Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914 – 2003)
Today, I walked through my library and I picked out Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The rise of Christian Europe (Published in1965). His introduction to the subject reads like watching the best movie of history ever made. Or rather: like a history movie that has not yet been made.
Through his tale we can sense the physiology of our civilization, its breath and life’s rhythms, as they developed in their earliest ages, some time after the decline and fall of Rome.
But our history also arose out if it, out of Rome and out of all the forces that threatened it, Barbarians, Germanics, Gauls, Visigoths, Arabs, Huns, and so on. The Mongols! Whatever constitutes ‘Europe’ – it has emerged out of all that seemingly chaotic rubble of the Dark Ages.
"The end of Antiquity, that is one great problem which I shall have to consider in these pages. Its effect was enormous: it is one of the great discontinuities of history. It was the end of a whole world, a world which till then had been continuous for over a thousand years."
In great clarity and depth Trevor-Roper depicts the ascent of Europe out of the succession of kings and queens in many places, and the necessary historic process flowing out of them - and out to them. It is out of this that our sense of time and our sense of civilization have emerged.
The book carries on to “…speak of certain episodes periods of history which, in my opinion, represent or illustrate the great turning-points in that remarkable process: the rise of Europe from its eclipse, from the total abasement which followed the fall of the Western Empire of Rome, to the position of strength from which, in the twentieth century, it set forward to dominate the world.”
Europe is our history
Our history is Europe
When Europe fails, our history ends. Even the United States will have a different history only because of Europe (*).
We could ask – in the mean time – whether we are still a Christian Europe. From a purely historic perspective this seems almost undeniable. A Europe that is not essentially Christian will be a new and different Europe in the eyes of history. Different from the one we have known over the past fifteen hundred years.
So we have to be aware that in shedding the primacy of Christianity, as some propose in order to safeguard equality for all religions, and in making our culture essentially secular, we are creating a fundamental threshold in history. What Europe does that constitute? Is there a future Europe in which indeed all religions can live peacefully together?
Going back to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s masterpiece which breathes the origins of our civilization, our constant succession of rapid change and slow stagnation or decline. It is the breath of civilization on which we still live and will continue to live -from rapid change to slow stagnation or decline. And up again.
Where do we wish to be, and where do we think we are?
The essence of history is its unpredictability. The same applies to the future - by definition! -. We have no idea where we are. Only history will tell.
For Trevor-Roper, the major themes of early modern Europe were those of intellectual vitality, religious quarrels and of divergence between Protestant and Catholic states, the latter being outpaced by the former economically, politically and constitutionally. European expansion overseas was incidental to these processes. In Trevor-Roper's view, the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries were part of the reaction against growing doctrinal pluralism, and were ultimately traced back to the conflict between the rational worldview of Erasmus and other humanists, and the spiritual values of the Reformation. (**)
We are not void of spiritual aspirations. But we can not call ourselves outright intellectually vital these days. Ignorance is more abundant than – say – forty years ago, or so it seems. We live in a tremendously creative time of history, and I have no doubt we will at least be long remembered for our creative legacy, our movies and cartoons, our technology.
But this is not sufficient for a civilization to be on any way up. The beautiful toys we master conceal the human misery we fail to solve.
In this sense we should look at Europe as a potential failure as long as the misery of much of the other life on Earth is not resolved.. Africa, environment, climate, clean water supply, etcetera. Even the Romans understood that civilization requires the ongoing and unlimited flow of clean water.
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(*) One could argue that Washington is our true inheritor of the mantel of Rome, not Paris or Berlin, or London, or even Rome itself.
(**) Source: Wikipedia
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