The Idea of Europe

January 19, 2015
What lies ahead for Europe after Christianity's loss of cultural dominance is one of the great cultural questions of the century. The celebrated literary critic Steiner addressed this mystery in a widely admired 2003 lecture, now reissued with a long foreword, as a slim hardbound book. Steiner first considers the civilized Europe of coffee houses, of ever-present history, and of tamed nature with "no Death Valley, no Amazonia, no âoutback.'" He then turns to Christianity as a "fading force" in continental life, once saturating the culture but mortally wounded by its "manifold role" in the Holocaust. For Steiner, Hegel's "sense of an ending" culminates in the fate of the Jews and the collapse of Marxism. Reigning systems of belief led to Auschwitz and the Gulag. In turn, these horrors gave rise to contemporary agnosticism and atheism. Steiner recoils from the materialism and vulgarity in which David Beckham is more esteemed than William Shakespeare and Charles Darwin. Steiner dwells throughout his essay on the ongoing tensions between the opposing ideals of "pagan Athens" and "Hebrew Jerusalem," calling the idea of Europe a tale of two cities. He also delights in a cryptic, oracular style. Many readers will find his commentary abstract, florid, or possibly anti-Christian. Yet this classic essay and its unsparing critique deserve attention.