Overcoming Europe’s amnesia

Is it possible to understand the development of Germany without reckoning with the Reformation? Can France be understood if the causes of the French Revolution get left out? Can Spain be understood without reference to Islam and Cordoba?

I ask these questions simply because Europe has witnessed a bizarre bout of deliberate historical amnesia.

During the drafting of the (aborted) EU Constitutional Treaty, there was a strong lobby - particularly in France - to omit any reference to the Christian history of Europe. Ideologically driven, this was a denial of the very Enlightenment thinking that had shaped Europe during the previous two centuries. It is a bit like trying to account for the rise of science without reference to religion - the assumption of an ordered universe was crucial to the endeavour, and this assumption came from a religious world view.

History is not easy to define. Various thinkers have debated the distinction between history and memory. In relation to the holocaust, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once commented that as the last survivors died, memory would become history - and history would become the battleground for ideologies. He argued that while people are alive, they can counter the ideological or selective historical accounts/rationales with the testimony of witnesses. Of course, it is not as simple as this: memory is also subject to revision, selection and ideological re-shaping. Nevertheless, some distinction can be useful.

This is pertinent to the questions of raison d’être facing Europe in the twenty-first century. We can only understand who we are by acknowledging where we have come from. And we can only shape what we want to become if first we have remembered (literally, ‘re-membered’ - that is, to put back together the parts of our story in order to enable it to make sense).

The contingent danger of remembering is, however, that we simply reject from that history what appears inconvenient to the narrative we now wish to shape. Hence, a secular culture that wishes to expunge from an explicatory introduction any reference to those parts of history that embarrass the current dominant prejudice. The Christian history of Europe should not be remembered for its problematic elements only, but also for how it has shaped for good the nature of European cultures: their world views, their art and literature, their law-making, and so on.

Any culture that claims to derive benefit from the Enlightenment must, surely, adhere to some element of rational, intelligent accounting for history. To this end, the Christian history of Europe is crucial for understanding where we have come from, who we are and what we might become.

About the author

The Rt Revd Nick Baines is the Bishop of Leeds (for the Diocese of West Yorkshire & the Dales). He was previously Bishop of Bradford (2011-14), and before that was Bishop of Croydon. He read German and French at Bradford University and, before ordination, worked as a Russian linguist at GCHQ. Nick Baines became a member of the House of Lords in 2014. He has represented the Archbishop of Canterbury at international faith conferences and is the English Co-chair of the Meissen Commission which develops relationships between the Church of England and the Protestant Church in Germany. He also preaches regularly at conferences in Germany – in German.