“Mere praxis is not light” (Pope Benedict XVI) A book written by Pope Benedict XVI, before he became Pope, whose title translates from the Italian as Europe: Its Spiritual Foundation of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, ought to be read by every European of whatever faith or no faith to better understand the roots of a…
The next difficulty is the identification of those secular matters that already exist within religion as such. This is not an easy task, since the time of Marx’s stigmatization of religion as “the opium of the masses,” ushering in secular atheistic humanism. To be sure, an anti-religion stance was already in place within Western civilization…
I’d like to begin this column with a quote from the June 9, 2004 report in the European Policy Center in Brussels. In such a report Dr. Jocelyne Cesari, a senior research fellow at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in both Paris and Harvard University has this intriguing quote: “Europe is the only…
At first glance, Vichian paradoxical thinking (the both/and) seems to defy the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction (the either/or). The various rationalists and mysologists of our era often parade as classical thinkers above the fray of the existential vicissitudes of the “unwashed masses” with their common sense, beyond the clouds, on Olympus; they present us with…
What will future historians and cultural anthropologists have to say about Western Civilization at the turn of the new millennium? If history has already ended, as Fukuyama continues to assert, they will of course have precious little to say. However, given the fact that, for better or for worse, we are still living within time…
What is this European original foundational spiritual idea that precedes even Christianity? Simply this: a commitment to theoria, the theoretical life which in its Greek etymology means the contemplative or reflective life in all its various aspects: the philosophical, the scientific, the aesthetic; in short the primacy of a holistic life of contemplation. All this…
In his Philosophical Discourse on Modernity Jurgen Habermas attributes the failure of the Enlightenment to the intrusion of foreign elements which derailed its original program of full human emancipation. He finds nothing wrong with the project itself, aside from the fact that it was prematurely abandoned for a romantic return to some form of pseudo-religion,…
The renowned Church historian Ernst Troeltsch once boldly declared that Europe had ceased to be Christian in the 18th century. Of course such a statement referred not to individuals but to the cultural identity of Europe as a whole. Some post-modern thinkers not only would wholly agree with that statement but would also point out…
Carl G. Jung pointed out in his Modern Man in Search of a Soul that Man is naturally religious and when he throws religion out the window, it will promptly return via the back door in the form of a fanatical cult or a totalitarian ideology. Giambattista Vico, the 18th century philosopher of history and…
“I never feel so European as when I am in a cathedral” (Robert Shuman) While the signing of the EU Constitution in Rome in 2004 was hailed as a “new beginning” by the Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Galkenende, who at the time presided over the EU Council, there were, and there still are, ominous…