The book, however, suffers from a weakness that becomes apparent when we consider European history in its entirety: it sees Christianity only in its Western form, in the form that it took in the former Latin Christendom, overlooking the different course that it took elsewhere–a course which may disprove certain of the author’s arguments–and thus conceptualizes Christianity’s strengths and weaknesses, and therfore Europe’s strengths and weaknesses, only within a purely Western shell. Royal cites the case of Pope Benedict XVI who once presented the following options:
When we consider the immensity of others’ needs, we can, on the one hand, be driven toward an ideology that would aim at doing what God’s governance of the world apparently cannot: fully resolving every problem. Or we can be tempted to give in to inertia, since it would seem that in any event nothing can be accomplished.
To this the pope replied that we had to keep hope within the framework of the ancient wisdom that we are limited beings, and therefore fail quickly if we only trust ourselves, thus reaffirming the Augustinian conception of the City of Men as separate from the City of God. In Augustine’s view, the City of God cannot be reproduced in human society, who are therefore forced to find devices to organize themselves into society. But it is precisely this very concept that is the basis for modern Western secularism, the separation of Church and State. Because the Heavenly City cannot possibly exist on earth, we are therefore ‘forced’ to organize ourselves in the best way possible, even if with the help of God, a path which may eventually end up in totalitarianism or all forms of compulsion. It is the Augustinian concept of the two cities that account for much of the exactions committed by the papcy and, later, the kings and states of Western Europe. The Augustinian concept of the two cities was absent in the other half of Christendom, the Byzantine Roman Empire, where the Platonic view that the earthly polis is the reflect of the divine pattern, and must be organized accordingly. from the start, there was no true separation of Church and State in the Byzantine Empire, as Justinian’s ‘symphony’ explicitely refers to.
Silentiarius
To put the question in different words, how successful can we be, if there is no society to enjoy this success? In the US they say, “we don’t have a society, but we have police!”
Can we say that someone who owns all the goods and wealth in the world, yet he is afraid to walk in the alien streets of ‘his’ alien town, lives a successful life in a successful country?
Sylvain
The answer to your question is obviously ‘no.’ This brings, however, another question: is ‘successful’ an appropriate word to describe the Western powers’ quasi-hypnotic rise to world dominion mainly through colonisliam and the market? In purely academic terms, it is an undeniable success, but I am not sure if this word is appropriate to describe the social and moral chaos that are now ours.