More than 100 years after the publication of Oswald Spengler’s work, Sunset of the West (1918-1922), which influenced important scholars, philosophers, as well as many writers, thinkers and politicians, sometimes very different from each other, in which the German philosopher identified the West as a civilization now heading toward its sunset after the glories of the Renaissance, essays on the subject have multiplied in recent years. We recall some of them: Living as Christians in a Non-Christian World. The Example of the First Centuries (Leonardo Lugaresi, 2020), The Crisis of the West (Santiago Cantera Montenegro, 2022), The End of Christianity and the Return of Paganism (Chantal Delsol, 2023), The Defeat of the West (Emmanuel Todd, 2024).
In particular, Todd’s essay and Lugaresi’s essay attract interest. Todd is known for having predicted the collapse of the USSR and the 2008 financial crisis years in advance, and in his recent essay, with great lucidity and intelligence, through detailed analysis of social indicators, family structures, demographic decline, the disappearance of religion and the triumph of nihilism in every aspect of social life, he speaks of a double defeat for the West, meaning by this word the capitalist economy and the U.S. system of power, extended to countries such as the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. He sees the West’s defeat, first of all, in the war in Ukraine where Todd believes Russia will prevail, but more importantly he sees it internally, demographically, economically, and morally. At the root of all this is the evaporation of the Christian values that were spread by two cultural revolutions: the Italian Renaissance and the German Protestant Reformation, which had fostered the flourishing of education, an ethic of work, responsibility, social discipline, and sacrifice for the community: an aggregating vision of collective life, which allowed economic development to take off and diverge from the rest of the world. Todd schematizes the degenerative process of Christianity in three stages: the transition from the phase of an active Christianity to the “zombie” phase, i.e., faded in worship but still persistent in morality and formal observance of rituals, to the current “zero” phase, i.e., “an absolute religious vacuum, in which individuals are devoid of any substitute collective belief,” which, precisely, underlies the “defeat.”
Todd’s analysis regarding the religious dimension is echoed in that of Lugaresi who states that although the peoples of Europe still largely call themselves Christians, there is reason to believe that it is mostly a nominal Christianity and that real Christianity now belongs to the experience of a very small number of people. From this observation, however, Lugaresi establishes a parallelism, between the first Christian generations who lived in the world of pagan or Hellenistic Judaic culture and the condition of Christians today, who are also a generation in the condition, in many respects, of the first Christians, regarding whom he hopes for the recovery of the spirit that animated them.
That is, it is a question of understanding how the early Christians, in a situation of even more radical and complete alienation from the Christian fact of the social context, despite being a numerically small group, managed to innervate society to such an extent that they changed the course of history. When Constantine, in a bold political choice as a great statesperson, bet on Christianity despite still being a minority reality (perhaps 10-15%), he did so because Christianity was culturally strong and the most significant and vital part of society.
The early Christian group did not conform to the world in which they lived, which is one of the greatest risks we face today but challenged it! In the sense of the Greek word krisis, that is, they lived in the world judging it in the light of the Gospel. As the Letter to Diognetus says: Christians are in everything like others, only they live a different life. In fact, they put themselves at the “service of the world,” paradoxically, putting it in crisis! This was the keystone of the spread of Christianity, made possible by the fact that the early Christians, in turn, agreed to be put into crisis by God, as is exemplarily the case in the episode of Paul in Athens (Acts 17), which lies at the heart of Lugaresi’s analysis. At first, Paul feels indignation at the idols of the Greeks and could have stopped there, that is, in a hostile context he could do one of three things: assimilate to the dominant culture, shut down or separate himself. The Apostle, on the other hand makes a fourth choice and relaunches. By putting himself in the speculative habitat of the Greeks he makes a crisis, that is, he judges them in the light of the Gospel, affirming that that unknown God whom they worship without knowing him, he proclaims to them. That is, if the Greeks agree to go all the way in their intellectual and religious journey, they will understand that Paul can make them know the unknown God because he has revealed himself.
Lugaresi is convinced that in the current situation of uncertainty and variety of positions everyone must, with the tools and convictions at his disposal, witness to Christ to the ends of the earth. That Christians, whether few or many, must do what they can to continue to have a crisis with the people of their time. In this regard, Lugaresi recalls Benedict XVI’s Regensburg speech in 2006 as a grand Christian crisis operation on the issue of faith, reasoning, and violence, on a dual side: that of Islam and that of Western rationalism, showing how both of those positions were at fault with the truth. This was not an attack; it was an exercise in crisis. Exactly like Paul’s in Athens.
All this should not be frightening because, Lugaresi notes, “history is constantly experiencing moments of Christianization and dechristianization,” and, as with a cathedral, when you finish restoring the facade you reassemble the construction site in the apse, also “the church is continually propped up by scaffolding and more than a field hospital, then, it resembles a construction site that never ends.”
Leonardo Salutati
Source: https://www.ilmantellodellagiustizia.it/2024/tramonto-o-alba-delloccidente-e-del-cristianesimo
