Today we often speak of Christian memory and its values: a memory that some of our contemporaries would readily, and even gladly, do without; values invoked out of a respect that is more superficial than rooted in the experience of living them out in daily life. We also observe that speaking of tradition and even of values is an endeavour that generally entails a sense of museum-like detachment and distance. Yet, from this historical and axiological perspective, Christianity seems to be reduced to a cultural phenomenon. We must acknowledge that, on many occasions, the appeal to its cultural expressions, to the works it has produced, and to the symbols it has proposed as symbols of humanity itself, has constituted a strategy of contemporary Christianity, to reclaim the dignity challenged by modern culture, to the birth of which it contributed, even though it has always rejected its orientation. Of course, the phenomenon described and the type of discourse to which I refer are specific to Western Europe and its forms of Christianity, but they are no less significant for the Eastern part of Europe, which later experienced, in successive waves and through ‘transfer’1, the problems of Western Christianity as problems of modernity.
In ‘The History of Christianity as a History of Culture’2, a text published by Professor Teodor M. Popescu in 1927, when he became holder of the Chair of Universal Church History at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology in Bucharest, many of the questions, attitudes and hypotheses that we still encounter today regarding the relationship between Christianity and culture, or between Christianity and modernity, are present. If we were to engage in an exercise of the imagination and set aside the ‘background’ to Professor Teodor M. Popescu’s argument—that is, his academic and cultural references which, with few exceptions, are no longer evident even to a well-read reader of our time— we would easily grasp the broad outlines of a theme that has remained the same and which seeks to answer the following questions: how do we understand the relationship between religion and culture?; how does this model of understanding apply to Christianity, or what are the distinctive features of Christianity in this regard?; and, finally, what is the relationship between Christianity and modernity?
The first observation I would like to make regarding the framework developed in the late 1920s by Professor Teodor M. Popescu in The History of Christianity as a History of Culture, is of a methodological nature and concerns his intellectual style and the perspective he adopted. Re-read 90 years after its publication, the work impresses with its academic rigour, its systematic structure and its complete alignment with the intellectual debate in the Western world. Teodor M. Popescu wrote these pages as if he were writing them from Berlin or Paris. His entire final plea for the role of Christianity in modern culture—which he would later, in 1936, in his lecture at the first Congress of Orthodox Theology in Athens, as a ‘sick culture’, is underpinned by a Western philosophical and historical analysis. Ernst Troeltsch, Rudolf Euken, Georg Mehlis, O. Spengler, Theodor Lindner, Fr. Schleiermacher, W. Windelband, Gaston Boissier, W. James, H. Delacroix, L. Laberthonière are the figures with whom he empathises or to whom he refers polemically. His intellectual style is an impeccable illustration of an era in the academic culture of Orthodoxy, dominated by the methods and conceptual apparatus of Western universities. Yet the lesson that this style offers us, I believe, even today lies in the endeavour to remain fully in step with the global challenges facing Christianity.
My second remark concerns the philosophical foundation of the conception set out in The History of Christianity as a History of Culture. This concerns a philosophy of history or, more precisely, of the object of history and, on the other hand, a very clear distinction between the essence of religion and the essence of culture. For Teodor M. Popescu, the object of history is human life itself, in all its manifestations, capable of culture and, therefore, a producer of values. The plurality of values represents the form in which culture becomes the object of history: an axiological perspective derived from the works of Rickert and Windelband. Thus, culture is understood as the transformation of nature, as a work through which humankind expresses and perfects its humanity by transcending nature, whilst remaining within the realm of becoming, of contingency, of the relative. In relation to these dimensions of culture’s historicity, religion, although it appears as a cultural value, is defined by meta-historical categories: its essence can only be understood through its relationship with transcendence, as an ‘intuition of the infinite’ (Fr. Schleiermacher), as a supernatural revelation, whose pre-eminent form of manifestation is the mystical experience (W. James). Religion, says Professor Teodor M. Popescu, is ‘a quality of humankind, without being a mere product of humankind’3). This clear definition captures an entire historical-religious issue concerning the essence of the religious phenomenon and the historical constitution of its manifestations: a set of issues which Teodor M. Popescu addressed from the perspective of the historical attempts or hypotheses of the German school of the history of religions, but which will accompany this discipline throughout its development. Returning to the argument of the work in question, it is worth emphasising the idea that religion, being man’s essential relationship with the transcendent, enters history as a cultural fact or as a cultural value, finding expression in all forms of human life: ‘religion thus becomes, by function, what it does not appear to be by nature’4 By generating cultural forms, it becomes integrated into the cultural sphere, capable of shaping the spirit of a people’s culture or even the political structure of a society.
The third point I would like to make concerns the very perspective that Teodor M. Popescu adopts, within the framework defined earlier, regarding the cultural creativity of Christianity and its implications in modernity. Just as it is well known that ‘the Gospel is not a cultural programme’, so too are the cultural achievements that Christianity has inspired throughout its history, achievements which today constitute the Christian memory. The great sanctuaries of Christianity have become works of art; monasteries were centres of culture that bridged the gap between the ancient and medieval worlds; the university was a creation of Christianity, with all that this entails in terms of critical thinking and scientific inquiry. The development and manifestation of Christianity throughout history are thus a ‘perfect cultural achievement’5, confirming the general rule of the encounter between religious life and history—an encounter that generates culture, without this being its primary aim. But what is it that makes the Christian religion – the ‘absolute religion’, as Professor Teodor M. Popescu likes to put it – something other than just one religion amongst many, a value or a cultural asset? The answer lies in the origins of modernity within Christian culture or civilisation and in the tension that Christianity maintains between its original meaning and its forms of expression, which become the culture of humanity. If we read ‘The History of Christianity as a History of Culture’ carefully, we shall observe that modernity is characterised negatively only insofar as it deviates from the moral meaning of Christianity, because modernity, as an expanding civilisation, has also meant the consolidation of the Christian mission in the world, albeit in a way that no longer explicitly claims to stem from the faith. Our world, as a modern world, carries with it its Christian origins and communicates them almost involuntarily to other cultures and civilisations which it encounters and integrates. Continuing Professor Teodor M. Popescu’s reflections in our own time, we might argue that the truly exceptional nature of Christianity’s cultural creativity lies precisely in the fact that it is the only religion which has allowed – in the sense of bringing about as a historical manifestation – the emergence of a culture that defines itself by contrast with its origins. Thus, Christianity is placed in the position of having to prove its religious vitality within frameworks entirely different from those it established and culturally consolidated; in this sense, it is the religion of the ‘exit from religion’, to use Marcel Gauchet’s phrase 6, or the end of all religion, as Alexander Schmemann put it in For the Life of the World 7. I would link Father Schmemann’s radical perspective (some might call it ‘Barthian’, in the sense of the tension between faith and religion) to the questions raised in Professor Teodor M. Popescu’s work. Let us recall that, according to Schmemann’s interpretation, Jesus’ response in the parable of the Samaritan woman completely renewed the understanding of worship, Christianity being ‘worship in Spirit and Truth’ which, through the person of the incarnate God, the distance between God and man, which is characteristic of other religions. The Son of God, Father Schmemann provocatively stated, ‘brought a new life, not a new religion’! For Teodor M. Popescu, too, the strength of Christianity lies in this new life, a source of energy and creativity, which leads us to believe that ‘the history of Christianity has not only been, but will continue to be, a history of culture’8).
- 1
This text first appeared in the Yearbook of the ‘Justinian the Patriarch’ Faculty of Orthodox Theology, 2009, pp. 510–515.
See Al. Duțu, ‘The South-East and the European Context: Culture and Solidarity in “Orthodox Europe”’, Bulletin VII, 1997, Institute of South-East European Studies, pp. 11–86.
- 2
First published in 1927 by Cartea Românească. We shall henceforth refer to the 1996 edition, included in the volume Biserica și cultura, EIBMBOR, Bucharest, pp. 7–56.
- 3
Teodor M. Popescu, ‘The History of Christianity as Cultural History’, in The Church and Culture, 1996, p. 14.
- 4
Ibid., p. 18.
- 5
Ibid., p. 39.
- 6
Marcel Gauchet, The Demystification of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. by V. Tonoiu, Nemira, Bucharest, 2006.
- 7
A. Schmemann, For the Life of the World: The Sacraments and Orthodoxy, trans. by Rev. Prof. Dr Aurel Jivi, EIBMBOR, Bucharest, 2001.
- 8
Teodor M. Popescu, “The History of Christianity...”, p. 56.