Athens, Rome, Jerusalem

Where do Europe’s ideas come from?

In the last lecture we saw that Europe cannot be defined by geography alone. It is largely an idea: a set of convictions about the human being, truth and power. The natural question is: where do these ideas come from?

The classic answer is that Europe was formed by the meeting of three traditions, named after three cities. The French poet Paul Valéry wrote, in a 1924 text, that “European” is any people that has passed through three influences: that of Rome, of Christianity and of Greece (paraphrased).

The cities here are symbols, not places on a map. Athens stands for philosophy and democracy. Rome stands for law and political organisation. Jerusalem stands for the biblical tradition, Jewish and Christian.

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

The relationship between these traditions was not always harmonious. At the beginning of the 3rd century, the Christian writer Tertullian, of Carthage (in today’s Tunisia), asked a question that became famous.

“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?”Tertullian, The Prescription Against Heretics, 7

Tertullian meant that Greek philosophy and Christian faith have nothing in common. History proved him both right and wrong: the two traditions quarrelled, but they also borrowed from each other.

In the 20th century, Lev Shestov (Athens and Jerusalem, 1938) and Leo Strauss (Jerusalem and Athens, 1967) saw in the tension between reason and faith the very secret of Europe’s vitality.

A heritage we use every day

The heritage of the three cities is present in our everyday lives. Romanian is a Latin language. The Civil Code of the Republic of Moldova uses terms that come from Roman law. The calendar of holidays is shaped by the Christian tradition. And words like “democracy”, “politics” and “philosophy” are Greek.

From myth to logos

In the 7th–6th centuries BC, in the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor, something new happened. Thinkers such as Thales of Miletus began to explain the world not through stories about the gods but through natural causes: what everything is made of, why earthquakes happen, how an eclipse can be predicted. This change is often called the transition “from mythos to logos”.

Logos (Gr.): word, speech, reason, ground, calculation. The common idea: a claim must have a ground that others can check. Example: “Earthquakes come from Poseidon’s anger” is a myth; “earthquakes have a cause in the earth, which we can look for” is the beginning of logos.

A myth is accepted because it is old or because an authority tells it. An argument is accepted only if it stands up to questions. Our word “logic” also comes from logos.

The transition was neither sudden nor complete: the Greeks learned geometry from the Egyptians and Babylonians and took their alphabet from the Phoenicians. What was new was their attitude: discussing openly, criticising the master’s ideas, seeking truth for its own sake.

Polis: deciding through discussion

The second Athenian invention is political.

Polis (Gr.): the city-state, a small, independent community in which citizens decide common affairs together. The words “politics” and “police” come from it.

Aristotle said that man is “by nature a political animal” (zoon politikon). And he added that man is the only being that has logos, that is, can discuss what is just and unjust (Politics, I, 2). For the Greeks, politics and reason are linked: life in the city means deciding through discussion, not by force.

In 508/507 BC, the reforms of Cleisthenes laid the foundations of Athenian democracy (demos = people, kratos = power). Citizens voted directly on laws in the Assembly (ekklesia), many offices were filled by lot, and the courts were made up of hundreds of citizen-jurors.

Isonomia and isegoria (Gr.): equality before the law and the equal right to speak in the assembly.

Pericles and those left out

The best-known praise of Athenian democracy is Pericles’ speech for the soldiers who fell in the first year of the Peloponnesian War (431 BC), recorded by the historian Thucydides.

“Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people.”Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II, 37

The text must be read carefully. “The whole people” meant only adult men with two Athenian parents. Women, slaves and foreigners settled in the city (the metics) had no political rights. It is estimated that only about 10–20% of the inhabitants of Attica could vote.

Athenian democracy was a huge invention, but also a very exclusive one. Big words (“the whole people”) are worth checking: whom do they actually include?

Socrates: thinking that asks questions

The heritage of Athens is best summed up by Socrates (469–399 BC). He wrote nothing: we know him mainly from the dialogues of his pupil, Plato. He talked with anyone in the public square (agora) and asked questions until the other person discovered that they did not know what they thought they knew.

In 399 BC, Socrates was accused of not believing in the city’s gods and of corrupting the youth. A court of 501 citizens sentenced him to death. In his defence speech, recorded by Plato, he refuses to give up philosophy to save his life.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”Plato, Apology, 38a

The paradox: the most democratic city of Antiquity condemns the man of free thinking.

Written law, in plain sight

The Romans turned the idea of justice into a legal system. Rome’s first written law, the Law of the Twelve Tables (about 450 BC), was displayed publicly in the Forum. Law was no longer a secret of priests and aristocrats: anyone could know it.

Rule of law: power is exercised according to public rules, known in advance, which also bind those who govern. Example: a fine is lawful only if the act was forbidden by a law published beforehand.

Over centuries, Roman jurists built a precise legal language: property, contract, obligation, inheritance. The jurist Ulpian (3rd century AD) defined justice as “the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due”.

A law above the laws

Influenced by Greek Stoic philosophy, the Romans also formulated the idea of a natural law, higher than the written laws of a state.

Natural law (Lat. lex naturalis): a moral order valid for all people, which reason can discover and which no written law can repeal. Example: even if a law allowed torture, it would remain unjust.

Cicero wrote in On the Republic (III, 22) that true law is “right reason in agreement with nature”. It is the same in Rome and in Athens, and no senate and no people can repeal it (paraphrased).

Citizenship: a widening circle

Athens was very strict about citizenship: a law of 451 BC granted it only to those born of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. Rome did otherwise. Roman citizenship was gradually extended: to the Italian allies, then to communities in the provinces, and in AD 212, through the edict of Caracalla (Constitutio Antoniniana), to almost all free inhabitants of the empire.

In AD 48, Emperor Claudius persuaded the senators to admit nobles from Gaul into the Senate, reminding them that Rome itself had become great by welcoming foreigners (Tacitus, Annals, XI, 24).

Citizenship protected you anywhere in the empire: the Acts of the Apostles (chs. 22 and 25) tell how the apostle Paul, a Jew from Tarsus, escapes flogging by declaring that he is a Roman citizen and asks to be tried by the emperor.

A common legal status can unite people of different languages and origins. Today, every citizen of an EU member state is at the same time a citizen of the Union.

Rémi Brague: Europe, the “Roman way”

The French philosopher Rémi Brague offers an original interpretation in his book Europe, the Roman Way (1992; published in English as “Eccentric Culture”). For him, Rome is not just one of the three sources: Rome is the way Europe relates to all its sources.

The Romans knew that they had not invented high culture: they had received philosophy, art and science from the Greeks. Later, Latin Christians knew that their religion came from the Jews. The Romans always saw themselves as heirs and transmitters, not as the origin.

Secondarity: Brague’s term for the attitude of knowing oneself to be “second”, the heir to older and more valuable sources that came from outside.

The consequence: European identity would not lie in a fixed content that Europe possesses, but in a relationship with something that came from outside. Hence Europe’s openness to what is foreign and its habit of renewing itself through “renaissances”, returns to ancient sources (the Carolingian Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance).

Reading Brague critically: the Eastern Rome too

Brague’s thesis concerns mainly Latin Europe. But the Roman Empire continued for another thousand years in the East, with its capital in Constantinople, and its inhabitants called themselves “Romans” (rhomaioi), even though they spoke Greek.

For Moldova, the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem came largely through Byzantium: through the Orthodox Church, the Greek of church books and Byzantine law. The historian Nicolae Iorga called this continuity “Byzantium after Byzantium” (1935).

The critical question: if we define Europe by the Western “Roman way”, do we not risk seeing Eastern Europe as a “second-class” Europe? Or, on the contrary, does the idea of secondarity fit very well a country like Moldova, which has received and combined influences from several directions?

Man “in the image of God”

The third tradition comes from the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) and from Christianity. Its first decisive idea is found in the very first chapter of the Bible.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”Genesis 1:27, KJV

Imago Dei (Lat.): “the image of God”. If every human being bears it, their worth does not depend on origin, wealth, power, intelligence or usefulness. A person’s worth is given, not earned.

This is the root of the modern idea of human dignity, which no state grants and therefore none can take away. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights begins with the sentence “Human dignity is inviolable” (Art. 1). The Constitution of the Republic of Moldova names, in Article 1, human dignity among the “supreme values” of the state.

A person in a coma, a newborn baby or a prisoner do not “produce” anything. Yet they have the same dignity as an Olympic champion.

Power under a higher law

The second idea concerns power. In the ancient world, the king was often considered a god or a son of the gods. In the Hebrew Bible, the king is a man like all others, subject to the law of God. The prophet Nathan publicly rebukes King David for taking another man’s wife and causing her husband’s death (2 Samuel 12).

The law demands the protection of the weak: “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19).

Christianity adds a distinction with enormous consequences. Asked whether taxes should be paid to the Roman emperor, Jesus answers: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). Political power has its own domain, but it does not rule over everything: a person’s conscience does not belong to the state.

From this distinction, after centuries of conflict, grew the separation of Church and state and freedom of conscience.

Equality: “neither Jew nor Greek”

The apostle Paul, the Roman citizen we spoke about, wrote to the Christian communities of Galatia, in Asia Minor:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”Galatians 3:28, KJV

The text did not abolish slavery, nor did it immediately change the status of women. But it states an idea that was radical for the ancient world: ethnicity, social status and sex do not determine a person’s worth. For Aristotle, some people were “slaves by nature”. For Paul, the slave and the master are equal.

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who is not a religious thinker, has stated that the egalitarian universalism from which the ideas of freedom, moral conscience, human rights and democracy were born is the direct heir of the Jewish ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love (paraphrased).

The person: from a mask to someone unique

From the theological debates of the first Christian centuries, about the Trinity and the nature of Christ, a new philosophical concept was born: the person.

In Latin, persona first meant a theatre mask, then someone’s legal role. The philosopher Boethius (6th century) gave the definition that became classic: a person is “an individual substance of a rational nature”.

Person: not just a specimen of the human species or a function in society, but someone unique and irreplaceable. Example: an employee can be replaced in their job, but as a person they cannot be replaced by anyone.

Summary: three traditions

Each tradition brought key concepts and can be found today in concrete institutions.

Inheriting is not copying

Today’s Europe is not a copy of Athens, Rome or Jerusalem. Every ancient idea has been reinterpreted, sometimes to the point of changing its meaning completely.

The biblical idea of equality before God needed almost two thousand years to become equality before the law. That road also passed through the Enlightenment, a topic we reach in the fourth lecture.

The myth of pure origins

Talk about the “roots of Europe” also has a dangerous side. It can become a myth of pure origins: the idea that Europe has an old, clean essence that must be defended against “others”.

But we have seen that each of the three traditions was formed through exchange. The Greeks learned from the Egyptians, Babylonians and Phoenicians, the Romans from the Greeks, and Christianity was born in the Near East, on the edge of the Roman Empire. None of these sources is originally “European” in the geographical sense.

In the 20th century, the ancient past also served authoritarian regimes: Mussolini claimed to revive the glory of Rome, and Nazi propaganda invented an “Aryan” past. When someone invokes “roots” in order to exclude, ask: what do they choose to remember, and what do they choose to forget?

“Christian roots” in the treaty?

In 2003–2004, when the EU states were drafting the Constitutional Treaty, some (Poland, Italy, the jurist J. H. H. Weiler in his book A Christian Europe) asked for the preamble to mention Christian roots. Others, especially France, objected, invoking secularism.

The compromise is found today in the preamble of the Treaty on European Union:

“Drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law…”Treaty on European Union, Preamble

The text acknowledges a religious inheritance without naming any religion and speaks of universal values, not of “our” values.

The genetic fallacy

The genetic fallacy: judging an idea by its origin, not by the arguments that support it. Example: “I don’t believe Pythagoras’ theorem, because Pythagoras led a strange sect.”

In discussions about Europe, the fallacy appears in two opposite forms (see opposite). A “bad” origin does not prove that an idea is wrong, and a “noble” origin does not prove that it is right. If human dignity is a value, it holds because we can justify it, not because it is old.

The conclusion: history helps us understand where values come from, but does not spare us from justifying them. That is exactly why the TEU preamble calls them “universal”.

Four possible answers

Let us return to the question of the lecture. Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union lists the Union’s values: human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights. Each tradition can claim part of the list.

For Athens: without public debate and the right to ask questions, no value can be defended. For Rome: the EU is a “community of law”, built through treaties; even the founding treaty of the European Economic Community was signed, symbolically, in Rome, in 1957. For Jerusalem: human dignity is the first value in Article 2, and all the others follow from it.

There is also a fourth answer, Brague’s: perhaps the most important heritage is not a content but the attitude of learning from others and bringing different sources into dialogue.

Build your position

Choose the tradition you consider the most influential and state your position using the scheme from Lecture 1.

Example thesis: “Jerusalem matters most, because human dignity is the foundation of all the other values in Article 2.” Now think about what a supporter of Athens would say.