The Perennial Thirty Years’ War. LEQS Discussion Paper No. 129/2018 February 2018

Carlsson, Ulrika (2018) The Perennial Thirty Years’ War. LEQS Discussion Paper No. 129/2018 February 2018. [Discussion Paper]

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Abstract

My task in this paper is to alert the reader to a culture war that is raging among us right here in Europe. This is not a war between religious fundamentalism and Enlightenment, nor between nationalism and global solidarity. It is a war we can think of, in Kierkegaardian terms, as the conflict between an aesthetic and a moral approach to life. But for the now I would like to present it in more concrete, historical terms, as the clash between the spirits of two cultural movements or institutions that have coexisted in Europe for five hundred years, not always peacefully. What Kierkegaard called ‘the aesthetic’, I see embodied in Catholicism; and what he called ‘the moral’ (or ‘ethical’), I understand as the spirit of Protestantism. I believe that what I call the Protestant spirit began to grow strong and spread in Europe as a result of the Reformation, but I will suggest rather than prove this historical claim. Most of my efforts will be philosophical, characterizing the two spirits and their manifestations.

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