There is a sense in Europe that the story has run out – a sort of European existential tiredness, if you will. In his well-argued polemic The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, Douglas Murray begins with a bold statement: “Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the European people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another matter.”
While there are many facets to this crisis, I’d like to draw your attention to one aspect in particular, which is Europe’s endemic feeling of existential tiredness – something the Germans call ‘geschichtsmude’, meaning ‘weary of history’.
This is a sentiment that is constantly felt by Europeans, and can strike by surprise at any moment. Some of us feel it all the time, while others catch it in waves or in surprising moments. Some might even voluntarily trigger this feeling through literature, as I found is often the case when reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Others might get a whiff of it in their daily encounters, when a conversation takes a turn towards meaning and purpose upon which no readily available answer springs to mind.
This feeling is not entirely new. For centuries, Europe has come up with terms describing some variant of this phenomenon, including pseudo-medical ones detailing symptoms of apathy and nervous exhaustion. Indeed, there was such a thing called ‘neuroasthenia’ – a 19th-century psychological disorder characterised by elevated stress levels and existential weariness.
The subject was also written about by thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others, from whom a consensus emerged that the accelerating rate of change due to worldly pressures meant, among other things, that there was a persistent draining of the European spirit that was specific to modern life. Those who sought to address this problem found themselves pursuing different lifestyle variations, ranging from physical and dietary changes, exemplified by the pre-antibiotic culture of the sanatorium, to the teachings offered across the orient – where Europeans could take their mind off the overwhelming weight of their past and present.
Today, we often refer to this as ‘burn-out’, although to our advantage the connotations vary slightly in that this term has perhaps caught on because it is more flattering than ‘tiredness’, implying that people have nobly given too much of themselves. Many books and articles offering insights about this phenomenon have emerged in recent years, with the historically familiar symptoms being cynicism, depression and lethargy resulting from overwork and lack of social support, among other things.
If working for little reward might push an individual to suffer from burnout, might it not be the case that an entire society can experience this too, provided that enough individuals suffer from it?
In Oswald Spengler’s pessimistic Decline of the West, it is argued that civilisations are like people: they are born, flourish, decay and die, and the West has reached the latter stages of this process. The normal rejection of this point of view is that the West constantly fears its imminent decline, but it might just be the case that, at some point, the self-pitying and self-flagellating West could be onto something. Nietzsche also considered this, lamenting that “we are no longer accumulating… We are squandering the capital of our forebears, even in our way of knowing.”
Nietzsche makes it easier to recognise that it was not a dietary change or a lack of physical fitness that was causing this decline, but an exhaustion resulting from a loss of meaning, implicitly acknowledging that the West is living off a dwindling cultural capital.
Irrespective of one’s personal opinions about Christianity, it must be acknowledged that, for centuries, the greatest source of energy came from the spirit of the continent’s religion. It was a readily available foundation from which one could draw existential sustenance to go to war, or to defend the homeland. It inspired Europeans to reach the greatest heights of human creativity – St Peter’s in Rome, the works of Bach and Beethoven, Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks and Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John, to name but a few.
In the 19th century, however, this source was dealt a series of seismic blows, and was scrutinised to the point at which its very foundations began to give way. When the texts of the Old Testament were beginning to be treated with the same scepticism as any other historical text, it had an effect that still remains largely unacknowledged today. Europe had explored the knowledge of its great myths and legends, yet the Christian story was the continent’s foundational myth and had thus remained untouched.
Recalling to his biographer – after having seen the works of German critics on the Old Testament, and in anticipation of their translation to English – Oxfordian Edward Pusey said: “This will all come upon us in England; and how utterly unprepared for it we are!” Needless to say, it didn’t take long for the same sceptical sentiment to extend its reach towards the New Testament, with David Friedrich Strauss releasing his critique titled The Life of Jesus Critically Examined in 1835.
What was once an incontrovertible system of belief turned into a new area of inquiry all over the Western academic world and beyond. Just as today’s Islamic scholars hopelessly attempt to divert criticism away from the foundations of their faith, in the knowledge of what it will do to them, the Christian clergy across Europe also tried to keep such criticism at bay, to no avail of course.
The tide of merciless scrutiny washed across the continent just as Pusey said it would. This was a fundamental turning point in European history, which meant that the Bible was up for critical analysis and which inherently acknowledges questions of authorship and fallibility. Some pretend that these changes were irrelevant or didn’t even occur but, in truth, the clergy had to acknowledge this fundamental shift and therefore had to shift with it.
Naturally, none of this happened in a vacuum, but in parallel with other works like Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which doubtlessly contributed to this process. Where once divine design explained it all, or rather explained it all away, science now had a comprehensive description that explained the world we inhabit without the need for a God.
Richard Dawkins put it this way: “Given sufficient time, the non-random survival of hereditary entities will generate complexity, diversity, beauty and an illusion of design so persuasive that it is almost impossible to distinguish from deliberate intelligent design.”
And while the origins of life remained unexplainable, the idea that it was all solved by the claims of religion seemed less and less likely. As is the case today, it was still possible to find deep wisdom and meaning in the ancient scripture but, as Douglas Murray puts it: “The Bible had at best become like the work of Ovid or Homer: containing great truth, but not itself true.”
And while the loss of belief and faith across the continent are often discussed, the effects of this are largely overlooked. Rarely has there been anyone of note who acknowledged that Europe had lost its foundational religious story, and that it was living off what its forebears had built.
This is as true culturally as it is geographically. Indeed, Europe is comprised of small towns and villages built around a church, which represents the heart of the community. But today, these once strident and thriving communities, energised by the convictions of their faith, are either dead or dying. Where faith still retains its presence, it is either highly uninformed, or is injured and weak – a shadow of its former self. The confidence such places had in decades passed has dissipated and the current has only swept to one side.
Yet here we still are, despite having lost our story. And as English atheist theologian Don Cupitt explained in 2008: “Nobody in the West can be wholly non-Christian. You may call yourself non-Christian, but the dreams you dream are still Christian dreams.” It might even be that “the modern Western secular world is itself a Christian creation”, he says.
Still, the fear of the consequences of what might succeed faith as the foundations of European values remains an ever-present, intense and reasonable reservation. And rightly so, as when we do away with our story, then what replaces it?
Christopher Attard