Our Culture, Counterculturally Speaking

Paula Fredriksen of Boston University is concerned with “the moral complexity of our civilization,” which is a very good concern to have. But why am I also concerned about the opening paragraph of her long review of a book on morals in antiquity? Here it is: “Freedom, democracy, philosophy; art, education, law. Many of the ideas and ideals that define our culture and what we most value in it trace back across millennia to the civilizations of Greece and Rome. These two ancient societies constituted a fundamental stage in the historical development of the West. Later, refracted through medieval institutions, reclaimed in the Renaissance, and re-appropriated in the Enlightenment, this classical patrimony continued to exercise a decisive influence in shaping the culture and the politics of Europe.”

What is missing from that is, of course, Christianity. Which seems somewhat odd in view of the fact that Fredriksen is a historian of Christianity. True, there is a passing reference to “medieval institutions”—which I suppose is intended, by a considerable stretch, to cover the history of Christendom, including Augustine, Benedict, Abelard, Anselm, Dominic, the Gregorian Reform, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” that became America. But “the ideas and ideals that define our culture and what we most value” are, at most, incidentally “refracted” through all that. Their source, reclaimed by Renaissance and Enlightenment, is ancient Greece and Rome.

The flagrant prejudice evident in this opening paragraph is carried through the thousands of words that follow. Fredriksen is not an ignorant person. How then to explain her mendacious rendering of the history of “the ideas and ideals that define our culture” except by a deep prejudice against Christianity? Of course, similarly distorted accounts can be found in many widely used textbooks. Fredriksen is to be commended for affirming, against powerfully assertive academic fashions, that there is such a thing as Western Civilization and that it is worthy of being valued. Yet her bowdlerized history of that civilization is at the root of the deepest divisions in our society.

What is called the culture war is not simply about this or that question disputed in the public square. It is most basically about the narrative of who we are. When Fredriksen says “our culture,” she means the continuum from ancient Greece and Rome that modernity restored after a medieval (i.e., Christian) digression. Her culture is the culture also of many others in the academy, especially in the humanities. That culture is a counterfactual and fanciful intellectual construct. It reflects the same prejudice that rejected the mention of Christianity in the preamble to the constitution of the European Union.

In historical fact, in honest scholarship, and in popular understanding, our cultural narrative is predominantly that of Jerusalem, which in the form of Christianity, and through centuries of conflict and devotion, appropriated, transmitted, and transformed also the legacy of Greece and Rome. To speak of “our culture” without defining reference to Jerusalem—to Sinai and Calvary, to Moses and Jesus, to the permutations of Christianity and the protests against its hegemony—is to speak of a culture not recognizable to the overwhelming majority of Americans. It is not recognizable because it is false. It is, in its sedately academic way, countercultural. What is called the culture war runs very deep.