The Consequences of a World Without Christianity?

There would be a western civilization, just one absent of Christianity. It would LIKELY have a strong Graeco-Roman heritage. None of the so-called barbarians wanted to destroy Roman civilization. They either wanted to preserve elements of it for their own purposes or adopt it wholesale.

Something would emerge - but it would be something very, very different from what actually developed as Western Civilization.

I agree completely that the Germanic tribes - Goths especially - wanted to preserve Roman civilization, or much of it, at any rate. (The Huns are a different story.) But any attempted fusion between Germanic and Roman culture would be more difficult - not impossible, but more difficult - without the mediation offered by Christianity. Assuming a collapse of the Western Empire in the 4th or 5th century, there'd also be less survivals of Roman and Greek knowledge and literature to sustain such a fusion. There would also be less in the way of a wider cultural or civilizational identity - unless some other equally potent faith were to take Christianity's place in this timeline.
 
I think it bespeaks a lack of political power and unity. Also, I think it's pretty clear that monotheist religions did not provide unity, peace or stability. ]

Unity, peace and stability are not always virtues, however - think of a potential Nazi Greater Germania. It would have possessed all three attributes in some very real fashion, from the Urals to the Atlantic - but at what a price!

Nor were they aimed at as the highest virtues by the Christian Church, at least not in a political sense - though at times Church leaders thought that desirable as well. The unity and peace aimed at above all was a confessional one (thus all the Church Councils). But it is here that the strong separation of the civil from the ecclesial in Christian thought comes to bear. And political disunity had certain advantages as well, in terms of cultural dynamism. A Christian apologist of later years might point to these maps and note that, for all its ills, the civilization depicted in 1300 was more dynamic, more vibrant, and full of more potential than the uniform color late Roman Empire map, given what we know of the political, technological and cultural achievements of Europe over the subsequent three centuries (and beyond).

Islam, on the other hand, has less sense of separation of the two speheres, and more explicitly aimed at political unity, which it kept for only its first century or so. But geography worked heavily against it there. The Roman achievement across so much of the same terrain is a singular one in human history. And ultimately, as it turned out, a transient one.
 
Something would emerge - but it would be something very, very different from what actually developed as Western Civilization.

I agree completely that the Germanic tribes - Goths especially - wanted to preserve Roman civilization, or much of it, at any rate. (The Huns are a different story.) But any attempted fusion between Germanic and Roman culture would be more difficult - not impossible, but more difficult - without the mediation offered by Christianity. Assuming a collapse of the Western Empire in the 4th or 5th century, there'd also be less survivals of Roman and Greek knowledge and literature to sustain such a fusion. There would also be less in the way of a wider cultural or civilizational identity - unless some other equally potent faith were to take Christianity's place in this timeline.

The likes of the Franks, Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Vandals were quite ready to adopt much of Roman culture, and to a degree, even the Latin language. The Church's role in any of this was over-rated. With the collapse of Roman authority in the west, the Christian Church was quite well-developed as an inter-regional organization, which was in the right place at the time to make itself indispensable and loan the services of its priesthood as civil servants and secretaries.

The thing is, even without the Church, there had been many educated local elites throughout the provinces of the empire. Many of these were the descendants of similar sorts of people (Greeks, Gaulish Aedui, Illyrians, Punics, and Iberians and others) who were granted citizenship by the Romans in return for their collaboration. Not to mention that people like Attila and Theodoric were themselves well-schooled during their captivity among the Romans. Without a Church organization in the absence of Roman rule, the same localized ruling-class would have simply put their knowledge and expertise to use in the aftermath of a "Barbarian" conquest.
 
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