Fjordman: Europe's Ability For Critical Analysis Is Born Of Its Cultural Eccentricity

There is an excellent post from Fjordman over at Gates of Vienna. He of the Fjords discusses how Europe's sense of itself as being a culture built on the history of other cultures (Greek/Roman) is what led to its system of self-criticism. This is not the way Fjordman phrases the argument, but it is the essence of the argument. Were Europe not looking simultaneously at itself and the other cultures to which it compares itself, Europe would not have become the ever-evolving, ever-progressing culture that it is.

Here is an excerpt:


Rémi Brague’s conclusion is that “when all is said and done, the cultural poverty of Europe has been her good fortune. It obliged it to work and to borrow. On the contrary, the richness of Byzantium paralyzed it, got in its way, because it had no need to look elsewhere. This has been noticed in regard to the history of art. One noticed it equally in regard to philosophy.”

”The consciousness that Europe had of having its sources outside of itself had the consequence of displacing its cultural identity, such that it has no other identity than an eccentric identity. It is now fashionable to hurl at European culture the adjective ‘eurocentric.’ To be sure, every culture, like every living being, can’t help looking at the other ones from its own vantage point, and Europe is no exception. Yet, no culture was ever so little centered on itself and so interested in the other ones as Europe.


America is an extension of that eccentric culture which Fjordman describes. As much as we all decry multiculturalism, it does arise out of this historic obssession which Europe and America has with learning and borrowing from the best of what other cultures have to offer.

The argument Fjordman makes comes down to this; cross-pollination is exactly what gave rise to our magnificence. We did not spring forth eternal from the egg of Greece. Instead, our culture evolved forward, over time, as a result the convergence of many different ideas, some of which we happened upon by accident.

For instance, Fjordman describes how the beginnings of what became the formal separation of Chruch and State was born of the simple fact that our culture was not the cradle of our religion:


Charlemagne, whom one nicknamed “the father of Europe” (Pater Europae), “dreamed of competing with Byzantium, in comparison with which, despite its then-weakened state, he could not help but feel inferior. Byzantium had all the signs of legitimacy: material riches (‘the gold of Byzantium’), a dynasty, the Roman name (the second Rome), manuscripts and scholars to read them, and numerous saints’ relics that were signs of the continuity of the Church from its apostolic foundation.

In his biography of Charlemagne, Einhard recounts that the emperor had bequeathed three tables of silver and one of gold in his will. On the first were represented, respectively, the maps of Constantinople and of Rome, and a map of the entire world. One will note that two maps are conspicuous by their absence: among maps of cities, that of Aachen, the capital of the Carolingian Empire. This city must at that time cut a poor figure alongside the two reference points which Europe never ceased ogling, the two Romes, the ancient and the contemporary. But also missing was a map of Europe, the newly founded empire of the Occident. Its founder could not gaze at himself complacently in the image of his creation.”

Brague states that “Charlemagne could thus see the place his own Occidental empire occupied, far from the centers, far from Jerusalem, far from everything — eccentric. He tried to be linked to Byzantium first by competing with it, and even in aping it — in architecture, for example: the basilica of Aachen imitates that of Ravenna, the single accessible example of Byzantine architecture.” He also dared to have himself crowned emperor of the Occident. All of this rested on an admission: “Legitimacy was elsewhere, it came from elsewhere.”


While in the Orient the Byzantine Emperor, who besides received liturgical prerogatives at his coronation, made and unmade the Patriarchs, the Occident followed another course. This may have been for reasons that one can consider as purely historical contingencies, and even as completely bad (the Pope was also a head of state, had privileges to defend etc.). The fact remains that, in the Latin Occident, a non-conflictual union of the temporal and the spiritual, which was not less dreamed of here than elsewhere (‘union of the throne and of the altar,’ or the theocratic dreams of certain Popes, etc.), has never been a historical reality. In Byzantium the situation was less clear.” There “the idea of a ‘symphony’ (a harmonious agreement) of the temporal power of the Emperor and of the spiritual power of the Patriarch tended to confound the two much more than in the Occidental theory of the ‘two swords.’

This had major long-term consequences for the growth of political liberty in the West: “In actuality, the Russian Orthodox clergy was brutally forced into submission to the Tsar starting with Peter the Great. In contrast, the Pope has always constituted, in the Occident, an obstacle to the ambitions of emperors and kings.

This conflict is perhaps what has allowed Europe to maintain that singularity which has made it a unique historical phenomenon. Its importance was clearly seen by Lord Acton, who wrote:

‘To that conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty. If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the king whom it anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism’ It was this conflict that prevented Europe from changing into one of those empires that reflected an ideology in their manner and their image — whether they produced it or pretended to incarnate it.”


Go read the whole thing.