By Mario J. Haas

(Editor’s note: This essay is a response to Ugo Stornaiolo’s Cultural Statelessness & the Mirage of Belonging)

This recent article gave me a lot of insight, and it was especially interesting to me, because it is in a way a topic also very close to me and makes myself feel a certain compassion; the question and struggle to find my personal (national) identity is one not so dissimilar to that of its author, myself being half-German, half-Polish. If I could be summarized it, it is a description of his pursuit of finding an anchor, a point to hold on to, an identity: cultural or national.

With the rise of modern technologies which make possible worldwide transport, telecommunication and human movement, in short, globalization – the case of the individual, who does not find roots in a specific national culture, becomes more and more common.

In his case there was a mix of Italian heritage, the upbringing in the modern state of Ecuador, in Latin America, and the culture brought forth from having been educated in a French school. Apart from that, there was also the rise of the Internet and the possibility to listen into the whole world from wherever he was.

The problem of the difficulty of finding a cultural identity is best described in his fourth paragraph: “my cultural identity could notbe explained simply by pointing out where I was born and what the basic history of the place is.“

In his case, cultural identity breaks with the old concept, where culture – even etymologically – was linked to cultivating a specific land, where the identity was linked to a specific area and its history, where a cultural settlement was presupposed.

A culture is a natural product, a result of certain people growing together in a certain space and time, creating a shared language of mutual understanding. The part we can grasp and see about a certain culture is therefore somewhat of an outer shell or the material manifestation of those specific human relations, which gave shape to this shell.

It is this shell, this material manifestation, which can be perceived by the outside viewer and which he describes while speaking of his Italian heritage: “Still, Italian culture was very much a part of my upbringing, with music, food, football, customs, traditions being very present in my childhood, and with my parents instilling in me an idealistic pride in a nation I belonged to despite being thousands of miles away.”

Now it is the case that this shell is empty. All of this traditional Italian food, music, customs are an homage to different times, to a different past and history. It is that, which grew out of a certain tradition and is now relived at some new space and time, which in his case was Ecuador.

I would argue that culture – in the modern sense – is an empty concept, even if we go so far back as the creation of national identity during the 19th century. Or rather, it is an empty concept, if we understand culture only through this lens of a material manifestation of certain traditions, which are being re-enacted without their substance.

This is what leads me to say, that we live in a post-cultural world, because the culture in the modern sense is perceived as only the material heritage of a country, while its soul – the very cause, which led to the creation of the material heritage, like truly lived-out Christianity – is not there any more.

Or at least so it is happening in Europe, where every culture developed as the result of the coming together of Christian values and Christianity in general with the material (geopolitical) conditions of the given society.

This can be seen in the art of the Italian culture especially: The Sistine Chapel is visited by millions of tourists and Michelangelo’s frescoes praised as masterful, while the sanctity of the place – the chapel for which the paintings were supposed to be decorations – is completely forgotten. The modern “culture”, which grew out of Christianity, has basically made a cult of itself; those outer layers, the “leftovers” of what it once has been, are taken and praised as culture itself.

The German writer Thomas Mann writes about this in his Doctor Faustus: since culture fell away from the cult and made a cult of itself, it has become nothing else then a falling away; and all the world after a mere five hundred years is as sick and tired of it as though, salva venia, they had ladled it in with cooking-spoons.

The current world conditions, especially globalization, have led to the end of those old cultures. Our West (broadly seen as the former Latin world) has inherited the actions of Luther (the divide in western Christendom, which led to the end of the western Christian unity) and Columbus (the beginning of World history and intercontinental travel). So now it is the case in the European West, that we are no longer bound to land nor religion, and there are no true cultures any more, only remnants of them.

Although it is true that there are places which are still more bound to the land than others – especially in the countryside even of Western countries where a truly lived culture and religiosity can still be found – the most important centres, like big cities, become more and more multicultural. And it is those places, which can be called cosmopolitan.

I would like to suggest an argument for cosmopolitanism, although a very specific kind, which – I would say – was already proposed by St. Paul. In order to argue for this kind of cosmopolitanism, one has to first look at the common and, from his perspective, pejorative understanding, which he describes very clearly: “Cosmopolitanism is at odds with this ideal, for it relies on the individual but not on the social. It does not create networks based on organic commonalities, like language, but simply accumulates, stacks people as long as they serve some useful purpose, mostly related to work and money.”

Today’s places, which are considered cosmopolitan, are a compound of individuals, who share a certain place – like a metropolis – only for the purpose of working and making money. In such places there can be no one culture, as there is no true bond between the people (nothing that goes beyond monetary success). It is actually rather common, that the differing cultures of the past become some sort of closed societies.

This is what he has observed at his own workplace, where in multinational groups those individuals who have the most cultural commonalities spend most of their time together.

What I am arguing for is that cosmopolitanism is a false ideal, if – and only if – it does not have a Christian base or root. It was, namely St. Paul, who in the Christian faith expressed the general with the true cosmopolitanism of the Christian community in at least three different letters, but especially in the last of those:

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (2 Galatians 3, 28)

“For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” (1 Corinthians 12, 13)

“Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.” (Colossians 3,11)

St. Paul states, that the one unifying principle of every human is Christ. And all the former outer aspects, the ‘shells’, like the place one has been brought up in, the heritage one carries (whether good or bad) is nothing compared to Christ, who is the true point of identity.

As it is the one and only meaning of the life of a Christian to become identical with Christ in following his
teachings, he reflects on this in a way, when he writes: “For a culturally stateless person like me, being
Catholic becomes my main cultural identity, because it is the one thing that can bring together cultures so dissimilar like the ones that compose my overall fragmented cultural background.” I would say it is more than a ‘cultural’ identity, it is the Identity as such. A true Christian is in some sense truly cosmopolitan; to him the whole world is home, as it does not matter at what place he lives out the Christian Ideal or where he happens to be at the moment.

I think this is what he also acknowledges when writing: “That is a basic difference with national culture: it is very locally bound, whereas religious culture tends towards the universal.”

It may appear that national culture is very locally bound, but it was through Christianity that the European cultures actually left most of their (pagan) locality behind and began to strive for the universal. Each individual European culture tried to live out the same Christian Ideal, but under their own local conditions, which had been somewhat of a necessity.

So his problem is the same one as for me and for many other people: it is the fact that the concept of the nation state in itself is in decline, due to the recent and rapid changes in the world.

One could argue that the concept of the modern nation state in and of itself was the last cry of the ending of a certain epoch. As with the slow but static demise of Christianity in the European societies in early modernity, it was the nation itself, which was made a cult of.

Compare the medieval states, for which Christianity was a natural part of their functioning, with the rise of the modern nation states, which are already a sign that this old order fell apart.

And this atheist, materialist cult of the nation as such – the nation which began to have an existence for its own and was now independent of Christianity – was the very thing that was the reason for the rise of the ideology of fascism in the European ‘nations’, but also its clearest expression.

However, what we see currently is, that Europe is moving away from binding concepts like nationality and nations, and moving towards globalization without any common ground or goal other than monetary success. Such cosmopolitanism will, I believe, do more harm than good.

But, on the other hand, this is the exact moment where Christianity can be reborn, just as it developed under similar conditions in the Roman Empire. I think it is only Christianity, which in such a world could be the fundamental binding principal (as it always was supposed to be, which is already seen in Paul). In this way I am for cosmopolitanism, a Christian cosmopolitanism, as I think this is the only hope the future of a globalized world will have.

And, as a closing remark, I fully agree with his words that the beauty of Christianity is that if we belong through faith and works, we will still belong even if we disagree with other individuals and groups within.

It might be the actual unity in diversity so much preached in the secular order but so difficult to achieve in it. Christianity always strived for universality, and the states of the past ages – with their individual cultures – were a necessity of the past world.

Now that the individuality of land and state becomes more and more obsolete, the universality of Christianity still holds, maybe stronger than ever before. And that’s why I would say, that his statement “I stand by my cultural statelessness“, is in reality expressing his Christian cosmopolitanism.