Even the names—”Middle Ages,” “Dark Ages”—guide such a person in his prejudices. Terms like “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment” are uncritically interpreted as literal descriptions of the spirit of the age. We should remember that the people who lived during the Renaissance did not consider themselves Renaissance figures. The term is anineteenth-century one that has been retroactively applied.
To the two groups I have mentioned—the ignorant and the half educated—we must add a third: those who know the West has Christian roots but want to leave them behind. When the drafters of the European Union’s constitution excluded any mention of Christianity from their account of Europe’s identity, they did so because they wanted to emphasize the degree to which Europe had broken with its Christian past. As George Weigel writes in The Cube and the Cathedral, secularism is now one of the banners behind which modern European man wishes to march.
In this and the next few chapters I intend to dispel some modern prejudices and show that Christianity is the very root and foundation of Western civilization. I will also argue that Christianity is responsible for many of the values and institutions secular people cherish most. Consequently, the desire to repudiate the Christian roots of Western culture is not only an act of historical denial, but it also imperils the secular person’s moral priorities.
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.
