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George Weigel

The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God Paperback – February 28, 2006

by George Weigel (Author)

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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? 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, George Weigel argues that Europe's embrace of a narrow secularism has led to a crisis of morale that is eroding Europe's soul and threatening its future -- with dire lessons for the rest of the democratic world. Weigel traces the origins of "Europe's problem" to the atheistic humanism of the nineteenth-century European intellectual life, which set in motion a historical process that produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cold War -- and, most ominously, the Continent's de-population, which is worse today than during the Black Death. And yet, many Europeans still insist -- most recently, during the debate over a new EU constitution -- that only a public square shorn of religiously-informed moral argument is safe for human rights and democracy. Precisely the opposite, Weigel suggests, is true: 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 defense of freedom -- without God? George Weigel makes a powerful case that the answer is "No," because, in the final analysis, societies are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.

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224 pages
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February 28, 2006
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5 x 0.56 x 8 inches
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9780465092680
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978-0465092680
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Editorial Reviews

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"Sheds light on the history of the twentieth century for everyone."

About the Author

George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center and one of America's leading public intellectuals. The first volume of his biography of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope, was a New York Times bestseller, and his writing appears regularly in a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal. He lives in North Bethesda, Maryland.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0465092683
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (February 28, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780465092680
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0465092680
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.56 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,092,223 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,078 in Religious Philosophy (Books)
- #2,834 in Political Philosophy (Books)
- #4,079 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality

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George Weigel

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George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.

From 1989 through June 1996, Mr. Weigel was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he led a wide-ranging, ecumenical and inter-religious program of research and publication on foreign and domestic policy issues.

Mr. Weigel is perhaps best known for his widely translated and internationally acclaimed two-volume biography of Pope St. John Paul II: the New York Times bestseller, Witness to Hope (1999), and its sequel, The End and the Beginning (2010). In 2017, Weigel published a memoir of the experiences that led to his work as a papal biographer: Lessons in Hope — My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II.

George Weigel is the author or editor of more than thirty other books, many of which have been translated into other languages. Among the most recent are The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God (2005); Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church (2013); Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches (2013); Letters to a Young Catholic (2015); The Fragility of Order: Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times (2018); The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020); and Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (2021). His essays, op-ed columns, and reviews appear regularly in major opinion journals and newspapers across the United States. A frequent guest on television and radio, he is also Senior Vatican Analyst for NBC News. His weekly column, “The Catholic Difference,” is syndicated to eighty-five newspapers and magazines in seven countries.

Mr. Weigel received a B.A. from St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and an M.A. from the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto. He is the recipient of nineteen honorary doctorates in fields including divinity, philosophy, law, and social science, and has been awarded the Papal Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, Poland’s Gloria Artis Gold Medal, and Lithuania’s Diplomacy Star.

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jaimeshawn

Interesting

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 4, 2014

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I was curious about this book: Much of what I see as the suicidal tendency in the Western Culture (American and European) I usually attribute to economics. (i.e. Demographic suicide: Young people do not marry and have children when there are no economic opportunities to sustain a family; Political suicide: Instead of supporting the military and legal power of the state, like middle class people do, a society of poor people tolerates and participates in lawless behavior; Social suicide: People that have no opportunity to have a middle class life, do not value the personal self-restraint and personal courage that defines 'civilization' as opposed to idolizing people like... like... the Kardashians.) So my view is that the collapse of the West is due to the collapse of the middle class, or in other words, poor people act like poor people.

Weigel's argument goes a little further in that he looks at why the upper-class supports policies that impoverish and decimate the middle class. Starting with Nietzsche's 'God is Dead', he argues that the the World Wars and current demographic suicide are the result of the Atheistic Humanism and that the span of destruction from the beginning of WWI in 1914 to the fall of the Soviet’s in 1989 merely is the most flamboyant part of a suicide that is sweeping across the continent today, with birth rates so far below replacement levels that the economic and political collapse of those counties is inevitable.

So is the West collapsing because of the Anti-Human Faith of the elites, or is it collapsing due to their greed and incompetence?

I think to truly answer the question, one would have to try to correlate economic growth with the beliefs of the upper class and somehow separate that from their greed and incompetence: That might be a truly impossible project.

Somehow the West grew out of the poverty and tyranny that has characterized most of the human experience, and somehow it has gotten to the point where the number of peasants in Europe is currently falling at a rate not seen since the arrival of the Black Death, but is it because of dependence and lack of opportunity? Or is it merely a larger example of what the mismanagement that English upper class inflicted on the Irish in the 1840s and 50s, or that the rulers of Europe did to Germany in the 30 years war?

I do know from having a nephew that is a card carrying member of Atheistic faith, that he really objects to considering it a faith, which is a sign of the parochialism and intolerance of that faith. An intolerance that claimed 100 million lives in its incarnation as Marxism, and intends to exterminate 90% of the people on the planet now, in its incarnation as 'Sustainability'. With an elite infected with such a faith, I expect the future for most people to be bad.

6 people found this helpful

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C. Rodriguez

Lay Catholic Reviews Weigel's Cube & Cathedral

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 22, 2005

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Weigel is one of my favorite authors, this is the fourth of his books that I have bought and read.

The seeds for Cube & Cathedral have already been sown in Weigel's book 'Letters to a Young Catholic', but are greatly expanded and footnoted in this latest endeavor.

The book delivers exactly what it promises, an analysis of how and why Western Europe is distancing itself from its Christian Roots and what the consequences will be. The book addresses recent events that have been extensively covered in newspapers, and also harkens back hundred of years to philophers whose ideas helped make us who we are today.

The tone of the book is prophetic, in the sense it warns on what will happen if we turn away from God. Weigel also offers hope, for the role each of us must play to turn our world to Christ. I got an overwhelming sense of Salvation History in reading this book, Church Time is slow and deliberate, giving each of us many chances to influence history. However, I also see how my role is a small one because there are so many of us throughout space and time also created by God, also called to holiness and saintliness.

The final hope offered is the incredible impact the World Youth Day agenda is having, in preparing the world for a rebirth in Christianity.

The book is a quick read, wide margins and ample spacing between lines. It lends itself to rereading and highlighting of ideas that can be used over and over again in daily converstaion with others.

20 people found this helpful

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The volume of a cube is greater than that of a cathedral

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 30, 2005

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The allegory in this book is quite simple, perhaps too much so: the "cathedral" contains the people of Catholic Christendom, while the "cube" consists of the secularists who reject any notion of god or objective moral order. The dwellers of the cathedral are responsible for giving societal arrangements meaning and offer hope and motivation for the future. The cube dwellers on the other hand, are responsible for the current malaise in Europe, offer no timeless solutions to societal problems, and have absolutely no vision for the future.

The author's thesis is not only provocative but a grand one, considering how much time it would take to substantiate it with sound research and historical analysis. One will not find such in this small book, for if it were included, the size of the book would increase beyond all measurable bounds. Indeed, there are many statements in the book that are completely unsubstantiated, that cite only anecdotal evidence, or that illustrate that the author does not have a command of basic knowledge of statistical sampling. One of these is the claim that Americans, after 9/11 and the Iraq War, became aware that they have a "Europe problem." How many Americans are aware of this? How does the author know that this is the case? What statistical sampling technique has he used? And how does he know that the United States and western Europe have "different visions" and that the "ideological gap" between them is based on a collection of experiences in the twentieth century that are different? Has he sampled the citizenry of all the countries involved to see if this is really the case? To what degree are they different? And again: is it statistically significant for his case in the book that one out of five Germans believed that the US was responsible for 9/11? Also, who are the European public intellectuals that are "Christophobic"? What are their names, and what writings or dialog serves as justification for labeling them as such? The list goes on, and there are also many places in the book where the author takes a swipe at other religions, such as the Islamic faith. In the latter for example, he plays on fears of terrorism in the supposed influx of Muslims into Europe. He forgets, perhaps intentionally, that terrorist Muslims are only a tiny minority of those who refer to themselves as followers of Islam.

If the European populace is indeed "Christophobic" as the author claims (again, without sound statistical evidence), perhaps there is good reason for their anxieties concerning religion. The savagery of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Thirty Years War serve as a grim reminder of the destructive power of religion. No, religion is not the cause of all the conflicts that Europeans had to endure over the centuries, but it no doubt gave courage to those who had to fight the battles. Promises of eternal rewards can act as a catharsis to those burdened with the horror of war, and can, perhaps without intending to do so, make it easier for wars to get off the ground. Individuals convinced that they are mortal and that there is no afterlife might perhaps be extremely reluctant to sacrifice themselves, knowing that this life, with both its vicissitudes and its joys, is the only one they have.

The author asks the reader to consider which group of people, those in the cathedral or those in the cube, are more able to offer a more stable and contented society, and one that is looks to the future with hope. Which culture, he asks, has a greater likelihood of protecting human rights, of defending "legitimate" pluralism, and of justifying morally the democratic project? He offers no surprises to the reader that it is the former that are better qualified, and he does not see any reconciliation or intersection morally or ideologically with the latter. Only "metaphysical boredom" will be result of dwelling in the cube he concludes. Occupiers of the cube will not have any sense of obligation to others, and will not defend their freedoms or meet their spiritual and physical needs.

Without a more detailed characterization of what constitutes a cube dweller, since the author did not offer a suitable one in the book, one can only make educated guesses as to their temperament and philosophical outlook. A reading of European literature does offer some evidence of the malaise and "metaphysical boredom" that the author has put forward as his main thesis. But a cube dweller could also mean a person whose secularism is not the result of cynicism or militant rejection of the religious worldview. It could mean an individual who finds the prospect of eternal life itself extremely boring, even terrifying. Such an individual understands that religion is to be rejected because it is superfluous and no longer needed for life's motivations and joys. Cube dwellers can no longer worship a deity because they can no longer believe that they can offer anything to such a deity. They have rejected the Christian god as they have rejected the gods of the Greeks: they have outgrown such notions and have turned their attention to the celebration of life and all the multiplicities it has to offer. They indulge themselves in the excitement of scientific discovery. They dance with joy in hearing of the latest technological developments, astounding as they are in the twenty-first century. Their enthusiasm for existence spills over in their treatment, tolerance, and deep respect for their fellow human being, knowing that others hold to possibly different worldviews, but who understand that conclusions reached are the result of different histories of neuronal synapses. Most importantly, they are quite willing to share their space in the cube with those who occupy the cathedral, but also the synagogue, the mosque, and the temple. There is ample volume in the cube to accomodate them.

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Jimenez

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 26, 2018

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Excellent and arrived as described

recluse

カソリックの反撃

Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on September 15, 2006

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タイトルはすっかり多文化主義の流れに飲み込まれたパリの二つの建物を現しているようです。そこにヨーロッパの緩慢なる自殺への流れを著者は見出しています。読んでみて気がつきましたが、これは、現代のユーロ統合に向かうヨーロッパに対するカソリックの神学者による異議申し立ての作品です。著者は現代の欧州統一の底流に潜むキリスト教忌避の動きを厳しく批判します。啓蒙主義の一面にのみ目をむけ、キリスト教の論理の中に内在している民主主義への萌芽とその歴史への貢献を無視する現代欧州の１９６８年の子供たちがその批判の対象となります。この視角は新鮮なものです。啓蒙主義の延長線上にあったものは、精神的な価値の没落とboredomだったというわけです。futureと題された章で、著者が予想する３つの未来のシナリオは、恐るべきその論理的な帰結を明らかにし読者に思考を促します。決して本質的な意味で、relativistやscepticistになることもできない私のような日本人にとっても、ここに繰り広げられる対立の構図はすさまじいものです。それに比べて、日本のメディアで紹介されるユーロの姿はなんと薄っぺらいことか。

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