This failure does not belittle the historical significance of the first attempt to establish an EU Constitution, especially since the Convention that had drafted it was expressly dedicated, as we said, to the ‘future of Europe’. It should be added that European public opinion was in a position to follow the Convention’s works, because its plenary sessions were open to the public.

Throughout the drafting of the constitutional text to be submitted, one of the points that without a doubt attracted more attention and provided ample material for various kinds of comparisons and discussions was the one concerning the ideal foundations and the historical and cultural values which were to constitute the general and basic principles underpinning the European Constitution. On this subject matter, the text produced by the Convention summarised its aims in the first paragraph of the Preamble. It stated it had drawn inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.

In turn, article 2 of Title I of Part I of the Constitution that had been prepared stated that the EU was founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities; adding that it understood these values as common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.

One can hardly say that these formulations were the best that could be hoped for on this subject, but the need for all-round mediation and consensus on a plane where, more than elsewhere, it was necessary to achieve and exhibit a show of unanimity by the contracting parties, may have understandably produced a certain degree of vagueness and wordiness.

Still, it is not surprising that these same issues – so open in themselves to discussion and dissent – have sparked the more notable episodes of controversy or drawn the most puzzling, when not openly hostile, comments from European public opinion. Amid these episodes, for reasons that are all too easy to understand, stands out the unrelenting call of Catholic Church leaders urging Europe’s ‘Christian roots’ to be explicitly, though not exclusively, ranked among the inspiring and founding principles of the Constitution for the EU.

The Catholic world and its culture saw nothing new in this topic, as we all know. In relation to the issues of European integration, we are reminded, for example, of a speech by Alcide De Gasperi at the Paris Parliamentary Conference of 1954, delivered on 21 April. While stating ‘that at the origin of this European civilization Christianity is found’, he pointed out that he did not intend ‘by that to introduce any exclusive confessional criterion into the assessment of our history’, but only wanted to speak of the common European heritage, of that unitary morality that exalts the figure and the responsibility of the human person with its ferment of evangelical fraternity […], with its desire for truth and justice acquired from a millenary experience.

It is easy to see that these are, in substance, the reasons rolled out in successive ecclesiastical and Catholic discourses on the question of European unity from Pope Paul VI up to Pope Francis.

While not included in the failed 2004 Constitution, the debate on Europe’s ‘Christian roots’ has remained very much alive, unsurprisingly perhaps, in Catholic circles; and it is worth mentioning that in a September 2008 conference in Varigotti (Finale Ligure) monsignor Josef Clemens, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the laity, was able to present a detailed account of the Christian roots of Europe through the thoughts of Joseph Ratzinger, who represents a wellspring of ideas and observations on the subject. Pope Francis also touched on the matter, in an interview with La Croix on 17 May 2016, although the words he used actually call for even more specific attention. Those roots, he said, are grounded in ‘service’ and in the ‘gift of life’, lest we risk falling into ‘triumphalism’ and ‘colonialism’. Yet he then went on to say that ‘we must speak of roots in the plural, because there are many’; and added:

His predecessor, Pope Benedict, had spoken of Europe’s manifold legacies: Greek, Latin, Christian, and the modern age. Benedict XVI thus proved himself to be very much in line with historical literature addressing the concept of Europe and its evolution over the centuries. It is for this very reason – one may well say – that he embodies even more prominently that element at the heart of the contrast over Europe’s ‘Christian roots’ at the time of drafting a Constitution for the EU.

The truth is that on a religious level Christianity cannot be regarded as anything less than a revolution of such force as to impact the course of history and start a new age, based on the final divine Revelation, announced by the prophets and carried out through the redeeming passion of Christ. What comes into being then – Christianity, in fact – is something utterly original and unprecedented, whilst marked by a radical and inseparable unity. Its roots lie embedded in human history from its original moment of fall and damnation, but also exists beyond eternity for the Absolute that transcends all history and time, redeeming man and radically altering the pace of human history.

In this sense, the claim to Europe’s ‘Christian roots’ was quite understandable from a religious point of view, while also poignant, given the depth of meaning that characterises the Christian faith (after all, it may be hardly recalled today, but the claim to those roots did not only come from the Vatican and Catholics, but from other Christian Churches as well). From different points of view, and on different levels than a religious and Christian perspective, the issue does not arise in the same way and in the same terms, nor can it do so. If taken beyond the scope of religious faith, piety, and logic (so to speak), Christianity is wholly steeped in history and, as such, boasts its own historical genesis and its own historical complexity. Viewed under the (albeit dim and humble) light of the historian, Christianity itself stems from many roots, and slowly begins to assert itself until it becomes the dominant force of the age into which it was born, while at the same time transforming itself greatly, in terms of its militancy, but also on a doctrinal and cultural level. The history of Christian churches bears irrefutable witness to this, with its struggles, its heresies and mutual condemnations.

Shifting our discourse to this historiographical level, Christianity arises from the multiple tensions and from the cultural and social yearnings alive within the so-called Greco-Roman empire. In its most essential elements, it came about by harnessing the yearnings and tensions of the land of Jesus, of Hellenistic culture, and of imperial Roman culture. As Joaquín Navarro-Valls told in one of his 2002 speeches, the roots of the European tree grow as deep in the ground of the Golgotha hill as in that of the Acropolis and the Campidoglio. This is true, but it behoves us to remember that the Golgotha hill, mentioned by Navarro-Valls, is not only quite near, but conceptually neighbours the Temple Mount, sacred to the memory of Israel. And from that memory, that Hebrew tradition, and in that context, even geographically, the preaching of Jesus was first born and went forth. Metaphors aside, at the basis of Christianity it is impossible not to identify and not to focus on the world of the Old Testament, to borrow a Christian biblical canon.

Hellenism, Romanitas, Judaism: herewith the three-forked root of Christianity. And it is no mere root. No confession or version of the Christian idea and spirit has ever repudiated or denied the unconditional designation of the Old Testament as an essential and constitutive element of the Revelation; and both the meaning and spirit of the Word in the New Testament have always been understood as stemming from the Old Testament, in its capacity to bring fulfilment and transcendence to the Word.

This genetic and conceptual relationship establishes Judaism as, in many ways, Christianity’s primary root. While no less strong, its relationship with the Hellenistic world is far more complex. In this regard, much has revolved around the figure of Paul of Tarsus. In particular, he is credited with a process of Hellenisation of the earliest form of Christianity that is thought to have profoundly changed its spirit to an extent that many far more authoritative theologians and historians believe Paul to have been the true founder of Christianity, which then developed throughout history. Without going as far as that, Paul’s mediation between Christian innovation and the Hellenistic world is completely out of the question. More important, however, is the relationship that developed between Christian patristics, both Greek and Latin, and the Hellenic world. Above all, it was Platonism (both in its Middle Platonic and Neoplatonic versions) that provided the thought and theology of Christianity with the categories and ideas of which it felt the need to elaborate conceptually and systematise, that is, to sort and organise within a system, the elements of the Revelation and of the nascent Christian tradition.

Between the second and fifth centuries the Christian world underwent a process of extraordinary importance in the moral and intellectual history of Christianity not only as a religious confession, but also as a centuries-long primary element of the Mediterranean world and, for a much longer time, of the European world. And this process can be appreciated even more when one thinks of that far-from-irrelevant strain of patristic thought, which condemned this Christian appropriation from the pagan world as being an unworkable contamination of truth with falsehood; yet, in its later transition from the professed incompatibility between Christianity and pagan culture to the development of its own thought, it appears to be far from averse to acquiring and utilising doctrines and models derived from ancient philosophy.

In actual fact, it fulfilled a historical need to conceptually strengthen the new wealth of Christian ideas rather than a mere desire or a need for cultural legitimacy. And the fact that the perception of this historical necessity was dealt with by referencing Platonic thought is, once again, an element replete with great historical significance. It meant that what had been constructed in the Hellenic world was truly an ‘everlasting purchase’; it had been the acquisition of something – simply said – not strictly limited only to its heyday, but whose intrinsic value rendered it susceptible to a never-ending actuality: after all, this ties in with the hallmarks of that entire civilisation of which even Platonism was an expression.

This is not the only reason why the importance of the meeting between nascent Christian culture and tradition and Greek philosophy (indeed, such a meeting had already occurred in the Jewish tradition) should be emphasised. In fact, the reasoning for this meeting, provided by the Christian writers who carried it through, should be singled out as a distinguishing element here. Even in Greek thought – they said – there were truths to be sought, to be found, and which had to be appropriated. They were truths engendered by that ‘seminal’ logos, spermatikòs, by those presences of the divine in creation, which – as ‘seeds of truth’ – men may seize upon randomly, sketchily, ecstatically, and inconsistently with their thought. This had occurred especially in the case of some Hellenic thinkers, whose seeds could therefore be picked to the benefit of the conceptual work, of which by now the need was felt.

In the way that the seeds thus picked were understood in relation to the Christian doctrine of the logos, or in the way that Christians would understand and define the logos, the divergences of patristics between the second and the fifth centuries were a great many, also on account of the intrinsic and organic relationship, always reasserted, between logos and Trinity. From the viewpoint that interests us here, the question is not confined to the Christian sphere. The discourse on the logos was an ancient one in Hellenic thought, and was not unknown even to Jewish tradition during the phase of closer ties with Hellenism, if not all-out Hellenisation, undertaken by some of its most important personalities such as Philo of Alexandria with his Hellenistic Judaism. What is worth emphasising here is that, throughout the developments ranging from Stoicism, to Middle-Platonism, to Neo-Platonism, to patristics, the idea of a sapiential tradition is hereby consolidated, bearing the most authentic values of being and living that will go on to spawn a great number of remarkable sequels in European history up to the modern age.

The roots of Christianity are, therefore, complex and multifarious with their three strands: Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman (three elements that, if examined, would also reveal multifarious roots). Their multiplicity and complexity also render simplistic many traditional notions, according to which Christianity acquired its religious genealogy from Judaism, its methodology and a large part of its conceptualisation from Hellenism, and its legal and institutional sense from Romanitas. It should go without saying that bilateral relations are not the issue here. In each and every one of those derivations it is always the whole pre-Christian body of Christianity that engages with the full gamut of the Christian spirit and of Christian thought. Hence, it is against the backdrop of this all-encompassing relational whole that the individual elements of Christianity hailing from the pre-Christian world must be measured and construed.

Derivations, roots: when all is said and done, the question remains that no derivation or root, however more exceptional or more intense it could be, would detract one iota from the creative originality, the disruptive novelty, the revolutionary inversion of values, or the global otherness of Christianity, in the guise it took between the first and second century, if set against the ancient world of Judaism, Hellenism, and Romanitas. Such was the magnitude of its originality, novelty, inversion, and otherness that, already between the third and fourth centuries Christianity had reached the status of a global and inevitable alternative to the past. In other words, it appeared as the driving force in a world that was experiencing profound changes already in the near future. And soon it would be for all to see what sheer energy that triumphant force carried within itself, with its ability to actively and decisively shape history, while the twilight of the ancient world was becoming more dramatic by the day, bringing about a widespread and ruinous collapse both in the material legacy of its civilisation and in its political-social, cultural, institutional, and legal structures.

In this sphere Europa/Europe was also known as a mythological name (the former) and as a geographical name (the latter). Its mythological meaning refers to the beautiful maiden, daughter of Oceano and Teti, who was snatched by Zeus in the form of a white bull. As the legend goes, the girl was abducted in Phoenicia, from whence the marauding god carried her away to Crete on his back, and here their union would be consummated. Some authors attach an allegorical meaning to this myth, among the most famous in ancient Greece: the abduction suggests that civilisation is relocated from East to West, just as the beauty of the abducted girl is likened to the superior value of civilisation that is brought from Phoenicia to the Greek island of Crete. While the allegory is suggestive, it is all too clear that it bears more resemblance to an imaginative makeover of an ancient fable by a modern mind.

In fact, the etymology and origin of the name indeed point to a Phoenician root. Their word ereb would have described the lands to the west of their Syrian heartland. Hence, Europe would have been the name given to the Western land or lands, and by extension would have applied to the West in general (by the way, even the name Asia, in the opposite sense of East, is thought to be of Phoenician origin or, in any case, borrowed from another Semitic tongue). Later scholars have questioned the Phoenician origin of the word, and did not rule out its Greek origin. For sure, it crops up in Hesiod in the eighth century BC, but again as a mythological name lacking geographical reference. It is hard to say when it acquired its topographical meaning. It makes an appearance again from the fifth century BC onward, in Ionian geographers, and since then it is possible to chart, albeit with some difficulty, the course of its geographical career.

It is quite certain that the name initially described certain regions of Greece: Thrace and central Greece in contrast to the Peloponnese and the Greek islands. The word caught on swiftly, encompassing both westward to the Iberian peninsula, and eastward to the Black Sea, following the routes of Greek expansion across the Mediterranean. And soon enough those same Ionian geographers end up by designating the lands north of the Mediterranean as Europe.

True, the term still retains a certain vagueness. Meanwhile, even though geographical knowledge improved thanks to the accounts of travellers, as well as the campaigns and endeavours of the Roman armies, fleets and imperial administrations up to the Rhine and the Danube, and beyond to Britain, by the end of the age of antiquity, however, actual knowledge of the European continent was altogether patchy and, to a large extent, inaccurate. In the Mediterranean, the European border was quickly identified with the Pillars of Hercules (ie, the Strait of Gibraltar), to the west. To the east it was the river Phasis (today called Rioni) in the Transcaucasian region, and more specifically in west...