The spirit of the world and the spirit of the Church inevitably come to stand in opposition to one another at some point. The spirit of our world is, in essence, the same spirit of which Saint John the Evangelist spoke in his First Epistle, where he said: Any spirit that does not acknowledge that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not from God, but is the spirit of the Antichrist, who is already at work in the world (cf. 1 John 4:2–3). It is therefore no surprise that the spirit of the world, which contaminates us all to a greater or lesser extent, is present and specifically directed against the One who came to morally restore the world.
Essentially, it manifests itself to us Christians by attempting to sabotage our progress along the Path opened up by Christ and to lead us astray from it. This is precisely what the Greek word διάβολος, ‘diabolos’, means: the one who separates, the one who seeks to seduce us, to lead us astray from the path to God, to mislead us, to put a stumbling block in our way. In Hebrew, one of the meanings of this word (Satan) refers to the one who throws a spanner in the works on the path we are travelling towards our encounter with God, towards our encounter with Meaning par excellence. Therefore, in the view of the Holy Fathers, of Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Paul the Apostle, the spirit of the world is the one who seeks to undermine our relationship with others and, through this, our relationship with Christ, Who tells us, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, that our salvation is built upon the refinement of our interpersonal relationship with God and with our neighbour.
We, today, are witnessing a more subtle invasion by the spirit of this world. He who hides behind the play of shadows and false lights, he who induces grave illusions in us, the great puppeteer, is the devil himself. In this regard, I refer to one of the finest books I have read about the devil. It is called The Devil’s Share and was written by the Swiss author Denis de Rougemont. The book’s motto, as the author himself puts it, is the most profound phrase a modern man has ever written about Satan: ‘The Devil’s most beautiful ruse is to convince us that he does not exist’ (Baudelaire, Petits poèmes en prose). We are thus told that the Devil’s most effective stratagem is to seduce us to the point where we are convinced that he does not exist. From that moment on, naturally, he has free rein in our lives. This spirit of diabolical origin takes on many guises in our world, guises we would never even think of, because it is difficult to decipher the evil camouflaged within the apparent, seductive ‘good’ that is presented to us. It is the spirit that has already convinced many that he does not exist. That is why, today, you can speak in public about anything, but if you bring up the devil, you can expect nothing but smiles, sarcasm and accusations of credulity; in any case, you will be met with suspicion and utter (intellectual) contempt for the subject. The Devil’s stratagem has thus succeeded.
We live in a world of fake news and the ‘post’ prefix
The Devil succeeds in many of his wiles; the spirit of the world is recognisable above all by the fact that it sabotages our relationships with others. This is also the case with the concept of the natural, so-called ‘traditional’ family, which, under ideological assault, is criticised, mocked, discredited and consigned by the media to the Village Museum. A great many examples can be gleaned from the press, which is inundated by the spirit of this world. I am referring to the editorial offices of television stations and newspapers. Insidious media messages convey something that appears reasonable or even welcome, but in reality they are cloaked in the garish guise of fake news. We know that the first piece of fake news in history came from the devil, who gave a firm assurance that no one would die if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the first successful attack on the truth; this was the first piece of false information received by humankind. But it was not the last. This sort of news thrives particularly in our times. What sort of world is this where lies are valued and the truth is disparaged? What sort of world have we come to live in? A world where the truth is left behind, where moral truth is no longer taken into account or included, for example, in a political or government programme. We are living in the post-truth era – a phrase declared ‘word of the year’ in 2016 by the prestigious Oxford Dictionary. Great importance is therefore attached in public discourse to the prefix ‘post’. We are always leaving something behind. We are always giving something up, parting with something that, strangely enough, ends up being declared outdated and unacceptable. We thus diminish ourselves in an essential respect; we become morally fragile.
The spirit of the age is abundantly present in the era of ‘post-truth’ and, in the distorted understanding of some, of ‘post-Christianity’ – as if Christianity could ever be something that has been left behind. We live in a world of the ‘post’ prefix, the prefix that tells us we have just parted ways with something. A refined man of Christian and Orthodox culture, the painter Horea Bernea, who made a vital contribution, alongside the writer Andrei Pleșu, to the founding of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, of which he was also director for many years, used to say that, ever since the Renaissance, humanity has been constantly losing something. (Post)modern society is like a patient losing blood, like a person losing their strength. We are constantly losing something precisely through the paradoxical advance along a line of mythologised progress, which, of course, offers much in return, yet still raises the question: ‘What is lost when something is gained?’. It is a very important question, one that must make us sit up and take notice. We are always gaining something in the realm of the visible, but we are inevitably—perhaps irreparably—losing something else in the realm of the invisible.
Something is always lost precisely through the paradoxical advance along a line of mythologised progress, which, of course, offers much in return, yet raises the question: ‘What is lost when something is gained? (…) Modern man, proud of his modernity but suffering from a crisis of lucidity and moral imagination, has come to live in a world from which the vertical dimension of authority and its moral-axiological criterion have vanished’
Stagnation in horizontality. The disappearance of order and the vertical axis of authority
This discussion of the spirit of the world can also be framed in terms of the encounter between the visible and the invisible. A current characteristic of the spirit of the world is the systematic critique and the fostering of distrust towards the invisible, towards the spiritual. Modern man, having become religiously indifferent, amoral, and adrift beyond good and evil—where essential virtues such as mercy, forgiveness and care for others are perceived as flaws or weaknesses— has come to believe that God is dead – ‘Gott ist tot’, as Nietzsche proclaimed – and to ignore (in a suicidal and uncultured manner) Dostoevsky’s warning in The Brothers Karamazov, namely that ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’. Consequently, modern man, proud of his modernity but suffering from a crisis of lucidity and moral imagination, has come to live in a world from which the vertical axis of authority and its moral and axiological criteria have vanished. We go through life morally numb, hypnotised by our everyday utilitarianism, increasingly indifferent to the sources that, until relatively recently, generated a form of moral authority within our families and our community. Those who grew up (in part) in the countryside, those who have experienced the atmosphere of Christian tradition, probably remember what was once called ‘rânduială’. There was an order to the affairs of human life, an order springing from the very nature and naturalness of these things. This word, ‘rânduială’, encompassed almost everything. People still possessed the guiding common sense that helped them to discern between what was proper and what was not proper to do.
Whilst remaining realistic, we must not idealise the exemplary nature and endurance of the village. The strictly traditional village is in decline in all modern societies. Traditions are fading, the order is dying. It is a sad thing, of course. Without being nostalgic, without believing that we can revive the old traditions, we have a duty, as Christians, to preserve and bear witness to in the public sphere—not just in private—to that which remains ever fresh and true: The holy tradition that seeks purity, the immense flow of moral light that rises from the Gospels, that springs from Scripture. No one can take Scripture away from us, one of the fundamental sources of European thought, culture and civilisation – and we are Europeans, cherishing a genuine and realistic Christian Europe. The Gospel, whose ever-relevant content must be conveyed to people today in a language suited to their understanding and concerns, not in the language of old sermons, contains the great good news from which a way of being in the world springs. Not of being cast into the world, as Heidegger suggests, but of situating oneself realistically within the world and its hierarchies, of viewing it, deciphering it and treating it as a gift, not as prey. From the Gospel of Christ we can draw the purest life-giving substance for our lives, the moral substance that ensures our vertical growth, which is also the antidote to infestation by the spirit of the world; for one of the characteristics of the spirit of this world is the construction (of life) on a horizontal plane. We have become apathetic inhabitants of this marvellous new world, the undisputed conquerors of its visible realm. We have even discovered ‘lateral thinking’ (a term that has also found its way into the Oxford Dictionary); we idolise human creations, yet we forget to lift the eyes of our minds towards the Creator. We live, move and have our being not in Him, in the One who came into the world to give it life in abundance (cf. John 10:10), but rather in the flattening realm of the horizontal, where the spirit of today’s world generously invites us (how could it be otherwise?) to sanctify entertainment. In the civilisation of spectacle – from which any act of reflection and moral self-examination is excluded – you are encouraged only to feel good at any cost, including that of forgetting the things that truly matter.
In the civilisation of spectacle – from which any act of reflection and moral self-examination is excluded – you are encouraged only to feel good at any cost, including that of forgetting the things that really matter.
The sanctification of entertainment and the enshrinement of ideologies
Of course, we all want to feel good; no one sets out to feel bad, but beyond this desire – which is justified to a certain extent – the obsession with entertainment emerges and is cultivated. Blaise Pascal, a Christian thinker of rare depth, warns us against this in his Pensées; he speaks of entertainment as the deep-seated impulse of a person who has capitulated to the spirit of the world. It constantly entices us towards entertainment, seeking to divert our attention from Meaning in the most pleasant way possible. It is not at all difficult to discern the idea of diversion within entertainment. This does not mean, however, that we should be gloomy, solemn or grave. That is not the case. Joy is part of our world. Christianity, Christ Himself, calls us to joy: ‘Rejoice!’ Nor is entertainment, in its benign, pleasant forms, evil in itself. What is evil is the idolisation of it. It is by no means a sin to laugh. You become suspect when you guffaw, when you abandon what is natural, plunging noisily into vulgarity, when you mock nobility, when you laugh foolishly, risking making a complete fool of yourself. What is wrong is the promotion of entertainment as a way of life.
It is diabolically deceitful and highly harmful to promote the subversive notion that, for example, everything that is wrong in our supposedly modern world is linked to religion, and in particular to Christianity; that all progress has been achieved in spite of Christianity and the will of the Church; that the atheistic Enlightenment is the world’s greatest achievement; that all that is good is linked to positivist rationalism; that European civilisation began after the French Revolution, and so on, when, in fact, the situation is, for the most part, exactly the opposite. Let us recall for a moment one essential point: modernity, including science, takes root and flourishes in the fertile soil of Christianity, not outside it. With regard to the goddess Reason and the triad of liberty, equality and fraternity, it is worth recalling that monstrous events did, however, take place in and after the year 1789. The bloodbath wrought with macabre enthusiasm and cruelty by those who idolised ‘immaculate’ Reason and spat in the face of Christian mercy and forgiveness has, to some extent, tarnished the revolutionary ideals, both those of the eighteenth century and those which followed them, seduced by a Utopia that has always had something to do with the spirit of the age. Let us recall that in the early 1800s, in Napoleon’s time, the concept of ideology was established. Antoine Destutt de Tracy devoted his five-volume work Éléments d’idéologie (1817–1818) to it.
Ideology soon became the favourite of the spirit of our world. It always contains a grand and deceitful promise. Ideology is built upon the promise of collective salvation, upon the promise of a radical transformation of the world in which we live, upon the promise of establishing Heaven on earth. In fact, it detests Heaven and everything that lifts our thoughts towards it. We shall find no ideology in history that does not hate the religious, the metaphysical, the Church, Christianity and any institution connected with them. All ideologies, beginning with the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, and continuing with socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism, Nazism and neo-Marxism, have all proved to be horrors; all have led humanity down a dead-end path that usually ends in murder. For the great ideological lie inspired by the father of lies is always positioned in opposition to the Truth.
The great ideological lies
In Christianity we have gnoseological access to the Truth, inasmuch as we are ontologically equipped to understand this world and its structures, which are permeated by reason and Revelation. God creates us with an ultimate purpose: that we may finally encounter Him, love the Truth, (pre)taste Him, ‘eat’ Him from and through the words of Scripture, and be nourished by Him. Ideology, behind which lurk the spirit of the world and the prince of this world, erodes our trust in the Truth, blocking our access to Him. Consequently, ideology deceptively proposes a change in society and its structures, a dramatic social transformation and the establishment of an earthly ‘paradise’, just as the Communists promised in the wake of the cruel ideologues Marx and Engels, just as the Nazis promised in their paganism, and just as other promoters of delusional and criminal ideologies have promised. Unfortunately for humanity, they were not content merely to put forward logically flawed promises; rather, possessed by ideology and a passion for political domination, they set the world ablaze with their unrealistic theories, unleashing extremely bloody revolutions in people’s minds and throughout society, which sent hundreds of millions of innocent people to extermination camps or directly to their deaths, or ‘guilty’ merely because they could not accept brainwashing, the denial of truth, the renunciation of faith in Christ, and the forcing of reality onto Procrustes’ bed. Establishing not heaven, but hell on earth.
Today, neo-Marxism, which has invaded the media, cultural and political spheres on a massive scale, makes the same promises, announcing to us, with great audacity and all too little cultivated intelligence through its vociferous activists, that it is high time we awoke from the death-like slumber of Christian conservatism (cheekily labelled fascism or even hate speech), to do away with the natural family, the classical school, the Church, virtues, patriotism, the nation, literary and artistic canons, the memory of the moral and cultural elites murdered by communism, and higher education based on discipline. All of these are addressed and presented to the public as retrograde and outdated (by whom?), discriminatory (against whom?), and unacceptable (to whom?).
Michel Foucault, a French postmodernist and poststructuralist philosopher, puts forward the idea of power structures which, in his critical – and, by implication, anti-Christian – view, were invented by the elites of capitalist and traditional society for the purpose of manipulation. It is claimed that classical education is such a power structure. According to a perspective shaped by Foucault’s theories, if you wish to learn truly, you must adopt a critically sceptical stance towards the school/university and the teacher from the outset, and systematically undermine their authority, as you are dealing with obscure representatives of conservative thought that must be denounced at all costs. The very idea of authority is thus undermined. Critical theory and the critique of authority are very powerful sophistical weapons. Foucault remains convincing to many, his work being widely translated, debated and influential. If, however, we examine this author’s biography, we shall discover things that are bitterly revealing of the true nature of Foucault the man, just as in the case of Jean-Paul Sartre, who, for example, being fully aware of the unimaginable atrocities of Stalinism fuelled by Marxism, said in a 1973 interview published in Actuel (by 1973, no one could claim to be unaware of the Gulag): ‘A revolutionary regime must rid itself of a certain number of individuals who threaten it. I see no other way of doing this than through death. One can always escape from prison. The revolutionaries of 1793 probably did not kill enough. Those who oppose communism must be eliminated.” Even today, perhaps especially today, Sartre is regarded as a brilliant writer and, certainly, a politically correct one. Yet his literary talent, intellectual capacity and philosophical erudition did not prevent him from asserting, without batting an eyelid, that people (his fellow human beings) must be physically eliminated if they oppose the ideology sweeping across their country. This is what ideological contamination means; this is how the devil works – sometimes through extraordinary minds!
I have given these examples because they relate to what has happened in recent history, since the 18th century, contributing to the emergence and promotion of ideology. Today, the most subversive ideology has taken the form of cultural Marxism. All that seething socialism lies behind it too, all self-obsessed, Luciferian figures, overcome by the third temptation once faced by Jesus, seduced by the disfiguring passion for worldly power—ideologically possessed figures whom Dostoevsky prophetically describes in his novel The Demons. The brilliant Russian writer, whose work was masterfully analysed by the Christian thinker Nikolai Berdiaev in his book The Philosophy of Dostoevsky, is, therefore, the one who describes socialism in its most appalling manifestation: the demonisation of man through his being taken over by ideology. What does it mean to allow oneself to be possessed by an idea? Verhovensky Jr and Stavrogin, for example, are characters from whom innocence and compassion have vanished entirely. Through such ideologically possessed people, the devil whispers socialist lies into the ears of the naive—and not only them. Socialism is the ultimate manifestation of criminal engineering on a social scale. The amorality of the crime springs from the amorality of the political project itself. An adventurer from a provincial town in Russia seemingly transforms, unseen, into the devil – or vice versa – because that man is capable of killing anyone for an idea that leads nowhere, since ideas that come to constitute an ideology inevitably end in nihilism.
This is the immense difference between Christian Revelation—with its truly existentially salvific message from which a culture of Life springs forth into the light—and the great ideological lie, from which springs, first in the dark recesses of the conscience, then in the mind and subsequently in society, a culture of death, a mindset fuelled by a lie seductively cloaked in the guise of ‘the greater good’ instilled by the devil, who detests the Truth, Life and the Way to them.
The ideas that make up ideologies
The spirit of the world, manifested in our world through ideology, often becomes visible through its actions to aggressively discredit the sources that generate a moral order in society and that form the backbone of public morality. To ask whether one can live in the absence of a moral order is naive. You can live, but you live a miserable life. You can live by hurting others, showing no regard for them, leading them by your fatal example towards nothingness, towards non-existence (as some regard the departure from this life). There are, in principle, three institutions that instil the natural moral order in society: the family, the school and the church. It is easy to see today that these three institutions are criticised, discredited, undermined and urged to reform, to open up (to welcome the ‘Trojan horse’ of novelty dictated by the ideological whims of the age), to adapt at any cost to the spirit of the age (the spirit of the world).
In this regard, it is highly likely that we will see the return to the public arena of the proposal to approve that National Strategy for Parental Education, a strategy for the (re)education of parents and pupils in the spirit of a profoundly anti-Christian ideology. Essentially, this Strategy – which was posted on the Ministry of National Education’s website in 2018, only to be subsequently withdrawn following widespread public outcry based on common sense – tells us that parents in Romania are excessively, unbearably conservative. What exactly do they wish to ‘preserve’? The normal family, the natural family – something intolerable to the ideologues hiding behind this official public document. That is why appeal is made to so-called experts in gender ideology who, as one, declare that parents in Romania are afflicted with the most extreme form of conservatism, and more recently, are haunted by ‘medieval chimeras’ and that both they and their children must understand once and for all that the family is not comprehensible as an objective reality; rather, it is a socio-cultural construct – ‘a constellation of ideas, images and terminology’ – constantly created and recreated by socio-cultural practices. Staggering! As Christians, however, we must not remain silent, but must bear witness (publicly) to the Truth.
Ideas! When ideas reach us—ideas promoted ineptly and virulently in the media, ideas intended to sweep us all along, with or without a ticket, towards a brave new world—we ought first to pause and reflect. Christ did not parade his ideas. Christ did not boast that He had ideas. We know full well that He was not an activist, nor did He write rousing texts. In fact, He did not write at all. The Truth came and continues to come to us through the Incarnation, as a Person, as a living example, embodied in deeds of Love and Light, never as a mere idea. Ideas can form ideologies. Some ideas, whether in constellations or not, arise in the realm of the intellect, severed from love and flattered to the point of egomania by the spirit of the world. That is why ideologies are the work of intellectuals who, no longer finding their place within their community, breaking away furiously from tradition, possessed by the demon of boredom and incendiary revolutions, come to detest the world in which they live, but above all the one that preceded it—that of their parents and grandparents. All these people end up wanting is to assert themselves (a tremendous temptation), ignoring the established values of the community, which they attempt to seduce down a path untested by anyone, thus becoming the mortal enemies of all that is enduring, and of the values validated by a history stretching back many millennia.
The truth has come and continues to come to us through the Incarnation, as a Person, as a living example, embodied in deeds of Love and Light, never as a mere idea.
Who, apart from these ‘shallow’ intellectuals, cut off from the world’s cultural tradition, become adherents of such ideologies? Who still falls so easily into their trap today? Sometimes young people, who have not yet had the chance to acquire the discernment or level of cultural awareness that would allow them to objectively select the ideas with which they are bombarded in the virtual world. Young people who embrace ideology just as casually as they put on a T-shirt bearing the image of the criminal Che Guevara and who get drunk on ‘Stalinskaya’ vodka, completely ignoring who Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was. Then there are the fringe elements, culturally uneducated people who feel the need to subscribe to something – in the end, anything at all. There are also the cheeky pundits who lounge about in radio and television studios, individuals with nothing to recommend them morally or professionally, yet who appear or are invited onto programmes daily, pontificating on anything and everything; industrious nihilists, experts in whatever looks good ideologically, unscrupulous chameleons whose uneducated minds are intensely inhabited by ideological obsessions, amongst which the reflexive and fierce criticism of the ‘backward’ Church fully demonstrates their glib cultural illiteracy. They are people who, incapable of deciphering and explaining the workings of the world in which they live, let alone that which preceded it, endlessly recycle the same few ideas and words (ideology deepens intellectual poverty and breeds obsessions), attempting – and indeed succeeding – through their messages to capture the public’s attention and divert it from the things that truly matter towards the trifles that plague our daily lives.
But what really matters? First and foremost, everything that Christ calls us to do in our saving relationship with the Other. Secondly, everything that is intrinsically linked to the natural order as reflected in personal life and in society, to the family, to the dynamic and life-giving Tradition, to education in the Truth, and to the authentic cultural and moral heritage enriched by Christianity. To put it succinctly, Saint Paul the Apostle tells us this, testifying that we (Christians) ‘have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may recognise the things freely given to us by God’ (1 Corinthians 2:12). He also urges us—and we would do well to heed him—that we must anchor our faith in ‘the power of God’, not in ‘the wisdom of men’, not in ‘the wisdom of this age, of the rulers of this age, who are perishing, but in the mysterious wisdom of God, which God has ordained for our glory and which none of the rulers of this age has known, for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory’ (1 Corinthians 2:5–8). These words, in our context, say it all.
Contemporary man, however, is no longer very interested in the gifts God has bestowed. Nor is he interested in eternity any more. It seems to him an incomprehensible absurdity. Everything is here and now, and so he must greedily seize upon it. Herein lies the temptation of hedonism, itself a feature of the grotesque nature of the spirit of this world.
Europe’s constitutional documents no longer make reference to the Christianity upon which it was founded
I would also like to draw attention to certain features of the spirit of the world in which we live. Fortunately, we are today integrated into Europe, including politically, and so we must remain. As Christians, however, our European identity is, first and foremost, of a religious nature and only then of a cultural, political, social and economic nature. We are Europeans and we value this above all for spiritual reasons. Europe is, by its very nature, Christian. When we say that we are Europeans, we are therefore saying that we are Christians – a fact which, unfortunately, some have come to ignore. In the media and in high-level European politics, there is no longer any talk whatsoever of Europe’s cultural, identity-defining and Christian foundations; instead, there is simply silence on this essential matter. Why? Several years ago, a concrete and specific legal event took place: the stubborn refusal of certain European officials to include an explicit reference to Christianity in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and in the draft European Constitution, as if Europe were an entirely secular space, as if it had emerged as a civilisation and culture out of nothing. A political committee vehemently refused to include references to Christianity in the European Union’s founding legal acts, contrary to the thinking of its founding fathers (Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gasperi). We shall find no anti-Christians amongst them. On the contrary, all those mentioned publicly acknowledged the role and essential importance of Christianity in the development of European culture and civilisation, as well as the duty to cultivate the Christian spirit within the Union. It is therefore easy to imagine that, by today’s standards, the founding fathers of the EU would be labelled illiberal, undesirable and unsavoury.
By refusing to make official mention of references to Christianity, contempt for cultural traditions of Christian origin – and for everything that makes up the identity of the peoples who today form the European Union – has, unfortunately, been legitimised. If we follow the news in the media closely, we will notice that two types of important information are consistently missing from radio and television programmes, as they cannot get past the ideological filters of the editorial teams of these opinion-forming outlets: good news about the Church and Christianity – nothing that casts them in a favourable light – and reports on the persecution of Christians around the world, given that Christianity remains the most persecuted religion to this day. Why is that, one might ask?
In a November 2018 report presented in Rome at the headquarters of the Italian Embassy to the Holy See, a report on the persecution of Christians worldwide, it was revealed that around 300 million Christians are suffering persecution even today. As a result of this oppression, approximately 100,000 people die each year. In total, 38 countries have been identified where serious or extreme violations of religious freedom are taking place. Of these, 21 countries are assessed as being places where Christians are brutally persecuted. In the 21st century, the century in which human rights have become a religion in their own right! Why do we not hear the media talking about these realities today, given that we are otherwise rigorously kept up to date with the fate of whales, dolphins and other innocent animals? Why is it that in Romania the rescue by firefighters of an unlucky cat that has fallen into a drain makes the news on the evening bulletin, whilst the killing each year of over 100,000 people are killed each year for their faith in Christ is hushed up? Perhaps it is also because, behind the major media conglomerates, some of those beautiful, free-spirited young people from the May 1968 protests have ended up – young people whose favourite slogan was: ‘It is forbidden to forbid’. No more limits, no more anything that might hinder our hedonism. But is it acceptable to enshrine in law the omission of Christianity as an essential source of European culture and civilisation, to ban media access to the truth about Christianity, or to mislead people about it and about the Church? In what sort of order?
Some of the young revolutionaries, positivists and hedonists of 1968 have become influential figures in academic circles and European cultural policy – people who, whether they intended to or not, were shaped by an anti-Christian spirit. Their systematically critical attitude towards Christianity and their insolent stance towards the Church were subsequently mimicked in the Romanian media after 1990. This may, perhaps, explain the a priori critical stance towards Christianity adopted by today’s progressive (in fact, regressive) elites, as well as their irrational vitriol against religious institutions or the manifestation of the Christian faith in the public sphere.
How can one accept the refusal to acknowledge Christianity in Europe when, if you remove Christianity from its history, there is hardly anything left to talk about? Officially, there is still talk of ‘Europe’s spiritual and moral heritage’. That is all. As if the inestimable richness of Europe’s heritage could be reduced to something so vague, as if it could mean anything in itself without the Christian substance that gave rise to it.
How can one accept the refusal to acknowledge Christianity’s place in Europe’s history, when, if you remove Christianity from that history, there is hardly anything left to talk about?
From the lofty perspective of the anti-Christian views held by some politicians, ‘we are therefore advised not to identify ourselves publicly as Christians; we are discouraged from defining our own cultural tradition as a Christian one; furthermore, it is deemed inadvisable for our moral and spiritual heritage to be described and defined as religious’1
Being a Christian has become something of a handicap in the eyes of much of the media, and being an avowed Christian can block access to high-level public office at European political level. These are things that have happened and are already happening. As we have seen, Christians are indeed persecuted in many countries around the world, but since this is not discussed publicly, whilst any other form of persecution and discrimination is severely condemned by the press as monstrous, it is as though Christians somehow deserve to be persecuted.
All this may seem somewhat removed from the topic discussed earlier. I believe, however, that these too are manifestations of the current spirit of the world in which we live, a spirit that remains silent on the subject of ‘Europa Christiana’. Our spiritual roots are Christian. In the Middle Ages (so often invoked by ‘homo mediaticus’ when, out of ignorance, he offers his opinion on Christianity and the Church), the state was not called, for example, France, but was called Christendom. Where has this Christendom gone? Has someone uprooted it and transplanted it elsewhere? No. It continues to exist. The peoples of Europe—the vast, silent majority of society—our parents and grandparents make up the Christian world of today, even if, inevitably, secularisation has already taken place, bringing about a separation between religion and politics. These people, who are naturally rooted in the Christian faith and who, precisely because of this, remain clear-sighted, connected to history through Tradition, to the present through realism and to the future through hope, these well-rounded individuals do not ignore their roots, their own human nature in all its aspects, or their vocation as spiritual beings. They are people who have been shaped by the teachings of Christianity in the spirit of humanity’s noblest moral tradition.
Unfortunately, we have reached a point of phobia (Christianophobia), a fear of Christianity and its fruits in human life, an ostracism of virtue, and a denial of our recent and distant past. Europeans have convinced themselves – not all of them, fortunately – that, to be modern, one must necessarily be anti-Christian and secular. This is an enormous and unjust confusion bordering on stupidity, given that it ignores the immense heritage of Christian culture. Who, for example, could walk through the Louvre or the National Gallery, or any of the world’s great museums, and make sense of what they see there if they have completely ignored the Bible and the history of Christianity? And for this reason alone – a strictly cultural one – the study of religion in schools is essential. Religion is not only a constituent part of our lives as moral beings, but also the cultural key to the soul of Europe – Europa Christiana.
That is why the Church and its churches are like organs that pulsate and transmit a flow of spiritual life that is absolutely essential for the natural breathing and blood circulation of the communal body. Perhaps they no longer pulsate with the same spiritual intensity as in other eras of Christian history, but the Church is made up of all of us, including those of us who feel the dissatisfaction of our own moral mediocrity. Beyond the scandal of Christophobia, we are confronted with the scandal of the self-ghettoisation of churches in modern Western society and with that of their compromises with the ideology of the age (such as the acceptance of so-called ‘same-sex marriages’).
Anti-Christianity in its various forms
We have reached such unnatural extremes because, in the absence of firm and steadfast opposition, the spirit of the world is gaining the upper hand progressively and in a progressive manner, taking on the visible forms—for those who have eyes to see—of manifest anti-Christianity. For example, under the broad umbrella of protection against domestic violence, the insidious and entirely unscientific ‘gender theory’ can creep in, according to which gender and sex are two distinct concepts (the Istanbul Convention, 2011). Anti-Christian ideological attacks are far more subtle today; we no longer witness the assaults of a spectacularly criminal Leninist-style totalitarianism. Today, at least in Romania, we are no longer thrown into prison for freely expressing in public what we believe and think. We may, however, be fined, labelled as fascists and illiberal, ostracised by the media, or, in the best-case scenario, ignored. The method favoured today by the ideologues on duty is that of gentle brainwashing. We are witnessing the unfolding of a form of ideological totalitarianism designed to lull us into complacency. A graffiti-style inscription from a Bucharest underground station springs to mind: ‘Stay calm! Everything will be fine!’. I wondered what that might mean. I wondered exactly what this ‘calm’ was that I was being urged to embrace on the spot, and what sort of ‘good’ it was that I was being assured was being prepared for me—a ‘good’ into which I had invested no effort whatsoever. I am not at all plagued by dark thoughts about possible global conspiracies. We must not drift towards such notions. I do, however, believe that we have a duty to inform ourselves thoroughly and from multiple angles, to remain clear-headed, alert to the manifestations—however subtle—of evil that loudly presents itself as good, faithful to the letter and spirit of the Gospel of Christ. We have a duty to refine our discernment, nourished by faith, and to exercise our minds within the broad expanse of (pre-)Christian European culture; to read, therefore, its great works destined to endure through the ages. Whilst we still can! Anchored in this way in the safe harbour of enduring realities, of non-negotiable moral and cultural values enshrined over time, shaped by Christian revelation or born directly from it, whilst remaining defenders of what is natural in every aspect of our lives, I do not believe we will be so easily seduced by the sirens of multifaceted socialism (including political correctness, about which the media remains silent) or by those of any other ideology.
Cultivated, not indoctrinated, having reached a natural level of spiritualisation, clarity and moral imagination, we shall see with our own eyes that the Church is not outdated, that religion is not obsolete, that, if you want to be modern and cool, you do not have to be anti-Christian and anti-clerical, that never and nowhere has Christianity called for foolishness, but rather for sobriety.
Cultivated, not indoctrinated, having reached a natural degree of spiritualisation, clarity and moral imagination, we shall see with our own eyes that the Church is not old-fashioned, that religion is not outdated, that if you want to be modern and cool you do not have to be anti-Christian and anti-clerical, that never and nowhere has Christianity encouraged foolishness.
Let us open the curious eyes of our minds wider, let us constantly nourish our spirit with all the nourishing words of the great books, let us throw wide open the door at which Christ knocks discreetly, let us strive to acquire the forgotten virtue of attentiveness to others, for in it there is no Hell, as someone like Jean-Paul Sartre believed in his amoralism, but Joy, as Saint Seraphim of Sarov testified with inspiration and spontaneity.
I believe that this is how we can save ourselves from the ideological temptation of the spirit of the world in which we have been given to live.
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Horia-Roman PATAPIEVICI, ‘The New Europe and the Missing Voice: Christianity’, an essay published in the volume The Unseen Decides Everything, Humanitas, 2015.