Nietzsche and the Vitality of a Post-Secular Europe

The late Christopher Hitchens remarked that there was more morality in one novel by George Eliot than all of the books of scripture combined. That remark came to mind when I began rereading Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, in which the prophetic atheist discusses biblical morality and Eliot, the 19th-century British author. Eliot was evangelical in her youth. After leaving the faith, she continued to affirm Christian virtues such as duty and love by believing that we know these moral truths self-evidently rather than by anything revealed.

Nietzsche contends that Eliot is shortsighted to continue upholding the content of beliefs while rejecting what inspired them: One does not have a right to have Christian morality without Christianity. He argues that if, like Eliot, the “English really do believe they know by themselves, ‘intuitively’, what is good and evil,” without

Christianity as a guarantee of morality, then this is itself merely the consequence of the dominance of Christian value judgements and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominance: with the result that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, and the highly qualified nature of its right to exist is no longer felt.

I momentarily believed that I was reading some book in response to the late Hitchens, such as David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions. Rather, Nietzsche was diagnosing the cultural environment that made possible the self-satisfied moral proclamations of European and other modern skeptics.

If Nietzsche’s criticism still stands today, it has only extended as a criticism of the European community. The continent from which an orthodox Christianity emerged into this epoch has largely abandoned the faith. While Hilaire Belloc penned a century ago that “Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe,” the Church has increased almost everywhere else and decreased in Europe so much that as Tom Phillips of The Telegraph observes, “more Chinese are thought to attend Sunday services each week than do Christians across the whole of Europe.” The Catholic Church is more global in perspective and number, but that it is forsaken by the very descendants of its artists, saints, and philosophers shows a decadency in a continent shrinking culturally, economically, and politically.

Many Europeans may believe that they can preserve their cultural vitality while rejecting the source of their identity as a collective group. But as our most recent non-European pontiff, Pope Francis, said last November to the European Parliament, “I consider to be fundamental not only the legacy that Christianity has offered in the past to the social and cultural formation of the continent, but above all the contribution which it desires to offer today, and in the future, to Europe’s growth.” Saint John Paul II delivered a 1988 address to the European parliament, calling the continent “a bastion of civilization.” Now Pope Francis says 26 years later to that same political body that Europe is “old, weary, and infertile.”

The E.U. is a very telling example of the gutting of the vast domains of European culture while Europe’s outward mechanisms, uprooted and unruly, subsist. Founded in the 1950s by several earnest Christians, The E.U. has evolved to such a state that it does not even mention Christianity in its Lisbon Treaty. Likewise in the summer of 2010, three million calendars were distributed with all cultural festivities mentioned save any Christian ones. Even the European Commission of Justice decided that crucifixes should not be hung in schools. Commenting on these incidents at a recent Hudson Institute conference on Christianity and European Identity, the atheist philosopher and Italian Senator Marcello Pera remarked that this cultural amnesia is a historical repetition of when in “1793 the French revolutionaries acted the same way: they reformed the calendar and transformed the cathedral of Notre Dame into the Temple of Reason.”

Also, whether someone leans economically center-left or center-right, one can still observe that the mechanisms of the E.U. (such as the unelected European Commission and the ideologically extreme European Court of Human Rights) chronically perpetuate an institutional injustice upon the civil societies of its member nation-states. Consider for instance the use of the word “subsidiarity” by the E.U. Subsidiarity as developed by Pope Pius XI means that what decisions can be made at the lowest level should be made at the lowest level. But the European Union distorts this term for the political purposes of an “ever closer union.”

Consider how one document by the European Parliament defines the term: “the principle of subsidiarity … means that the [European] Community is justified in exercising its powers when Member States are unable to achieve the objectives of a proposed action satisfactorily.” Since the actions are proposed by the E.U. for the very purpose of a United States of Europe, these goals lend themselves to being usurped by a higher power (just not the Highest power). Rather than beginning from below and only then building upwards, the E.U. begins from above and imposes objectives below. The example of the E.U. and its “principle of subsidiarity” illustrates a European political elite using the very language of its Catholic Christian heritage while neutering its substance.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, if the Europeans really do believe that they can say that they are European without Christianity as a guarantee of identity, then this phenomenon only shows the last fumes of the dominance of the Christian heritage. Put simplistically, Nietzsche worried that with the retreat of Christianity and the oncoming nihilism, good Europeans would lose their cultural vitality. How prophetic he has become about a cultural sterility in Europe today.

Consider the story that the atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas recounts in his essay, “An Awareness of What is Missing.” At the 1991 memorial service for his agnostic Swiss friend and author Max Frisch, Habermas experienced a certain unease: The ceremony took place without priests and blessings, Frisch’s mourners were intellectuals “most of whom had little time for church and religion,” and a statement was even read that “We let our nearest speak, and without an ‘amen.’” Yet the service was held in St. Peter’s Church in Zurich. The ceremony did not strike Habermas as peculiar, but “its form, place, and progression were peculiar.” Indeed, Habermas continues that Frisch, “who rejected any profession of faith,” had nevertheless sensed an inherent awkwardness to “non-religious burial practices.” So by his decisions to hold his funeral rites in the church in Zurich, Frisch “publicly declared the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rite de passage which brings life to an end.” Habermas in his essay declares that Europe, as a “post-secular society,” has sensed that it is missing something. The outward vessel that contained religious faith is coveted without the substance that made the water from that vessel worth baptizing.

All is not lost—as there have been underground churches in China, there are politically open but culturally underground churches in many European countries of intense piety. The Oxford Oratory has increased its attendance so vastly in comparison to over 10 years ago that it must decline Catholic priests applying to it. Within the streets of a university that is the poster boy of secular academia, a resurgence of the faith is massing. Or take the case of Sweden—pockets of unprecedented Christian ecumenism have arisen to re-evangelize it. Bjärka-Säby Castle is a chateau run by Pentecostals, has Lutheran ministers, and features nuns dedicated to St. Bridget of Sweden. Matthew Milliner says upon his visit to it that “whereas American Christianity is a mile wide and an inch deep, Swedish Christianity is an inch wide and a mile deep. Never have I seen ecumenical cooperation as I have here.” If Europe is to be a post-secular society, communities like these show signs of transcendent hope for a cultural renewal to transform Europe’s decadent and sterile political and economic mechanisms.

Nietzsche was able to recognize that Christianity is central to culture while his contemporaries were not. Maybe if Europe desires to be culturally, politically, and morally revitalized, it will see that it needs to be re-evangelized. As Pope Francis says, “A two-thousand-year-old history links Europe and Christianity … This history, in large part, must still be written. It is our present and our future. It is our identity.” The history of a Christian Europe may have just begun.