Challenge and Decline

German thought was also a dissolvent of orthodoxy. Hegel’s system could be recast in atheist form, as by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804—72), while the biblical critic David Strauss (1808-74) applied an extraordinary erudition to demon­strate that the New Testament was a work ofhistorical mythology.

Another cause of doubt about the biblical world­view was suggested by geologists and biologists like Charles Darwin (1809-82), whose evolutionary theory was charged with contradicting Genesis and denying the special spiritual status of man as a distinct divine creation. A number of Christian theologians gave evolutionary theory an orthodox interpretation as in the English Liberal Catholicism of Charles Gore (1853-1932), and, more recently, in the optimistic cosmology of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), but its anti-religious implica­tions were stressed in England by the agnostic T.H. Huxley (1825-95) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), and in Germany by the materialist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919).

Though tainted by association with the Tsars, the Orthodox Church in Russia retained its sense of identity with the nation, a role acknowledged in the Second World War, and despite recurring persecu­tion, it survived among the peasantry who formed the bulk of the popula­tion. But the advent of the world’s first enduring atheist state, territorially the largest in the world, meant the exclusion of Christians from public life, the prohibition of Christian education and evangelisation, the closure of churches at official whim, and the confinement of religious activity to the performance of a liturgy remarkable for its transcendent and other-worldly mystery and power.

The First World War saw the breakup of two other Christian empires, the German and Austrian, but it also led to the resurrec­tion of Poland, whose self-understanding as the ‘Christ of the nations’ infused Christianity with messianic nationalism. At the other geographical extreme, the Easter Rising in Ireland against British rule in 1916 produced in 1922 the most devoutly Christian nation in western Europe. The re- Catholicisation of Ireland by the Ultramontane movement as part of the modernisation of a demoralised society was one of the most signal triumphs of nineteenth-century Christianisation.

The First World War also marked the beginning of the end of European hegemony with the rise of the United States as a great world power. The resulting loss of self-confidence accompanied the eclipse of the more sanguine religious liberalism of the nineteenth century, and gave a new prominence to the hitherto neglected existentialist theology of the Danish Soren Kierkegaard (1813—55), who influenced the neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth (1886-1968), the most considerable of modern Protestant theologians. The intellectual vitality of Catholicism was represented by such lay theologians as the Augustinian voluntarist Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) and the neo-Thomists Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) and Etienne Gilson (1884—1978), as of Eastern Orthodoxy by the Russian Vladimir Lossky (1903-58). Churchgoing fell between the wars where it was already weak, as the Church surrendered many of its voluntary activities in education and charity to the State, but Christianity also flourished as an adjunct to official civic religion and political conservatism, which strengthened religious prac­tice in the peasantry and middle classes and further decreased it in the urban proletariat. The Virgin’s appearance at Fatima in 1917 not only reinforced Portuguese popular religion, but gave a supernatural sanction to Catholic hostility to Communism, while a classic confrontation was the polarisation of Austrian politics in the 1920s and 1930s between a clerical government supported by a largely believing countryside and an anti-clerical Socialist administration in Vienna.

After the defeat of Germany, eastern Europe passed under Russian Communist rule, and despite rigorous persecution, at its worst in Albania where religion is officially proscribed, Christianity has shown an impressive resilience as a spiritual refuge from secular totalitarian state power, and is at its most impressive in Catholic Poland, in which the Solidarity movement is largely Catholic in inspiration, and has drawn much of its strength from the patronage of the present Polish Pope, John Paul II (b. 1920). Elsewhere, Christian experience of Communism has varied from the continuous harassment practised in Czechoslovakia to the modus vivendi achieved after great suffering in Hungary. The Catholic Uniat Churches of Russia and Rumania were forced by the Communist authorities in 1946 and 1948 to renounce the authority of Rome.

In western Europe, the Christian contribution to post-war reconstruction came primarily through the Christian Democratic parties, which combined a modernising and moderately reforming influence with a commitment to religious tradition. Their following was concentrated in classes and regions of persisting Christian strength: strong in Brittany, Flemish Belgium and the Rhineland, weak in such heartlands of nineteenth­century anti-clericalism as Belgian Wallonia and the Italian Red Romagna. There was, however, a lightening of such anti-clerical hostility in France and Austria, as Catholicism became less wholly identified with the political Right. There was also a marked eclipse of the four-hundred-year-old antagon­ism between Protestants and Catholics, and of that spirit of denominational rivalry which had so sustained the church revivals of the nineteenth century. A new ecumenical spirit among Protestants deriving from the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference in 1910 bore fruit in the formation of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948, while the decline of old sectarianisms encouraged church reunions like the amalgamation of the sundered branches of Scots Presbyterianism in 1929 and of English Method­ism in 1932.

These changes coincided, however, in the 1960s with the subversion of traditional religious values by a newly affluent neo­pagan mass culture, hedonist, consumerist and materialist, leading to the individualisation and disintegration of the loyalties of Christian as well as Socialist blocs of collective practice and opinion, and to the widespread adoption of permissive moral norms and a much sharper decline in church­going. This revolution was given a kind of sanction by the vulgarisation of the psychoanalytic theory of the Jewish-born Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who dismissed religion as an illusion connected with personality disorder and sexual repression, though a more favourable view, of the imaginative power of primordial religious archetypes, informed the writings of Carl Jung (1875-1961). The impact of secularisation has, however, been very uneven, and has been influenced by every local circumstance of religious and political tradition. De-Christianisation has been most marked in those parts of Europe in which the Church was already weak: thus the largely Communist, under­churched former latifundia of southern Portugal remain much less religious than the small peasant proprietors of the north, while at the other extreme of Europe, western Norway preserves a pietist tradition against secularist Oslo. Sweden offers the contrast of a Church establishment embracing almost the whole population with one of the lowest percentages of churchgoers in Europe, while in England, in which the largest single body of regular worshippers is now a Roman Catholic one of largely Irish descent, a Church of England establishment survives, to give a general sanction to civic and folk religion and to act as an institutional framework for warring church parties, Protestant and Anglo-Catholic, conservative and liberal. There are constitu­tional Christian monarchies in the Low Countries, Spain and Scandinavia, and religious behaviour remains a significant feature of the Eves of some of the wealthiest and best-educated sections of European society, as well as of some of the poorest and least literate.

In other ways, the picture is a very mixed one. Traditional Christian attitudes continue to influence human relations at every level, but in the specific matter of regulating sexual mores by Christian laws, most of Europe has ceased to be Christian. Science and medicine may have diminished the importance of certain traditional consolations of religion, and, less rationally, shaken belief in the possibility of miracles; but scientists and doctors are not noticeably less believing than the professional classes from which they come. If heavily urbanised populations are cut off from the Christianised calendar of the agricultural year, the widely varying levels of religiosity from city to city are less a consequence of a uniform experience of urbanisation than of the equally varying degrees of religious practice in their respective surrounding countrysides.

For all the complexities of these new developments, however, there has been a perceptible weakening of Christian institutions, a displacement of religious commitment from public allegiance to private conviction, and a softening of the terrors of a properly Christian belief in sin, Satan, hell and judgement. Not that European man is more ‘rational’ than his forebears, but his favourite superstitions seem remoter from Christianity. Even such bastions of the faith as Ireland have seen an erosion of belief and practice, especially among the young, and most of the statistical indexes, which speak of an ageing religious population, indicate a still further future decline. The Church’s response has not been encouraging. The recent experi­ments, both Protestant and Catholic, with radical theologies and liturgies, have attracted Christian minorities, but they often appear to amount to an internal desacralisation of religion, which has disoriented and disheartened traditional worshippers and made no significant conversions from among the ranks of unbelief. The only major expanding forms of Western European religious life in the age of ecumenism have been upon the fringes, among the ecstatic Pentecostal or conservative revivalist and ‘fundamentalist’ Protestant sects, especially those with a strong apocalyptic message; various imported, often adapted or syncretic, oriental religions; and the Muslim faith professed by Pakistani, Algerian and Turkish immigrants into Britain, France and Germany.

Against so pessimistic a conclusion it might be said that the roots of European Christianity lie deep, and it has been possible here to give only the most fleeting glimpse of the splendours and miseries of the Christian legacy: enshrined in the lives and works of princes and peasants, doctors and confessors, saints and scholars, warriors and persecutors, liberators and blood-stained villains and martyr-heroes; the innumerable company of all blessed and faithful people, and a good many less faithful; men and women of every sort and condition, a goodly portion of that multitude which no man can number who have bowed the knee at the name ofjesus. In the present ahistorical climate, their witness, in all its variety, is discounted, and so is the religion which, for good and ill, has been at the heart of European history. But it is now no longer clear that it will remain so. Having been during most of its two-thousand-year history predominantly the refig­ion of Europe, Christianity is now showing a much greater vitality in former mission fields in the Third World, and it now seems more likely to survive in Europe under Communism than in the increasingly sceptical, pluralist and secular societies west of the Iron Curtain. There, perhaps, like its Founder, it may have to die before its rise again.