hugely important element in defining what we mean by European identity–for good and for bad. In art and in literature, in music and in sculpture, even in our political culture, Christianity has been a leitmotif–an inspiration as well as an object of rebellion.There is no normativity in aﬃrming this empirical fact. There is only normativity in denying it.

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The conundrum here boils down to this: many Catholic scholars have confused the public disciplines of constitutional democracy with a private discipline of religious silence in the public sphere. Worse than that, Christian scholars have internalized the notion that to integrate Christian thinking and Christian teaching into their reflections on constitutional law, on political theory, on social science, is a betrayal of their academic standing, of their objectivity, of their scientific credentials. Another reason adduced by Weiler is fear. Fear that in an academy dominated by an intellectual class which often leans to the left or to the center-left and insists on “politically correct” principles, an incorporation of Christian insight (other than a study in scientific fashion of religious phenomena) would brand the scholar as lacking in scientific objectivity; of not being a “free thinker.” And finally Weiler mentions sheer ignorance. Precious few in the intellectual classes have read, studied, and reflected on the teachings of the Church, even less those of the current pontificate, its encyclicals, the apostolic letters, etc, with the same assiduousness that they study the latest oﬀering from the secular intellectual icons of our generation. Weiler maintains that while it is shocking that the explicit request of the Holy Father would be denied by the Convention, it is even more shocking that the call of this pontiﬀ to the laity to be the messengers of Christian teaching in their own private and professional lives goes in many cases equally unheeded.

a Europe that does not deny its Christian inheritance and the richness that public debate can gain from engagement with Christian teachings

Weiler goes on to explain that while Christianity is a sociological and historical phenomenon, it is also a a living faith based on revealed truth. Here is where Christian teaching becomes relevant. The reader may ask at this point: what has all of this got to do with European integration? Wealer, speaking as a scholar and not merely as a believer, insists that it is indeed a great deal, that the narratives of history such as the story of European integration have no inherent meaning. They have the meaning we give them. What is at stake is what meaning we want to give. A Christian Europe is not a Europe that will endorse Christianity. It is not a call for evangelization. A Christian Europe is one that can learn from the teaching of Christianity. To reflect, discuss, debate, and ultimately assign meaning to European integration without reference to such an important source is to impoverish Europe.

For lay people and for non-Christians, this becomes a challenge to match. Christianity today oﬀers interesting “takes” on the central issues, the core issues, the deepest challenges in the very self-understanding of what Europe is about but few, even among Christians, are aware of it. Weiler oﬀers some examples which he hopes will motivate the reader to read and reflect on those teachings: the relationship to the “other”–within our society, across our boundaries within Europe, and beyond Europe–is arguably the most important challenge to which European integration tries to respond. Well, the encyclical Redemptoris Missio is a profound statement on how to think, to conceptualize a respectful relationship with the other. The Catholic teachings expressed in this encyclical are concerned with tolerance, respect and inclusion, concepts inextricably connected with freedom and democracy.

That is certainly not the role of the European Union. It simply means a Europe that does not deny its Christian inheritance and the On the one hand, the encyclical bravely es- richness that public debate can gain from enchews the epistemological and moral rela- gagement with Christian teachings. tivism of post-modernity by affirming that which it considers to be the truth. But at the Weiler points out that there is something same time, it treats with the utmost respect comic, bordering on the tragic, in observing those who do not share in that Truth. One those most opposed to any reference to relicannot truly respect the other if one does not gion or Christianity in the draft Constitution have respect for oneself, individually and col- at the forefront of opposition to Turkish lectively. Forgetting one’s heritage is indeed membership in the Union. It is indeed an ina shabby mode of respecting oneself individ- sult to Christianity and its teaching of grace ually and collectively. Much can flow from and tolerance to claim that there is no place this insight in the various debates on Euro- in Europe for a non-Christian country or pean integration. worse, for non-Christian individuals. Weiler For Weiler, the marketplace is another core observes that he is an observant Jew, son of issue of the European Union. Some would a rabbi with European roots that go back even argue that it is the core issue. Here hundreds of years and that his ancestors again, Weiler points out that the encyclical were often the victims of Christians and Centesimus Annus offers one of the most Christianity; yet he finds it puzzling that anyprofound reflections on the virtues of a free one would fear the recognition and acknowlmarket but also of its dangers to human dig- edgment of the dominant culture (i.e., nity. It is a reflection that goes well beyond Christianity) as an empirical historical fact, the mantra of “solidarity” so dear to political and reveals a fear of his which is also an inactivists of many stripes and which one finds sight, and it is this: “If I have a fear, it is the folendlessly in the debate of European integra- lowing: to deny the relevance of the tion. Europe need not espouse the teachings Christian heritage in European public symof the Church in this matter. But why exclude bolism and European public space, for to them from the debate? And there are many deny that is to deny, too, the relevance of my other examples in the book. own religiosity in that same public space.” And of course the logical last inquiry is this: That would probably be just fine for those how would non-Christians react to the no- who wish to eliminate religion altogether tion of a Christian Europe? Are we to exclude from both the public and the private sphere, Turkey for example? Professor Weiler ex- but it remains a shortsighted social and poplains that a Christian Europe does not mean litical strategy, for is a body politic is based a Europe for Christians. It does not mean an on the rejection of one’s history and heritage official endorsement of, or call for, evange- it will be built on sand and will not survive for lization. very long.

Alcide De Gasperi’s Humanistic Vision of the European Union “Faith sustains us; and optimism, where a great political and human ideal such as European unification is to be attained, is a constructive virtue.” Alcide De Gasperi (Achen, 1952)

he words above encapsulate the European spirit of Alcide De Gasperi. Most historians and scholars consider the statesmen Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi the four most significant visionary founding fathers of the European Union. Sadly, some sixty years later, one detects on the political horizon of the current EU (now composed of 27 nations as compared to the 6 original founders sixty years ago) some unimpressive uninspiring political midgets half clowns and half villains who far from being competent and able to confront the present EU economic-political crisis and lead the people of the United Europe back to

the original vision of its founding fathers, may be presiding over its dissolution. One senses an ominous nostalgia for the good old ways of rabid xenophobic nationalism of some seventy years ago. Indeed, those who forget their history are bound to repeat it, and perhaps it is high time to recall once again the vision and inheritance of those legendary founding fathers. I’d like to dwell on one in particular: Alcide De Gasperi, the statesman who represented Italy at the founding of the Union in the early 50s, informing and nurturing the spirit that forged European integration, the very opposite of the present prime minister who is a moral and political embarrassment.

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Europe had to get rid of, once and for all, of the seeds of conflict and disintegration that existed within her

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De Gasperi was born in Trentino, an Italianspeaking region that formed part of the Austro-Hungarian empire before the First World War. In 1911 he was elected to represent Trentino in the Vienna parliament. In so doing, he represented a minority within a vast multinational and multicultural grouping of nations within the Austro-Hungarian empire. After the First World War, he once more became a member of parliament, this time the Italian one, Trentino having become part of Italy. Like Schuman, De Gasperi came from a border region that experienced particularly acute suﬀering during the wars in Europe. This experience marked him for life, and helped him to form the conviction that: “the lesson that all Europeans can learn from their tumultuous past is that the future will not be built through force, nor through desire to conquer, but by the patient application of the democratic method, the constructive spirit of agreement, and by respect for freedom. (Speech on the award of the Charlemagne prize, 24 September 1952, Aix-la-Chapelle).

To understand what made De Gasperi tick one must grasp that his commitment to Europe was also rooted in his deep faith and guiding principles. As a committed Christian, he opposed all forms of totalitarianism. As Chairman of the parliamentary group of the Italian People’s Party, he opposed the rise of the fascist party. In 1927 he was imprisoned for his participation in the Aventin movement. Sentenced to four years in jail, he was released after sixteen months when the Church intervened, but was then forced to withdraw from political life for fifteen years, and worked as a junior employee in the Vatican library. But from 1943 he was to occupy various ministerial positions, and continued to oppose the powerful Italian Communist Party. De Gasperi responded immediately to Schuman’s call for an integrated Europe, and worked closely with the latter and with Konrad Adenauer and Albert Schuman. After the allies entered Rome in June 1944, as the unchallenged leader of the Christian Democrats he became Minister for Foreign Aﬀairs and later the first Prime Minister of the new Italian Republic. While Italy was still at war, he resumed diplomatic relations with many countries. In 1945, De Gasperi was given the task of organizing a government of national unity. The head of several governments between 1945 and 1953, he chose, despite the strong influence of the Communist Party, to take Italy into the Atlantic Alliance, to participate in the Marshall Plan and, from 1949, to join NATO.

He enabled Italy to regain its rightful role and place. For De Gasperi, gaining a firm foothold in the Western camp and European integration were two parallel paths. Military alliances had to respond to the needs of the post-war period, the Soviet threat and the essential redefinition of power relations. European integration was something much worthier and much more noble, that would lead to a community of peace and ideals: “we are aware that we must save ourselves, that we must save the heritage of our common civilization and secular experience. Because while it is true that the Atlantic Pact covers a large part of the world, it is equally true that in this world, Europe has within it the most ancient sources and the highest traditions of civilization” (Ibid.). As far as his vision of a united Europe, his approach was simple. The ultimate objective was peace - peace within Europe. Europe had to get rid of, once and for all, of the seeds of conflict and disintegration that existed within her:

“it is essential for Europe to defend herself against a disastrous heritage of civil wars the cycle of attack and counter-attack, of a desire for dominance, a greed for wealth and space, of anarchy and tyranny that has been the legacy of our history, otherwise so glorious. What hope can we oﬀer to the younger generations in the aftermath of the Second World War? An absolute ethical vision of the nation with its trail of conflicts and demands or, rather, a quest for a higher expression and a wider fraternal solidarity? What path must we take in order to maintain that which is noble and human in national strengths, whilst coordinating them in the search for a supranational civilization that can balance them, represent them and make them part of an unstoppable tide of progress? We can achieve this only by imbuing national strengths with the common ideals of our history and by allowing them to operate in the sphere of the variety of magnificent experience of common European civilization.

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We can achieve this only by creating a meeting point where these experiences can come together so that we may take the best of them and thus create new ways of living together, inspired by the aim of greater liberty and greater social justice. It is on the basis of this association of national sovereignty, founded on democratic constitutional institutions, that these new ways can flourish.”(Ibid.). De Gasperi was convinced of the existence of a desire for European unity, a unity that he saw as already present in people’s minds, but lacking in material expression: “Europe will exist, and none of the glory and happiness of each nation will be lost. It is precisely in a wider society, in a more powerful harmony, that the individual can assert himself and fully express his own genius. (Speech to a round table organised by the Council of Europe in Rome, 13 October 1953). De Gasperi’s constant worry as regards achieving this unity was the ongoing institutional challenge of preserving national identities and avoiding the creation of a hierarchical relationship between the Member States. Herein lie the key and the secret to the success of the European project: “we must seek union only where it is necessary or, rather, where it is essential. By preserving the independence of all that forms the basis of the spiritual, cultural and political life of each nation, we safeguard the natural bases of our life together’. (Ibid.) The only way of ensuring balance in the system was through a built-in

guarantee, i.e. by institutions responsible for jointly supervising shared resources. But these institutions must be energized with new life: “If we restrict ourselves to creating shared administrations, without a higher political will invigorated by a central body in which the wills of nations come together, are fully expressed and come alive in a higher framework, we risk the possibility that compared with the various national strengths, this European venture may seem cold and lifeless – it could even at times appear a superfluous and even oppressive extravagance, like the Holy Roman Empire at certain moments in its decline.’(speech to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 10 December 1951). A higher political authority was thus essential. It would bring “greater cohesion and increased responsibility” (Ibid.). It is important to point out that the goal of the construction of Europe was never purely economic, as some maintain. It was the product of a more overarching aspiration that, for De Gasperi and Schuman and Aidenauer, drew on Christian teachings on fraternity, social questions and unity: “Christianity has an active and constant moral and social influence. It is expressed in the law and social action. Its respect for the free development of the human person and its love of tolerance and fraternity are reflected in the quest for social justice and international peace. But these principles cannot operate without peace. In peace the spirit of cooperation will truly flourish.”(Ibid.).

Europe should develop, then, on the basis of these great principles: ‘the fundamental aim of European unity must be to preserve our democratic way of life and our traditions of civilization and freedom, and to strengthen our free national institutions” (Speech to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 16 September 1952). De Gasperi’s message may be summed up in a few words: the objective of European integration must always be the search for peace, solidarity and fraternity among European peoples. Alcide De Gasperi visionary message remains relevant today. He always believed that it was the Union’s destiny to grow: “this circle where six countries are already grouped together must remain open so that, as in nuclear attraction, other countries may join or come closer”. (Ibid.). Indeed, the motivations of the founding fathers were rooted in a higher order, independent of material and national interests.

As De Gasperi put it: “to unite Europe, we may have to destroy more than we create: to discard a world of prejudice, a world of fear, a world of resentment. What it took to create a united Italy, where every town had learnt to hate its neighbour over long centuries of servitude! The same thing will be needed to create Europe.”(Ibid.) De Gasperi drew from faith the motivation for a fierce defense of Christian values in the service of freedom. As he expressed it: “Christianity is at work, perpetually at work, in its moral and social effects. It can be seen in law and in social action. Its respect for the free development of the human being, its love of tolerance and brotherhood are reflected in its work of distributive justice in social matters and in international peace. However, we cannot put such principles into practice without peace; it is in peace that the spirit of cooperation will gain its full impetus.”( September 1952 in Aachen).

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It is necessary to overcome national interests as forms of social selfishness

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He shared with Adenauer a strong dislike of extreme nationalism, from either the right or the left. For both, the unification of Europe represented the principal foreign-policy objective: this was regarded as the only way to protect Western and Christian civilization against totalitarian forces and, at the same time, to give Europe a leading role in the world.

As an international statesman, he played a highly constructive role and he is credited with having had the insight to understand the role that could be played by parties with Catholic leanings. Christianity could be a cement of sort that could transcend the cen- De Gasperi’s great merit was really that he tripetal forces of cultural diversity. acted courageously and positively to build, in addition to a common defence, a political The Atlantic Pact represented for De Gasperi Europe which would not replace the individnot only a military-based defense alliance, ual Member States, but would allow them to but also an instrument of political and eco- complement one another. According to De nomic cooperation. In the political structure Gasperi’s vision, the Europe of the Six was his pro-European vision had the crucial ele- only a beginning, a first step through which ment which could lend Europe a close and it was possible to explore new ways to enorganic unity. “It is necessary to overcome able a wider European union to be created. national interests as forms of social selfish- He was fully aware that this union should not ness” stated De Gasperi. Indeed, his roots, his remain isolated, but should have links with culture and his religious background were the rest of the world. The pro-European stratthe raisons d’être for his particular sensitivity egy advocated by De Gasperi met with unanto supranational matters. He found the same imous and warm approval. religious background in two statesmen who, De Gasperi oﬀered us a testimony of faith in with him, laid the foundations for European the powers of good and of peace. Indeed, unity: Schuman and Adenauer, both the European Union will only find its cultural Catholics and activists in Christian Democrat identity and its very soul when it manages to parties. But De Gasperi probably had a more remember its origins as expressed by the videlicate role, taking on the function of medi- sion of its founding fathers. The people are ator between the other two, who repre- starving for such a vision. Neither economic sented countries divided by almost a century prosperity nor soccer games will ever fill that of war. vacuum.

Klaus Held on Religion, Science and Democracy in European Culture

laus Held, from the University of Wuppertal, wrote a brilliant essay on the identity of European culture. It was translated into English by Sean Kirkland of Goucher college. It can be found in the journal Epoche', Vol. 7, issue 1 (Fall 2002) and its title is The Origins of Europe with the Greek Discovery of the World. This essay ought to be a must for anybody seriously investigating the origins of European culture and concerned about its future. Held begins his analysis by observing that it was by no means a mere coincidence that science and democracy arose in the same age among the same people, that is, among the ancient Greeks. Heraclitus is identified as the very first thinker who begins to seriously reflect upon the earliest scientific activity and at the same to contemplate communal life in the Greek polis.

He credits him with the designation of the word "kosmos" as encompassing the whole world. He also designates the word "logos" as the relation among everything there is in the world and the openness to this relation among human cultures, Europe being merely one of those cultures. What however is unique to European culture is its readiness to remain open to the relation of belonging together, that is, the logos.The next important insight comes from Parmenides and it is this: the human perception of things (noein) and the existence of things (einai) belong inextricably together. As far as Held is concerned these two insights of Heraclitus and Parmenides mark the beginning of European culture characterized by a basic openess to other cultures, a going out, so to speak, from one's own culture to other foreign cultures and having as its foundation the life-world of humanity, that is to say, the "kosmos."

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The Christianization first of the Roman Empire, then of the people pouring into the Mediterranean region from the other side of the Alps, constituted the second great beginning of European culture

Thus begins a type of investigation which is characterized by freedom from bias (the measuring criterion of science) and called "historie" or exploration. At this point of origin scientific exploration is indistinguishable from philosophy. The twin institution which is born together with science in ancient Greece is that of democracy which according to Held "can be spoken only where a free space in the general freedom of opinion among the citizens is expressly institutionalized." These two institutions are the outward form of the "inaugural spirit of Europe." At this point Held utters a warning, namely this: "The temptation of Europe, and in the modern period, for the whole Euro-American Western culture, lies in identifying the one world discovered here, a world of all human beings that provides a place for all their various life-worlds, with one of these worlds...namely equating the one shared world with our own European Western home world." Nevertheless, Held asserts that "no other developed culture has managed to perceive the proper claim of foreign life-world with such a lack of prejudice as that which occurs under modern international law."

It is this lack of bias that may eventually allow for the "europeazation of humanity", which sounds like a very eurocentric assertion but remains valid if the proper openness to foreign cultures is maintained; for as Karl Jasper has aptly put it: "Europe is peculiar perhaps only in that it is, in possibility, everything." Which is to say that Western Civilization (which includes the Americas and Australia and other places in the globe) distinguishes itself by the fact that it is never finished, it is always coming-to-be; there is always a next renaissance, a re-birth, on the next horizon; a new synthesis is always in the making. Europe's self understanding is provided by foreign cultural forms. Here Held arrives at what I would consider his most important insight concerning European cultural identity, and it is this: "...the Christianization first of the Roman Empire, then of the people pouring into the Mediterranean region from the other side of the Alps, constituted the second great beginning of European culture." He is alluding to that great synthesis of Antiquity and Christianity culminating with Christian Humanism (prepared partly by Christian monks copying and preserving ancient Greek and Latin manuscripts) whose pioneers are Dante and Petrach, then soon afterward followed by the Italian Renaissance.

Constant change and re-birth constitutes in fact the paradigm of a religion that has as its most important symbol that of the Resurrection ('Behold I make everything new"); a capacity to begin anew which (and this may surprise euro-fanatics) which Held individuates in "the founding fathers of North American democracy, who brought it from Europe in the 18th century; these men elevated federalism to the principle of the American democratic constitution, as is demonstrated in their 'Federalist Papers.'...European culture, due to its openness in natality [i.e., re-birth] to the universal world as place for many particular life-worlds, has the chance to show the world how its own multiplicity can be kept alive." The essay in itself is a model of a lucid historical survey of a complex culture which manages to remain unbiased because it does not

fall into mere Machiavellian considerations of "real-politik". The question arises: "can this hoped-for model become a future reality or is it a mere chimera, an utopia, never to be reached?" In my opinion, it can happen on two conditions: 1) that the principle of federalism is respected and implemented on the political level, and here the EU can learn much from the US, 2) that Europe's cultural identity as a "novantiqua," that is to say, a synthesis of antiquity and Christianity is recognized and acknowledged as part of the cultural patrimony of Western Civilization. Held himself gives a dire warning in this regard: "A European Community grounded only in political and economic cooperation of the member states would lack an intrinsic common bond. It would be built upon sand.

The Tragic Loss of the European Spiritual Identity

he renowned Church historian Ernst Troeltsch once boldly declared that Europe had ceased to be Christian in the 18th century. Of course such a statement referred not to individuals but to the cultural identity of Europe as a whole. Some post-modern thinkers not only would wholly agree with that statement but would also point out that indeed the 18th century is the watershed separating Christendom, so called, or the old Europe, and the new modern Europe. This New Europe, after World War II has finally transformed itself in the European Union and is based on purely neutral, that is to say, non-ideological, economic, scientific, educational foundations. This leads to a crucial question: are those foundations reliable and solid enough by themselves, or is there something sorely

missing? Is the absence of spiritual foundations a sign that a more perfect union transcending nationalism will forever elude the European Union? Some post-modern philosophers attribute the problem of modernity to a mistake made at the beginning of Western culture, to Plato in particular. They assume a continuity between modern rationalism and the principles of reason as formulated by the ancient Greeks. Others draw a distinction between the original principles of rationality and their modern interpretation. They trace the root of that distinction, with its dramatic political implications, to the modern turn toward the human subject as the only source of truth and its consequent pragmatism. This turn was initiated, to be precise, by RenĂ&#x2039; Descartes, widely considered the father of modern Western philosophy.

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What post-modern thinkers reject is not only Enlightenment rationalism, but also the original Greek form of rationality. For them rationality is little more than behavioral attitudes, a sort of incessant self-correction and perfectibility patterned after the experimentalism and self-correction of science. This is considered progress. In fact, it is branded as deterministic inevitable progress: the newest is always the best. Allegedly, it does away with disastrous and destructive universalist totalizing ideologies, the grand scheme of things a la Hegel, the grand narrations, often at war with each other. The argument is this: it is better to be more modest in one’s goals and humbly attend to immediate social and economic needs. Welcome Epicurus and Lucretius, away with Plato’s grandiose Forms. What is conveniently side-stepped are some fundamental issues at which we shall look a bit more closely. Indeed, the ineluctable fact is that Europeans no longer agree on spiritual values; those values that, despite political conflicts, were in place prior to the Enlightenment. It took the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka (who in turn greatly influenced Havel) to dare propose, in the middle of the 20th century, a return to an idea that used to be characteristic of the European tradition since the Greeks but in the 20th century is seen as a scandal and an anomaly: the care of the soul by way of a great respect for truth and the intellectual life, holistically conceived. Plato had claimed that it is through that life that we, as human beings endowed with a soul, partake of the life of the Ideas and share the life of the gods themselves.

Later, Christians adopt this notion but change its direction. For Christians, theoria, or contemplation, remains the fundamental principle of any viable culture. Bereft of it, a civilization is left with nothing but a sort of aimless and blind praxis leading to its eventual destruction. Christopher Dawson for one explored and clarified this idea in his famous The Making of Europe. So, the next question is this: can such a principle as advocated by Plato play a role in the spiritual unification of Europe? Which is to say, must the commitment to reason abandon a sort of rationalistic universalism that opposes it to an anti-rationalist particularism? To deepen a bit more: is not abstract rationalism and its irrationalist reaction responsible for much of the ominous nihilism which Nietzsche, for one, claimed hovers over Europe like a menacing specter? Has it not, in fact, corrupted the very principle of reason that, up to the Enlightenment, had constituted Europe’s spiritual identity? Has it not turned wisdom against itself? Prior to World War II, the philosopher who most acutely perceived the spiritual crisis that rationalism has caused in Europe was Edmund Husserl. In a famous lecture delivered in Prague on the very eve of one of the darkest chapters of modern European history, he said this: “I too am quite sure that the European crisis has its roots in a mistaken rationalism. That, however, must not be interpreted as meaning that rationality as such is an evil or that in the totality of human existence it is of minor importance.

The rationality of which alone we are speaking is rationality in that noble genuine sense, the Greek sense, that became an ideal in the classical period of Greek philosophy.” All we need to do is give a cursory look at Husserl’s philosophy of phenomenology to be convinced that Husserl regarded modern objectivism as the quintessential expression of this rationalism. It reduces the world, which for the Greeks was a spiritual structure, into an object, and reason into an instrument for manipulating matter. One may ask, how then did Husserl view the spiritual identity of Europe? He advocated that the particular must be fully reintegrated with the universal, an idea that Kierkegaard too had proposed. Husserl says: Clearly the title Europe designates the unity of a spiritual life and creative activity--no matter how inimical the European nations may be toward each other, still they have a special inner aﬃnity of spirit that permeates all of them and transcends their national diﬀerences…

There is an innate entelechy that thoroughly controls the changes in the European image and directs it toward an ideal image of life and of being. The spirited telos of the European in which is included the particular telos of separate nations and individual persons, has an infinity; it is an infinite idea toward which in secret the collective spiritual becoming, so to speak, strives. But the question persists: is it possible at this point in its history to revive the spiritual idea of Europe? An idea that, despite its violent historical conflicts still ongoing in Bosnia, has kept its people united within an unrestricted diversity? Food for thought, to be duly digested by those of us who, like Husserl, are perceptive enough to sense the spiritual crisis he was talking about. In his Philosophical Discourse on Modernity Jurgen Habermas attributes the failure of the Enlightenment to the intrusion of foreign elements which derailed its original program of full human emancipation.

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It would be a mistake for the EU to imitate the US and attempt a repetition of a mega-nation

He finds nothing wrong with the project itself, aside from the fact that it was prematurely abandoned for a romantic return to some form of pseudo-religion, such as the worship of nature in the 19th century, the era of Romanticism. Undoubtedly there is something unfinished about the Enlightenment, but contrary to what Habermas believes, it is not the execution of the project that failed to reach a conclusion but the concept itself. Many question nowadays the very principle of rationality that directed Enlightenment thought. This may sound paradoxical, for indeed it is the adoption of reason by the Greeks and the subsequent synthesis with Christianity as achieved by Augustine and Aquinas that distinguishes European culture from all others and defines its spiritual identity. To be sure, the real culprit was not reason or rationality but rationalism, which was unknown to the Greeks. Rationalism is a modern invention inaugurated by Descartes and consisting in a separation of the particular from the universal and assigning supremacy to the universal while misguidedly assuming that a rationality constituted by the human mind could function as the same comprehensive principle that it had been for the Greeks.

To the contrary, a rationality of purely subjective origin produces mere abstract, empty concepts in theory and pursues limited human objectives in practice, mostly narrowly focused upon economic and political concerns. Einstein had it on target: our era is characterized by perfection of means and confusion of goals. Indeed, in developed societies where economic concerns have become all-important and dominant, the protection of sub-national identities and minority groups are at risk. One place where any obstacle to economic development has been successfully eliminated is the United States, usually mentioned as a model of federalism encompassing many nationalities. Many EU politicians advocate a United States of Europe. That may sound progressive, but it remains a chimera given that the nationalistic and regional identities are still very strong in Europe; nor is it desirable. It would be a mistake for the EU to imitate the US and attempt a repetition of a meganation which would translate into a superpower bent on power and the forcible exportation of democracy (an oxymoron if there ever was one). The price that will have to be paid will be further erosion of Europeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original spiritual unifying principles, the very roots of its cultural identity, and the embracing of a bland mixture of varied cultures leveled to its least common denominator.

Soccer games heralded as a unifying principle may indeed be emblematic of that mistake. What some Europeans fail to grasp is that what keeps so many ethnic nationalities and groups together in the US is a constitution which guarantees certain basic rights transcending nationality and even the very power of the State in as much as they are conceived as inalienable. Those enshrined ideals make “a pluribus unum” possible, as the dollar bill proclaims. As the recent conflicts in the Balkans have shown only too well, it will prove quite diﬃcult for Europeans with diﬀerent languages reflecting diverse cultures to create a United States of Europe, nor should they. As it is, all the worst features of American popular culture are imitated, even by those who are antiAmericans, while the best is largely unknown or ignored. That is not to deny that one of the major achievements of the European Union has been the preventing of a major destructive conflict on the continent at the level of a world war for the last sixty years or so. However, to count on mere political-economic motives to completely free Europe from its

past destructive legacies may be a miscalculation. Calling oneself a Newropean will not do the trick either. It would suﬃce to take a hard look at the xenophobia that has raised its ugly head and pervades the EU especially its most aﬄuent countries. Superficially it seems directed at immigrants coming from outside Europe but often the real target is a neighboring country. What seems to be lacking within this economic, political, educational coordination that is the EU is a deeper kind of integration based on an inclusive spiritual idea. How is this to be achieved in a secular democratic society pledged to protect the rights of all its citizens and their diversity? A nostalgic return to the Greek-Christian synthesis and the Christendom of medieval times (at times imposed politically) will not do and is not even desirable. That was a synthesis meant for Europeans Christians (many of them forced to get baptized by their kings who found it politically convenient to switch from paganism to Christianity), not for non-Christians, not to speak of the non-Europeans which are now counted into the millions in Europe.

In any case, it is undeniable that at present no spiritual foundation for a genuine unification exists. The present proposed Constitution which nobody even calls constitution any longer but a compact, mentions a fuzzy kind of spiritual heritage almost as an afterthought. Many Europeans don’t seem to be too concerned about such an absence, if indeed they even perceive it. And yet, some kind of new synthesis is needed. Unfortunately, it will not even be envisioned, never mind implemented, unless Europeans, begin a serious reflection and a debate on the original idea to which Europe owes it cultural unity and identity. That carries the risk of being perceived as an old European, maybe even an anti-modern and anti-progressive, rather than a “Newropean,” but I would suggest that without that original idea, which precedes Christianity itself, a crucial novantiqua synthesis will not be perceived either and Europeans will be sadly condemned to repeat their history.

What is this European original foundational spiritual idea that precedes even Christianity? Simply this: a commitment to theoria, the theoretical life which in its Greek etymology means the contemplative or reflective life in all its various aspects: the philosophical, the scientific, the aesthetic; in short the primacy of a holistic life of contemplation. All this sounds strange to modern and postmodern ears accustomed to hear praxis and a purely pragmatic notion of rationality emphasized over and above theory. Marx, for one, expressed such a mind-set in the 11th of the Theses on Feuerbach with this catchall slogan: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world diﬀerently, the point is to change it.” Indeed, but to start with praxis is to put the cart before the horse. Unfortunately, postmodern theories, in an attempt to reject an extreme kind of rationalism, have also rejected the primacy of reason understood holistically and tied to the imaginative, which had ruled Western thought since the Greeks. Precisely the belief in that primacy, together with a common faith that could envision the transcendent, had been one of the spiritual foundations of Europe. It was that kind of devaluation and departure from foundational traditions that Husserl was decrying before World War II. Here the question naturally arises: is it still possible to revive the ideals behind Europe's spiritual identity? If this requires returning to a common Christian faith and to a pre-modern concept of reason, it will prove practically impossible. Science demands a more diﬀerentiated notion of reason than the one inherent in ancient and medieval thought.

Does the above reflection intimate perhaps that Europe must be satisfied with a merely political, technical, scientific, and economic integration? Such a spiritually "neutral" union does indeed appear to be “enlightened” in as much as it avoids the unfortunate conflicts of the past. Furthermore, many Europeans today think that social and cultural diﬀerences obstruct or slow down the process of economic growth and social progress. Why, then, don't all Europeans adopt English as the common language for science, business, and technology, leaving French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages to private life? Again, this may sound strange to post-modern ears, but if the European Union were reduced to a means for smoothing out political and economic transactions among its member states, not only would the individual states, not to speak of regions, gradually lose their identity, they would also be doomed to play a very subordinate role on the world stage in the future. Even today, only a half century after the United States has economically and politically come to dominate the world, its powerful media and commercial enterprises have deeply aﬀected the

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As for the common Christian faith that forged such a strong bond among Europe's peoples, many Europeans have lost it, if they ever had it, and most recent immigrants, many of them Muslims never had it to begin with. This is not to forget that Moslem civilization in Spain during the Middle Ages was more developed and advanced than a Western civilization devastated by the Barbarians.

A European community grounded only in political and economic cooperation of the member states would lack an intrinsic common bond. It would be built upon sand

languages, the communications, and the cultural patterns of Europe. The eﬀect is most visible in the smaller nations. Thus in the Low Countries the language of the news media has become infected with American idioms, bookstores are filled with American publications or translations thereof, television and cinema compete for the most recent American shows or films—all this at the expense of linguistic purity and respect for indigenous literature. The result is a general decline of native creativity. What is even more perplexing is that what is being imitated is not the best of American culture (which is there if one takes the trouble to look for it) but the worst and the mediocre. Be that as it may, whoever controls the economy of another country is likely to control its culture as well, as Benjamin, Adorno and Marx have well taught us. Building a strong economy of one's own, as Europe is doing at present, is a necessary step to resisting such domination.

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But that alone may not be suﬃcient. If the European Union were to be reduced to a mere economic union, its leveling eﬀect on European culture would in the end be comparable to the one the United States has begun to exercise. We are all Americans because we all drink Coke; and we are all Europeans because we all go to soccer games on Sunday! To the contrary, Europe's political and economic unification must be accompanied by a strong awareness of a distinctive cultural and spiritual identity. This is the reason why the dispute over Europe's Christian heritage is so important. In writing the preamble to the EU constitution, the most significant element in the European tradition is erased at the peril of building on political sand, as Kurt Held reminded us in his essay on Europe titled The Origins of Europe with the Greek Discovery of the World,” with the following words: “A European community grounded only in political and economic cooperation of the member states would lack an intrinsic common bond. It would be built upon sand." The American techno-economic model of a political union is not suitable for Europe, especially of a Europe which has forgotten its spiritual roots and in the past has substituted them with political ideologies. Being a new country, with immigrants from various traditions, the United States had no choice but to build politically on a spiritually and culturally neutral foundation but the separation of Church and State is deceiving.

Its spiritual roots remained strong and were in fact a unifying principle. This base enabled the United States to integrate the economy and the social institutions of its states into a strong and coherent unity that resulted in the most powerful nation in history. But the glue that held the uniform structure together were the ideals of the Enlightenment (ultimately based on a Judeo-Christian ethos) as enshrined in its Constitution. There is a lesson there for Europe to be pondered carefully before embracing anti-Americanism or, even worse, a slavish imitation of all the worst features of American culture. Contemporary Europeans have preserved their diverse languages, customs, and histories, even at the regional level, and that points to an appreciation for tradition and heritage which is indispensable for a strong cultural identity.But, to reiterate, Europe needs a strong spiritual reintegration as well as a political-economic one. That requires that it assimilate essential parts of its spiritual heritage: the Greek sense of order and measure, the Roman respect for law, the biblical and Christian care for the other person, the humanitas of Renaissance humanism, the ideals of political equality and individual rights of the Enlightenment. The values left by each of these episodes of Western culture are not as transient as the cultures in which they matured. They belong permanently to Europe's spiritual patrimony and ought to remain constitutive of its unity.

None can be imposed in a democratic society. Yet none may be neglected either, the theoretical no more than the practical, the spiritual no less than the aesthetic. In recent times Europeans, discouraged by the self-made disasters of two world wars, have been too easily inclined to turn their backs on the past, to dismiss it as no longer usable, and to move toward a diďŹ&#x20AC;erent future declaring themselves â&#x20AC;&#x153;Newropeansâ&#x20AC;? with a new identity. In the years after World War II, the model of that future was America. In recent years, Europeans have become more conscious of their specific identity and are beginning to intuit that such an identity resides in the past; it stems from a unique past, created by the hundreds of millions of men and women who for three millennia have lived on "that little cape on the continent of

Asia" (Paul Valery) between the North Sea and the Mediterranean, between Ireland's west coast and the Ural Mountains. It has given Europeans, in all their variety, a distinct communal face. This new awareness of cultural identity makes Europeans view the entire continent and its many islands, not only their country of origin, as a common homeland with common purposes. This unity of spirit in a rich variety of expressions must be remembered in forging the new European unity and ought to be mentioned in the EU's constitution. It ought to be remembered also by North Americans whose roots are indeed Europeans; in that sense they too are also Westerners and inheritor of Western civilization, albeit accepting and integrating other experiences such as the African, the Native American, the Latin-American, the Asian.

The Return of the Gods and the EU Constitution Transformed into a Treaty

arl G. Jung pointed out in his Modern Man in Search of a Soul that Man is naturally religious and when he throws religion out the window, it will promptly return via the back door in the form of a fanatical cult or a totalitarian ideology. Giambattista Vico, the 18th century philosopher of history and civilizations who fully understood and explained the connection between myth and religion, points out in his New Science (1730) that the burial of the dead, hinting at belief in an afterlife by primitive man, is concrete proof of some archaic form of religion which he considers a sine qua non (together with language and the institution of marriage) for the beginning of any kind of primordial civilized society. Indeed, religion and atheism (see Lucretius' De Rerum Natura) have been around since time immemorial, but it is only with the arrival of nihilism in the 20th century that we witness the political installation and practice

of the religion-less State, to wit Nazi Germany; a State which descends into the cult of self-worship or race worship, not too dissimilar from that of the ancient Romans worshipping goddess Rome, or the Soviet Union worshipping an ideology called Marxism and conceiving any religion as poisonous to the body politic, a rival ideology of sort. We know quite well the nefarious fruits of those social experiments. Indeed, it is by their fruits that the wolves in sheep's clothing are best known. We ought to remember and reflect on those fruits which are only a few decades old, or sooner or later those wolves shall return. In some way they have already showed their ugly face once again in Kosovo only a few years ago. Some of them are now at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Christianity comes to Europe via the Middle East but, as hinted above, there were in Europe already native archaic religions going back to the Stone Age.

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Moreover, as Klaus Held points out in his essay on the origins of European culture, never was religion so discussed in ancient Greece as when science and democracy were making their debut in the 4th century BC. Perhaps the best example to support this assertion is Plato's Euthyphro. There we read about Socrates and Euthyphro discussing the nature of holiness. After some debating back and forth they finally come to a consensus that the holy is what all the gods agree in approving. Socrates however, true to form, follows with another more penetrating question: "Is the holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy"? At first Euthyphro misses the point of the question. For this is the question of the "reasonableness" of the gods (or God as the case may be). To ask the same question in a slightly diďŹ&#x20AC;erent way: "Would absolutely anything the gods approved of, be holy just because they approve of it, or are they bound to approve of only what is holy"? Which is to say, are they free to approve or disapprove or are they bound by reason just as humans are?

As Nietzsche well grasped, with that penetrating question Socrates has discovered the basic dilemma of the relationship between religion and morality. The dilemma is basically this: either goodness cannot be explained simply by reference to what the gods want, or else it is an empty tautology to assert that "the gods are good." In that case the praise of the gods is simply power-worship. For us moderns the question may be put thus: is Aquinas right in his faith in reason that leads him to found his theology on the scaďŹ&#x20AC;olding of Aristotelian rationality? With that question we arrive at the statement of the U.S. founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Which is to say, it is universally evident to reason that human rights are universal and inalienable, independent of agreements among men or among gods. If God created us human creatures with reason, She expects us to use it as a way of reaching the truth, and the truth shall make us free. Even God, if She respects truth, cannot let a Lucifer out of hell, the angel who said "evil be thou my god" (see Milton's Paradise Lost). Moreover, was Aquinas right in pointing out that Truth can be distinguished as scientific, religious, and philosophical but it nevertheless remains one and indivisible? Perhaps the most important point of his Summa is that religious faith cannot contradict reason; when it does, then we have separated truths and we may be dealing with a fanatical cult of sort leading to falsehood.

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Is the holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy"?

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By the 12th century the Olympian and Nordic gods have dwindled to one God and Western civilization is entirely monotheistic and Biblical. The Enlightenment however begins the work of God’s liquidation culminating with Nietzsche's madman shout: "God is dead" at the end of the 19th century. Leibniz basically poses the same dilemma as Socrates when he writes that: "Those who believe that God has established good and evil by an arbitrary decree.... deprive God of the designation ‘good’: for what cause could one have to praise him for what he does, if in doing something quite different he would On one extreme there is Machiavelli's posihave done equally well?" tion which takes hold of the Aristotelian concept of virtue (understood as a good habit as The problem here, as Nietzsche and others opposed to vice, a bad habit) and turns it upwithin Christian Western Civilization also saw side-down: virtue is nothing else but somequite well, is that Socrates really believes that thing done well, competently and "knowledge is virtue," and that by merely dis- thoroughly. The virtuous Prince is he who cussing the virtues and clarifying their gets a hold of power and holds on to it at any essence, one is then bound to become a vir- cost. Pushed to its ultimate conclusion, the tuous person. Plato, who is actually the one logical rationalist who operates by pure reawho presents Socrates to us, is more skepti- son (what Vico calls "the barbarism of the incal. He posits the irrational in the human soul tellect") will make the trains run on time and which needs to be rained in (see the image efficiently, will gas millions of innocent of the charioteer and the two winged horses women, children and men, and then conin The Phaedrus). He had observed the likes ceive himself as a "virtuous" person; someof Critias, Charmides and even Alcibiades, body to be admired and praised for his converse at length with Socrates and then go supreme competence in doing a thorough off and become elitist sophists, corrupt peo- and efficient job. ple who use language not as a means to a Then there is the Christian view as expressed sincere dialogue aiming at truth, but as a tool by St. Paul: "I know the good, but I do evil." In to control and manipulate others. They were other words, there is something within the precursors of Machiavelli and his philos- human nature that is perceived as flawed ophy, still alive and well within Western Civi- and less than ideal at its source, which makes lization. Socrates' dictum "knowledge is virtue" There are two other more modern views on sound rather hallow and a bit naÔve. virtue.

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What remains to be seen now is whether or not the people will insist on a Constitution that reflects their traditional and democratic values

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Paul and to a certain extent Plato are a bit more realistic about human nature. Plato knows about the irrational part of the soul; Paul knows that there is a garden which has been left behind, and that there is a snake in such a utopian garden and there are fallen angels as Milton points out. As pure spirits, they know what virtue is, rationally unencumbered by the weakness of the senses, but freely embrace evil nonetheless. It is naive on Socrates' part to think that nobody would choose evil by simply knowing what evil is. In a flawed universe, knowledge is not automatically convertible into virtue. In the same way, it is naÔve to think that a Constitution proclaiming the universal rights of man with no appeal to a Creator of human nature (through which they become inalienable, not to be granted and not to be violated by any State no matter how powerful) is any kind of guarantee that those rights will be always respected.

To wit, the former Soviet Union and the present People's Republic of China who have wonderful theoretical ideals in their constitutions, or “on paper” so to speak, for the most part violate them in practice. To be sure, these three understandings of virtue were proposed in one form or another under the guise of rationality, piety, morality or holiness at the Plenary Session of the Convention for the EU Constitution held in Brussels a few years ago. Unfortunately, they were never thoroughly debated. One of the frequent contributors to the forum on the future of Europe (Carlos del Ama, a Spaniard who teaches philosophy in Madrid) submitted a document at the conclusion of the Convention, on which I assisted him for the English version. It showed that, contrary to what the modern anti-religion sophists and rationalists go around peddling nowadays, historically, most of the Constitutions of the world at the very least mention a Creator in their preamble as a way of grounding themselves in something more durable than the historical vicissitudes of humankind and its power politick. The decision not to do so for the EU Constitution, while enthusiastically invoking on the part of Mr.Valerie D'Estaing the goddess Europe at the opening session of the Constitutional Convention, leaves one wondering if the above examined distinctions were at least discerned, if not discussed.

And so it was not too surprising that the feast of the gods on the Mount Olympus to celebrate the EU Constitution proceeded full speed ahead on Rome's Capitoline Hill where the draft Constitution was signed by the head of states of the EU. But it now appears that an apple was thrown on the banquet table by an angry rival goddess who had not been invited at the party: the goddess of discord. As of now, the diﬃculties of reaching a harmonious agreement on a viable EU Constitution continue unabated. The Rubicon seems to have been crossed and sadly there is no willingness on the part of the political leaders who pushed the draft through, democratic deficit and all, to reconsider much of anything, albeit there is much obstaculation on the part of individual states such as Poland and the UK.

What remains to be seen now is whether or not the people will insist on a Constitution that reflects their traditional and democratic values, or if they will opt for submission to what the EU bureaucrats and the politicians have carried out in their name without submitting it to a universal referendum. So far the French, the Dutch and the Irish have rejected it in a referendum. The politicians have devised a stratagem to ram it down the people’s throat: change the name from a Constitution to a Treaty, thus referenda will no longer be needed. Ultimately though, the people will get the Constitution they deserve, for better or for worse. As Erick Fromm has well taught us, there are many ways of escaping from freedom. The flip side of that phenomenon is the dictum of Thomas Jeﬀerson: "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom."

The EU Constitution: The Cart before the Horse? “I never feel so European as when I am in a cathedral” Robert Shuman

hile the signing of the EU Constitution in Rome in 2004 was hailed as a “new beginning” by the Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Galkenende, who at the time presided over the EU Council, there were, and there still are, ominous disturbing signs that by ignoring the “old beginnings” the cart was placed before the horse once again, as had already happened with Italian unification. On Friday, October 29th 2004, twenty-five heads of state comprising the then European Union put their signatures to the proposed EU constitution in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, Italy. Other signatories were three candidate states: Bulgaria, Rumania and Turkey. Two of them have since entered the Union.

The Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Galkenende hailed the event as “a new beginning.” To be sure, the “old” beginning hark back almost half a century to 1957 when the Treaty of Rome was signed in the very same August Room where the EU Constitution was signed. That treaty established a permanent alliance among six founding European nations. Those were the days of De Gaulle, De Gasperi, Eidenauer, Churchill, Shuman, Monet: the visionary founding fathers of a United Europe. One has to wonder why inexplicably, one hardly ever hears of them anymore. It’s as if they had been relegated to the generation of the old Europeans of the “old beginnings,” a sort of passè generation superseded by the generation of “new beginnings,” born after 1950.

The drafting of this important document by the Constitutional Convention, headed by Gisgard D’Estaing, began in 2001 and took two years of debates, negotiations and compromises, not to mention fierce disagreements of various kinds, the most notorious perhaps revolving around the issue of the mentioning of Christianity or whether or not the document ought to have any reference to a deity, something present in some 90% of constitutions around the world. The focus was particularly on whether or not to include a reference to Christianity, which many knowledgeable Europeans, even the atheists among them, consider not only a sine qua non for understanding the European cultural identity, but the cement needed to hold together disparate countries with disparate languages and mores. As it happened, the acrimonies continued till the last minute before the planned signing. The secularist liberal politicians would not compromise on this issue reasoning that a strict separation of Church and State had to be honored thus insuring “laicitè,” or secularism.

This, in turn, insures that each individual’s civil rights, including the right to worship and practice the religion of his/her choice, or not to practice any religion at all, are honored. Paradoxically, they were asking that people be anti-clerical to protect Christianity from itself. The specter of the Inquisition and past religious wars was duly resurrected, never mind the more glaring failed experiment of the Soviet Union, a State without religion, underpinned by a political ideology called Marxism with all the trappings of a secular ideological fundamentalism, not to speak of Nazism. In any case, this fierce opposition to the reference to Christianity in the EU Constitution eﬀectively derailed its planned signing on 13 December 2003. It seemed that Iris, the goddess of discord had made her appearance on Mount Olympus on such a day throwning her famed apple on the banquet table. This was an embarrassment for the presidency of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi at the EU Council of Nations. The Irish presidency which followed also failed to produce a signing. The Dutch presidency succeeded however. It managed to settle the issue of proportional voting and insure that the signing took place in Rome, exactly forty seven years after the beginning of the new entity called the European Union. Thus the concluding ceremony of the Constitutional convention in Rome resembled its beginning in Brussels, when the mythical Europa was invoked by Gisgard D’Estaing.

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Indeed, Santayana was on target when he said that people change their gods but hardly their way of worshipping them. So the event begs the question: was it a genuine success or a Pyrrhic victory of sort? Let’s analyze those still fresh events in the light of the past events of Italian unification. There is a forgotten lesson there that I believe will return to haunt the European Union; for while Marx might have been wrong on many aspects of his social philosophy, he was right in one particular aspect: those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it, even if, as Santayana also reminds us, the second time it may come about more as a farce than as a tragedy. In 1870 Rome was snatched away from Pope Pius IX and became the capital of a united Italy. A latecomer to the community of European nations, since 1861 it had proclaimed itself a liberal constitutional monarchy under Victor Emanuel II. The architects of this new polity were Count Benso di Cavour, Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. This was indeed a new Rome with a fresh “new beginning” epitomized in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s famed novel Il Gattopardo. It was not the first Rome of the ancient Roman Empire, or the Medieval Holy Roman Empire aping it; nor the second one of the Renaissance King Popes who governed the whole of central Italy, the so called Papal State, but the third Rome: the capital of a new liberal secular nation intent on claiming its rightful place among the nations of Europe, colonialism and all.

Shuman and his generation were very aware of the necessity of a common cultural patrimony; that the cement for a unified Europe needs to be cultural, not racial, not nationalistic even if it be that of a hyper-nation.

Sixty short years later, the king of Italy was proclaimed Emperor of Italy, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Libya by none other than the strong man of Italy, Benito Mussolini, holding the bridles of power as a sort of omnipotent Roman consul who, to better obfuscate and mystify matters, had resurrected the Machiavellian myth of the direct genetic line of the Italian people to the Romans. Mussolini strutted about on the world’s stage calling the Mediterranean “mare nostro.” The reality is that 90% or more of the genes in present day Italians are not Roman. In present day Italians there are genes that belong to Arabs, Normans, Longobards, Visigoths, Fenicians, Greeks, French, Austrians, Spaniards, Celts, you name it and they are there. So the national anthem which proclaims that “Italy has woken up and dunned on her head the helmet of Scipio,” to finally evict the invading foreigners as Scipio had done with Hannibal, rather than a Machiavellian political reality is a caricature, a sort of “the impossible dream” of simple-minded racist nationalists and imperialists: the Petains, and the Mussolinis and the Hitlers and the Bossis and their descendants.

This was so because the foreigners now lived inside the very genes of the people who had invaded Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire. The pure Roman race as well as the pure Aryan race were chimeras pure and simple, an historical fraud perpetrated on the people; for Italians were now one of the most bastardized races of Europe, and all the better for it. But despite the bastardization, people somehow managed to live together in harmony because they could be inspired by certain ideals rooted in universal experiences such as the Roman Empire and the Catholic (the word means universal) Church. Danteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s De Monarchia reflects that reality and proposes it as an ideal. No more in 1861. This new modern nation was now bent on aping the imperialism of the other nations of Europe and donning the tight jacket of a secular centralized nationalism contemptuous of regional diďŹ&#x20AC;erences, an experience to which she was not well-accustomed.

Alessandro Manzoni, the devout Catholic and the greatest literary figure of the 19th century, had fervently hoped, with Beethoven, that Napoleon would restore those larger trans-national, cosmopolitan, European universal values, but they were both to be greatly disappointed. What was still at work, despite the proclaimed ideals of the French Revolution, was good old nationalism coupled with good old imperialism; a greater France masked as Pan Europeanism. Manzoni, however, despite his great reservations about Napoleon, saw no contradiction between being a good Catholic and being a good liberal and accepted a seat in the newly minted Italian Senate of the new nation. But he was the exception which few followed; for, to make matters worse, the Pope had retreated to the Vatican palaces as a sort of prisoner excommunicating all those who supported what he considered a usurping national secular State.

So in the Pope’s eyes, the pious Manzoni was also a bad Catholic. Paradoxically, it was Mussolini who some sixty years later, while conquering Ethiopia a la Caesar, ignoring the protests of a feckless League of Nations, came to an accommodation with the Church by making the Vatican an independent State. The anti-clericalism of many liberal Italians was not diminished however and persists even today. It is an ancient grudge apparent in Rome more than other Italian cities and partly explains the strength of the Communist party in Italy. By 1930, with the establishment of Vatican City, one could have said “all is well that ends well” as far as relations between Church and State were concerned. The Italian State was legitimized in the eyes of the Church and Italians could once again be patriotic and religious at the same time. But the demarcation between the secular and the sacred were still blurry. The Italian Constitution continued to declare Italy a Catholic country till recently when that proclamation was abrogated. Religion was taught once a week in public schools. Moreover, the proclamation of freedom of religion would have to wait for the Vatican II Council thirty some years later. Indeed, there was a snake in this heavenly garden called the New Liberal Italy. It was hinted at by the Prince of Salina in the above mentioned novel when he tells his nephew Tancredi, who has been fighting with General Garibaldi for Italy’s political unification: “We need to change everything so that it all remains the same.”

What did the prince mean by that enigmatic statement? Simply that what would happen in Sicily and most of Southern Italy, as far as ordinary people were concerned, is that one King (Ferdinand II of the Bourbon) would be substituted with another (Victor Emmanuel II of the Savoy), and things would return to normal. As it happened, things worsened. Rather than bringing unity and harmony and some kind of social justice to Southern Italy, Italian unification exacerbated the socio-political plight of Southern Italy; the industrial North was privileged at the expense of the agricultural South, giving rise to banditry for a while, so that by the turn of the 20th century millions of Southern Italians were forced to emigrate to the Americas or to Australia. It is not an accident that 90% of Italian-Americans have grandparents who emigrated from Southern Italy. It was the very political architect of Italian unification who put it best with his famous dictum: “Now that we have made Italy, we need to make the Italians,” which is to say, the cart had misguidedly been put before the horse. Italy had been designed and built, and now the people were asked to simply accept the design of a few elitist politicians who thought that they knew better than them. So much for liberalism and democracy. Most of the one thousand patriots, the so called Red Shirts, who liberated Sicily in 1859 were university students, intellectuals and professionals, the elites of their society; this was hardly what one might call a populist movement. The people were merely asked to vote on the annexation or on the Constitution imposed on them.

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A Constitution is not a treaty among States but a social compact among the people

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So the Prince of Salinas was correct in his cynical statement: we must change everything so that nothing will change. As it happened, what was constructed after the unification was a “little bourgeoisie Italy” composed of merchants bent on accumulating wealth, blissfully neglectful of the universal ideals of both the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, of Humanism and the Renaissance, not to speak of cultural patrimony, values and cultural identity. They felt little allegiance toward the new Northern King (who did not visit Southern Italy till 1900 prompting the famous Neapolitan song “Come back to Sorrento” a thinly veiled allusion to his neglect of the South). And so the unity of Commerce and a Central Italian Bank, without the consent of the governed, did not hold water for very long, and the experiment with democracy ended abruptly sixty short years after unification with the advent of Fascism and the strongman Mussolini. After the Second World War Italy was proclaimed a Republic and became one of the original founders of the European Union.

What are the insights to be derived from this brief and schematic overview of the history of Italian unification—insights which may prove useful to the present day architect of European unification? The first insight could be this: a cultural identity of disparate people with disparate mores and even disparate languages (which reflect their culture and therefore are to be jealously preserved) cannot be imposed from the top down by elitist leaders, philosopher-kings with esoteric ideas. It has to come from the bottom up, democratically. Before drafting a Constitution one needs to listen carefully to the people and determine which are the universal common values that can function as a sort of cultural cement of their political union. Then one needs to obtain their consent. Not to do so and proceed with the formation of a united Europe without determining what does it mean to be a European is to put the cart before the horse. Shuman and his generation were very aware of the necessity of a common cultural patrimony; that the cement for a unified Europe needs to be cultural, not racial, not nationalistic even if it be that of a hyper-nation. It needs to recognize cultural heritages such democracy, science, Greco-Roman civilization, Germanic concepts of freedom, Christianity (which when authentic is always universal and trans-cultural), the synthesis of Greco-Roman civilization and Christianity which is Christian Humanism and the Renaissance. A Central Bank and the promise of prosperity, or Machiavellian concepts of Realpolitik, or universal soccer games on Sunday simply will not do.

Even a common language could not prevent a civil war in the US. That civil war proves that it is dangerous to put ideals in a Constitution which are not meant to be honored. The people will not stand for it forever, for as Lincoln put it: one can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but one cannot fool all the people all the time. Were one to glance at the very first article of the EU Constitution one would read these words: Inspired by the will of its citizens and the European States, to build a common future, this Constitution establishes the European Union... So the second insight to be derived from the mistakes of Italian unification is this: that unless those first words of the EU Constitution are really meant and honored in the future, then that common future will be built on sand and one is perpetrating a great fraud on oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s people. One notices in that first article that the will of its citizens is declared the original inspiration; the will of the people takes precedence, as it ought in any democracy worthy of its name, over the will of its elitist aristocratic leaders, and the will of its member States.

Assuming that the people have already been listened to, the member States need to let people ratify the polity that they have created in their name. A Constitution is not a treaty among States but a social compact among the people. Those people have a past as well as a future and that past needs to be known and respected before forging a viable future. A car without a rear-view mirror may eventually end up in a ravine. The French, the Dutch and the Irish, voted down the Constitution in a referendum. To switch metaphor again: to make Europe first and the Europeans later, is to put the cart before the horse. That cart and its horse may too end up in a ravine. The twenty-five head of states present in Rome pledged to ratify the Constitution within two years; eleven of the twenty five pledged a referendum among their people, which is all well and good, but there are ominous signs that those may be empty promises. There is talk now of bypassing referendums and leave the ratification to the individual statesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; congresses. Even more ominously the very word Constitution has been dropped and the old one Treaty has been resurrected.

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The people in their rage may bring down the whole structure called European Union, once they realize that it is being constructed without their consent.

The racist and fascistic Italian Lega for one seems to be balking at the idea of a referendum. Silvio Berlusconi, the then PM now back in power went on record saying that “We shall commit ourselves to ensuring that Italy ratifies the new treaty without delay.” What is ominous in those words is that Berlusconi refers to the Constitution as “a treaty among States.” But a Constitution is more than a legally binding treaty to insure prosperity, greater commerce and movement of goods among nations. It is also a document that ought to inspire the people to create a greater more meaningful union aiming not at goods but at the Good, the Beautiful, the True. It takes more than a bank to inspire people. Romano Prodi, the ex PM who then presided over the EU Commission, reveals that he has a better notion than a Berlusconi of what a constitution is all about when he declared that “The new Constitution goes beyond existing treaties. It has an innovative content of the social rights…and new social clauses.” Indeed, to ignore the will of the people will mean that the cynical politicians will have to deal with the wrath of the people later on. The people in their rage may bring down the whole structure called European Union, once they realize that it is being constructed without their consent.

Finally, let us take a brief imaginary look at the symbolism and the semiotic signs present at the very signing of the Constitution on 29 October 2004. In the first place one ought to note the silence of the people. That is a powerful sign in itself. There were neither demonstrations, nor festivities among the people at this august event; an event overshadowed by the Borroso/ Buttiglione crisis in the EU Parliament. Could it be that Iris, the goddess of discord was there, invisible perhaps, but there nonetheless to continue the mischief she initiated on December 13th 2003? There were other disturbing signs. Those who are familiar with Rome know that piazza Campidoglio was the ancient citadel, the core of Imperial Rome, the first Rome that is. There is an equestrian statue in the middle of the piazza portraying the anomaly of a philosopher-Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. But the architecture of the buildings surrounding the square belongs to the second Rome, the Renaissance Rome of the Popes. The square was in fact designed by none other than Michelangelo. The heads of states must have passed silently by that statue of Marcus Aurelius and then climbed the scalone Michelangelo in order to enter the great hall of Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi, another throw back to ancient Rome. But here too, that “sala” is more Renaissance then ancient.

Another irony: the Constitution, which makes no reference to Christianity, was actually signed under the prominent bronze statue of a Pope in full regalia and wearing his tiara. And who pray was this Pope? None other than Innocent X, the last Pope of the Catholic counter-reformation. He is the one who wrote a bull of condemnation against the treaties of Westfalia in 1648 which, after thirty years of religious wars, declared the end of the so called â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sacred Roman Empireâ&#x20AC;? and authorized religious freedom in Europe. Pope John-Paul II who had declared religious freedom as part of the Church Constitution in the 20th century was not as much as consulted or even mentioned at the ceremony; as if he lived on another planet somewhere.

And for obvious reasons: he is the one who had been insisting that Christianity be acknowledged in the EU Constitution as one of the pillars of Western Civilization while honoring and keeping separation of Church and State and religious freedom. He was ignored and the EU Constitution was signed in his face, so to speak, under the auspices of the goddess Europa and the goddess Iris (perhaps represented by Buttiglione, the rejected minister of Barrosoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s EU Commission) and the vigilant watch of a reactionary Pope who condemned religious freedom in the 17th century. Dante must be turning in his grave in Ravenna at the sight of those strange ironies of history.

Dante's Vision of a United Europe

here is a rather naive notion that the vision of a politically United Europe was born ex nihilo in 1950. The notion is naive because it loses sight of the fact that there is no such thing in history as creations ex nihilo. We stand on the shoulders of giants. It is therefore both proper and fitting to remember and celebrate those European cultural giants who, after the fall of the Roman Empire, began envisioning a United Europe. As a Christian humanist, Dante exemplifies the synthesis of Antiquity (i.e., Greco-Roman civilization) with Christianity. The mere fact that he chose Virgil, the poet of Latinity, as his guide in the Commedia, hints at it. With that synthesis Dante becomes the poet of the Italians just as Virgil had been the poet of the Romans. By giving them a written literature (The Divine Comedy) he gives them a national language and a cultural identity.

There is a passage in The Divine Comedy where Dante is transported in spirit above the vicissitudes of men and flies higher and higher in the blue sky till he sees the earth just as 20th century astronauts saw it from the moon. I suppose that makes Dante the first global space walker, albeit via imagination. Two intriguing characteristics in this passage are worthy of notice: in the first place Dante does not discern any geographical or political borders on the earth: he sees the whole earth, holistically, so to speak, just as the astronauts saw it from the moon in 1969. Thereafter Dante comments that "vidi quell'aiuola che ci fa tanto selvaggi" which translates loosely as "I saw that puny garden that makes us so vicious." He is addressing not just the Florentines or the Italians, or the Europeans but the whole of humankind.

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In eďŹ&#x20AC;ect Dante with this contrast of good/bad, ugly/beautiful, true/false, puny/precious, is saying that this unique earth which is Man's only home within time and space is meant to be beautiful as a garden at the outset, but the sad ugly present reality is that in this garden brother kills brother; it is one of general viciousness and incessant warfare. Dante is pointing out that this garden is a garden of exile and humankind's journey is a journey back to the future, a journey of a return toward that utopist garden it originally left behind. Later in his imaginary journey Dante will enter the earthly garden of Eden on top of the mountain of Purgatory, but his journey transcends even that beautiful earthly garden. It is crucial to remember here that Dante, as he writes the Commedia, is himself in exile. He has been expelled from his beloved Florence because there too brother is fighting brother; Ghibellines are fighting Guelfs. Dante used to be a Guelf; they were divided in the Blacks who saw in the Pope an ally against the Emperor (Henry VII of Germany at the time), and the Whites who were determined to remain fiercely independent of both Pope and Emperor. When the Blacks, supported by Pope Boniface VIII (later placed in hell by Dante for politicizing his spiritual mission) seize power, Dante, as a White, is sent into exile. It is this condition of exile, of constant frustration of having "to eat the hard bread of others' homes," of constant hardship and uneasiness and dissatisfaction, that propels Dante into a spiritual quest aptly depicted in the Commedia and ending with his famous "tua volontâ&#x20AC;Ą, nostra pace" (your will, our peace). Had he stayed in Florence he would have remained just another self-complacent mediocre politician.

The experience of exile transform Dante's political views; he ends up embracing the cause of the Ghibellines and begins to champion the unification of Europe under an enlightened Emperor. He writes a Latin political tract titled "De Monarchia" where this vision is set forth. Dante has now come full circle, from the particularity of his city of Florence he is now envisioning a Europe unified by universal ideals such as justice, peace, the common good, the True, the Good, the Beautiful; ideals to be privileged above and beyond mere Machiavellian power considerations. His is a Humanistic political ethic founded on universal Christian principles. The Europe that Dante envisions in De Monarchia is one that keeps a strict separation between Church and State (what Italians now call "lo Stato laico") so that which is Caesar's will be given to Caesar and that which is God's will be given to God. That means religious freedom and tolerance for other faiths and traditions such as the Moslem, fully welcomed at the Court of Frederick II in Palermo and which greatly influenced Italian culture. Italy will be just another country among European countries and its preeminence will consist less on its militaristic Roman heritage, and more on its Humanistic foundations. Dante is therefore one of the grandfathers of this vision of a United Europe. As the consummate poet he is, he reminds all Europeans that, in the words of the Dante scholar, the British-American poet T.S. Eliot, "...The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started from and know the place for the first time." At that place we shall rediscover "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle" [The love that moves the sun and the other stars]â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Paradiso XXXIII, 145.

Vaclav Havel Authentic Humanist and Cultural Hero for our Troubled Times "Kafka’s hero is, above all a hero for our time, a godless age in which power endowed with a higher meaning has been replaced with a vacuous power of tradition and legal and bureaucratic norms, that is, by human institutions. Man, deprived of all means and all weapons in his eﬀort to achieve freedom and order, has no hope other than the one provided by his inner space". Ivan Klima (in The Spirit of Prague)

áclav Havel’s humanistic philosophy is a powerfully heroic voice of the post-cold War political landscape, advocating that Europe recover its own soul; urging a global revolution in human consciousness; reconnecting the story of man to a transcendent principle within the cosmos; nothing less than the voice of Hope. "Kafka’s hero is, above all a hero for our time, a godless age in which power endowed with a higher meaning has been replaced with a vacuous power of tradition and legal and bureaucratic norms, that is, by human institutions.

Man, deprived of all means and all weapons in his eﬀort to achieve freedom and order, has no hope other than the one provided by his inner space". Ivan Klima (in The Spirit of Prague) With the possible exception of Franz Kafka, I know of no modern Czech writer whose political philosophy, within the Western Humanistic tradition, is more inspirational than Václav Havel’s. To my mind the best way to imagine him, is as one of Kafka’s “heroes for our time,” a powerful voice calling us back home to our humanity and urging that Europe know its cultural soul.

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A moral system does not exist to help society function but simply so that man can be human… it is morality which defines man

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This is not to make Havel an esoteric thinker coming out of some Olympian cloud. He is to the contrary, the last arrival of a long line of Czech visionaries and political philosophers who were formed within the crucible of the Cold War. Particularly important as Havel’s predecessor, greatly influencing his thinking is Tomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937), a brilliant philosopher, member for 15 years of the Austrian-Hungarian Parliament, and champion of an independent Czechoslovakia who in 1919 became president of the first Czechoslovakian Republic, just as Havel became president of the post-cold war Czech Republic. Masaryk was in turn greatly influenced by Franz Bernano while studying in Vienna. Like Bernano, he was alarmed by the fact that within Western civilization, increased scientific sophistication did not result in any discernible moral progress. He also discerned that modern reason had become detached from the world of good and evil had regressed to a Protagorean clever sophistry detached from the ethical. Later on, Masaryk developed a friendship with Edmund Husserl.

It was he who conveys to Husserl a sense of the spiritual crisis of modern Europe. Husserl eventually publishes his famous The Crisis of European Science (1936) where he aﬃrms that in the Western World theoretical knowledge has somehow lost contact with living human experience, and that the morally ordered world of our pre-reflective lived experience is the life-world of humankind. All these ideas are perceivable in Havel’s own thinking. Another strong influence on Havel’s thinking is the philosopher Jan Patocka (1907-1977) who had studied with Husserl and then taught Havel. He was instrumental in publishing Charter 77, the statement of resistance to Soviet occupation and communist ideology for which both Patocka and Havel were jailed by the Communist authorities. It was Patocka who had brought Husserl to Prague as a guest lecturer when Husserl was expelled by the Nazis from Freiburg University. In any case Patocka grouped his writings in a book titled Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. There, we find ample evidence that the subject which most captivated him was that of the human struggle. In the last essay of this book titled Wars of the 20th century and the 20th century as War Patocka writes a brilliant commentary on fragment 26 of Heraclitus, and interprets his polemos as “struggle, fight, war,” a kind of adversarial relationship with reality, a struggle against the world which ontologically can be compared to realities such as love, compassion, happiness, justice. In fact, for Patocka, polemos, had priority over the other realities. Thus Patocha corrects Husserl’s assumption of an underlying harmony within reality.

These “heretical essays” became a sort of manifesto to rally the Czech citizenry against the Soviet forces of occupation. Those essays insisted that when the ontological supports of hope fail, then personal responsibility must be evoked, in order to establish a community of solidarity. Out of this solidarity arises what Patocka calls “the power of the powerless.” The legal basis of this solidarity was the 1977 Helsinki Agreement on human rights which aﬃrms that human beings are obliged to discover and protect a valid moral foundation, and one ought not to expect that it be provided by the state or social forces alone. As Patocka himself explains: “There must be a self-evident, non-circumstantial ethic, and unconditional morality. A moral system does not exist to help society function but simply so that man can be human… it is morality which defines man.” This concept of human rights is redolent of the concept of “inalienable rights” which accrue to being human and no state can give or take away, as proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence.

Be that as it may, what Masaryk, Patocka and Havel have in common is a recognition that as a result of a disharmony which began with Cartesian rationalism, European life and thought were in profound crisis. This of course echoed Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences where the problems of modern philosophy are traced back to Descartes, the beginning of a crisis of self-alienation; something also noticed by Vico but alas ignored some two hundred years before in his New Science (1730). Husserl insists that this profound alienation and dysfunction could not be resolved unless normative status was attributed to Lebenswelt (life-world), the basis of ethical autonomy. Mechanistic science had unfortunately substituted the old awareness that human life belongs to an ordered moral universe. This idea is especially evident in Masaryk’s Suicide as a Mass Phenomenon of Modern Civilization. Nineteenth-century science has, in fact, usurped the authority previously accorded to faith and reason.

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Masaryk is convinced that it is crucial that humans return to a world of primary experience in order to be reconnected to a vital sense of good and evil. This is also the vital concern of Dostoyevsky’s existential novels. Havel is part of an ongoing Czech intellectual tradition which, in order to be able to "live in truth" has recourse to Husserl’s Lebenswelt to counter an oppressive Marxist ideology tending toward manipulative, rationalistic and mechanistic theoretical deductions. This is possible only by paying attention to “the flow of life.” Indeed, for Havel “time is a river into which one cannot step twice in the same place” (fragment 21 of Heraclitus). When Havel in his “Politics and Conscience” (1984) makes reference to Husserl’s distinction of the natural world from “the world of lived experience” by which to approach the spiritual framework of modern Western Civilization and the source of its crisis, he is by implication also invoking Vico’s distinction between the world of nature made by God, and the world of culture made by man. In any case, Havel’s brilliant insight is this: there is a fundamental distinction between the world that can be constructed out of an ideological viewpoint and the world rooted in a trustworthy lived-experience.

Impersonal manipulative forces can be resisted only by the one true power we all possess: our own humanity. This is nothing less than Humanism at its very best. It all begs this question: Where does Havel locate the foundation for this humanity which he finds in the phenomenal experiential world? The answer can be glimpsed in a letter written in 1989, from prison, to his wife Olga: “Behind all phenomena and discrete entities in the world, we may observe, intimate, or experience existentially in various ways something like a general “order of Being” The essence and order of this order are veiled in mystery; it is as much an enigma as the Sphinx, it always speaks to us diﬀerently and always, I suppose, in ways that we ourselves are open to, in ways, to put it simply, that we can hear.” (“Letters to Olga,” letter n. 76) The reader should notice here that within this “order of Being,” the emphasis is not on sight, on clear and distinct Cartesian ideas, but on hearing, on the perception of the mysterious. In 1994, in a lecture at Stamford University Havel also makes reference to “unconscious experience,” as well as “archetypes and archetypal visions.” This echoes Jung’s collective unconscious and the archetypes, or the idea of fundamental experiences shared by the entire human race, found in all cultures, no matter how distant in space and time they may be from one another. What is unique to Havel is that, like Vico, he sees the history of the cosmos recorded in the inner workings of all human beings: the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. Moreover, the history of the cosmos is projected into man’s own creations, it is the story of man, and it joins us together.

One of the constant refrains in Havel’s political philosophy is that of the loss of respect, including self-respect, apparent in the modern and post-modern world: loss or respect for what Havel calls “the order of nature, the order of humanity, and for secular authority as well.” Gone is the sense of responsibility that inhabitants of the same planet ought to have towards one another. Havel sees the causes of this loss of respect in the loss of a “transcendental anchor” which he considers the source of responsibility and self-respect. He pleads that humankind must reconnect itself to “the mythologies and religions of all cultures.” Only thus they can engage in the common quest for the general good. What exactly is the general good? Havel’s answer is that a “global civilization” is already in the process of preparing a place for a “planetary democracy.” But this planetary democracy here on Earth must be somehow linked with the Heaven above us, with the transcendent.

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Havel is convinced that only in this setting “can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created, with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us, and all of us together. The authority of a world democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe.” (ibid. p. 9). Havel does not assume that such an order has already arrived in Europe. To the contrary, his essay titled “The Hope for Europe (The New York Review, June 20, 1996) stands as a provocative survey of Europe’s enormous influence on human civilization, but this influence is ambiguous; it can be constructive but also destructive. Let us examine more closely Havel’s views on ideology, European Civilization and the European Union. In an essay by the title of “Politics and the World Itself” published in 1992, Havel critiques the Cartesian-Marxist assumption, which is the general assumption of philosophical rationalists, that reality is governed by a finite number of universal laws whose interrelationship can be grasped by the human mind and anticipated in systematic formulae. He insists that there are no laws and no theories that can comprehensively direct or explain human life within the context of an ideological fix-all.

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Even after thousands of years, people of different epochs and cultures feel that somehow they are parts and partakers of the same Being, which they carry part of the infinity of such a Being. As Havel aptly puts it: “all cultures assume the existence of something that might be called the ‘Memory of Being,’ in which everything is constantly recorded.” Which means that the guarantees of human freedom are not found in systems of thought, or ideologies, or programs of action but in “man’s relationship to that which transcends him, without which he would not be, and of which he is integral part.” (In “Democracy’s Forgotten Dimension,” April 1995, pp. 3-10)

The authority of a world democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe

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Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed will be unavoidable

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More specifically Havel proclaimed that: “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed—be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization—will be unavoidable.” (“A joint session of the U.S. Congress” Toward a Civil Society: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1990-1994, pp. 31-45). This echoes Martin Buber or C.P. Snow's insight on the two worlds: the world of "I-it" of science concerned with manipulation and use of matter out there (what Descartes calls extension into space), and the world of "I-Thou," the In 1990 Havel addressed the U.S. Congress world of the humanities and the poetic charon the subject of democratic ideals and the acterized by dialogue and ethical concerns. rebirth of the human spirit where he reflected on the end of the bipolarity of the So, what is to be done? Havel answers not Cold War and the beginning of “an era of with another ideology or a program or a Plamulti-polarity in which all of us, large and tonic blueprint but by simply reminding peosmall, former slaves and former masters will ple that the way out of the crisis is dedication be able to create what your great President to responsibility: “Responsibility to someLincoln called ‘the family of men.’” He also de- thing higher than my family, my country, my clared that: “consciousness precedes being,” company, my success—responsibility to the by which he simply means that the salvation order of being where all of our actions are inof the human world lies in the human heart, delibly recorded and where they will be the human power to reflect, and in human properly judged.” responsibility. Consequently, we need to abandon “the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be put into a computer with the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution.” Moreover, as far as Havel is concerned, there is no “universal key to salvation.” We must recognize the pluralism of the world within an elementary sense of transcendental responsibility. This kind of responsibility is anchored in “archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion, and, not least, faith in the importance of particular measures.”

In 1995 Havel gave a commencement address at Harvard University where he recognizes that the world has already entered a single technological civilization and in the spirit of Husserl, Masaryk and Patocka he sounded the alarm: there is also afoot a contrary movement which finds expression in dramatic revivals of ancient traditions, religions and cultures. In other words there is an attempt at the recovery of “archetypal spirituality,” a searching for “what transcends us, whether we mean the mystery of Being or a moral order that stands above us… Our respect for other people, for other nations, and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of Being, where it is judged.” What about Europe? In 1996 in his address at Aachen which he called “The Hope for Europe” (See The New York Review, June 20, 1996) Havel surveys and analyzes Europe’s enormous influence in world civilization but articulates some provocative thoughts: this influence can be both constructive and destructive. The challenge is to discern the positive constructive influences on which to build. He identifies the best that Europe has to oﬀer the world in “a place of shared values.” To talk of shared values is to talk about European spiritual and intellectual identity, the European soul, if you will. His sincere hope is that Europe, for the first time in its history “might establish itself on democratic principles as a whole entity.”

There is a caveat: this will happen only if the values that underlie the European tradition are supported by a philosophically anchored sense of responsibility. More precisely: “The only meaningful task for the Europe of the next century is to be the best it can possibly be—that is, to revivify its best spiritual and intellectual traditions and thus help to create a new global pattern of coexistence.”(ibid.). In Havel's “The Politics of Hope” one reads that “in my own life I am reaching for something that goes far beyond me and the horizon of the world that I know; in everything I do I touch eternity in a strange way.” With this grounding, politics becomes ‘the universal consultation on the reform of the aﬀairs which render man human.” There is no doubt that in Havel we have today a rare strong voice of the post-Cold War “new Europe" advocating a sort of "conspiracy of hope." A conspiracy this that insisting that politics must be accorded a transcendental source and foundation or it will be building on sand.

Jurgen Habermas on the Vision of a Post-Secular Europe "A European community grounded only in political and economic cooperation of the member states would lack an intrinsic common bond. It would be built upon sand." Klaus Held

he above quote is lifted from a brilliant essay published in the Fall of 2002 by Klaus Held titled, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Origins of Europe with the Greek Discovery of the Worldâ&#x20AC;?. The essay is a must read for anyone interested in exploring the very origins of European culture and concerned about its present trajectory and its future destination. Now that the whole Western world is in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, his words on the inadequacy of a mere economic vision with an attendant banal trade treaty parading as a constitution of sort, resonate with special vibrancy.

Held insists throughout his essay that to forget the vital component of religion, which was at the root of science and democracyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s appearance in ancient Greece, is to understand precious little of what makes Western cultural in general the unique culture that it is. This is a theme previously explored by Christopher Dawson (in his The Making of Europe, 1932) as well as by George Santayana, an atheist who nevertheless held that the enigma that is Europe will forever elude us without a clear and unbiased understanding of the phenomenon of Christianity.

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Europe is the only region of the world which has a general hostility toward religion— that Europeans have a tendency to explain every sign of backwardness in terms of religion

Two years later, on June 9, 2004, Held's watershed article was followed by a report by the European Policy Center in Brussels drafted by a senior research fellow, Dr. Jocelyne Cesari. In it Ms. Cesari reports that Europe is the only region of the world which has a general hostility toward religion—that Europeans have a tendency to explain every sign of backwardness in terms of religion. The European tendency, according to this scholarly report, is to equate Muslim religion, and indeed all religions, with fanaticism. This phenomenon unique to Europe was also documented by the World Values Survey conducted by a group of social scientists who identify its roots in the Enlightenment Period, the period of Voltaire, the very icon of Enlightenment who while asserting that he would defend to death the right of dissent and free speech of any citizen, at the same time, and paradoxically, writes the famed “Mahomet, of Fanaticism” in 1745, without ever retracting his misguided tract. In fact, he dies cursing Dante whom he considered a bigoted Medieval (Gothic was his favored slur) poet and therefore not a great poet. That spirit, according to Cesari and the World Values Survey lives on today.

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But there are signs that the anti-religion virulence is in abeyance in Europe and one who detects those signs is none other than the present day European philosopher Juergen Habermas. He seems to detect what he calls a “post-secular” age on the European horizon. This has all the self-proclaimed secular humanists, who generally disdain religion and advocate its liquidation, a bit worried lately. Their strident vitriolic statements against religion have been on the increase lately. For they have always fantasized of being at the very cutting edge of what it means to be modern and “enlightened” and now feel such a position challenged not only by theologians and religious leaders but by a philosopher to boot. The misnomer “secular humanism” was certainly not invented by the original European humanists in 14th century Italy. Its acknowledged father, Francesco Petrarca was a deacon of the Church and indeed most humanists were and remained pious believers. Secularism by itself is a neutral term distinguishing the sacred from the secular or temporal. Dante certainly made the distinction and places three Popes in hell for failing to make that distinction and confusing the sacred with the temporal. Indeed, Humanism by itself does not indicate an unfriendly stance toward religion.

The modern fallacy consists in placing secular as an adjective before humanist as if to imply that to be a humanist one needs to be a secularist inimical to religion which is definitely not the case. It is also not the case that all secularists (what the French and Italians call “laicite” or “laicità”) are ipso facto atheists and agnostics unfriendly to religion. One of those secularists was Robert Shumann who is up for canonization by the Catholic Church, another was De Gaperi who was also a devout practicing Catholic. But the vitriolic language persists. Here is a quote from a famous avowed atheistic scientist, Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” One may object that the likes of Dawkins are mere aberrations and therefore my argument against them is an ad hominem one, that I am fighting straw men and windmills, but to the contrary I would submit that they are examples of a type of “enlightened” modern prototypes ready to fantasize a bully God while denying his existence, convinced that the sooner religion is liquidated, the better. They are willing and ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater and eliminate the use and the practice of religion because of its abuses.

Jurgen Habermas must have surely read Held’s influential essay. Habermas is very much involved in the debate on the EU identity and has even signed manifestos on the same with Umberto Eco, the late Derrida and other influential philosophers. In 2005 Habermas delivered a lecture on the occasion of the Holberg prize which then became an article in 2006. See “Religion in the public sphere” by J. Habermas, in European Journal of Philosophy 14: 1-25. The core of that essay is that secular citizens in Europe must learn to live, the sooner the better, in a post-secular society and in so doing they will be following the example of religious citizens, who have already come to terms with the ethical expectations of democratic citizenship. So far secular citizens have not been expected to make a similar effort.

Habermas addresses the debate in terms of John Rawls’s concept of “public use of reason.” At the beginning of the article Habermas introduces two closely linked ideas: on the one hand the increasing isolation of Europe from the rest of the world in terms of its religious configurations, and on the other hand the notion of “multiple modernities.” He challenges the notion that Europe is the lead society in the modernizing process and invites his fellow secular Europeans to what he calls “a self reflective transcending of the secularist self-understanding of Modernity,” an attitude that goes beyond mere tolerance in as much as it necessarily engenders feelings of respect for the world view of the religious person, so that their pronouncements don’t automatically engender derision and contempt a la Voltaire.

In other words, Habermas while advocating reciprocity and the “public use of reason” in the agora and not in the privacy of one’s church, synagogue or mosque, is proposing a new challenging question: Are religious issues simply to be regarded as relics of a premodern era, or is it the duty of the more secular citizens to overcome their narrowly secularist consciousness in order to engage with religion in terms of what Habermas calls “reasonably expected disagreement”? That of course assumes a degree of rationality on both sides. It is indeed a challenging argument, one in which the relative secularity of Europe is increasingly seen as an exceptional, rather than prototypical case.

Christianity and Europe: Tony Blair at Yale University

n 1996, the year before he became prime minister, Tony Blair published a collection of his speeches and articles under the title New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. In that book Blair inserts the history of Britain within the larger context of the history of Christianity and very much in the tradition of Christopher Dawson, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and George Santayana, underlines the fact that one will understand precious little of Great Britain and even less of the whole of Europe’ s history and development, on every level, unless one manages to learn well the history of Christianity. To do that one need not be necessarily a believer. And in fact, the approach in that book is analytical and intellectual revealing little of Blair’s personal relationship with the divine.

Nevertheless, we do know that Tony Blair, the son of a militant atheist began his exploration of Christianity while at Oxford in the early 1970s and subsequently embraced Anglicanism in 1974 and later on Catholicism; this too was in the tradition of C.S. Lewis, G.K Chesterton, and Christopher Dawson. Here are a few excerpts from chapter 7 of the above mentioned book (titled “Why I Am a Christian”): “First a politician’s health warning: I can’t stand politicians who wear God on their sleeves; I do not pretend to be any better or less selfish than any-one else; I do not believe that Christians should only vote Labour; and I do not discuss my religious beliefs unless asked, and, when I do, I discuss them personally.

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Of course, they influence my politics, but I do not wish to force them on anyone else… Easter, a time of rebirth and renewal, has a special significance for me, and in a sense, my politics. My vision of society reflects a faith in the human spirit and its capacity to renew itself…I am often asked how my religious convictions have played a role in the emergence of my political thinking. First, my view of Christian values led me to oppose what I perceived to be the narrow view of self-interest that Conservatism—particularly its modern, more right-wing form—represents. But Tories, I think, have too selfish a definition of self-interest. They fail to look beyond, to the community and the individual’s relationship with the community. That is the essential reason why I am on the Left rather than on the Right…Christianity is more than a one-to-one relationship between the individual and God, important as that is. The relationship also has to be with the outside world. Second, Christianity helped to inspire my rejection of Marxism….The problem with Marxist ideology was that, in the end, it suppressed the individual by starting with society. But it is from a sense of individual duty that we connect the greater good and the interests of the community—a principle the Church celebrates in the sacrament of communion.” During his lengthy tenure as Prime Minister, Blair seldom revealed to his constituent the kind of private compass to his life that faith represents for him.

He has established the Tony Blair Faith Foundation whose mission is to foster greater understanding among people of various religions by involving them in collaborative projects, such as development eﬀorts and dialogue. It is a simple yet vast undertaking: to make religion a force for good as globalization mixes together people of diﬀerent cultures and faiths. The US operations of the foundation will be headquartered at Yale University. In the fall of 2008 Blair has co-taught a course at Yale, with the eminent Christian theologian Miroslav Volf. The course’s theme was the intersecting forces of faith and globalization. It was the first of three seminars that Blair has committed himself to teach at Yale and it immediately followed the unveiling of his Faith Foundation in the summer of 2008. A press conference launched the foundation at the Time Warner Center in New York was hosted by Christiane Amanpour and Bill Clinton who provided the opening remarks. What all this activity amounts to is an initial giving voice to a belief that faith can and in fact should have a role in public decisions. This, in a country mind you, and in a culture—modern Western culture—which keeps religion and politics separate and tends toward a secularism which loudly and contemptuously proclaims the exclusion of that voice from the public square to relegate it to the purely private in a church on Sunday, a synagogue on Saturday or a mosque on Friday. It is a controversial proposition, to say the least.

Nevertheless, Eboo Patel, executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, an non-profit organization based in Chicago has lauded the Blair enterprise: I think this movement needed a world leader, and Tony Blair is a world leader. He is one of the type of people who can take the interfaith movement to the next level. There is a new category emerging of interfaith activists, along the lines of human rights or environmental activists. I am now consistently speaking to several hundred or several thousand people, when just five years ago I was talking to seven people in a church basement. And Tony Blair is the first leader of this stature to take this issue this seriously. Gustav Niebhur, director of the Religion and Society Program at Syracuse University and author of Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America chimes in “This is a testing time for him, when he has to move from one stage to another and show people he is sincere and committed and can achieve something real.”

Reverend Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church in California and author of the best-selling book The Purpose Driven Life, who delivered the benediction at Barrack Obama’s inauguration, and serves on the group’s advisory council, has revealed that the foundation has already “raised several million dollars” for its projects and this was largely due to Blair’s contacts and stature. One of the insights that Blair has brought to the course on Faith and Globalization at Yale is that while Globalization obliterates borders and frontiers, faith often becomes a reaction to it and pulls people apart and that is unfortunate. Blair points out that he saw such a phenomenon when he was a prime minister, before and after 9/11 and he adds that “even if you are of no religious faith and don’t even like religion, you should be interested in this. But specifically, if you are a person of faith, the question is, what role does faith have in the future? My view is globalization needs strong values to guide it make it equitable and just.”

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My view is globalization needs strong values to guide it make it equitable and just

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It should be stressed at this point that the Faith Foundation of Tony Blair is not dedicated to mere theoretical and abstract projects but has placed on the table concrete active projects such as Malaria No More, with the aim of providing insecticide-treated mosquito nets to people in sub-Saharan Africa. Another is that of selecting 30 men and women of various faiths, aged 18 to 25, from the United States, Britain and Canada to work for African countries combating malaria and then return home to raise money for an awareness about the disease. Moreover, the Faith foundation has also asked Harry Stout, chairman of the Yale’s religious studies department, to develop a secondary school curriculum for the foundation’s use in fostering interfaith discussion among teenagers. The 25 students who took the course cotaught by Blair (chosen from 270 who applied; a microcosm of globalization from various cultures and faiths) describe his teaching method as Socratic; one of probing questions and tentative answers.

He has discarded the air of seasoned authority on the subject. He appears to be exploring the truth himself rather than delivering it. His co-teacher has said that Blair gives the impression of moving toward something without being completely sure yet, what it is. The course basically explores the extent and causes of religious resurgence, also situations in which religion has proved to be an oppressive force, as well as situations when it has been largely positive. As per the syllabus of the course: “the conditions under which robust religious allegiances can constructively be employed in the pluralistic environment of an increasingly interconnected world.” Which is to say, the aim is to arrive at a holistic picture; not a cherry picked or biased one, for or contra religion wherein caricatures abound and few insights are garnished. The course was developed in concert with the Yale Divinity School (a school across which I resided for the four years of my residence at the Yale Graduate School in the 70s when I was studying for my Ph.D. in Italian humanism) which has been working hard lately on Muslim-Christian reconciliation. Also with the Yale School of Management which has highlighted the work of religious groups to bring about debt relief for African nations. Blair hopes that the course will serve as a template for similar courses at other institutions and to that goal he has made a three year teaching commitment to Yale. It ought to be noted here that Blair, as mentioned above, has further converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism but only after leaving office because he did not wish that action to be misunderstood.

His wife and children were already Catholics and now he can take communion with them when they worship together. As he put to his students in a class in October: If you are a person of faith and are engaged, people seem to think that everything you do is because of some special relationship you are claiming with God. But, for example, if you take a decision, as I took on several occasions, to engage in military conflict, to go to war—leave aside whether you agree or disagree with individual decisions—there isn’t a transmission where your faith tells you that this the right way to decide this issue. But if you are assessing of whether you are going to do it or you are not going to do it, the issue of right or wrong is important, and actually in my view should outweigh the issue of constituency—or indeed, I would even say, constitution. I put that up as a question. I think that faith in that sense can be progressive. Not—and you must understand what I am saying here—not because the decision is necessarily the right decision. But progressive in the sense that issues to do with right and wrong are part of the decision-making progress. Now, if I understand Blair, he is saying that the classical universal ethical criteria to judge right and wrong, which are not purely religious but go back to Plato and Aristotle, ought to be applied in arriving at momentous decisions and not simply judge whether or not they are in the interest of one’s country in a relativistic mode. Be that as it may, those 25 chosen students will eventually disseminate those ideas found in the seminar’s syllabus by developing curricula for secondary school students.

To be sure, the cynics, believers and non-believers, whom we’ll always have with us, have decried the futility of such an enterprise against the rage and the violence perpetrated in God’s name and will continue confusing freedom of religion with cults of various stripes which enslave and coerce. But Blair has a diﬀerent view and remains adamant insisting that “what most people want is a sense of purpose derived from spirituality in their lives.” Ultimately his fight is against those who’d like to use faith to shut themselves oﬀ from other people and against the religion bashers who’d like to reduce religion to a mere caricature. Like President Obama, he is gambling on the idea that there is an immense constituency for peaceful coexistence among all nations and all people. In fact, Obama’s recent inauguration may be seen as a symbol and emblem of such an idea.

Christopher Dawson and The Making of Europe

In 1932 Christopher Dawson published a book titled The Making of Europe which had enormous success and established his reputation as a scholar of incredible range and erudition who could communicate with great clarity and elegance. He had previously written two other books: The Age of the Gods (1928), and Progress and Religion (1929) but this was unique. The book avoids the conventional burdensome footnotes, bibliographies and theoretical frameworks and reads like a romantic novel, hence its popularity. Indeed, 19th century Romanticism was a corrective to the previous century, the so called age of Enlightenment.

It did this by questioning the rationalist conviction that the empirical physical sciences constituted the paradigm of all knowledge and thus reinstated Giambattista Vicoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s revaluation of history against the Cartesian depreciation of it as mere gossip. Vico had observed that the external world of nature is ultimately impenetrable, for the human mind can only attempt to manipulate it within the strict limits set by God who created it. The stream of history, on the other hand, is essentially the world that the human creative spirit has made, and therefore despite its recurring mysteries, it can come to be known by humans in an incomparably deeper sense.

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religion is the soul of a culture, and a society that has lost its spiritual roots is a dying society, however prosperous it may appear externally

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Dawson shared this revaluation of history as did Hegel when he declared history the highest form of knowledge: the self-realization of the absolute spirit in time. And what was the single idea, the keynote of Dawson’s thought as found in The Making of Europe? I was this: religion is the soul of a culture, and a society that has lost its spiritual roots is a dying society, however prosperous it may appear externally. The fate of our civilization was endangered not only by the fading of the vision of faith that originally formed it, namely Christianity, but the failure to integrate the world of reason and science with the world of the soul, which has lost the power to express itself through culture. In Dawson’s view this was the tragedy of modern man. Before writing his famous book, Dawson had read and pondered deeply the works of Augustine (The City of God) and Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). He was also influenced by Lord Acton’s World History, wherein Acton aﬃrms that “religion is the key of history.” He slowly became aware of the continuity of history and of how the coming of Christianity had transformed the dying Roman Empire into a new world.

He spent fourteen years of intensive study before writing his twenty some books among which Enquiries into Religion and Culture (1934), Religion and Culture (1948), Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950), The Crisis of Western Education (1961), The Formation of Christendom (1961). All these books dealt with the life of civilizations. The underlying idea in them was the interaction of religion with culture and subsequently with civilization. Religion is discovered to be the dynamic element in every culture—its life and soul. He discovered that worship, prayer, the rite of sacrifice, and the moral law were common to all religions and so what the object of worship, and that moreover, the destiny of the human race was conditioned not only by material progress but by a divine purpose or providence working through history. Dawson also discovered that “the world religions have been the keystones of the world cultures, so that when they are removed the arch falls and the building is destroyed” (Progress and Religion, p. 140). As he surveys the two millennia of Christianity, Dawson noted four landmarks. The first one is the new element which defines the diﬀerence between the new faith and the old mystery religions of Europe: this is the principle of a dynamic and creative spirit that inspires the whole of life. The Christian religion has a power of renewal that has accompanied it through the ages.The second landmark was the extraordinary development in the fourth century A.D., when Constantine declared Christianity the oﬃcial religion of the Roman Empire. After centuries of living on the inherited capital of the Hellenistic culture, this fountainhead seemed to run dry.

Yet the achievements of Greece and Rome were not rejected by this new faith. They were merely transformed. Classical learning and the Latin language became fused with the ideals of a Christian society that was founded not on wealth, tyranny and power but on freedom, progress, and social justice. Latin became “not only a perfect vehicle for the expression of thought but also an ark which carried the seed of Hellenic culture through the deluge of barbarism” (The Making of Europe, p. 49). The third great change of thought, according to Dawson, came about in the 16th century with the Renaissance and the Reformation, which brought an end to medieval unity. The fourth came about after the industrial revolution in the 19th century and led to the 20th century.In one of his last books, The Crisis of Western Education, Dawson calls our own era the age of Frankenstein, “the hero who creates a mechanical monster and then found it had got out of control and threatened his own existence” (p. 189).

He had in mind atomic warfare and he argued that if Western society were to gain control over these forces there would have to be a reintegration of faith and culture, and that there is an absolute limit to the progress that can be achieved by perfecting scientific techniques detached from spiritual aims and moral values. This is similar to Einstein assessment of our era as one characterized by perfection of means and confusion of goals. But let us go back to The Making of Europe which remains Dawson’s best-known book. In it he demonstrates that Christianity has been the spiritual force that created the unity of Western culture, indeed the commonwealth of Europe itself, from the chaotic world of myriad warring tribes. He shows in that book how the Dark Ages, the period between 400 and 1000 A.D., became a dawn witnessing to the conversion of the West, the foundation of Western civilization and the creation of Christian art and liturgy.

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the world religions have been the keystones of the world cultures, so that when they are removed the arch falls and the building is destroyed

And he then asked a crucial question: If such a transformation could happen in the age of the barbarians could it not be repeated now? Like the founding fathers of the EU, Dawson, after the Second World War, was already envisioning a new united Europe. But he soon realized that there was a problem which faced not only Europe but America too and all societies that consider themselves Western. The problem was this: the disastrous separation of culture from its religious base brought about by the modern “barbarians of the intellect” and assorted nihilists had not been stemmed by the modern educational system which considered the study of religion superfluous and in fact aimed at its liquidation. The unity of thought, which had prevailed in European civilization over a thousand years, was shattered by excessive specialization which allowed the educated elites to see the tree and miss the forest; moreover science, philosophy and theology had long since split apart. Education, rather than being a preparation for life, had become purely utilitarian and vocational. Humanistic studies needed to be resurrected in all schools and not preserved, almost as a relic of the past, in places

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like Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities as a sort of frosting on the cake of education. This was urgent since the Trojan horse of the neo-barbarians had already entered the citadel of learning and was hard at work to destroy it from the inside.Humanism as integrated with Catholicism was at the forefront of Dawson’s speculation. It was that humanism which produced the medieval unity of the 13th century exemplifying Christian culture par excellence. For the flowering of art in every form reached its zenith in Europe between the 13the and 15th centuries with the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, the fresco painters of the Florentine school Giotto and Fra Angelico, and the sculptures of Michelangelo. It was also the age of saints and mystics, both men and women: St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominick, St. Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, just to name a few.

It must be mentioned that Dawson was not advocating a nostalgic return to the Middle Ages; neither was he commending the external apparatus of medievalism, nor Charlemagne’s so called Holy Roman Empire, but rather “a return to the forgotten world of spiritual reality” to which these centuries bear witness. He was not recommending an evasion of the present day cultural dilemmas. He was indeed an intellectual for whom ideas were important but many of his colleagues noticed a paradox in him: together with the remote facts of history, he knew of the latest current events in remote corners of the world, and understood and spoke several European languages. Indeed, he had the gift of seeing deeper and further than many of his contemporaries because he had the capacity to interpret the present in the light of the events of the past. As he put it: “The more we know of the past, the freer we are to choose the way we will go.”

To conclude, it is a mistake to think of Dawson as an anti-modern. Both he and Vico have been so branded. Rather, what he was advocating was a retrieval of spiritual values in a godless and nihilistic world. The reason he was assigned the first Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University was that he had the well earned reputation of being a very broad-minded scholar, able to contemplate opposite ideas and integrate them. He was, in short, a consummate humanist who understood the universal character of the Church; she belongs neither to East nor to West but stands as a mediator between the two. It was in fact his humanism which led him to conversion to Catholicism as it also happened for G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene and David Jones. I hope that this brief sketch of a great and beautiful mind will motivate some readers to a deeper exploration of its ideas.

Europa, Quo Vadis? Mere praxis is not lightâ&#x20AC;? Pope Benedict XVI

A book written by Pope Benedict XVI, before he became Pope, whose title translates from the Italian as Europe: Its Spiritual Foundation of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, ought to be read by every European of whatever faith or no faith to better understand the roots of a crisis that lies in the very soul and cultural identity of Modern European Man. This book explores the issue of secular salvation within modern European society. It was published shortly before Cardinal Ratzingerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s elevation to the Papacy. It is basically the expansion of a lecture he gave on May 13, 2004, in the library of the Italian Senate, i.e., the Sala Capitolare del Chiostro della Minerva. He was invited there by Marcello Pera, who besides being the president of the Italian Senate at the time, is also a professional philosopher. The general theme of the book is this: modern Western Civilization finds

itself in a crisis which many political and cultural pundits see as the crisis of the EU Constitution, or perhaps as the demise of the NATO alliance, or the war in Iraq, or global terrorism, or the entrance of Turkey in the EU. In reality the roots of the crisis lie much deeper, in the very soul and cultural identity of Europe, a continent that besides being a geographical place is also an idea which has developed over many centuries. The very title of the book alerts the attentive reader that we are dealing here not only with geography, history and spirituality but with cultural anthropology and philosophy of history. Those roots lie in the spiritual emptiness in the heart of Europe, in its low birth rates (there are now more old than young people in Europe), in its failure to understand its own origins and uniqueness and to forge new paradigms for its future.

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Europe, in this very hour of its maximum success, seems to have become empty from within, paralyzed in a certain sense by a crisis of its circular system, a crisis that puts at risk its very life… It is as if this new polity called the European Union were being asked “Quo vadis, Europa?” This European Pope has chosen the name of Saint Benedict who is none other than the founder of Western monasticism and the patron saint of Europe. Few have commented on the historical significance of such a choice, and yet it seems to me crucial for understanding the mind-set of a Pope who, contrary to the conventional wisdom, will not be a mere clone of John-Paul II. Were I to choose an appropriate metaphor to describe this spiritual emptiness of modern European man to which the Pope refers, I would have recourse to a horrific scene in a dark cave in the deepest part of Dante’s hell where Dante and Virgil encounter a man, the so called lantern man, holding his own head in his right hand and “doing light unto himself.” (Inferno XXVIII). Historically the man is the French poet Bertrand del Born, a man for whom action is everything; the kind of activism which does not need truth as its underpinning and that assumes that somehow one can act first and ask questions later; that one needs not ask first what is a just action, and what is justice, not in a relativistic mode but in an absolute way.

Appropriately Dante places him in the circle of the disseminators of discord. He epitomizes quite well, seven hundred years ahead of its time, modern man running full speed ahead in the grip of political ideologies of inevitable deterministic progress that promise to change the world without ever asking what is good and what is not good for the world or what is indeed the ultimate Good. The result is not light but more dissensions and wars. By showing us a man who holds his own head to make light unto himself, Dante shows us the man who enlightened himself by a reason devoid of any sense of transcendence, thus turning upside down the biblical statement that “the truth shall make you free.” On the contrary, this man believes that it is frenetic action and praxis (one thinks of the futurism of a Marinetti) that yields truth, or better, partial, relativistic, particular truths. The sorry fruits of this positivistic-rationalistic mind-set which within modernity begins with Descartes and continues with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, all the way to modern times, are the lagers and the gulags of the 20th century underpinned by ideologies galore that promise a secular salvation of sort and paradise on earth. The Pope points out that one such modern ideology is liberation theology which in Latin America ended up substituting the Christian idea of redemption. The relation of personal responsibility to sin and redemption was shifted to the relation between social structures and redemption. The approach is now not that of conversion of the heart but that of social engineering: the redesigning of the social order in order to eliminate evil from the world.

The Redeemer himself is looked upon as a sort of Superman fighting for justice democracy and the Western way of life. Redemption becomes a secular political process. This is the myth of secular redemption, of politics that misguidedly promises what it cannot deliver: spiritual renewal and redemption and elimination of evil and injustice from the world. Dostoyevsky gave voice to that myth with his novel The Devils. After tracing the history of the very idea of Europe and its relation to Islam beginning with St. Benedict and Charlemagne, the Pope’s book then deals with the traditional Christian basis that made Europe and which seems now to be fleeing, thus condemning Europe to an inevitable decline. It is paradoxical that while its economic successes have spread world-wide via modern science and economics, they seem to have left the European mind with little sense of its own meaning.

Traditional Christianity is now opposed by older Asian and African religious traditions which are becoming increasingly attractive to a spiritless people who have forgotten their own religious tradition grounding the dignity of each individual in divine creation. What seems to have replaced this tradition is Machiavelli’s “ragion di Stato,” or a real politik based on rational cold reason and on purely economic, political and military considerations. This reason considers the religious view a purely mythological view of the world. God becomes a private aﬀair to be taken care on Sunday and not to be dragged in public life or in the formation of values. Often those who do worship on Sunday are branded as bigots. A soccer game on Sunday is seen as of more value. Some have gone as far as considering soccer games the cement that is needed to unify disparate European cultures and races.

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It is no wonder that to Africa and Asia, Europe appears empty of worthy values. To quote the Pope: “Europe, in this very hour of its maximum success, seems to have become empty from within, paralyzed in a certain sense by a crisis of its circular system, a crisis that puts at risk its very life…There is a certain strange lack of will for the future of Europe. Its children, which are the future, come to be seen as a threat to the present…They do not come to be felt as a hope, but rather as a limit of the present.”

Another insight of these reflections is that of the West’s excessive criticism and hatred of itself (examined in this page in the article on Bin Laden). This is found paradoxical in a multicultural Europe that is open to all traditional cultures. The Pope identifies this lack of appreciation for one’s own culture in the loss of the sense of the sacred and the transcendent which is integral part of the JudeoChristian ethos. Thus Europe has become a total stranger to itself, to what made it what it was and what is. So, while rejecting what is worst (things such as imperialisms of all kinds, and colonialism and nationalism), Europe needs to recuperate what is best in its heritage: service to the whole of humanity. For Europe to be Europe, it must recover the “what” which is at its origins and which founded it. It must re-examine with a critical eye its multi-cultural alternatives. Returning to revitalized preChristian pagan cults and life-styles will hardly provide the cure for modern nihilism. That would mean seeing Christianity as an external imposition and pave the way for a return of the European gods; or the rejection of political absolutism such Communism in the name of a Nietzschean transcendence of rationality; another pseudo-solution.

The Pope speculates that in order not to disappear, Europe must rediscover its religious roots and with them the “unconditional status of human dignity and human rights” independent of any civil jurisdiction. But the words “value” and “rights” ought not be conceived in the voluntarist mode given them by modern philosophy. Those values and rights are inalienable, not created by any legislature, not even democratically conferred by the citizens to themselves. They are part In the future we may well expect Benedict of a natural law that even non Christians like XVI to continue asking “Quo vadis. Europa,” Cicero and Marcus Aurelius well understood. and to urge it to “nosce te ipsum,” i.e., know thyself. For the moment, as we search for selfThey are part of a superior order, rooted in knowledge and a proper answer to those exGod and not to be manipulated by anyone. istential questions, it may prove beneficial for Abuses such as genetic manipulation, all Europeans, with or without faith, to poncloning, commercialization of human order those reflections on the plight of Western gans, the recycling of corpses are mentioned. civilization and on the spirit of the times by These actions “justify what is not able to be a European Pope who knows both phenomena quite well. justified.”