For many people, we are currently in a civilizational war raged from Ukraine to Gaza which geopolitical, economics and military aspects are straightly visible. But what aren’t so seeable could reveal a reality perhaps more threatful than invasions, boycotts and terrorism. Despite the crude behavior of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, the Islam’s aggressivity and the inconsistency of woke culture, something broader and sounder menaces the West.
In many aspects it’s virtually impossible to deny the occurrence of a civilizational war today. When Samuel Huntington, remounting to Toynbee and Braudel, wrote Clash of Civilizations in the late 90’s, an array of scholars urged his retractation, almost so acidly as they cursed the End of History of Fukuyama. Huntington, distinctly than Toynbee and Braudel, focused on geopolitics, while they backed their works on religion and historical structuralism respectively. No matter their approaches, those authors commonly enhanced the cultural aspects peculiars to civilizations, Huntington taking leverage from the Cold War’ end, when evanished the ideological polarization and emerged other cleavages from the History.
However, the surge of hate and intolerance, not just inter-civilizational but also intra-civilizational, as observed in the Russian civilization between Russians and Ukrainians, Shiites and Sunnites in the Arab world and now in the main Western countries divided by polarized political and ideological opinions, poses new difficulties to categorize the origins of the almost generalized and intercrossed conflict that spreads around the Globe.
At this point we can turn the view to the most advanced civilization and try a more accurate sight on its core of values and beliefs that distinguishes it from its rivals and competitors. Those ones only can be discernible if we return in History to understand its chrysalid, the Church, since the I century A.D. Despite the Christianity was the main source of identity and allegiance of Western civilization, what shines from these two thousand years is the multicivilizational character of Christianity born from Greek and Jew civilizations and spread around the globe leaving enduring presence in all continents.
Absorbing the sophisticated philosophic elaboration from Greeks and the nomism of alliance from the Jews, the Christianity took social form in the Church to endure a long and consistent evolution culminated, not just in the Western institutions, but also and perhaps mainly, in an existential practical backed in freedom, autonomy and tolerance. Presently the religious origins of this weltanschauung are fading due the myth of the secularization of society and the laicization of State, but its roots are inescapably visible.
Conscient of the utter evil emanated from the Death of God’s Theology in the XVIII century, after the last world conflict, the West was capable not just to build more comprehensive international institutions, but, beyond this, to rescue from the darkness of its memory the nucleus of thinking and acting of its civilization, the Christianity. Germany and Italy resurge from the ashes conducted by Christian leaders, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi, and the Church retakes its protagonist role in politics, education, ethics and moral, most important, based in a well-founded ecumenism emanated from Vatican II Council.
Be Christian today is over all be conscious of this evolution that culminates in a world vision ecumenically founded in God where the common Humanity of all human being is contemplated without restrictions. The Westerns shall be ready to fight for their values, beliefs and way of life, but remembering always what they are: essentially Christians, confidents in what its civilization can and shall offer to the Humanity.