The Cube and the Cathedral

Why do Europeans and Americans see the world so differently? Why do Europeans and Americans have such different understandings of democracy and its discontents in the twenty-first century? Why is Europe dying, demographically? George Weigel offers a penetrating critique of 'Europe's problem'
and draws out its lessons for the rest of the democratic world. Contrasting the civilization that produced the starkly modernist 'cube' of the Great Arch of La Defense in Paris with the civilization that produced the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Weigel argues that Europe's embrace of a narrow and cramped secularism has led to a crisis of civilizational morale that is eroding Europe's soul and failing to create the European future.
Reminding us that history is read most acutely through cultural, rather than political or economic, lenses, Weigel traces the origins of 'Europe's problem' - which first became lethally evident in World War I - to the atheistic humanism of nineteenth-century European intellectual life: setting in motion an historical process that eventually produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cold War - and, most ominously, the Continent's depopulation, which is worse today than during the Black Death.
Yet many European leaders continue to insist - most recently, during the debate over a new European consititution - that only a public square shorn of religiously informed moral argument is safe for human rights and democracy. Precisely the opposite is true, Weigel suggests: the people of the 'cathedral' can give a compelling account of their commitment to everyone's freedom; the people of the 'cube' cannot.
Can there be any true 'politics' - any true deliberation about the common good, and any robust defence of freedom - without God? Geeorge Weigel makes a powerful case that the answer is 'No' - because, in the final analysis, societies and cultures are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.
George Weigel offers Europeans a profound analysis of the moral and cultural decline of their culture and their society. Europe's collapse of morale, its power-deficit, and its depopulation have profound implications for the future of Western Civilization, not only in Europe, but also in America, Australia and throughout the world.
Geroge Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian and one of America's most distinguished public intellectuals, is the author of the acclaimed international bestseller, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II. Three of his other books - Soul of the World, The Truth of Catholicism, and Letters to a Young Catholic - are also published by Gracewing.