Christianity in the making of Europe

pp. 67-82

in: Gérard Delanty, Formations of European modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Christianity was not originally European but Asiatic and its origins were in Judaism, The oldest known Christian church is in Jordan. Yet it was to become the most characteristically European feature of the civilization that followed in the wake of the Roman Empire. The Christian church did not see itself as European as such but universal. It was not until the separation of the Roman and Byzantine traditions of Christianity from 1054 that the equation of the former with Europe, understood as the Occident, became established. For centuries Europe was more or less equated with Christianity. Although based on a universalistic belief system that itself was not specific to Europe but global, Christianity was an integral part of European civilization. Even the secular and republican societies that were to develop in Europe maintained links with Christianity, which adapted in different ways to modernity and to the secularization that it brought.