Christianity and the West―Criticizing Lawrence Auster

“It was Christianity that became Europe’s unifying ideology and inspired figures from Charlemagne to Columbus.”

In 2005, the late conservative writer Lawrence Auster published a response to one of his critics. The critic argued that Christianity had added little or nothing of value to Western culture. Auster disagreed. Since this specific question is seldom discussed, the dispute seems worth revisiting even 20 years after the fact.

Auster’s challenger advances roughly the argument one might expect, highlighting Western civilization’s beginnings in Greece and Rome and casting the Dark Ages as a regressive interlude of Christian obscurantism. The Renaissance’s subsequent rediscovery of the classical heritage is what made European civilization great again, he says. In that sense, his thesis is not too original. He does, however, make a few points which seem to cast fresh light on parts of Western history. Thus, he muses that “Shakespeare is littered with [references] to Jove, Jupiter, Niobe, Nero, Alexander, but very few to any Christian heroes.” True enough, though Christianity certainly belongs to the “Elizabethan World Picture” which so frequently suffuses the Bard’s work.

Auster’s rebuttal is more interesting, especially in light of historian Henry Bamford Parkes’s 1969 volume The Divine Order, a chronicle of European history. Auster would include The Divine Order in a “reading list” of “personal favorites and recommended books” the following year. Despite this endorsement, some of his arguments run counter to Parkes’s account of European history.

Auster emphasizes that the path to the relative flourishing of the High Middle Ages was paved by religiously inspired military action: “the Catholics of Europe, led by the Carolingians, were able to drive back the Arab Moslem invaders from France in the early 8th century, subdue the gangster realm of the Avars in Eastern Europe, and rescue the Papacy from the barbarian Lombards.” Auster’s mention of the Muslim invasion is problematic since Islam is partly based on Christianity. Would a similar creed have emerged among the Arabs, and inspired similar invasions, if Christianity had never existed? Perhaps, perhaps not.