TimCallahan
Philosopher
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2009
- Messages
- 6,293
Tim, you are picking and choosing a bit here, and I think that's a mistake. Christian influence on Western Civilization isn't debatable: it is imbedded in the cultural heritage. The key word is "Western" and therein lies the once again obvious point that Christianity varies in practice.
The profound split (and IMO the great tragedy of Christendom) between the Latin and Greek churches in 1054 (which of course had been percolating for some time) informs how people categorize East and West, even into the Cold War. (Plenty of the old "you aren't the right kind of Christian" bun fights there, for centuries. See also the fun Croat/Catholics had at the expense of Orthodox/Serbs during WW II, Ustazi, etcetera.)
When you say "ours" who exactly are you talking about?
By whom?
What do you think will or can replace it?
Other than providing a set of common cultural assumptions (about which people of course quarreled) no, no influence at all.
Your assessment does not seem very accurate. Based on some recent reading I did on the relationships between Carolingian, and later HRE, imperial courts. The Defenestration of Prague, for example, sixteen hundreds ish, was in a large part informed by the clash between where and when Church and State authority was valid. (See also the Guelphs and Ghibellenes as pivotal disputes between Church and State well before the Enlightenment.) I can offer you "render unto Caesar" as a root philosophical underpinning of the separation between Church and State, but quite frankly, I don't think that stands up too well, nor do I think it was the critical meme behind it.
The other point about Western Civilization that your OP didn't address is the Reformation, a profound influence on Western thought, and for my money a necessary precursor to the Enlightenment, and from that the eventual attempt to empower the citizen. Without that necessary cultural step, no Protestantism, and thus no cultural philosophical basis for the American Experiment, part and parcel of which are freedom to worship as one pleases, or not at all, and the explicitly anti-Papist (and at the same time Anti-Anglican) doctrine forbidding an official state religion. (Memory foggy, but "How the Scots Invented Western Civilization" is a fun little romp through how patterns of philosophy and thought emerged from the Kilted ones).
Tidbit: some European countries still apply tax revenue to churches/cathedrals (Italy, France, Germany I think, I'd have to check). This is IIRC done as cultural/heritage maintenance, or perhaps, more cynically, as a way to keep attracting tourist revenue. Is that separation of church and state? Is that doctrine universally European?
Second Tidbit: IIRC, Napoleon III was the last Emperor in Europe who one could call "defender of the faith" from the Pope's point of view.
Last bit: without the American petri dish in which the European ideas were played and experimented with, I am not convinced that European Deomcracy would have arisen, although the English Parliamentary example might eventually have spread anyway, due to proximity.
DR
Well, I don't think I'm picking and choosing. My point is that if all the qualities in Western Civilization that D'Souza and Stark assert are Christian in origin are implicit in Christianity, we should see them in other places where Christianity is dominant over a long period of time. And we don't. Therefore, if the influence is only from Western Christianity, I would say it is more western than Christian, and that any Christian influence was itself the product of mixing barbarian freedom-loving cultures, Greek philosophy and Christianity. This mix was eclectic and largely the product of contingency.
Contingency and happenstance have a greater impact on history than we would like to think. For example, the untimely death of the chief khan, Ogodai, derailed the invasion of Europe by the Golden Horde under Batu Khan. Had Ogodai lived a bit longer, it's quite possible all of Europe would have been part of a Mongol khanate.
It was also simple chance that the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanid Persian Empire had been engaged in an exhaustive 20 year war, leaving both empires militarily weak, just at the time that Islam erupted out of the Arabian peninsula.
I really do see contingency and the chaotic state in what had formerly been the Western Roman Empire as the source of the separation of ecclesiastical and temporal power. This doesn't mean that each side didn't continue to try to become dominant. Certainly, the desire of temporal rulers to dispense with ecclesiastical authority was a major reason for the success of the Protestant revolt.
As to the American influence on the sread of democracy in Western Civilization, I agree with you. However, remember that what the colonists were originally demanding were "rights as Englishmen." In other words, English parliamentary rule was the crucible in which the American Revolution was formed.
