The Latin of Europe, the Germanic Europe

Rémi Brague, in his book translated into Turkish as Avrupa: Roma Yolu (Europe: The Roman Way), states that “Europe is a variable concept.” Yet this variability does not go so far as to include everyone. Therefore, although Brague says, “One is more or less European”—or precisely because he says so—he creates his own classification and states: “Even though the Protestant world seems to me as European as the Catholic world, the belonging of the Eastern world, with its Greek and Orthodox traditions, to Europe does not appear as clear as the belonging of the Latin and Catholic tradition.” Of course, this is a distinction based on religion, and it ultimately serves the definition of Europe that Brague will present. Remarkably, Brague tries to reach a definition of Europe by narrowing it, despite the European expansion and the new forms the European Union was expected to take in the early 1990s, when the book was written.

Still, these divisions represent an important step for Brague in arriving at his narrowed idea of Europe. For Brague, one might say, reaches his “core” Europe by tracing how an expanding Europe is split into dualities. Accordingly, first comes the division between the Mediterranean basin as the West and the rest of the world as the East—a division that, even if Brague does not name it as such, is in fact structured according to the borders of the Roman Empire. Within this division, another binary split follows: with the emergence of Islam, the West is divided into a Christian North and a Muslim South across the Mediterranean. Similarly, a third split occurs—this time within the initial division that resulted from the partitioning of the Mediterranean basin—leading to the division between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. Finally, the Catholic West itself is divided again, leading to a separation between the Catholic West and the Protestant North.

Brague’s effort to arrive at a narrowly defined idea of Europe through such divisions unfolds through an interesting method. In the face of all these splits, he asks, “What do we truly possess as our own?” Considering the shared humanism between the barbarian East and the Hellenized West, and the Greek philosophy inherited by the Muslim world, he argues that Greekness, Judaism—which had existed outside the Mediterranean basin since ancient times—and Christianity—which continued to exist in the East—could not be “possessions” or “properties” exclusive to Europe. Yet, “The Christian world has never been seen—neither by itself nor by other civilizations—as Greek or Jewish. The Christian world has been perceived as Roman. The Greeks themselves considered themselves Roman even during the Byzantine period.” Thus, “Europe in the narrow sense” has a quality “perhaps possessed only by itself, claimed only by itself, and indeed one that no one else has even tried to seize from it”: “This is Romanity—or, more precisely, Latinity.” In other words, as a result of the dual divisions within Europe, the only thing that could not be taken from it—on the contrary, the only thing it gave to others (to the Greeks, the Slavs, even the Ottomans)—was Romanity. Hence, Europe is the Roman way. “Even the Ottoman Empire desired Romanity.” Yet its defining trait—Latinity—was desired by no one other than Europe itself.

Romanity—or more precisely, Latinity, which was desired by no one outside of Europe and thus remains Europe’s own possession—exhibits an interesting feature, according to Brague: as we see in Kant, it is Romanity that makes both the Judaism (or, in the language of the literature, Jerusalem) that was transmitted to it, and the Hellenism (that is, Athens) that was transferred to Europe, into what they are. Those who are European “can only be ‘Greek’ and ‘Jewish’ insofar as they are first ‘Roman’.” Romanity precedes both Jerusalem and Athens. In this sense, the field through which transmission is made possible is Romanity itself.

Brague also issues a critique: “Those who place the Greek and the Jew in parallel—whether to set them against one another or to exalt them together—tend to overlook the Roman: the Romans invented nothing.” But according to Brague, this claim is false.

Moreover, he argues, it is also mistaken to defend Romanity by claiming that what Rome handed down was “law.” For there exists a Roman experience—largely ignored by philosophers until now—that carries a broader, even “universal,” value: the Roman may not have invented anything new in comparison to the Jews or the Greeks. However, they accomplished something that could rightly be called an innovation: the Romans “presented what was old for them as something new.” Thus Brague arrives at the following definition: “To be Roman is to present the experience of the old as new, and to render the old as something that renews itself through grafting onto new ground; this renewal constitutes the very principle from which new developments emerge from the old. To undergo a beginning that is a beginning anew is unique to Rome.” Therefore, if Europe—according to Nancy—comes into being like a newborn child each time, it is this Roman power to perpetually renew the old that enables the emergence of such a European idea.

On the other hand, this definition implies that there is no ancestral homeland called Europe—as Elon Musk seemed to suggest when he referred to Europe as a destination for remigration. For Romanity—although Brague himself does not exactly name it this way—is marked by a retreat from the Mediterranean under the pressure of Islam toward more inland territories, and by the act of making those lands a homeland anew. Hence Denis Guenoun, summarizing the internal divisions that shape Brague’s narrowly defined Romanity and its subsequent transformation—of course, through the mediation of the Church—into a homeland, writes: “Europe is precisely this: Romanity pushed inland (as Church and empire).”

Europe has no ancestral homeland; at most, it offers the appearance of a vague landmass within a silhouette, becoming perceptible in the dimming twilight of each new movement—or the continual figuration of a “universal” that is not truly universal, embedded within the form taken as the idea of Nancy’s gaze that sees itself seeing. As a result of this figuration, Europe perpetually reterritorializes itself. Naturally, as a consequence of this reterritorialization—this retreat from the inland sea of the Mediterranean to land—new elements emerge, such as feudal law. Yet the most significant outcome is that this very kind of feudal law ultimately spreads across the globe in the form of colonial law.

Still, Europeans, of course, will not recount this retreat from the Mediterranean—and the feudal and colonial law that emerged from it—in such terms. However, alongside Simone Weil’s denunciation of Rome—calling it, along with Israel, “a great beast”—and Brague’s criticism of Heidegger for having “reflected very little on the Roman experience, and when he did, his approach was highly negative,” Romanity and Latinity present themselves to us in a very different light within Heidegger’s thought.

According to Heidegger, behind the historical framework that Kant constructed through a cosmopolitan perspective and the idea of a “universal” history—a narrative that proceeds as Greek, Roman, and so on—lies an effort to Romanize the Greeks, which in turn distorts and transforms Greek philosophy itself. He makes similar critiques elsewhere, but more explicitly in Parmenides, Heidegger ties this transformation to imperium. Accordingly, he sees Romanity as a transformation that reshapes even the Greek notion of polis into something “political” in the modern sense—thus leading to an imperial mode of understanding it—rather than as the renewal of the old, as Brague interprets it.

Of course, Heidegger’s main concern is to identify where Greek thought—already a form of transmission—was most properly transferred. In his view, the Greco-Roman mode of thinking contains many faulty transmissions; the proper transmission, he argues, should have been Greco-Germanic. To support this claim, Heidegger draws on many concepts; however, if we are to explain his point, we must focus on alētheia and the concepts associated with it—concepts he emphasizes throughout his works.

According to Heidegger, when the Greek alētheia was Romanized—i.e., when it was transferred to Rome—it became veritas; then, under the influence of the Church during the Middle Ages, it transformed into adaequatio, rectitudo, and iustitia; and ultimately, in modernity, it took the form of certitudo. Thus, alētheia, which is often translated simply as “truth” but in Greek means “the disclosure of what is concealed,” underwent a loss of meaning. In Parmenides, Heidegger explains this loss mainly through the transformation—or transmission—experienced by the Greek pair alētheia–pseudos under the authority of imperium.

According to Heidegger, if alētheia carries a meaning akin to “truth,” it is not because it directly denotes something visible in and of itself. Alētheia signifies that which is attained only through a certain kind of openness—an openness reached by the lifting of what is concealed. However, when alētheia was transferred to Rome or Latin, it was rendered as veritas. Veritas, by contrast, signifies “certainty” or “truth” in a sense that is unrelated to the uncovering of the hidden.

Likewise, pseudos—which in Greek means “veiled” or “covered”—became falsum when transferred into Latin. Yet pseudos does not bear the connotation of “falsehood” or “error” that falsum carries.

Here, Heidegger performs a subtle maneuver by suggesting that falsum encompasses not only “false” in the propositional sense, but also what we might call the “fake”—as in “counterfeit,” such as forged currency or a fake painting. For him, these are things that can be falsified. However, this meaning more properly belongs to pseudos, since the “fake” or the “counterfeit” is an unauthorized replica of something authorized—something produced through imitation of the original. Consequently, in everything that is transmitted, a similar condition can easily be sought: being either the original or the imitation.

For Heidegger, the reason why the Greek pair alētheia–pseudos suffered this semantic loss lies in the form assumed by imperium—first as a political power, and then, as the Church came to reinterpret Greek meanings within its own ecclesia, as ecclesiastical authority. Heidegger does not treat imperium merely as a political formation peculiar to the Latins; he also thinks of it as a mode of being. To explain this, he returns to pseudos. The essence of pseudos differs between the Greeks and the Latins. The Greeks, in the end, deceive; but falsum, derived from fallere, points to “making one kneel.” And this, too, is a form of imperium: it establishes its own veritas by dragging others into falsum.

In this context, Heidegger also offers an etymology of the word imperium. According to him, imperium derives from im-parare, meaning “to establish, to make arrangements,” and from prae-cipere, meaning “to preemptively occupy something and, through this occupation, to exercise command over it”—in other words, to possess that which is occupied as territory. In short, imperium means “command, order,” and thus signifies domination. For Heidegger, the reason why the essence of imperium is “supreme command” lies precisely in this.

Heidegger thus says: “That the West today still—and now more decisively than ever—thinks of the Greek world through a Roman lens, that is, as Latin, that is, as (pagan) Christian, that is, in a Romantic, modern-European fashion, is an event that strikes at the innermost center of our historical existence. What was previously politikós, emerging from the essence of the Greek polis, began to be interpreted in a Roman manner. Since the time of the imperium, the Greek word ‘political’ has come to be understood as something Roman. Now, what remains Greek in it is only the sound,” he says, thus fundamentally opposing the Roman mode of political understanding.

These are, of course, intriguing observations. For although Heidegger, while opposing Romanity, claimed that the Greeks were more faithfully echoed not by the Latins but by the Germanic Germans, and not by Latin but by the German language, it was the Germans who, after the collapse of Rome, attempted to carry on the imperium—and, in a sense, also brought about its demise. Of course, the Portuguese and the Spanish, who—empowered by the Church—set out across the oceans to colonize others, could also be seen as versions of an imperium; as could the British, who appeared more like an imperium in their behavior than a mere monarchy; or, if one follows Hannah Arendt, the Americans, whose entire political architecture was borrowed from Romanity. But setting those aside, it was the Germans—or more precisely, the German conception of the Reich—that sought to lay claim to the Roman Empire’s political legacy as an imperium after its collapse. And even before that, the first obvious example that comes to mind is the Holy Roman Empire. Why this happened is, in a sense, tied to Romanity itself and the developments that followed its fall. That is, the form taken by the German search for empire was shaped by Europe’s internal divisions, in relation to Rome.

To briefly elaborate on this point—and if we are to speak of Brague’s narrower and more fragmented idea of Europe, the same Europe that also serves as the driving force behind the European Union—a Latin and Germanic axis emerges within the regions bounded by a Rome that has retreated inland and, in a way, made this continental character into a supposed ancestral homeland. This axis is quite particular—and excludes even countries such as Italy, which, whether as a unified nation-state or as a union of city-states like the Vatican, has never quite found its final form. Within this axis, France stands on one side, representing the Latinity of post-Roman Europe, while Germany stands on the other. France was formed by the political power of Rome; Germany, at the very least, by the ecclesiastical power that emerged from breaking away from the Roman Church.

This picture can in fact be explained through one of the internal divisions Brague identifies for Europe—namely, the Catholic–Protestant split produced by the Reformation.

Denis Guenoun, in About Europe, states that after Romanity collapsed, one of the two elements that constituted it remained intact. The Church did not collapse; on the contrary, it found itself continuing to baptize even the very barbarians who had destroyed Romanity. At a certain point in history, the two entities—imperium and ecclesia (i.e., the place of assembly)—began to interweave and reinforce one another, occupying the same imperial space. Of the two, it was the imperium that collapsed—not the Church.

As a result, following the fall of the imperium, the territories that once composed the imperial domain became fragmented and subject to redefinition. On these lands—treated as if they were ancestral homelands despite not being so—kingdoms began to emerge. Meanwhile, the Church, which continued to fulfill its ecclesiastical role, retained the power to bestow imperial authority upon kings. This led the kingdoms to inherit the political and theological unity once held by the imperium. From this point forward, it was no longer the emperor, but the king—who asserted dominion over his own land and carried ecclesiastical sanction—who became the sovereign.

However, when the Reformation emerges, and the French monarchy finds itself in a distinct position compared to other monarchies such as Spain, Portugal, or even Britain following the collapse of the imperium, the separation—or what Brague describes as a division—begins to take on a qualitative dimension. When the Reformation arises, other kingdoms are able to clearly choose their camps: Spain aligns with the Catholic camp; Britain joins the Protestant camp. But the French monarchy—emerging from the Germanic Franks who had conquered Gaul and defeated the Romanized Gauls, only to adopt the language, religion, and even culture of those they had defeated, thus becoming Latinized—although it aligns with the Catholic camp, is compelled to suppress the Protestants within its own borders and the growing tendency toward Protestantization. This pressure gives the French monarchy a distinctiveness compared to other kingdoms. France begins to acquire techniques of statehood.

French statehood is the result of suppressing the Reformation. Yet this suppression returns to France in the form of the Revolution. In short, although France continues to remain in the Catholic camp after the Revolution, it becomes capable of implementing the conditions of Protestantism—without becoming Protestant itself. It achieves this through the notion of a “nation” possessing a state—an idea implemented with the Revolution and transformed into a “universal” model. In this way, the “nation” begins to take over the ecclesiastical collective that was previously borne by the king, becoming, as it were, the Catholic counterpart of the Protestant principle cuius regio, eius religio—that is, “the ruler’s religion is the religion of the subjects.” Thus, the “nation” emerges in France as a political project inherited from Romanity.

Germany, on the other hand, had not yet reached a stage where it could form itself as a kingdom at the time Romanity collapsed. As such, it sought to organize itself as both an imperium and a kingdom—seeking approval from the Church and trying to integrate with it accordingly. Therefore, until the Reformation, Germany—or what we now call Germany—oscillated between becoming an imperium and a kingdom.

When independence from Roman Catholicism was declared with the Reformation, the newly emerging idea of the “nation” came to substitute for the ecclesiastical collective of Romanity. Germany inherited Romanity’s ecclesiastical idea, and its notion of the “nation” began as a theological concept. However, the Reformation, too, failed to unite Germany as a single “nation.” As a result, Germany developed as a set of autonomous principalities within its own territories. At the root of Germany’s fascination with the Greeks lies, in fact, this very impulse to distance itself from Romanity.

Yet when the French Revolution occurred and Germany was subsequently invaded, a new sense of German patriotism began to arise—as seen in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. Nevertheless, Germany was unable to enact a revolution (revolution, or in its fuller classical sense, deveran) that would match this patriotic sentiment. For this reason, French unification and German unification reflect two different responses to the same post-Roman trajectory. While France took shape within the framework of a “state” model, Germany consistently found itself fated to become an imperium.

Thus, behind the divergence between the Latinity of Europe and the Europe of the Germanic peoples lies the differing effects of Romanity. So, does Europe unite—or does it truly unite? In the next essay, we will explore this question through Husserl, who sought to answer it.