I am not talking here of the economic crisis that is gripping Europe, leaving Portugal with 17 percent unemployment and Spain with 26 percent. These are agonizing realities for those living through them. But Europeans have lived through more and worse. Instead, I am speaking of a crisis in the European soul, the death of hubris and of risk-taking. Yes, these resulted in the Europeans trying to convert the world to Christianity and commerce, in Russia trying to create a new man and in Germany becoming willing to annihilate what it thought of as inferior men. The Europeans are content to put all that behind them. Their great search for the holy grail is now reduced to finding a way to resume the comforts of the unexceptional. There is something to be said for the unexceptional life. But it cannot be all there is.
Looking out a window at the cape on which Henry's school was built, it is difficult to connect today's Europe with his. His was poorer, more diseased, more unjust than this one. Life was harder and bleaker than we can imagine. As someone closer to the harder and bleaker side of Europe than to its glories, I can understand not wanting Europe to go there again. But there is no one without guilt, especially those who carefully catalogue the guilt of others. It is also impossible to imagine a truly human life without the hunger hidden inside the princely monk Henry.
We humans are caught between the hunger for glory and the price you pay and the crimes you commit in pursuing it. To me, the tension between the hunger for ordinary comforts and the need for transcendence seems to lie at the heart of the human condition. Europe has chosen comfort, and now has lost it. It sought transcendence and tore itself apart. The latter might have been Henry's legacy, but ah, to have gone to his school with da Gama and Magellan.
