Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  There is little in this position that seems calculated to elicit assent or even sympathy in educated readers today. Such an audience will not merely disagree with Eliot’s preference for a Christian society; it will likely find his description of the alternatives puzzling, or perverse. Perhaps with some less than welcome help from so-called Christian Reconstructionists,26 we might form some dim idea of what a modern Christian society might look like. And we can concoct imaginary scenarios—albeit fantastic and probably dystopian ones—by which such a society might come about.27 But paganism? Seriously?

  Indeed, what would it even mean to embrace, today, a “pagan” society? To revive the practice of sacrificing bulls to Apollo? To make important political and military decisions by poring over the entrails of animals, or by studying the flight patterns of birds? Nobody, surely nobody worth bothering about, wants anything like that. As Thomas Bulfinch wrote (with perhaps a tinge of regret?) in the introduction to his famous book of mythology: “The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct. The so-called divinities of Olympus have not a single worshipper among living men.”28

  Nor need we turn to secularists to press this objection. Consider this observation from another lecture, also given at Cambridge by a literary Anglican, a decade and a half after Eliot’s presentation. In a talk inaugurating a chair in Renaissance and medieval literature, C. S. Lewis commented:

  It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in press or pulpit, who warn us that we are “relapsing into Paganism.” It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity “by the same door as in she went” and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.29

  Given such peremptorily dismissive criticism from a fellow in the faith, Eliot’s thesis may seem hopeless. And if “paganism” is equated with sacrificing bulls to Zeus, or perhaps with fantastic stories about whimsical or lascivious deities, the thesis would indeed be irredeemable. (Although given Lewis’s ample use of fauns and dryads and satyrs and such in his own stories, one might wonder why he in particular should be so dismissive of paganism, even in this fairly literal sense.)

  We might, but probably should not, deflect Lewis’s criticism by speaking not of “paganism” but rather of something like a “classical” orientation or worldview. “Classical” is a more respectable quality, and it is possible to revere the “classical” culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans without endorsing the religious subcomponent described as “paganism.” Indeed, this stance (manifest in, among many other sites, the celebrated epic history of Rome’s decline by Edward Gibbon) is by now utterly familiar. Nor is there anything especially unsettling about the claim that the modern world has in many ways returned to a “classical” perspective and culture: as it happens, this is the central claim of a recent book by Ferdinand Mount explaining, as its subtitle suggests, “how the classical world came back to us.”30

  And yet, it would be a mistake to try to salvage Eliot’s thesis through this kind of amendment. Though it may incite resistance, the term “paganism” is preferable to “classical,” I think. Not merely because it is more provocative, nor because Eliot used it, but because it retains a recognition of something I think Eliot meant (and in any case, should have meant) to recognize: namely, that religion—or what we would call “religion”—was central to and not detachable from the much-admired classical approach to culture and sexuality and politics.

  To be sure, Eliot referred not to “paganism” simpliciter, but rather to “modern paganism.” That term might of course be nothing more than an unilluminating pejorative. Conversely, it might be that beneath the surface features or manifestations, there is some more substantive continuity perspicuously connecting the classical perspectives and practices we call “paganism” with modern movements and views. In that case, Eliot’s thesis might provide insights that more conventional accounts of our situation do not. And it might turn out that just as Laycock’s question seems to be a variation on the question urgently pressed almost two millennia ago by Tertullian, so the answer to the contemporary question will turn out to be a modern version of the classical explanation.

  The Inquiry

  That, at least, is the hypothesis on which this book proceeds. The book grows out of a project that I have thought of as an extended reflection on Eliot’s quixotic proposal. This project thus involves the consideration and defense of various claims that will seem counterintuitive, or worse, at least initially.

  Why undertake such a project—one that is faced from the outset with daunting obstacles and entrenched incredulities? And why invite anyone else—namely, readers—to join in the project?

  The answer, quite simply, is that Eliot’s diagnosis may provide much needed illumination. At the beginning of his first lecture, Eliot explained that he was advancing his admittedly unconventional interpretation in response to “immediate perplexities that fill our minds.”31 He declared as well his “suspicion that the current terms in which we discuss international affairs and political theory may only tend to conceal from us the real issues of contemporary civilisation.”32 Indeed, “the current terms in which we describe our society . . . only operate to deceive and stupefy us.”33 I have a similar suspicion.

  But how have “current terms . . . tend[ed] to conceal from us the real issues of contemporary civilisation”? Well, here is one possibility. Modern understandings of history and culture commonly work against the backdrop of a story in which history unfolds in stages, one replacing the other: once retired, past stages are gone for good. Been there, done that. More specifically, an ancient and classical world culturally dominated by what is often called “paganism” eventually gave way to a medieval world presided over by Christianity, which in turn was gradually superseded by a modern world characterized by “secularism.” So we live today in “a secular age,” as the title of a hefty book by the philosopher Charles Taylor has it.34 History does not stop, and so we may move on—indeed, we may already be in a “postsecular” period, as some observers claim—but there is no going back to earlier stages of Christendom or paganism.

  Something like this historical story and this “no going back” progressive conception of how history unfolds is taken as virtually axiomatic by educated people today. Thus, in culture-war controversies over matters like same-sex marriage, traditionalists and holdouts are frequently warned against being on “the wrong side of history.” The progressive conception informs the confident dismissal of the possibility of modern paganism even by traditionalist religious thinkers like C. S. Lewis. The “historical process,” Lewis declares, does not “[allow] mere reversal. . . . It is not what happens.”

  The conception of history as progressing—as moving from pagan to Christian to secular—widely informs our interpretations of current cultural struggles, which are often depicted as conflicts between progressive “secular” constituencies and holdover “religious” actors. And yet, this “secular versus religious” framework increasingly seems inadequate. That is because the parties and factions on all sides of the culture wars exhibit qualities standardly associated with “religion”: an uncompromising zeal or passion, a tendency to view issues in “good versus evil” or “light versus darkness” terms, an eagerness to demonize opponents. These are the features that Laycock finds so dismaying in the current culture wars. Perhaps surprisingly, and distressingly, similar tendencies—and in particular, an eagerness to resort to the rhetoric of demonization—are starkly evident even in some decisions of the United States Supreme Court.35

  A
t least a few observers have recognized that our current cultural struggles are most perspicuously described as a contest between competing religiosities.36 But between which religiosities? One party, though complex, has a familiar feel to it—it is composed mostly of traditional Catholics and evangelicals and devout Jews, uneasily allied with Mormons and perhaps a few Muslims. But what sort of religiosity animates the other side?

  This is where Eliot’s proposal might provide some help. Both the implausibility and the potential illumination in his proposal derive from the fact that it implicitly departs from the standard, taken-for-granted view of Western history as a one-directional advance from one stage to another (pagan, to Christian, to secular, to . . . postsecular?) and instead discerns an ongoing contest between two contrasting and enduring religiosities or orientations. In the classical world, one of these orientations was most conspicuously (though not solely) manifest in Christianity; the competing orientation was manifest in what came to be called “paganism.” And those contesting orientations remain active today—or so Eliot’s diagnosis suggests—in shaping our culture, our politics, and our world. They were and are foundational to the practices that provoked Pliny’s question almost two millennia ago, and that provoke Douglas Laycock’s question today. The investigation and defense of Eliot’s proposal thus offer an oblique but potentially revealing way of addressing the questions noted earlier in this chapter.

  That investigation and defense will require considerable work, as well as a willingness to examine and perhaps reconsider our ingrained attachment to some current assumptions that are often taken for granted. We have already noticed one of those entrenched assumptions—the assumption that history moves forward from one phase to another, leaving past phases irretrievably behind. Another common assumption that we will discuss is the widespread conception, pervasive and influential in the academy, of human beings as bearers of “interests” who live and act primarily to further those interests (and who, accordingly, need to be understood and explained as “rational interest-seekers”). In contrast to this conception (though not necessarily in contradiction to it) is the possibility that humans—or many humans—have an essential religious dimension, and that without appreciating this religious dimension we will not understand what people are or why they behave in the ways they do.

  Such assumptions about the nature of human beings are presupposed in all discussions of human affairs, and so we will need to consider them at the outset. Then we will turn to the Rome of late antiquity and observe the struggles, sometimes inconspicuous and sometimes quite open, between “paganism” (as it came to be called) and Christianity. We will see how these contrasting religiosities reflected basic existential orientations that could not easily coexist in peace. The tension led to the back-and-forth political struggle of the fourth century between Christianity and paganism.

  But although Christianity ultimately prevailed in that struggle as an official and political matter, we will see that the contrasting orientations endured: though officially defeated, paganism as a distinctive existential orientation persisted through the centuries in uneasy collaboration and contention with an official Christianity. And in recent decades, that position has become more open and confident. It is readily discernible, for example, in the work of respected and thoroughly “secular” thinkers like Ronald Dworkin, Sam Harris, and Barbara Ehrenreich.

  Finally, we will return to the present and consider how the conflict between the kind of religiosity represented by Christianity and that reflected in paganism can help to make sense of our present situation.

  Why go to the trouble? But I have already said: the motivation for the undertaking is the hope of illumination. My goal is the same as Eliot’s—to see through and past “the current terms [that] only tend to conceal from us the real issues of contemporary civilisation.”37

  In addition, I should at the outset make, a fortiori, the same disclaimer Eliot did: “This is a subject which I could, no doubt, handle much better were I a profound scholar in any of several fields. But I am not writing for scholars, but for people like myself.”38 For people, scholars or not, who find our times perplexing, and troubling, and who find the standard “religious versus secular” interpretations and explanations unsatisfying. Perhaps Eliot will provide some help. We will see.

  1. Pliny’s numerous letters to the emperor Trajan are filled with flattery. “I am well aware, Sir, that no higher tribute can be paid to my reputation than some mark of favour from so excellent a ruler as yourself.” The Letters of the Younger Pliny, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1963), 265. Such praise pervades the letters; see 260, 264, 277, 291, 296.

  2. The letter is reprinted in Letters of the Younger Pliny, 293–95.

  3. For a careful analysis of the episode, see Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 15–30.

  4. Letters of the Younger Pliny, 293.

  5. Letters of the Younger Pliny, 293.

  6. Letters of the Younger Pliny, 294.

  7. Letters of the Younger Pliny, 295.

  8. Tertullian, “Apology,” in Selected Works (Pickering, OH: Beloved, 2014), 1. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.

  9. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:56.

  10. Jonathan Kirsch, God against the Gods: The History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Penguin, 2004), 63.

  11. MacMullen quickly qualifies this description by noting that Romans were sometimes severe on Jews, Christians, Druids, and a few others, but he mitigates the observation with the explanation that in these instances “humanitarian views were the cause, not bigotry.” Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 2. See also Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 2 (referring to classical paganism’s “spongy mass of tolerance and tradition”).

  12. These rumors are reported in Minucius Felix, “Octavius,” in Ante-Nicene Church Fathers, Fathers of the Third Century, trans. Philip Schaff (London: Aeterna Press, 2014), vol. 8, chap. 9, pp. 10–11. See also Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York: Penguin, 1999), 209; Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:522.

  13. See, e.g., Stephen Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 60–64; E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 112. However, it is possible that one bizarre and renegade group associated with Christianity—the Carpocratians—did indulge in seriously licentious conduct. Benko, 64.

  14. See James J. O’Donnell, Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 79.

  15. True, he was called that by me. Steven D. Smith, “Lawyering Religious Liberty,” Texas Law Review 89 (2011): 917. But although not everyone would give the same assessment, Laycock’s stature in the field is undeniable. Thomas C. Berg, “Laycock’s Legacy,” Texas Law Review 89 (2011): 901 (“Douglas Laycock is a towering figure in the law of religious liberty”).

  16. See, e.g., Douglas Laycock and Thomas C. Berg, “Protecting Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty,” Virginia Law Review 99, in Brief 1 (2013): 9 (“Of course, no same-sex couple would ever want to be counseled by such a counselor. Demanding a commitment to counsel same-sex couples does not obtain counseling for those couples, but it does threaten to drive from the helping professions all those who adhere to other religious understandings of marriage”). On the practical futility of asking a counselor to counsel people contrary to the counselor’s religious commitments, see Joseph Turner, “Counselors like Me Need Conscience Protections like Tennessee’s,” Federalist, May 3, 2016, http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/03/counselors-like-me-need-conscience-protections-like-tennessees.

  17. L
aycock and Berg, “Protecting Same-Sex Marriage,” 9.

  18. Douglas Laycock, “Religious Liberty and the Culture Wars,” University of Illinois Law Review 2014 (2014): 879.

  19. See Steven D. Smith, “Die and Let Live: The Asymmetry of Accommodation,” Southern California Law Review 88 (2015): 703.

  20. T. S. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt/Harvest, 1948), 36. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.

  21. See, e.g., White v. Tennant, 31 W. Va. 790 (1888).

  22. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 47.

  23. “Paganism,” he acknowledged, “holds all the most valuable advertising space.” Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 18.

  24. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 18.

  25. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 18–19.

  26. See, e.g., Rousas John Rushdoony, Christianity and the State (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1986).

  27. See, e.g., Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1985).

  28. Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch’s Mythology (New York: Collier Books, [1867] 1962), 13.

  29. C. S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum” (lecture, Cambridge University, Cambridge, 1954), https://archive.org/details/DeDescriptioneTemporum.