The Three Cultures

The origin of Europe is, fundamentally, a combination of the Mediterranean eros and Indo-European reason, of the Orthodoxy and Catholicism of the Southeast and the Protestantism of the Center-North. As such, it must forge a fraternity of the matriarchal and the patriarchal, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, of the heart and of reason. At the center of virtue is the mediation of polar contrasts: North and South, cold and warmth, abstraction and passion.

A true European democracy would have to remediate the disjunction between the liberal Northwest and the communitarian Southeast. However, for the time being, the pax europea has only managed to achieve the peace of the euro as the common currency, and at a high cost. This approach focuses on the mercantile aspect of abstract reason, which is typically capitalist and is accurately represented by Indo-European reason, necessary yet insufficient. With this reason, we are again witnessing the triumph of Athens at the expense of Crete and Rome, as the German thinker Ulrich Beck has noted.

Crete is the birth and nationalism; Athens is reason and internationalism; Rome is Christianity and an open universalism, which is projected as the spiritual Ecumene and as moral ecumenism.

At present, the European conflict between North and South is reproducing an old struggle between liberal Athens and Mediterranean Crete—a struggle that, today, would be paralleled on higher altitudes between the Germanic Berlin and the Latin Paris. The only resolution for this conflict lies in the mediation between the extremes, which proceeds at once dialectically and democratically. In a word, co-implicatively.