The Tap Root of Western Civilisation

 Even new atheists now are beginning to recognise that the Christian ethos and tradition are what hold the West together and are also a bulwark against the forces of the barbarian and the alien.  It might be too late.  With the ongoing revolution in thought initiated by the Enlightenment, but with dark roots much further back, Western culture has become a vacuum into which forces such as Islamic belief are rushing.  Neither is the West any longer capable of protecting its physical borders.  

Some New Atheists want a cultural Christianity, whereby the transcendental truths of  the Church are mimicked and simulated while we pridefully maintain the claims of the Fall - Man actually neither believes or needs God.  A bit like marrying a person you do not love to have children, ending in divorce, faking religious faith does not work.  People will pick it up as phoney.  This perhaps has been the problem of the liberal Christianity of Western European churches.  And if you simply claim the ethos and the civilisational benefits, you have no justification for doing so, whereas Islam can point to its claimed transcendental justification.  Every culture and civilisation is based upon transcendental claims, albeit prior to the conversion of Rome these pagan metaphysical fundaments of cultures were parochial and culturally located.  With the conversion of the Empire the universal claims of the Church became the tap root of the world empire.

Therefore something changed with the Edict of Milan.  The very reason for persecuting the Church was its universal claim and rejection of local gods.  All of humanity is made in the image of the same God.  The particular and the universal, the problem of the One and the many is solved.  The solution is in the Incarnation.  Sin and death are defeated for all of humanity.  Each person has an eternal future and potential for theosis if they freely accept salvation.

This is the tap root of Western civilisation as well as being a true universal belief.  We can see political liberalism and philosophical humanism as being related to the Church teaching that man is free to choose (Mary's assent to the Incarnation and every free conversion and baptism since) and is made in the image of God and can be transformed into the likeness through Christ.  The problem with the West is that these beliefs rooted in the Church became detached from faith and led to the selfish individualism, the hubristic scientism and the secular vacuity of the modern and post-modern West.

The West has a tap root of the Church, but a cultural inclination to revolution.  Going back as far as the Schism, we see an assertion of rebellion and innovation in the seizure of power by the Papacy and the unliteral alteration of the Nicene Creed.  This seed of revolution would develop through nominalist rejection of universal truths, the fascination with magic and the occult, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and atheistic materialism, leading to the disconnection of Western thought from the transcendent spiralling into the madness of post modernism, deconstruction and existentialism - politically manifesting as wokeness and transgenderism and being further developed by the Silicon Valley demonic genii, trying to find everlasting mortal life in this world.

So we must understand the West as being disconnected from the tap root and this then growing into the deformed revolutionary spirit, promoted by secret societies and political ideologies from Jacobinism to Marxism and Fabianism,  so that the West now can neither defend its civilisation or really knows what its values are - equating them to the Jacobin revolutionary non-values of the revolutionary spirit. 

This tap root though did not only feed and nourish the West.  it nourished the Near East.  The Church emerged from the Middle East through the Greek world.  This is prophesied in John's Gospel, after the Jews reject Christ:

"The Pharisees therefore said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing?  behold, the world is gone after him.  And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast: The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus.  Philip cometh and telleth Andrew:  and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus.  And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified."

John 12: 19-23

Just as the Jews reject the Messiah so the Greeks accept him through the preaching of Paul. And the Church Fathers were Greek speakers and educated as Greeks.  Culturally the Church's conquest of Latin Rome through the blood of Christian martyrs was the deep Greek theology winning the Roman Empire.  

That tap root, that first sprouted in Judea, Syria then Greece and also Egypt won the West spiritually.  And yet from 1054 incrementally the West has broken its link to its tap root.  Even the emphasis on Judaeo-Christian culture is a tacit dismissing of the Hellenistic root of the Church, because the Jews rejected Christ and chose political revolution against Rome leading to the destruction of the Temple and the end of Temple Judaism.  Rabbinic Judaism would then emerge defining itself in opposition to the Church.

The result of this revolutionary and political choice to move away from the Church is the secularism and disintegration of the West, making it unable to resist the coming demographic and cultural conquest by Islam.  This is not only demographic.  The West cannot resist the demographic change, but more seriously it has no answer to Islam's transcendental claims.  In the bizarre and topsy turvy world of woke liberalism, where we cannot define a woman and are starting to offer suicide on demand as a service, more people of European origin will find answers in the clear message of Islam.  A religion that offers a political answer without the personal transformation of repentance and theosis.  In the crazy world of the West in freefall from any transcendent sense, Islam will be something people can grab a hold on to save them from the vicious spiral of Western degeneration.  Andrew Tate is a warning.

The West's tap root though presents a very different understanding.  God is triune and the second Person of the Trinity is incarnate.  He only became incarnate through the willingness of Mary to consent, the Mother of God.  Following from this salvation lies not in conquest but a personal assent. Death is defeated and Man has the potential to be transformed into the likeness of God through grace - deification is the gift.  Islam rejects this entirely and cuts us off from the salvation offered.  If the second Person of the Trinity does not become fully man, then man cannot be saved.  It must be full incarnation.  As Saint Gregory of Nazianzus put it: "For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved."

So if the West rejects its own degeneracy and begins to be transformed by Islam, thinking it has reached transcendental truth, it will be further cut off from salvation.   Liberalism, New Atheism, secularism might soon look more like a stage, clearing the ground for the final conquest of the West and the complete detachment from its tap root.  Through its revolutionary zeal the West will have brought about its end.  The Church remains, but Western civilisation, like the First Century Jews, has chosen political revolution over salvation.