Eurocentrism

IN 1992, as Europeans voted on the Maastricht treaty to formalize the European Union, intellectuals produced a spate of books on the “Meaning of Europe.” Almost lost in the pile was an essay by Rémi Brague–a professor of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy at the Sorbonne who has written on Maimonides, St. Bernard, and Leo Strauss–called “Europe, la voie romaine” (Europe: The Roman Way). While the other books from the Maastricht year were forgotten long ago, Brague’s has won increasing respect from historians and philosophers for its extraordinary density of erudition and insight, and from lay readers for its transparent and unpretentious prose. It has been even more talked-about in recent months since, along the way, it judges the culture of Christendom against the culture of Islam, and vice versa. Its appearance in English as “Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization,” albeit in a somewhat clunky translation, is a cultural event of the first importance.

For Brague, “Europe” is a synonym for “Western civilization.” Those who would sum up this civilization with a few bywords–the free market, democracy, technology, imperialism–are misguided, Brague thinks, since other civilizations had those things first. Geographical descriptions are unsatisfactory, too. Not only are the borders of Europe disputable, the civilization’s center of gravity has been constantly on the move: from the Mediterranean to the Rhine and Seine to the British Isles, and now, perhaps, to the East Coast of the United States. “The frontiers of Europe,” says Brague, “are solely cultural.” And his radical thesis is that those cultural frontiers remain Roman.

The Roman Empire’s mark is highly visible in Europe even today. Brague notes that in Germany, the Reformation resonated especially in areas beyond the limes, or Roman frontier. (You could determine the location of the limes from a map of the 2002 German federal elections, too, with Socialist victories above it and Union victories below.) But to call Europe “Roman” is not just to go hunting for place names and rituals that have survived. Nor is it a matter of establishing the cultural clout of the Roman Catholic church, although Brague, a Catholic himself, has a sharp eye for its ongoing influence.

But that is not the core of what Brague means by the Romanness of European culture. Looking back on our cultural forefathers, the most important thing to remember about them is the humbling fact that, aside from some dabbling in the law, “the Romans invented nothing”–either in culture or religion. This weakness is, for Brague, Europe’s enduring strength. Europe is a civilization that, by definition, has had to look outside of itself to define itself.

Europe’s situation, that is, is one of “secondarity” in two realms–culturally, in the debt Latin pays to Greek; and religiously, in the debt Christianity pays to Judaism. Latin letters don’t “follow” Greek literature–they pay obvious homage to it, and we turn to the unbowdlerized worldview of the Greeks themselves even today. Nor does Christianity “supplant” Judaism: It relies on the Old Testament’s account of God, and in so doing preserves it. This course of events was not inevitable. “It would be much easier,” writes Brague, “to pretend that the Old Covenant has purely and simply lapsed and has now been replaced by the new.”

This, in fact, was the solution suggested by the second-century heretic Marcion, who proposed repudiating the Old Testament and expurgating the New in order to distill out of Christianity a new religion of “love.” For having waged a polemic against Marcionism that preserved the “Jewish” element in Christianity, St. Irenaeus has been recognized as a father of the Catholic church. It is time, Brague writes, that we recognize him as a father of Europe as well. “It was religious secondarity,” he writes, “that prevented all culture inherited from Christianity, as is the case with Europe, from considering itself as its own source. The refusal of Marcionism is thus, perhaps, the founding event of the history of Europe as a civilization, in that it furnished the matrix of the European relationship to the past and anchored it at the highest possible level.” Brague is not the first to speak of the West’s twin inheritance from Athens and Jerusalem. But the concept of secondarity is new.

ONE IS TEMPTED to ask whether this isn’t mere neologistic nonsense. After all, isn’t every culture “secondary” to the culture it follows?

The answer is no. Ideally, to illustrate what is special about Europe, one would need to have, for comparison, another culture that received both Greek and Jewish inheritances and dealt with them in a radically different manner. As it happens, there is such a culture: Islam.

In dealing with Islam, which is after all his field of study, Brague is unstintingly respectful. “I do not at all identify Europe with the civilized world,” he writes. “To be outside of it is not to be inferior to it.” He insists on the West’s enormous debt to Islam, not just for Islam’s custodianship of Greek philosophy through the Dark Ages, but also for its influence on a variety of lesser phenomena we think of as European, from courtly love to scholasticism. Brague even echoes the complaint of many Muslim scholars that European scholars have willed themselves into amnesia about this debt.

Nonetheless, Brague levels at Islam, from a philosophical rather than a historical perspective, many of the criticisms Bernard Lewis did in “What Went Wrong?”, his 2002 volume on Islam’s humiliating encounter with the modern West. Brague makes plain that Islam’s means of assimilating other cultures has harmed it relative to Europe. A long tradition accuses Christianity and Judaism of having falsified the texts entrusted to them, so certain Islamic authorities ban the study of any holy text except the Koran–even for the purposes of understanding what Christianity and Judaism are. Such practices have consequences in “non-religious” walks of life. Islam has studied foreign cultures, of course, but for almost purely practical reasons. After ransacking foreign libraries for useful material, Islamic scholars have tended to “throw away the shell,” as Brague puts it, and lose all contact with the civilizations from which the texts came. While granting exceptions (like the scholar al-Biruni, who studied India and Hinduism around A.D. 1000), Brague does not believe that Islam has ever consistently used its knowledge of other cultures to reexamine itself.

Europe, by contrast, has gone in for such self-correction with a vengeance. Brague takes note of the “massive social fact” that, for century after century until quite recently, European elites were chosen (through the university system) on the basis of their capacity to master foreign languages. Specifically, ancient languages, to the end that Europe might constantly revivify itself with reference to Greco-Roman antiquity. And this has created the basis for the characteristic European form of progress, which other civilizations might regard as evidence of weakness: the “renaissance,” which Brague defines as “a return to the original texts against the traditions that claimed to follow them.”

It is hard to do justice to the richness of “Eccentric Culture,” to the sparks of observation and opinion that Brague throws off as he forges his new reading of the Western past. He shows how scarcity of papyri and other writing materials resulted in the wholesale destruction of literary works. (Imagine how the preoccupations of the twentieth century would look to posterity if every single copy of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” were cannibalized to provide paper for “Who Moved My Cheese?”) He describes the Neo-Platonism that swept the Greco-Roman world in the third century as a “Noah’s Ark” of doctrines; those worldviews that couldn’t be assimilated into Neo-Platonism, like Epicureanism and Stoicism, were submerged in a flood of recopying, and have left only the faintest traces in our day.

Similarly, he wonders why the leading translators in the Arab world were often Christians. He finds it telling that European civilization is among the only ones in the world to consistently give children nondescriptive names.

He scoffs at those who think religious revivals can be engineered for public-policy ends. (“Faith does not produce its effects except where it remains faith, and not calculus. . . . We owe [the civilization of Christian Europe] to people who believe in Christ, not to people who believe in Christianity.”) He speculates that, since many Westerners have used a study of Greek and Latin as an antidote to “barbarism,” the simultaneity of decolonization and the decline in classical studies may not be accidental.

THIS IS A BOOK about antiquity with a surprising relevance to our contemporary predicament. Brague is particularly worried by identity politics, even though he describes it in different terms than one usually encounters. He thinks it may be positively “unhealthy” to have a culture of one’s own–a worldview that one considers one’s ethnic property, rather than an achievement. Two dangers of identity politics are present for contemporary Europeans. The first is the resurgence, under modern conditions, of Marcionism–or at least of its belief that the present generation is the repository of all wisdom, and that religious and secular traditions can be discarded with impunity. The second is the increasing belief among Europeans that Europeanness is “a guaranteed income and not an adventure,” which is causing them to lose sight of how hard-won their civilization in fact is.

Brague appears to find this second prospect especially worrisome. “It could be that Rome is no longer in Rome,” he writes, “and that the ‘non-Europeans’ are [now] fundamentally better able to take on the Roman attitude that has been Europe’s good fortune.”

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

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Click here to order Rémi Brague’s “Eccentric Culture.”