The death of Europe is in sight, but only men and women die...

On the “Dying” of Europe

by James V. Schall, S.J. (1928-2019)

The striking opening sentence of an essay by Bret Stephens in the October 19, Wall Street Journal reads: “The death of Europe is in sight.” But what precisely is dying? We recall Belloc’s famous “Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe,” except that most of Europe has lost that faith that made Europe. “Re-evangelization” and the “New” Evangelization have had little impact. So is it still “Europe”?

Eric Voegelin, in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, remarked that the origin of modern ideology lies in a lack of courage, in a loss of faith of Christian men in the reality of the transcendent order as presented in that faith. This subsequent ideology causes the death of an Europe unwilling to preserve what it is.

A prosperous Europe, in its own confusion, is literally “invaded,” predominantly by Muslims from various failed states. We look at the pathetic decline in European birthrate, itself a sign of serious spiritual disorder.

What replaced the old European nations, Christendom, was a secular humanism devoted to a “universalism” that sought to downplay or rid itself of its Christian heritage. In many ways, it has “peacefully” accomplished this purging. The Church itself in old European lands seems confused and open to the doctrines of this humanism, as the recent Synod on the Family often demonstrated.

In a remarkable essay, “The Love of One’s Own and the Importance of Place,” George Friedman wrote: “Dying for a regime dedicated to the pursuit of happiness makes no sense. Dying for the love of one’s own makes a great deal of sense. But the modern understanding of man has difficulty dealing with this idea. Instead it wants to abolish war, banish war as an atavism or at least brand war as primitive and unnatural. This may all be true, but it should be noted that war simply won’t go away. Neither will the love of one’s own and all that follows from it.” We might say that war continues because its Kantian abolition ultimately implies that there is no distinction between good and evil in our lives. It is against this latter doctrine that good men will still fight – if they can.

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Obviously, this approach postulates new “rights” that guarantee the purpose of the abstract state’s “humanism.” The new “European” man is cleansed of all the variety that made him worthy of interest. But this new man, since he is an abstraction, is incapable of dying. Only men and women die. Likewise, only men and women beget. Bad ideas do not “die.” Either they are seen as erroneous and rejected or as enticing and put into the world. Of the “dying Europe,” requiescat in pace.

Source: www.thecatholicthing.org