Walter McDougall’s book and Creed & Culture highlighted by Mark Bauerlein

Uncovering the Christian Past: New and Notable Books

Creed & Culture is a new press. I advise readers to get on its mailing list. A new and impressive offering is The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe, by Walter A. McDougall. I include it in this list of Christian history because McDougall has chapters on “The Biblical Origins of European Civilization,” faith and reason in the medieval millennium, the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Reformation (he dislikes the term counter-reformation). To McDougall, “historians cannot understand past cultures without delving into what they considered holy.” The culture and politics of the whole medieval era were shaped by the Roman Catholic Church, he says, and the early modern era, including the Enlightenment, was shaped by the Protestant Reformation. In the medieval world, the Church stood out as the most dynamic institution or “estate.” “The church was so diverse and mobile,” McDougall writes, “because it was the only estate a person was not born into but called into.” McDougall quotes Sts. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, describes the paintings of El Greco and Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome, and details the rise of the Jesuits, whom “Protestants hated and feared.” The election of Pope Paul III in 1534 started a reform within the Vatican that was long overdue, which the Council of Trent formalized. Throughout the turmoil, “Europe’s culture not only survived but thrived.” When he gets to the present, the author is not so sure; he quotes Elie Wiesel, Solzhenitsyn, and others who speak of the decline of the West. Western civilization is a gift to humanity, he believes, but it may not last. 

Continue reading . . .