The key to our civilisation

Wednesday, 31st March 2010

The Chinese have recognised Christianity’s importance in Western culture, says Cardinal George Pell, so why don’t we?

Last month, Melbourne was visited by a plague of atheists angrily rejecting an absence. They probably gave a boost to theism. In 1983 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said the principal cause of the evils of the 20th century was that ‘Men have forgotten God’.

The consequences have been significant also in the West. When human beings are no longer made in God’s image, they become simply the highest form of animal. With no eternal destiny there is no danger of judgement in the afterlife for our wrongdoings. As Czeslaw Milosz has pointed out, ‘a true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death — the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged’.

Calls by some to reject all religions have been amplified in the wake of Islamist terrorism. But not all religions are the same. Different faiths produce very different societies, as the Chinese specialists now realise. Christopher Dawson argued that the biggest mistake that radical secularists have made over the last two centuries is to believe that religion is merely ‘a secondary phenomenon, which has arisen from the exploitation of human credulity’. It is impossible to understand the history and triumph of the West without Christianity.

Teaching philosophy, history and English literature, in solid rather than debased forms, is essential to passing on the Western heritage. Children should be edged towards considering the big questions: is there truth? what is goodness? can we believe in beauty? Knowledge is indispensable but it is never enough by itself. We need to represent God and the insights about how we should live, which come from recognising our shared human nature. Christians need to challenge intellectually the many agnostics of goodwill to face up to the absence of alternatives.

Teaching the foundations of Western civilisation is not an intellectual or aesthetic luxury. It is essential to building strong communities and to ensuring that places like Australia remain just and decent societies.

George Pell is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. This is adapted from his remarks at the launch of the Institute of Public Affairs’ Foundations of Western Civilisation Program in Melbourne last week.