Western Culture Today and Tomorrow: Addressing the Fundamental Issues
Part One ('What is Europe?'), Chapter 1 ('Europe: Its Spiritual Foundations Today and Tomorrow'), Sections 1 ('The rise of Europe') and 2 ('At the turn of the modern era').
Europe as a geographical and cultural concept.
In those meetings it became perfectly clear that Europe is a geographical concept only in a way that is entirely secondary...it is a cultural and historical concept.
Europe and the Mediterranean--the 'mare nostrum'.
...the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, which by virtue of their cultural ties, by dint of trade and commerce, and by reason of their common political system formed all together a true and proper continent.
Christianisation of the Roman Empire.
Disintegration of 'Mediterranean Europe' with the advent of Islam and the rise of the Carolingian Empire.*
...at the beginning of the eighth century drew a boundary across the Mediterranean and, so to speak, cut it in half, so that all that had been one continent until then was thenceforward subdivided into three continents...
Split of the empire between Eastern (Byzantium) and Western parts.
...the Roman Empire with Constantinople as its center held out there—although under increasing pressure on its frontiers—until the fifteenth century.
This eastern Roman Empire...extended farther to the north, until it reached the Slavic world, and it created its own Greco-Roman world, which differs from the Latin Europe of the West in its liturgy, its ecclesiastical constitution, its alphabet, and by its renunciation of Latin as the language of the learned.
The limes, which until then had been a continental boundary line, disappears and opens up toward a new historical space that embraces Gaul, Germany, Britain as lands forming a true and proper nucleus...
Political and spritual power unified in the East, separated in the West (Pope Gelasius I).
As early as the beginning of the Constantinian era, a duality of powers was taught there: in fact, the emperor and the pope had separate powers; neither one had complete authority. Pope Gelasius I (492—496) formulated the Western view...
...a separation and distinction of powers was introduced, which became extremely important in the subsequent development of Europe and which laid the foundations, so to speak, for what is distinctively typical of the West.
The idea of empire re-taken in the West further north under Charlemagne--The 'Sacrum Imperium Romanum'. Sense of history and 'mission'.
In this process of displacing boundaries, the conceptual continuity with the preceding Mediterranean continent, although measured geographically in different terms, was assured by a theological interpretation of history...
...the Roman Empire—renewed and transformed by the Christian faith—was considered to be the final and permanent kingdom in the history of the world in general, and therefore the association of peoples and states that was taking shape was defined as the permanent Sacrum Imperium Romanum...
The roots of Europe, East and West.
...the rise of the Carolingian Empire, on the one hand, and the continuation of the Roman Empire in Byzantium and its mission to the Slavic people, on the other, as the true and proper birth of the continent of Europe...
Fall of Constantinople (XV century); 'translatio imperii' towards the North and East with Moscow as 'the third Rome'.*
...the Byzantine heritage was not dead. Moscow declared itself to be the Third Rome and now founded its own patriarchate based on the notion of a second translatio imperii [transfer of the seat of the empire] thus presenting itself as a new metamorphosis of the Sacrum Imperium [Holy Empire], as a distinct form of Europe, which nonetheless remained united with the West and was increasingly oriented to it, until Peter the Great attempted to turn it into a Western country.
Split of the West (XVI century) between Catholic and Protestant Christians.
A large part of the Germanic world separated itself from Rome; a new, enlightened form of Christianity arose, so that henceforth a line of demarcation ran through the West, which clearly formed another cultural limes, a boundary between two different ways of thinking and interrelating.
Translation of Western Europe and Christianity beyond the Atlantic, to America carrying its internal fractures.
To the expansion of Europe toward the east, thanks to the progressive extension of Russia toward Asia, corresponds the transplanting of Europe outside of its geographical boundaries in the world beyond the Atlantic Ocean, which is now called America.
French Revolution and 'Enlightenment': the rise of a secularist worldview. God and faith relegated to the realm of feeling and the private sphere.
...a third turning point, for which the French Revolution was the signal light seen around the world.
now [in the late eighteenth century] did this spiritual framework go to pieces formally as well—that spiritual framework without which Europe could not have been formed.
For the very first time in history, a purely secular State arose, which abandoned and set aside the divine guarantee and the divine ordering of the political sector, considering them a mythological world view, and it declared God himself to be a private affair, that did not play a role in public life or the formation of the popular will.
God did not appear to be clearly knowable; religion and faith in God belonged to the realm of feelings and not to that of reason. God and his will ceased to be relevant in public life.
Political realism with power based on linguistically uniform regions (nations, states) as new subjects of history and each with a 'universal mission'--potentially in conflict with those of others.
...nations and states had become identifiable as such through the formation of uniform linguistic regions and that these appeared as the unique and true subjects of history and therefore attained a status higher than they had had previously. The subject of history was now plural, and the explosive and dramatic consequences of this are evident in the fact that the great European nations considered themselves entrusted with a universal mission, which necessarily led to conflicts among them...