Neither Greek nor Jew

Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization, by Remi Brague, South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2002. 205 pp.

IT HAS BEEN SAID that the core of the spiritual vitality of the West is the fundamental tension between Athens and Jerusalem. True as it may be, this claim leaves in complete obscurity the character of the West that enables it to harbor and sustain such conflicting sources, a character which cannot be explained by recourse to one of the two poles without rendering the tension between them something less than fundamental. According to Remi Brague's Eccentric Culture, this omission finds its remedy in reflection upon a third city: Rome.

But this formulation (and, incidentally, the subtitle of the English edition of Brague's book) is slightly misleading. Brague is emphatically not writing about "Western Civilization," since he considers the Orient/Occident distinction ultimately untenable. Brague's learned and brisk historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological meditation is about Europe, about what makes Europe a distinct cultural entity, and therefore about what it means to be European. This stimulating book is meant in part as an antidote to the cultural suicide being carried out in Brussels, as well as to the reactionary responses it provokes.

"Romanity" is the name Brague gives to a salutary inferiority complex at the heart of European culture. In the original case, the Romans recognized the Greeks as their superiors in attainment of the true and the beautiful and in suppleness and vigor of language. "To be 'Roman,'" Brague remarks, "is to have above one a classicism to imitate and below one a barbarity to subdue." It is to recognize the imperative of liberal education as traditionally understood, which is always a soul-forming education in the language and literature of peoples other than one's own. Thus Rome, for Brague, is not another cultural content to be compared to Athens and Jerusalem. Rather, it is the form of cultural appropriation that allows Athens and Jerusalem to be the content of an education. Such an articulation helps to explain what appears to be a relatively common experience, especially among conservative students, of marveling at the Greeks but feeling more affinity for the Romans: to marvel at the Greeks is itself to experience affinity with the Romans.

What most characterizes Romanity is the consciousness of "secondarity," the consciousness that one's cultural origins and points of reference do and ought to have their source in another culture. As Brague puts it: "To say that we are Roman is entirely the contrary of identifying ourselves with a prestigious ancestor. It is rather a divestiture, not a claim. It is to recognize that fundamentally we have invented nothing, but simply that we learned how to transmit a current come from higher up, without interrupting it, and all the while placing ourselves back in it."

A central but not entirely lucid development of Brague's thesis is his analogy from the Rome/Greece relationship to the Christian/Jewish relationship, his claim that as Christians, "[our] Greeks are the Jews." Like the Romans, who had to learn what was home-grown for the Greeks, Christians have to be inducted into the covenant that is itself constitutive of the Jews as a people. Without the Hebrew Scriptures and their categories of Creation, Sin, Covenant and, above all, Messiah, the central Christian doctrine of Incarnation is wholly unintelligible. Thus, it is the Incarnation that renders Christians conscious at once of both the distinctness and the provenance of their tradition from that of the Jews--which is to say, of their religious secondarity.

Now, the cultural connection of Rome to Greece is an arguably accidental (and unarguably mortal) grounding of one historical civilization upon another. The rootedness of Christianity in the Jewish covenant and Scriptures, however, is a providential and sempiternal grounding of one relationship between man and God upon another. By thus elevating secondarity from the level of the contingent to that of the absolute, the Church ensured the permanence of secondarity as a model for culture itself. As T.S. Eliot argued, European humanism cannot long sustain itself as a cultural impetus without the Christian religion to steady it. For Brague, the decisive moment of this enshrinement of secondarity in the religion of Europe is the Church's repudiation of the heresy of Marcion, who tried to radically oppose the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, rejecting the former. "It may be then," observes Brague, "that Saint Irenaeus, from his polemics against Marcionism and his affirmation of the identity of the God of the Old Testament with that of the New, is not only one of the fathers of the Church, but also one of the fathers of Europe." But do not expect to see a portrait of Irenaeus on the Euro.

To elucidate this deep relationship between religion and culture, Brague examines an exemplary foil to Christian culture (and a tradition in which he is deeply learned as a scholar), the absorption of classical learning in the medieval Islamic world. Islam lacks a sense of secondarity in religion. It views earlier biblical revelations as only fragmentary versions of what is perfected in the Koran, and moreover, as versions preserved only in texts corrupted by the religious communities who adhere to them. The earlier texts are thus wholly superseded by the Koran. Consequently, the Arabic language of the Koran is the ultimate language, the chosen language of God. This means that Greek texts translated into Arabic have passed from an inferior language to a superior, so that once the work of translation is done there is no need to preserve the superseded originals or continue cultivating the skills needed to read them. No religious secondarity, no cultural secondarity. Consequently, despite the fact that the Islamic world shares with Europe the double heritage of Greek philosophy and Biblical religion, it cannot sustain the fundamental tension between them as durably or as energetically as Europe has. The history of Europe from Charlemagne forward is a history of renaissances propelled by recourse to original sources dutifully preserved and recopied. Islam has religious revivals, but no real renaissances.