Let us begin by examining how Christianity formed a kind of foundation pillar of Western civilization. Actually, the West was built on two pillars: Athens and Jerusalem. By Athens I mean classical civilization, the civilization of Greece and pre-Christian Rome. By Jerusalem I mean Judaism and Christianity. Of these two, Jerusalem is more important. The Athens we know and love is not Athens as it really was, but rather Athens as seen through the eyes of Jerusalem.
“It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon accuses Christianity of replacing classical civilization with religious barbarism. But classical civilization was itself infused with barbarous practices like pederasty and slavery. Moreover, the Christians didn’t destroy Roman civilization. The Huns, Goths, Vandals, and Visigoths did. These barbarians, who came from the pagan regions of northern Europe, smashed a Rome that had long been weak and decadent. Fortunately, they eventually converted to Christianity. Over time it was Christianity that civilized these rude people. Christianity didn’t overrun and lay waste to a learned civilization. Christianity found a continent that had already been laid waste. The “Dark Ages” were the consequence of Roman decadence and barbarian pillage.
Slowly and surely, Christianity took this backward continent and gave it learning and order, stability and dignity. The monks copied and studied the manuscripts that preserved the learning of late antiquity. Christopher Dawson shows in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture how the monasteries became the locus of productivity and learning throughout Europe. Where there was once wasteland they produced hamlets, then towns, and eventually commonwealths and cities. Through the years the savage barbarian warrior became a chivalric Christian knight, and new ideals of civility and manners and romance were formed that shape our society to this day. If Christianity had not been born out of Judaism, Rodney Stark writes, we might still be living in the Dark Ages.
Christianity is responsible for the way our society is organized and for the way we currently live. So extensive is the Christian contribution to our laws, our economics, our politics, our arts, our calendar, our holidays, and our moral and cultural priorities that historian J. M. Roberts writes in The Triumph of the West, “We could none of us today bewhat we are if a handful of Jews nearly two thousand years ago had not believed that they had known a great teacher, seen him crucified, dead, and buried, and then rise again.”
Consider the case of Western art. Have you been to the Sistine Chapel? Seen Michelangelo’s Pieta? Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper? Perhaps you are familiar with Rembrandt’s Christ at Emmaus or his Simeon in the Temple. In Venice you can see the spectacular murals of Veronese, Titian, and Tintoretto. What would Western music be with- out Handel’s Messiah, Mozart’s Requiem, and the soaring compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach? If you haven’t, set foot in one of the great Gothic cathedrals and see what those anonymous builders did with stone and glass. Is Western literature even conceivable without Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare? My point is not only that all these great artists were Christian. Rather, it is that their great works would not have been produced without Christianity. Would they have produced other great works? We don’t know. What we do know is that their Christianity gives their genius its distinctive expression. Nowhere has human aspiration reached so high or more deeply touched the heart and spirit than in the works of Christian art, architecture, literature, and music.
Even artists who rejected Christianity produced work that was unmistakably shaped by Christian themes. Goethe was a kind of pantheist who viewed God as identical with nature, yet his Faust is a profound allegory derived from Christian themes of suffering, transformation, and redemption. Our greatest skeptics and atheists— such as Voltaire and Nietzsche—are inconceivable without Christianity (Voltaire was educated by Jesuits; Nietzsche’s father was a pastor and the title of his autobiography, Ecce Homo, is a reference to what Pilate said of Christ: “behold the man:’)
