Little wonder that the proponents of the Rawlsian liberal community would ostracize these views, and the citizens who insist on maintaining them, from the civic sphere and consider them “unreasonable.”74 Unreasonable in the same sense that Christians were viewed as uncivil and unreasonable in the Roman Empire.75 And little wonder that Robin West and other progressives would force such citizens to accept the “shared” public norms as a condition of participating in the public sphere, including the economic marketplace.
Toleration or War? It is not that the de-Christianized city could not put up with such views and such citizens. During the decades and centuries in which Christianity still dominated the civic understanding, at least as a sort of residual regulative ideal, dissenters like John Stuart Mill expounded attractive visions of a more “open” society76 committed to a more principled and expansive tolerance than what prevailed in ancient Rome. In the tolerant modern city, people of fundamentally different convictions could gather together, forcefully advocate and debate their competing and incompatible “comprehensive doctrines,” and then decide democratically what course the community would take. This more classically “liberal” vision contemplates a robust community of confident, tough-minded citizens who do not bracket their commitments to truth, who understand that other citizens have different and sometimes incompatible views, and who are prepared to encounter and respond to strong condemnations of their own views and ways of life (sometimes, if that is where the argument leads, by modifying those views and ways of life). Public discourse in such a community would be, as the Supreme Court once explained, “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”77 Self-confident, thick-skinned citizens would accept, perhaps even appreciate, what Andrew Koppelman only partly sardonically describes as “the joys of mutual contempt.”78 Surely there are still citizens and theorists who cling to that more “liberal” vision of “a confident pluralism,” as John Inazu describes it in a recent book.79
Moreover, at least some of the reasons that animated the ancient pagan city’s episodic but forceful suppression of Christianity do not seem to apply today. The devotees of “modern paganism,” for example, typically would not assert that there are deities who will be angered, and who will accordingly smite the city or fail to answer its auguries, because of the community’s toleration of the blasphemies or sacrileges committed by Christians.
So it is imaginable that Christianity, along with other strong and transcendent religiosities, could be tolerated and accommodated even in a pagan community—in a classically liberal (as opposed to immanently progressive) pagan community.
Still, a triumphalist paganism may see no reason to extend such accommodation to citizens whose views and values reject and disrupt the immanent religiosity on which the pagan city is built. Recall Harvard professor Mark Tushnet’s declaration, noted earlier in the chapter: “They lost, we won.” Tushnet goes on to advocate a “hard-line” approach to the defeated religionists. “You lost, live with it.”80
Tushnet’s recommendation raises a prudential question: Could a “hard-line” approach succeed in realizing the genuine community to which the pagan city aspires? At present our politics are polarized and our public discourse is shrill, shallow, and nasty, as observers on all sides of the cultural divisions often complain. But perhaps that is because the cultural conflict is still active. Civility never flourishes during wartime. But if the party of immanence were to prevail, decisively, and then were to consolidate its control through “hard-line” measures as contemplated by Tushnet and others, perhaps a genuine, peaceful, respectful community could be achieved after all.
Maybe. That is no doubt the progressive aspiration. But here an observation of the historian Edward Gibbon may be pertinent. As noted in chapter 7, some historians have surmised that if the fourth-century pagan emperor Julian had reigned for a longer period, paganism might have been reestablished and Christianity gradually eliminated.81 Gibbon disagreed. By the mid-fourth century, Christians still may not have represented a majority of Roman citizens; even so, “if we seriously reflect on the strength and spirit of the church, we shall be convinced, that before the emperor could have extinguished the religion of Christ, he must have involved his country in the horrors of a civil war.”82 As we saw in the previous chapter, proposals today are not for “extinguish[ing] the religion of Christ,” exactly, but rather for excluding it from an ever-expanding public sphere—one now construed to include the economic marketplace—and relegating its committed practitioners to a shrinking domain outside the city walls. But a similar prudential question is presented. And a similar if somewhat scaled-down prediction seems plausible.
Plausible—not certain. As we saw in chapter 9, surveys showing that a large majority of Americans are still Christian are for these purposes largely unreliable. Many people who mark the box for “Christian” (or “Methodist,” or “Catholic”) may be profoundly uncommitted to or altogether ignorant of their ostensible faith. The ranks of self-professing Christians are likely pervaded by people who are realistically more pagan than Christian.83 And there is no way to take an accurate head count.
Even so, it seems likely that there are still enough genuine and committed Christians to make the “hard-line” imposition of a pagan society difficult. Moreover, unlike the Christians of late antiquity, who could hardly have supposed that they had built the empire (which, after all, had largely assumed its shape and boundaries before their religion even came onto the scene), modern Christians can assert with some plausibility that they and their Christian forebears were responsible for the construction of the civilization that is now being wrested from them. Christians, to be sure, are taught to be submissive and to “turn the other cheek.” But that injunction is subject to interpretation, and in any case, with this as with other precepts, Christians have often fallen short of their announced ideals. It would be understandable if they did not passively acquiesce as modern paganism seizes the city that they and their ancestors have constructed and attempts to relocate them to the shrinking space outside the city walls.
Predictions are precarious, and it is possible that a “hard-line” refusal to accommodate traditional Christianity—with respect to marriage, sexuality, employment, education, commercial activity, and other matters—could succeed in more or less peacefully repressing the nonconforming constituencies. “You lost, live with it,” as Professor Tushnet says.84 But it seems at least as likely that the uncompromising approach will merely raise to a new level of intensity the culture wars that over the last several decades have flourished mostly in unedifying but nonviolent forms.
And so in the end, alas, it may be that the shimmering pagan city, like the Christian one, is simply not to be realized in this world—or at least not by the application of law and force.
Modern Paganism and Human Fulfillment
As we have seen, in its aspiration to create community, the modern progressive project has sought to separate the city, or at least the civic sphere, from claims about Truth—claims that came with the Christian revolution and are likely to be divisive. We have thus far been considering whether that strategy is likely to succeed in constructing genuine community, and we have seen that the prospects are doubtful. But now let us set doubts aside and ask a different question. Suppose the modern pagan city could be established and maintained. Would that city allow us to come home again at last, after centuries of wandering in the wake of the fourth-century Christian revolution? Would it dispel the sense of “homelessness” that Walker Percy discerned in the modern world? More generally, how efficacious would a triumphant modern paganism be in providing people with spiritual fulfillment—in providing the kinds of goods that (as we discussed in chapter 2) many people seek and that religion has typically sought to supply?
In considering these questions, we will not attempt to arrive at any final judgments about Truth—about the truth of paganism (in its diverse forms), or Christianity (in its diverse forms), or any other religion. Rather, as in chapter 7, we will a
ttempt to survey the strengths and weaknesses of modern paganism relative to these truth- and spirituality-oriented desiderata.
Minimalism and Believability. One relevant feature of modern paganism of the philosophical sort—a feature that may be either a strength or a weakness—is that, unlike many other religions, it does not seem to demand much of its adherents, either creedally or behaviorally. Think of Ronald Dworkin’s “religion without God,” which we discussed in chapter 9. An adherent of Dworkin’s religion will affirm that life has “objective” meaning and that there is in the world “objective” beauty or sublimity. Nothing more is required, really. The religion does not instruct adherents on what and where meaning and beauty are, on how these “objective” qualities have come to exist, on what if anything they demand of anyone. Susan Wolf, as we saw in chapter 2, argues that philosophers have no very good account of what it even means for value to be “objective”; Dworkin’s religion does not remedy that deficiency.
In short, by contrast both to ancient mythical paganism (which at least implicitly asked its devotees to believe, in some sense, in a host of divine beings) and to Christianity (which affirms a series of refined creeds and doctrines), Dworkin’s “religion without God” asks for very little. To be counted as a congregant, it is seemingly enough to affirm, “I think that my life is really (and not merely subjectively) valuable, and that the world and the sunset and the Grand Canyon are really (and not merely subjectively) sublime.”
With respect to believability, this minimalist stance is in one sense a strength. Most people today—certainly people with higher educations—would find it impossible to believe in anthropomorphized deities like Zeus, Apollo, and Athena (just as many educated people in late antiquity found it impossible to believe in these deities in any literal way). Many of the same people, whether or not they have devoted any study to the issue, are likewise convinced that science or historical criticism or something else has rendered the claims of the Bible or the Christian creeds unbelievable as well. We noted the philosopher Luc Ferry’s observation that “neither the ancient model nor the Christian model remain credible for anyone of a critical and informed disposition.”85
Correct or not, Ferry surely describes the mind-set of many educated people in our times. At the same time, not many people are willing to relinquish the idea that there are things that are “sacred” or “sacrosanct” or “inviolable”—the human person, perhaps, or maybe the natural environment, or a species of animal or plant. Modern paganism allows people to affirm this sort of minimal, immanent sacredness without signing on to the more ambitious, complex, and (for many) incredible claims of either full-bodied paganism or the transcendent religions. Recall, from chapter 9, Barbara Ehrenreich’s explanation that by contrast to the transcendent God of Christianity and Judaism, whom she rejected, “amoral gods, polytheistic gods, animal gods—these were all fine with me, if only because they seemed to make no promises and demand no belief.”86
If modern paganism’s creedal minimalism is a strength, however, that quality may also be a weakness: modern paganism may be vulnerable in much the same way that ancient philosophical paganism was vulnerable. Ancient philosophical paganism attempted to shore up a polytheism that was becoming increasingly implausible (at least for the more educated) by interpreting the gods as symbolic representations of a more unitary and encompassing divine reality. But as we saw in chapter 7, the position rendered itself vulnerable to Christian critics like Augustine, who contended that if the divine Reality was actually unitary, it would be more sensible to acknowledge and worship that single Reality than to persist in pretending to honor a vast and unruly host of merely metaphorical deities. Thus, as R. T. Wallis observes, “In seeking to establish traditional worship on a philosophical basis the [later pagan philosophers] ironically ensured the triumph of Christianity.”87
Put differently, whether or not they were ultimately true, both full-bodied polytheism and articulated Christianity at least had a sort of integrity. Philosophical paganism, by contrast, was neither one thing nor the other; it attempted to occupy a sort of no-man’s-land in between these positions. But that middle position turned out, arguably, to be less defensible and attractive than either of the leading alternatives. Hence, philosophers today still study and debate Plato and Aristotle on their merits; they take an interest in Plotinus and Porphyry mostly as a matter of antiquarian interest. As a historical proposition, the philosophical paganism of Plotinus and Porphyry turned out to be important mostly because it could be a sort of stepping-stone to Christianity (as it was for Augustine).
In an analogous way, the modern philosophical paganism reflected in Dworkin’s “religion without God” attempts to occupy a sort of middle position between the “disenchanted” world of scientific naturalism and the full-blooded transcendent religions of Christianity and Judaism. Unlike naturalism, Dworkin’s religion wants to affirm that “objective” value, “objective” beauty, sublimity, and the sacred exist; unlike biblical faith, this religion wants to disavow any reference to or reliance on a transcendent source, like God, for such qualities. But without such a reference, it is wholly unclear what these affirmations mean or why we should accept them.
True, as Dworkin observes, most of us have the experience of encountering things that seem valuable or beautiful. And we experience these things and their qualities of value or beauty as real. Naturalistic science offers reductionist accounts of such experiences as subjective projections. By contrast, transcendent religion attempts to account for such experiences by reference to a transcendent source. Each kind of account has its logic, its own sort of integrity. The naturalist will think that the reductionist accounts are sufficient and securely grounded in empirical observation, and that the transcendent accounts reflect a kind of “wish fulfillment” or intellectual immaturity.88 Conversely, a traditional religious perspective may perceive that reductionist and naturalistic accounts are insufficient (because they fail to credit or adequately account for the fullness of such experiences) and that an expanded ontology that includes at least one transcendent reality—God—offers a more adequate account of our experience. The debate has been flourishing for centuries; it will likely not abate any time soon.
The “religion without God” of modern paganism, by contrast, agrees that the reductionist and naturalist accounts are inadequate—hence Dworkin’s sharp criticisms of Richard Dawkins—but it is unwilling to expand its ontological inventory89 to include anything supernatural or transcendent. Rather, while rejecting the naturalist’s reductionist normative judgments, it attempts to stay within the naturalist’s more immanent ontology. But within the naturalist ontology, it is wholly unclear why we need to posit “objective” values, “objective” beauty, or immanent sacredness. Reductionist and subjective accounts will seem to give us all we need, to explain all that we observe. Indeed, it is unclear what it even means to posit such “objective” entities or qualities, or what “objectivity” consists of; it seems to be a foreign or alien element within the naturalistic framework.
Upon reflection, the “religion without God” of modern paganism (at least as manifest in its Dworkinian version) may thus come to resemble a kind of self-referential pulpit pounding, or an exclamation mark added to first-person judgments. “This Rembrandt painting isn’t just beautiful to me; it really is beautiful, dammit, and if you don’t think so you’re just wrong!” Such claims have neither the tough ontological frugality of the naturalistic position nor the expansive sublimity of the theistic vision. They seem understandable mostly as a sort of unstable halfway house or way station for people in transition, either from scientific naturalism to transcendent religion or vice versa.
Minimalism and Spiritual Efficacy. If its minimalism is a strength but also a weakness of modern paganism with respect to believability, the same is true with respect to spiritual efficacy. Humans are both social and embodied beings; both the immanent religions of ancient paganism and the transcendent religions of Christianity and Jud
aism have accordingly sought to address people’s religious nature through performances, spectacles, sacrifices, or liturgies that bring people together and engage them through their bodily senses—sight, hearing, smell, even touch and taste. Humans are also intellectual beings, so religions ancient and modern have provided material for the mind—whether in narrative form (as in the elaborate pagan myths and also in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures) or in more dialectical (as in the Jewish Talmud) or propositional form (as in the Christian creeds, theologies, summas). Such narratives, discussions, and propositions speak to questions like the origin and purpose of life, the meaning of evil, the significance of death.
Humans are also active and embodied beings, living in the world; so religions both ancient and modern have provided their adherents with precepts and commandments—with things to do, ways to live. These have included the rituals and libations and sacrifices of ancient paganism and Judaism and the moral instructions and liturgies of Judaism and Christianity.
By contrast, modern philosophical paganism (at least of the Dworkinian variety) offers none of these things. It sponsors no ceremonies, prescribes no rituals. It does not attempt to explain why the world exists, why we suffer, or whether there is anything for us after death. In this respect, once again, modern paganism is minimalist in comparison either to its ancient predecessor or to its more modern transcendent competitors. One wonders whether modern paganism is simply too intellectually, morally, and ceremonially or liturgically thin to provide what religions are supposed to provide.
But then, perhaps this critical judgment is unfair, overlooking the obvious. True, the “religion without God” may not offer ceremonies, rituals, even moral codes separable from the rest of life and identifiable as pagan religious ceremonies or codes. But then, that is arguably the whole point of immanent religion—namely, to discern and declare the existence of the sacred within the world, and within life. In this sense, it might be said that modern paganism does engage the senses and prescribe ways to act and live. It engages the senses in . . . musical concerts, or plays, or athletic contests—or walks on the beach or in the woods. It allows us to ponder the big questions of existence and life and death in whatever ways we are already inclined to ponder them. And it authorizes us to receive instruction in how to act and how to live through whatever media and means we already receive such instruction—school, home, movies, podcasts, philosophy books.
Pagans and Christians in the City Page 52