To recapture Europe means re-creating the faith. It is hard to imagine that the Roman Catholic Church might re-emerge as Europe's defining institution. The European Church is enervated. But I do not think that is the end of the matter. As I argued last month, Russia has become the frontier between Europe and the Islamic world and, unlike Europe, is not prepared to dissolve quietly into the ummah. Pope Benedict's recent pilgrimage to Turkey, it must be remembered, only incidentally dealt with Catholic relations with Islam; first of all it was a gesture to Orthodoxy in the form of a visit to the former Byzantium, its spiritual home.
Franz Rosenzweig, that most Jewish connoisseur of Christianity, believed that the Church of Peter (Rome) and the Church of Paul (Protestantism) would yield place to the Church of John (Orthodoxy) - that the churches of works and faith would be transcended by the church of love. If Europe has a future, it lies in an ecumenical alliance of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and at least some elements of Anglicanism.
For the time being, Europe's constitution will be stillborn. But Europe is not yet dead. Russia is the place to watch, and the quiet conversation of Catholicism is the still, small voice to listen for.
That's how the column ends. I know Spengler checks in on this blog from time to time. I'd love to read him expand on this point. What did Rosenzweig mean by RCism and Protestantism yielding to Orthodoxy? That Orthodoxy would displace both in the West (because it's certainly not happening in the Global South, where Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism are going great guns)? If that's what he meant, then by what means did he foresee such a radical event taking place? In a reunified Christian church that has healed the Great Schism? From a sociological point of view, why would a population that had grown indifferent to Catholicism and Protestantism embrace Orthodoxy?
I'd like to go back to a couple of others statements Spengler made in the column:
Without the faith, Europe's civil society could not exist, and a challenger to the authority of faith, no matter how powerful, ultimately must fail. ...But the unifying concept of Christendom is what made it possible to create nations out of the detritus of Rome and the rabble of invading barbarians.
It sounds like Spengler here makes similar points to Alasdair MacIntyre's in "After Virtue": that Europe's (and MacIntyre would say our own) emotivist secular ethic, devoid of the absolute telos provided by shared belief in transcendent morality, has no power to bind or create social cohesion, and that a people alienated from the narrative that formed the precepts of their culture will necessarily dissolve as a people.
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An old article about Saint John's christianity by Natalia Narochnitskaya, Russian historian and PhD: http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/relphilculture.htm Here is one more article by the same author, might be interesting to those who are interested in Russia: http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/spiritgeopolrivalry.htm Masha
The irony of Russia problem is this: Christianity triumphed over paganism precisely because the pagans knew (in the early middle ages) that the life of all the nations was, as Isaiah said, a drop of the bucket. Eternal life in Christ replaced the false immortality of the blood of the pagan tribe; rebirth into Israel, the eternal people, gave the Gentiles eternity. Russian Orthodoxy was as guilty as other Christian strains in Europe of identifying Christianity with what Dostoyevsky called "the only God-bearing people." It is a contradiction in terms to make Christianity a mere instrument to preserve a people; from the Christian standpoint, the life of a particular people is contingent and temporary. As the Elf Lindor tells Frodo at the outset of Tolkien's trilogy, other peoples lived here before you came, and others will live here after you are no more. That is the normative medieval outlook which is antithetic to nationalism; the cultivation of the vulgar languages is simply an instrument of Christian education in the medieval world.
Amen.
Here is the Hallo (P.284-285) "For a thousand thousand years, faith now hopes to have proved itself in love, and love to have brought true faith into the one-and-universal light of the world. Man speaks: I hope to believe. "Hope is given to man only if he has it While love is presented precisely to the hard heart, and faith to the heretic, God presents hope only to him who hopes. Consequently hope does not found a new church. For here it is not a question of a new pagan but only of the living one who unites for himself the little paganisms of body and soul into the great paganism of life. And this union, the mere fact of the pagan's appearance, already implies his conversion. The Johannine completion has no form of its own; it is, in short, not a bit more but simply the completion of what was hitherto bits and pieces. Thus it will have to live within the old structures. For in this period, a third Christian church with its people entered the orbit of Christendom, the Easter church. It is as age-old as the other two; they are only seemingly successive, in fact all are equally old. But it did not come to life for Christianity as a new church. Rather a renewal of the forces of faith and love accrued to the old churches from the Russia of Alyosha Karamozov. And the Russian Church proved to be the soil which nourished a limitless force of hope only for its own people, and even for that only after emerging out of its dusky interior. The integration of the Russians into the Christian orbit was one of the great events of ecclesiastical history...The Johannine Church itself does not assume a visible form of its own. It is not built: it can only grow."
The formulation of "three ages of Christianity" stems originally from the theologian Joachim di Fiore c. 1135 - 1202). To quote Rosenzweig's cousin and collaborator, the Christian writer Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: "Joachim calls the future 'Johannine': Paul being tied up with Peter in the visible church of Rome, John, the Apostle of charity, is made the patron of the new age of pure spirit." Schelling (from whom Rosenzweig no doubt first encountered the discussion) saw the new 'Johannine' age as one of what he called "philosophical Christianity," certainly quite different from what Joachim had intended. Rosenzweig's own formulation of the "three ages" as those of "love (RCC), faith (Protestantism) and hope (Johannine)" is original. He associates the coming of the Russian Orthodox Church to the world scene with the latter but does not see a specific institution embodying the Johannine spirit as such; hope does not need a new church, he adds, but inspires all the existing ones. There is extensive scholarship identifying Eastern Orthodoxy as a third or "Johannine" stream of Christianity. See for example http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-6779(196606)25%3A2%3C363%3AEIDKDO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O.
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