144. Catullus, Carmina 5, quoted in E. L. Mascall, The Christian Universe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), 20.
145. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (New York: Dover, 1997), bk. 4, p. 21
146. Homer, The Odyssey 5.212–234.
147. Cf. Fox, The Classical World, 47 (“In Homer’s poems, the dominant image is that there is no life beyond the grave. . . . This superb view of man’s condition heightens the poignancy of a hero’s life. We are what we do; fame, won in life, is our immortality”).
148. Sophocles, “Oedipus at Colonus,” in Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 1982), lines 274–75, p. 299.
149. Aurelius, Meditations 2.15.
150. Homer, The Iliad 12.374–381, pp. 335–36.
151. Homer, The Iliad 21.528–530, p. 535.
152. Homer, The Iliad 17.515–516, p. 457.
153. Homer, The Odyssey 11.255–258.
154. 1 Pet. 1:24–25.
155. Augustine, City of God 4.5, p. 149.
156. 1 Cor. 15:55.
157. Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 84–85.
158. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 19.
159. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:464.
160. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:447. See also 1:510 (“Minds afflicted by calamity and the contempt of mankind cheerfully listen to the divine promise of future happiness”).
161. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1984), 175.
162. Gibbon, Memoirs, 175.
163. See above, 172.
164. Augustine, City of God, bks. 6–10.
165. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 22.
166. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 21. Cf. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 51–52 (arguing that Christianity appealed to “a need for a God with whom one could be alone: a God whose ‘charge,’ as it were had remained concentrated and personal rather than diffused in benign but profoundly impersonal ministrations to the universe at large”).
167. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 24.
168. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 15. Cf. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 78 (“The Christian revolution promoted a radical message of love and charity, flaunted the idea that even the foolish and uneducated could be wise, that the virtuous simpleton could outargue learned philosophers, that the rich should be generous to the poor, that the holy should care for the sick”).
169. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian, 29.
170. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), 4.22, p. 194.
171. Aurelius, Meditations 2.8.
172. 1 Cor. 2:9.
173. Homer, The Iliad 17.515–516.
174. Augustine, Confessions 1.1, p. 1. Hereafter, references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
175. This is a paraphrase; the actual quotation reads “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
176. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edward Fitzgerald, ed. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1990), para. 12, p. 27.
177. Sophocles, “Oedipus at Colonus,” lines 1381–1383, p. 358.
178. Cf. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:520 (“The Pagan multitude, reserving their gratitude for temporal benefits alone, rejected the inestimable present of life and immortality, which was offered to mankind by Jesus of Nazareth”).
179. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 216.
180. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:478–79.
181. Augustine, City of God 1.35, p. 49; 18.49, p. 896.
182. Augustine, Confessions 10.48, p. 200.
CHAPTER 8
Under a Christian Canopy
We saw in the last chapter that by the end of the fourth century, Christianity had triumphed over paganism, at least in the political realm. Emperors like Theodosius—and, later, Justinian—tightened legal restrictions on pagan worship and practice. And thus began the long period of Christian political dominance often described—or deprecated—as “Christendom.” The nations of Christendom were the Christian societies that T. S. Eliot perceived as the historical antecedents for the more confused modern situation that by inertia or default was still vaguely Christian but was vulnerable to being displaced by “modern paganism.”
But was paganism actually extinguished, or was it merely driven underground? Or perhaps hidden in plain sight? Surely a deeply rooted religiosity that had flourished for centuries could not be simply and finally extinguished with the issuance of a few imperial edicts and the smashing of a few temples. Thus, Peter Brown reports that “even a century and a half after the battle for the public faith of the empire was lost to Christianity, the philosopher Proclus would be writing, in the mood of a still evening after thunder, intimate hymns to the gods and a totally pagan Elements of Theology.”1 And historians observe that paganism lingered on both in the countryside and in enclaves like Athens for decades, even centuries.2
Even so, by the end of the fifth or sixth century, paganism had for the most part been effectively suppressed. Or so historians say.3 And if we think mostly of what Varro had described as the mythical and civic forms of classical paganism,4 the obituaries are probably accurate enough. But if we instead consider paganism not just in terms of these concrete public manifestations but also as an existential orientation or as the form of immanent religiosity that sacralizes this world, a different judgment will emerge.
In this chapter, we will briefly survey how, under the public supervision of official Christianity, paganism continued to flourish in a number of senses. Our survey will begin with the most conspicuous though perhaps least important mode in which paganism persisted: many of the external features of classical paganism—the “badges and incidents” of paganism, to borrow a phrase from American constitutional law5—were preserved, either in their own forms or as incorporated into the official Christian faith and culture. Next we will consider how paganism endured as a powerful, evocative, shaping force in the historical memory and imagination of the West. It persisted both in a positive form—in wistful memories of (and attempts to recapture) the beauty and freedom that had ostensibly been lost with the suppression of paganism—and in the more negative form of a lingering anger or resentment toward the force that had supposedly defeated and suppressed it—namely, Christianity.
Finally, we will consider how the substantial essence of paganism (namely, as an orientation that sacralizes this world and its goods) survived and flourished. Usually, to be sure, this orientation did not and does not identify itself as “paganism.” But then, ancient paganism did not identify itself as “paganism” either.
The combination of these modes of pagan persistence leads to a different, perhaps surprising question: Far from being eradicated, did paganism in fact remain the dominant cultural position even after the ostensible triumph of Christianity? The answer to that question, it will turn out, is complicated. In a certain sense, the Western world has arguably always remained more pagan than Christian. In some ways Christianity has been more of a veneer than a substantial reality. Perhaps the most emphatic testimony to this fact has come from Christian priests, preachers, and prophets, who have consistently held that the world—the ostensibly Christian world—is very far from actually understanding and accepting the transcendent Reality proclaimed by Christianity. And yet the Christian veneer, if that is what it is, has been important in its own right, because it has represented a sort of canopy within which paganism has survived and even flourished. Less metaphorically, Christianity has supplied the regulative ideal, or authoritative standard, under which culture and political discourse have functioned.
The widespread acceptance of that ideal, despite failures in realization, suggests that descriptions of the centuries between the fall of Rome and the rise of the modern world as “Christian,” or as “Christendom,” are not fal
se. In an attenuated but crucial sense, these were “Christian” societies, as T. S. Eliot and so many others have supposed.
And so, both the pagan and Christian alternatives have persisted. Paganism has not needed to be reinvented; it has been with us all along. Remove the Christian canopy, repudiate the Christian regulatory ideal and aspiration, and what remains would be . . . paganism. In this way, the choice between a Christian and a pagan society has remained very much a live possibility.
The Enduring Incidents of Paganism
Just because Christianity became officially preeminent, it could hardly be expected that people would promptly relinquish practices and modes of speech and thought that had grounded and shaped their lives for centuries. And in fact, the practices and features of ancient paganism survived, in two basic ways.
First, although pagan sacrifices might be abolished and pagan temples torn down, other indicia of paganism persisted. Magical and astrological practices reminiscent of paganism continued to flourish for centuries.6 So did the terms and names of paganism; though scarcely anyone pauses to notice the fact, even today the days of our week trace their names back to Greco-Roman or Nordic deities (the sun, the moon, Tiw, Wodan, Thor, Frige, and Saturn).7 Likewise for our months: January is named for the Roman god Janus, March for the god Mars, April for Aphrodite, May for Maia, June for Juno, July and August for the first two of the divinized Caesars.
Second, many pagan notions and practices managed to become baptized, so to speak, and thus to persist and even flourish in a sort of converso existence. They were incorporated, in only slightly altered form, into Christian religion and culture. A symbol of this process is the majestic Roman building called the Pantheon, still intact (and still visited by millions every year). The building, whose customary name refers to the array of pagan deities, survived although or because it was rechristened as a church dedicated to Christian martyrs. The same thing happened to innumerable pagan temples, shrines, and practices.
In this vein, Keith Thomas recalls
the notorious readiness of the early Christian leaders to assimilate elements of the old paganism into their own religious practice. . . . The ancient worship of wells, trees, and stones was not so much abolished as modified, by turning pagan sites into Christian ones and associating them with a saint rather than a heathen divinity. The pagan festivals were similarly incorporated into the Church year. New Year’s Day became the Feast of the Circumcision; May Day was SS. Philip and James; Midsummer Even the Nativity of St John the Baptist. Fertility rites were converted into Christian processions and the Yule Log was introduced into celebrations of the birth of Christ.8
Ramsay MacMullen likewise describes how Christianity incorporated or annexed large chunks of pagan practice.9 Christian holidays were adjusted to correspond with traditional pagan celebrations, so that people could continue to parade and party as they had always done. Liturgical services adopted and adapted pagan practices of lighting candles, ringing bells, bowing or bestowing a reverential kiss on entrance into a church. The content of lay prayers and petitions continued mostly unchanged, although they were now directed to one among a swelling host of saints instead of to some member of a pantheon of deities.10
MacMullen concludes that “the triumph of the church was one not of obliteration but of widening embrace and assimilation.”11 Of the Renaissance period, a thousand years after the official demise of paganism, Jacob Burckhardt observed that “many local and popular usages, which are associated with religious festivals, are forgotten fragments of the old pre-Christian faiths of Europe.”12 In fact, “the popular faith in Italy had a solid foundation,” Burckhardt thought, “just in proportion as it was pagan.”13
To be sure, insofar as pagan practices were successfully “baptized,” they ipso facto became Christian, not pagan. And yet a forced conversion is susceptible of being sloughed off. In which case, the incidents of paganism remained, ready to revert to their former character.
The Persistence of Paganism in the Western Imagination
As names (like the days of the week) and practices were assimilated into newly emerging forms of culture and liturgy, their pagan origins might eventually be forgotten by most practitioners. One might thus argue that history and the fading of memory have purged these references and practices of any real pagan content (much in the way that no one today thinks of Los Angeles as the city of the angels). Thus, with respect to so-called “pagan survival,” Robin Lane Fox argues that “almost all of this continuity is spurious. Many of [paganism’s] details were set in Christian contexts which changed their meaning entirely.”14
Often, however, just the opposite has happened: Western thinkers and cultures have self-consciously attempted to remember and even revive the classical past—including the pagan elements of that past. And they have harbored a deep, active resentment of Christianity for obliterating the freedom and beauty associated with paganism. Indeed, a good deal of Western art, literature, and academic or popular polemics on political or religious or cultural subjects amounts to the relentless reenactment and rearticulation of these positive and negative themes. In these ways, paganism—even classical paganism—has maintained a prominent and revered place in the historical imagination of the West.
Although both the positive and the more negative or accusatory dimensions of paganism’s legacy have reverberated throughout Western history, in fact each dimension is conveniently associated with a particular era or movement. The positive dimension, or the effort to recall and recover the positive virtues of the classical past (including its paganism), is identified with—indeed, it is the essence of—what we call “the Renaissance.” The negative or accusatory dimension was a central theme of what we call “the Enlightenment.”
Yearning for the World That Was Lost. Regret or nostalgia for what was lost with the ostensible demise of paganism has been manifest in a variety of forms. One is poetry. Thus, Owen Davies observes that “the great German poets Goethe and Johann von Schiller fell in love with the gods of Rome and Greece, and the harmonious beauty of the sacred groves and pools where they were worshipped. In Britain, the Romantic poets Wordsworth, and particularly Keats and Shelley imbued the landscape with pagan enchantment.”15 Thus Wordsworth’s “Great God! I’d rather be a pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,”16 reacting against what he perceived as the spiritual barrenness of the modern, commercialized world.
Or Heinrich Heine’s whimsical and yet wistful story “Gods in Exile.” Heine’s story tells how, with the coming of Christianity, the gods had been forced to “take flight, seeking safety under the most varied disguises and in the most retired hiding places. Many of these poor refugees, deprived of shelter and ambrosia, were now forced to work at some plebeian trade in order to earn a livelihood [and] . . . to drink beer instead of nectar.”17 Nonetheless, these gods would occasionally come out of hiding, albeit sometimes in disguise, and would appear to mortals. Heine described “a pale assemblage of graceful phantoms, who have risen from their . . . hiding-places amid the ruins of ancient temples, to perform once more their ancient, joyous, divine service; . . . with sport and merry-making . . . to dance once more the merry dance of paganism, the can-can of the antique world—to dance it without any hypocritical disguise, without fear of the interference of the police of a spiritualistic morality, with the wild abandonment of the old days, shouting, exulting, rapturous. Evoe Bacche!”18
Sometimes the yearning has gone further, generating active efforts to recover that pagan past. Probably the outstanding manifestation of this impulse is what we call the Renaissance. The name itself means rebirth, and the thing for which the thinkers and artists of the period were seeking a rebirth was, of course, the classical heritage of ancient Greece and Rome.
The Renaissance has generated any number of historical interpretations, some of which deny that it is useful to talk about a “Renaissance” at all.19 But what seems clear is that fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century thinkers and artists, first in Italy and th
en elsewhere in Europe, made a vigorous effort to recover the writings, the ideas, and the artistry of antiquity—and to model their own writing, thinking, art, and governance on those ancient precedents. In this “new civilization” of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt asserted, “its active representatives became influential because they knew what the ancients knew, because they tried to write as the ancients wrote, because they began to think, and soon to feel, as the ancients thought and felt.”20 The recovery effort was hardly limited to ancient religion; it included Greek and Roman rhetoric, law, politics, poetry, architecture, sculpture, and painting. But the pagan elements came as part of the package.
Probably this pagan dimension is most vividly manifest in the painting and sculptures of Renaissance artists. Hundreds of depictions of episodes from the stories of Greek and Roman gods by masters like Botticelli, Veronese, Titian, and many others make up an essential part of the cultural outpouring that distinguishes this period.21 Of Botticelli, for example, Paul Johnson observes that “he was the first great Renaissance artist to make full use of ancient mythology not merely for subject matter—The Birth of Venus, Primavera, et al.—but to give his works spiritual content.” For Botticelli, “paganism was his forte and myth his inspiration.”22 More generally, “the Renaissance was in one important respect a celebration of the artistic and intellectual virtues of pagan antiquity to modern civilized life.”23
A doubt arises, though: Does all this artistic rejoicing in pagan deities and stories reflect actual paganism, or merely the appropriation of pagan images and themes for more modern purposes? It is hard to be certain; indeed, it is hard to know whether the question even makes sense.
We might conjecture that in painting his airy and alluring Venuses, Botticelli surely did not actually believe that the goddess was physically real, gracefully embodied and actively intervening in the affairs of mortals and even mating with them, as she does in the Iliad and the Aeneid. Pico della Mirandola wrote a book defending the literary and artistic use of pagan deities and themes on the premise, as Paul Strathern explains, that “the early classical and pagan gods should be seen as embodiments of more abstract metaphysical ideas. . . . Seen in this light, the goddess Venus thus became the abstract ideal of beauty.”24 Similarly, the Apollo and the Calliope in Raphael’s Parnassus, painted in a Vatican chapel for Pope Julius II, were understood to be symbols of knowledge and poetry, not actual and active beings hanging out on a holy mountain.
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