Some Enlightenment figures arguably did demonstrate such an orientation, and there was, as David Sorkin has shown, a strong religious streak in the Enlightenment.75 Gay acknowledges that at times the philosophes felt a sense of “awe before Power or even the grand regularity of nature” or “were animated by what Freud has called the ‘oceanic feeling’—that sense of oneness with the universe that is the ground of so much poetic religious feeling.” And yet the Enlightenment thinkers “subdued or excised” such feelings, which were “marginal to their thought.”76 We can accordingly defer the search for an orientation of immanent religiosity until we come to more contemporary thinkers in whom (as we will see in chapter 9) that orientation is more overt and unapologetic.
The Pagan Orientation
Our discussion has suggested that despite its official and ostensible defeat by Christianity in late antiquity, paganism persisted in a variety of ways—in the incidents or features of paganism that survived or were incorporated into Christian culture, in the nostalgia for and the effort to recover pagan civilization manifest in the Renaissance and later, and in the ongoing, profound resentment against Christianity harbored especially in the more educated and enlightened classes. These are all ways in which it might be said that classical paganism—the paganism of ancient Greece and Rome—continued to resonate after its supposed suppression by Christianity.
Less conspicuous but even more important, though, is the persistence, or perhaps the perpetual recurrence, of what we earlier described as the pagan orientation, or the commitment to the immanent sacred. This is the orientation that beatifies and sacralizes the goods of this world—that holds that “the sacred” exists, and that it exists in this world and this life. In this sense, it might be said that paganism persisted and would likely persist even if all memory of the classical past could be blotted out (as perhaps it may be, in some sectors of the population anyway, as classics departments close and as fewer students read Homer, Virgil, Ovid, or Cicero—or Gibbon).77
Indeed, it might plausibly be argued that paganism is the natural condition of humanity. From the moment of our birth until the hour of our death, after all, we see and hear and feel and act within this world. This is the world that we know directly and personally—the world we can be sure of. Conversely, we are consigned to rely on inference or intimation or faith to discern anything beyond this world. So we will naturally tend to find meaning and sublimity within this world—the one we know and inhabit. Paganism in this existential sense may draw sustenance from ancient precedent, but even without that support, it will naturally arise on its own. And Christianity could not reasonably expect to eradicate that natural orientation.
Indeed, it hardly wanted to. As discussed in earlier chapters, the Christian position has never been to deny the goodness of this world, but only to insist that it is not the ultimate good, and that its goodness derives from a more transcendent source. A Christianity that somehow managed to extinguish the sense of the goodness and sublimity of the world would have betrayed its mission and fallen into a sort of gnostic heresy. The more delicate aim for Christians, rather, has been to retain that sense of sublimity, even to intensify it, while bringing it under the jurisdiction of a higher, transcendent good—namely, God. That is a task that by its nature never has been and probably never could be accomplished once and for all—in a society, and perhaps even in any given individual.
Indeed, Christian teachers perhaps more than anyone else have insisted on the point. For centuries now, Christian leaders have implored followers to come to church to be reminded of the faith to which they purported or attempted to commit themselves at baptism or confirmation or confession. A central feature of such services is the homily, and a persistent theme of such sermonizing has been the fallenness of humanity—its immersion in the gods and goods of this world—and hence the desperate need for regeneration that will orient (and reorient, and reorient) humans to their true good. Sometimes the denunciations have been sharp and shrill. Savonarola has already been mentioned; others will think of Jonathan Edwards convicting his wailing parishioners of being “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”78 Sometimes the reminders have been more gentle and encouraging. Either way, the propensity of most people, Christian or otherwise, to become mired in idolatry toward the goods of this world has been a prevalent Christian theme. The theme amounts to an admission of the ongoing power of the orientation we are here describing as “paganism.”
The Perpetual Dominance of Paganism?
We began this chapter by noticing the common view that holds that for better or worse, paganism was eliminated in late antiquity by the triumph of Christianity. Aiming to challenge this view, our discussion may seem to have veered to the opposite conclusion: despite its political defeats, it was in fact paganism that remained the dominant cultural position. Christianity has been little more than a veneer covering over a mainly pagan world. It has been a sort of “sacred canopy”79 enclosing a quotidian reality that is some combination of pagan and secular.
So, is this reverse judgment correct? Yes and no. For reasons we have discussed, it is plausible to say that paganism is the natural condition of humankind. And an up-close look at actual, daily life in virtually any place or period, under the ostensible jurisdiction of Christendom or elsewhere, will reveal countless acts and attitudes—of violence, greed, lust, pride—that depart drastically from the Christian ideal.
Still, before we reclassify the Western world as pagan, two qualifications are imperative. Or maybe three. The first qualification we have already noted: for most periods in the West, and arguably for most individuals, the conflict between a transcendent orientation and a more immanent orientation to the goods of this world has constituted an ongoing struggle. Thus, most periods and most people have not been simply pagan or simply Christian; rather, they have wavered and wandered between the two.
Second, even while falling far short of compliance with Christian teachings, governments and individuals in the West, at least from late antiquity through the modern period, have over and over acknowledged Christian precepts, doctrines, and rites as a sort of recognized regulative ideal and dominant authority. That acknowledgment has been recurrently expressed in both positive and negative forms.
The positive expressions are pervasive and conspicuous, if we are inclined to notice them. So we see Christian religion enlisted in the consecration of kings and emperors. And of the other important events that constitute and define human life—births, marriages, deaths. We have already noticed how the spectacularly worldly Lorenzo the Magnificent calls in his longtime nemesis, Savonarola, to take his deathbed confession. We see the acknowledgment of Christian authority in the thousands upon thousands of paintings of Jesus, the Virgin, and the saints, by artists celebrated or obscure, adorning the churches, some majestic and some humble, that shape the skyscapes of thousands upon thousands of towns and cities through Europe and America. It is not uncommon for such paintings to feature a depiction of the patron or sponsor—most likely some noble or merchant who, after a life of acquisitiveness and strife and perhaps occasional or regular debauchery, wants nonetheless to be portrayed and remembered as a tiny, submissive figure kneeling before the Virgin and the infant Lord.
The acknowledgment of Christianity as an authority is evident in the political rhetoric of the medieval period in which, even as kings battle the church, they defer to and enlist Scripture and Christianity in their own cause.80 It is evident as well, though more implicitly and indirectly, in modern political rhetoric that invokes themes that would have had no appeal to ancient pagans, and that are part of the Christian legacy. David Bentley Hart observes:
Even the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal equality, or basic human dignity that pre-Christian Western culture would have found not so much foolish as unintelligible. It is simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to believe in a
ny of these things—they would never have occurred to us—had our ancestors not once believed that God is love, that charity is the foundation of all virtues, that all of us are equal before the eyes of God, that to fail to feed the hungry or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, and that Christ laid down his life for the least of his brethren.81
To be sure, there are good grounds to suspect hypocrisy in many of these outward displays of Christian religiosity by princes, merchants, and even popes and priests, whose lives reflect not piety but rather a strong proclivity to prefer the goods of the world over the supposedly higher blessings promised by Christianity.82 And yet that hypocrisy confirms rather than discredits the proposition offered here—namely, that the authority of Christianity as a regulative ideal has been acknowledged and accepted through much of Western history. A man may be primarily and essentially a pagan and yet aspire to be Christian; his actual behavior will thus look hypocritical relative to his (sincere) aspirations. Or even if he has no such aspirations and puts on a show of religiosity only as a pretense for the public or for posterity, he thereby acknowledges at least the public authority of the Christian ideal.
More generally, the acknowledgment of Christianity as an ideal or a standard is powerfully if inadvertently apparent even in the familiar accusations made by Christianity’s critics, as discussed earlier. The most familiar criticisms, after all, essentially accuse Christianity of failing to live up to its own ideals and commitments—to ideals and commitments that the critics themselves at least implicitly take as authoritative but that for the most part would not even have been embraced as such by ancient pagans.
Thus, Christian princes and priests are accused of supporting violence and warfare against perceived opponents; the Crusades and the inquisitions are the most commonly invoked instances. But in the Roman world, this militant policy toward opponents would hardly have been perceived as a failing at all. On the contrary, the Romans unashamedly celebrated their military conquests with spectacular processions (or “triumphs”) in which the conquerors were glorified and the defeated paraded in humiliation before respectively cheering and jeering Roman crowds.83 Or Roman conquests were memorialized for posterity in monuments such as Trajan’s Column or the Arch of Titus, proudly depicting in enduring marble for all to see the slaughter and humiliation of the Dacians or the Jews. In indicting Christianity for its violence, critics thus embrace a Christian standard and deploy it against Christianity.
Or Christianity is criticized for accepting slavery, or for leaving classes of serfs or women in an abject and oppressed condition. The criticisms may be cogent enough—again, though, under Christian standards. Under pagan customs and views, by contrast, these social inequalities would hardly have been seen as faults at all.84
For centuries, in short, Christianity has been fiercely and often cogently criticized; such criticism has intensified and become more respectable (or hackneyed) since the Enlightenment. But the criticisms themselves have typically traded on Christian values, principles, and aspirations. They have thus acknowledged, perhaps inadvertently, the authority of Christianity as an ideal. In that respect, it continues to seem apt to describe Western societies, as T. S. Eliot did, as (at least latently) Christian.
The Secular Alternative?
We have noted two responses to the proposition that despite their Christian veneer, Western societies have all along been more pagan than Christian. The first response suggested that the conflict between Christianity and paganism, or between transcendent and immanent religiosity, has all along been a struggle, both within societies and within individuals; so univocal descriptions of any society, or even any person, as simply “Christian” or “pagan” are doomed to be misleading. The second response suggested that despite their rampant paganism on the level of actual or daily practice, at least through much of Western history most people and societies nonetheless have recognized Christianity, consciously or not, as a sort of authority or ideal. Even to the extent that Christianity has been more a veneer than a deep reality, the veneer has been important in its own right, because it has meant that Christianity has persisted as a sort of ideal for organizing and evaluating culture and society.
But there may be a third objection, which at least from a modern perspective might seem even more obvious and powerful. Our discussion may seem to have proceeded on the assumption that Christianity and paganism, or transcendent and immanent religiosity, are the only or at least the salient alternatives. On that assumption, if despite their Christian pretensions a person or a society behave and believe in manifestly un-Christian ways, it would seem to follow that they are in reality pagan. But this inference ignores the possibility of other alternatives. And from a modern perspective, one such alternative may seem overwhelmingly obvious—namely, secularism.
So if a person is not Christian, or not truly Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, or something else), he or she is not necessarily “pagan.” It seems far more likely—today, at least—that the person is not religious at all, but rather “secular.” That at least is surely how most people today who do not identify with any traditional religion would describe themselves. And so for a person or a society, it seems, the salient choice today is not between transcendent and immanent religion, but rather between being religious and not being religious. In other words, between being religious and being “secular.” And in fact, most Western societies have chosen the latter alternative: they have become “secular.”
So goes a familiar story, at least, which is no doubt true to a significant extent. And yet it will turn out that secularism is also more complex than has often been supposed. Secularism comes in various forms, and in at least one of its influential forms it has functioned as a sort of cover for a resurgence of paganism—of Eliot’s “modern paganism.” We will consider how this has happened in the next chapter.
1. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1971), 73.
2. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 129 (describing “polytheists firmly established in small cities all over the eastern empire . . . up to and beyond the end of the sixth century”). Cf. Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1993), 168–69: “In rural districts the country folk were deeply attached to old pagan customs, especially those associated with birth, marriage, and death. In the Western provinces the pastoral problem for centuries was to stamp out pagan superstitions among the peasants on the land. But in the towns, even in such Christian citadels as Syria and Asia Minor, clandestine rites, including occasional sacrifices, continued to be practiced as late as the seventh century.”
3. See, e.g., Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11–19; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 2:71.
4. See above, 88.
5. See Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409, 439 (1968) (explaining that the Thirteenth Amendment allows Congress to regulate to address the “badges and incidents” of slavery).
6. See generally Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
7. Cf. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 80 (“Throughout the Middle Ages, the stars still hung above Christian Europe, disquieting reminders of the immortality of the gods. The gods had left their names on the days of the week”).
8. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 54.
9. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 150–59. See also Peter Hunter Blair, The World of Bede (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 63: “The [pagan] temples were by no means to be destroyed, but only the images which they housed. If the temples were well built they were to be consecrated to t
he service of God so that the people might continue to worship in familiar places. They should not be deprived of their customary sacrifices of oxen, but on appropriate days they should build wooden booths in the neighbourhood of former temples, now converted to Christian use, and celebrate with religious feasting, their animals no longer sacrificed to devils, but killed for their own food with thanksgiving to God.”
10. On the proliferation of saints and their function in restoring sanctity to nature, see Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, rev. ed. (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 161–65.
11. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 159.
12. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, [1860] 1990), 306.
13. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 307.
14. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London: Penguin, 1986), 22.
15. See Owen Davies, Paganism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91.
16. William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” in Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (New York: Dell, 1955), 364.
17. Heinrich Heine, “Gods in Exile,” in The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine, ed. Havelock Ellis (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2013), 155, 156.
18. Heine, “Gods in Exile,” 159.
19. Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3.
20. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 136.
Pagans and Christians in the City Page 30