Post-Christian West: A Jewish Perspective
Prof. Paul Eidelberg
The present writer is trying to understand why Christendom, so much more powerful than Islamdom, is in retreat?
The reader should regard this as a heuristic essay, bound to have many shortcomings, but therefore intended to stimulate discussion of the dilemma confronting our civilization.
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1. Although the notion of post-Christian Europe has become a trope among serious commentators, the tendency is to focus on the external causes of this historical phenomenon, namely, the corrosive impact of the moral and cultural relativism that has long permeated European education. As I have elsewhere said, Relativism is a nation-killing doctrine. It renders life meaningless, undermines the desire for children, and promotes hedonism and pacifism. Relativism therefore saps a nation’s will and its stamina to confront evil: today the manifested in Islamic terrorism.
2. Did I say “evil”? The word “evil” has virtually disappeared from the vocabulary of America’s ruling elites—politicians, academics, and journalists. They’re afraid to whisper an unflattering word about Islam. So the Boston bombers were “jihadists. No one with the possible exception of Lee Harris, known as the “philosopher of 9/11” and the author of Civilization and Its Enemies, dares insinuate that Islam is the greatest enemy of civilization, hence of freedom and human dignity. Isn’t this equivalent to damning Islam is the most dangerous source of evil?
3. Perhaps pundits should stop prefacing any negative statement about Islam with sugary acknowledgments of many decent Muslims who are not “jihadists.” This may obscure the fact that approximately 20% of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims support jihad—which amounts to one jihadist for very American!
Of course there are many Muslims who, unlike so many Palestinians committed to Israel’s destruction, would not use their own children as human bombs. But their Quran speaks of Jews and Christians as “dogs” and pigs,” and exalts the Muslim who “slays and is slain” for Allah (Sura 9:111).
4. Although democratic university-bred doctrine of moral relativism (or moral egalitarianism) may dull the moral standards of countless pundits, relativism alone will not explain the decline of Christianity in Europe. Why, indeed, should Christianity decline if it does not harbor within itself—perhaps in its very origin—the causes of its decline, as we see in the West’s craven attitude toward Islam?
5. At the risk of offending friends, to whom I apologize in advance, ponder the antinomianism introduced into pagan Rome via the Christian doctrine, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” To thus separate religion and state is to confine spiritual concerns to the Church and to leave a welter of political, social, and economic matters to the State, that is, to the more or less arbitrary will and contrivances of men.
This is the price Christianity had to pay for discarding Jewish law, which the Church did to facilitate the acceptance of Christianity in the pagan world (pagans were hardly keen about circumcision). Having no all-embracing revealed law of its own, the Church had to adopt and, at the same time, desacralize the partially religious but pagan laws of a then decadent Rome. (To be sure, the ecclesiastical authorities developed a body of canon law for the government of the Church and its members.)
6. It may appear shocking, but Christian antinomianism is a basic cause of secularism in the West. By limiting itself primarily to “spiritual” matters, Christianity leaves its adherents subject to the shifting laws of the nation-state, and of course the laws of the nation-state, in addition to contradicting the laws of other nation-states, may foster irreligion and permissiveness and thus clash with Christianity. (Consider how various western nations have legalized gay marriages.) Moreover, the separation of Christian morality and public law in the West deprived the law of any sanctity and authority while depriving morality of the support of law. The consequence is evident throughout Europe and America—rampant hedonism, immorality, and crime.
7. I should note in passing that both Catholic and Protestant theologians and philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries regarded the laws of the Hebraic Republic of antiquity as superior in wisdom and justice to all others.
8. Unfortunately, the separation of Christian morality and public law has made Christianity less and less relevant in the daily social and economic activities of men. This split between morality and law cannot but divide the soul of the individual and corrupt the nation of which he is a citizen. While individual Christians may be pious, the nations are typically unscrupulous. Ponder these words of Rabbi Isaac Breuer, a philosopher and jurisprudent:
Christianity addresses itself directly and solely to the individual in complete disregard of nations and of their role as basic elements of history. To the suffering individual, the victim of injustice and oppression, Christianity promised reward or salvation in the life hereafter or in the beyond of history when nations would (supposedly) cease to exist. It urged the pious Christian to turn the other cheek, to resist not evil, instead of seeking to steer his nation on the path of justice. Hence the Christian individual and his nation drifted farther apart. Christian Europe has presented this interesting phenomenon: while individual citizenries of the nations abandoned paganism to become Christian, the nations comprising these very citizens remained pagan [as witness how those nations participated in the Nazi Holocaust]. The dogma, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s ...” armed the wicked, for the State was Caesar. It arrogated to itself absolute sovereignty and recognized no moral law but self-interest.
9, In Judaism there is no Caesar and there is no Church. Nor is there any split between law and morality. In Jewish morality the Divine Will appears not in an abstract manner, as in Christianity, but in the concrete and rational precepts of the law—the Halacha. In fact, what is distinctive about Judaism is not “morality” but laws of morality which are concrete and which clearly relate thought and deed.
10. In contrast, the behavior of Christians is to be governed not by moral laws but “moral precepts” and “love.” Both are problematic. Moral precepts are vague generalities. Belief in such precepts leaves mankind with the problem of applying them to diverse circumstances, which requires judicial reasoning linked to a coherent body of laws. As for love, nothing is more dangerous than this emotion when charged by religiosity without the restraints of law. How often has the “religion of love” tortured and slaughtered men to save their souls?
11. Appalled by the horrific slaughter that took place in Christian Europe in World War I, Rabbi Kook candidly reveals some of the basic flaws and failings of Christianity. “By emptying law of its divine content,” Christianity has often succumbed to “the grossest wickedness.” “The poison invades the private law of the individual and spreads through the souls of nations, becoming the foundation of national hatred and the evil of bloodshed …Bearing in mind that Rabbi Kook died in 1935, hence before the Nazi Holocaust, in which even France participated—France, the land of “liberty, equality, and fraternity”—he writes:
Europe rightly gave up on God, whom she never knew. Individual humanists adapted to the sublime good, but not an entire nation. No nation or tongue could understand how to aspire to the Good, the All, let alone how to stamp with this the foundation of its existence. Therefore, when in our day nationalism grew strong and penetrated the system of philosophy, the latter was forced to place a big question mark over all the content of absolute ethics, which truly came to Europe only on loan from Judaism, and as any foreign implant, could not be absorbed in its spirit.
12. Rabbi Kook nonetheless recognized that, “to a degree the hard shell of human depravity [was] softened” by Christianity; but he foresaw that beneath the veneer of Christianity, paganism “will win out … will resent the sparks of the spirit of Israel … and hatred of Israel will increase.” And so it has come to pass. Recall the temporary resurgence of Christianity in Germany immediately after its defeat in World War II. Devastated by the war, Christians flocked to the churches as the only pillar left to lean upon. But now Jew-hatred is again ascendant in Europe, reminiscent of the 1930s.
13. Is there a way of avoiding this quagmire? The Israel-America Institute calls for a revival of the Biblical roots of the American Republic, a discussed in my book The Theo-Political Foundations of American Exceptionalism(Lightcatcher Books, 2012), and its sequel The Beginning and End of American Exceptionalism: Toward a New Beginning (in process).
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