Why we cannot understand the West without Christianity
A very old fragment of the Bible. Photo AFP, Menahem Kahana
Christian Life
Cédric’s daughter recently started high school. Browsing through her books, her father discovered that humanism is the dominant worldview. Cédric thinks that schools deserve better.
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Christian parents in Europe often find themselves confronted with ideas propagated in their children’s schools that run counter to their faith. The majority of European children spend most of their time in a school where their thinking is shaped by a non-Christian education system. That can sometimes give parents a sense of powerlessness.
After several years of homeschooling, our eldest daughter (soon to be 15) has just started an online high school. After just a few weeks, we are already seeing the extent of non-Christian thinking that governs education in Europe. It is undeniable that the world of modern education in Europe is based on humanistic presuppositions. It is a worldview that changes over time, but it only moves further away from the truths of Christianity.
To make it more concrete: One of the claims I have encountered in the material presented to my daughter is that the rise of Christianity in the Roman world is also seen as one of the reasons for Rome’s decline. The reasoning is then that Christianity alienated citizens from both the Roman gods and traditional Roman values.
The underlying idea, therefore, is that Christianity was a destructive force for Roman civilisation. But is this idea consistent with the facts?
In his book From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and its Opponents (1998), Danish-American historian David Gress devotes an entire chapter to the ideas put forward over the centuries to explain the fall of Rome. These ideas have undergone several changes.
Until the nineteenth century, the popular idea was that Rome fell because of the violence of the Germanic tribes (the Barbarians). In the twentieth century, the option of internal decline became the most popular. Decline was understood that the Romans had gradually abandoned the Stoic philosophy that could have created a free space for all peoples to live in safety. Then came the idea that a combination of Roman decline and Germanic strength was the cause of Rome’s fall.
However, since the nineteenth century, Christianity seemed to be the most plausible culprit. This was in the spirit of the time, as can be seen in Friedrich Nietzsche’s bitter statement:
“These holy anarchists [the Christians, ed.] claimed to be performing a work of “piety” in destroying the “world”, that is, the Roman Empire, until no stone was left standing, until even Germans and other thugs were able to take over” (quoted by Gress, page 150).
Therefore, it is not surprising that some European history courses today teach that Christianity was one of the main causes of the fall of Rome. This idea follows the religious narrative imposed by humanism. It runs more or less like this: European (Roman) civilisation was rich and powerful until the fall of Rome. Then came the Dark Ages, i.e., Christian Europe. But (and in this narrative, they are thankful for this), the Enlightenment brought Europe back to its true roots.
Making Christianity the number one cause of Rome’s fall helps to support the humanistic narrative. But is this idea valid?
This is the first article in a series about secular and Christian education
Misinterpretation
David Gress explains that the idea that Christianity was the main culprit behind the fall of Rome stems from a misinterpreted sentence by Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), the leading historian on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire over the last 300 years:
“His definition of the event [the fall of Rome, ed.] as “the triumph of barbarism and religion” puzzled and misled many over the next two centuries. Most read it to mean that Rome fell because a barbarous religion, Christianity, had degraded another ancient culture and undermined civic morality. But that was not what Gibbon had in mind. He meant that Roman culture had already become barbarous and demoralised, and that this decline both preceded and enabled Christianity. It also enabled the barbarian invasions, which Gibbon, in another, less-well-known sentence, called “the principal and immediate cause of the fall of the Western Empire of Rome” (Gress, 140).
In other words, Gibbon believed that Christianity had merely completed the decline that had already begun with the abandonment of Roman civic morality. But even Gibbon’s idea remains incomplete, to say the least.
If it were true that Christianity contributed to the fall of Rome, what can be said about the Eastern Roman Empire? When we talk about the fall of Rome, we only refer to the western part of the Roman Empire. The eastern part, with its capital in Constantinople (now Istanbul), remained untouched for another millennium. And yet, this part of the empire was Christianised more quickly than the western part. The idea of Christianity as a destructive force doesn’t seem to fit.
Furthermore, how is it that the Germanic invaders adopted the faith of the vanquished? If Christianity was a force of destruction, these Germanic tribes would have destroyed themselves very quickly. However, the opposite happened. Germanic Europe would develop into one of the most advanced civilisations in history. The idea of Christianity as a destructive force doesn’t seem to fit here.
David Gress explained that the Romans adopted Christianity because they primarily sought salvation for their souls. The Greek and Roman gods, as well as their justice, were cold, impersonal and abstract. Plato’s philosophy, or the goddess Chance, failed to offer a better option for the masses. Only Christianity could provide a satisfactory answer because this faith was rooted in a personal God who sent his only Son to live a human life and die on the cross for the sins of humanity. God’s love and goodness quickly replaced the false gods and the abstract philosophies in the hearts of many Romans.
Christianity may have contributed to the destruction of an oppressive pagan political system such as the Western Roman Empire, but this remains an incomplete picture. It was especially Christianity that built the foundation of the European civilisation that would develop over the centuries and whose fruits our societies continue to enjoy today.
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