On Paganism
Sometimes, and I hear this especially from Catholic proponents of the “Benedict Option”, we are told that Western civilization has entered a new phase of paganism. The implication of this is clear: that public culture has succumbed to crassness, sin, and debauchery, and that the frenzied pursuit of pleasure that stems from a morbid fear of death has itself led to a culture of death. Regardless of whether this is true, it reveals a certain poverty of thinking about what paganism actually is.
In the original context, a pagan was literally an inhabitant of a rural district. Christianity was a religion of the city; in the later Roman empire, the least Christianized inhabitants were peasants. Anyone who has observed village life will tell you that their internal behavior is strictly circumscribed, and deviations are punished. This is largely because villages are and were precarious communities depending on cooperation to survive and motivated by distrust of the outside world. These are not communities made of pleasure-seeking sybarites.
When the Emperor Julian (the epitome of a prudish moralist) entered the Christian stronghold of Antioch with his army, the mores and customs of these city dwellers offended him, and he compared the inhabitants unfavorably to the rustic peasants of Gaul. The Antiochenes were pleasure seekers and sensualists, but they were also dedicated Christians who put on lavish displays of piety that enraged the Emperor. The papacy in the 10th century as well as the late 15th century may have been corrupt and decadent, but it was nevertheless the premier vanguard of Christendom.
So, paganism is not self-indulgence; it is actually the triumph and sacralization of custom. By this I mean folkways of a traditional, concrete community tied to a physical location. The opposite of paganism is Revelation: the sacralization of a mystic vision, of word made into flesh that transgresses the realities of the material world. Revelation is Orthodoxy; paganism is Orthopraxy. Revelation is very appealing to kings and statesmen, for it transcends physical boundaries and allowed them to escape the strict social discipline of Custom. The pagans of antiquity were horrified by the Christian monastic tradition. The notion that one could abandon community and silently unite with the divine in isolation was deeply shocking. Likewise, Christian rejections of marriage enraged pagan villagers, for marriage and the alliances it created were the foundations of sustaining village life.
Zoroastrianism was the first known non-pagan religion for it represented a severe break with ancient Aryan customs. The gods were no longer to be propriated with rituals; they became demons and human were now expected to satisfy a sole deity who was only satisfied by righteous conduct and purity of thought. The Jews were essentially a pagan people until their Babylonian captivity. Originally, Yahweh was simply one god among many, though he was the god peculiar to the Hebrews. The Israelite and Judean kings are repeatedly castigated in the Old Testament for worshiping foreign gods, but these are retroactive condemnations. The authors of these criticisms were exiles returning from the Babylonian captivity who needed to gloss over an uncomfortable truth. Namely, that worship of multiple deities was typical and widespread (even Solomon did it) by the royal houses of Israel and Judah.
The Babylonian captivity was a brutal assault on the customary beliefs of the Jews. Like most forced migration, it was intended to assimilate them into a new cultural milieu. But torn away from their their homeland and with their community scattered, the Jews clung to their old beliefs by maintaining a more abstract vision of their faith. Thus, they were totally susceptible to the revelatory message of Zarathustra, filtered through the Persian king Cyrus. Cyrus, creator of the first true “World-Empire” is not merely a friend to the Jews; he is anointed by God, a deity who is no longer the tribal god of the Hebrews, but the Lord of the whole universe.
Hinduism is a kind of hybrid belief between custom and revelation. The caste system, for example, is a triumph of custom and parochialism. The Vedas are certainly a pagan text. But the Bhagavad Gita is anti-pagan and revelatory; it begins as a justification to break an extremely primeval taboo, the shedding of the blood of one’s kinsmen, for the sake of maintaining a transcendent order. Increasingly, it seems Hinduism will succumb to revelation, especially if the forces of Hindutva succeed. The idea that “Hindus” are an organic community to be encompassed within the machinery of the state is an intrinsically revelatory message and will require retroactive revelations to be parsed from Hindu scripture that were previously not recognized as such.
The message of the Buddha was a revelation, and in its original formulation, Buddhism cannot be regarded as paganism since it amounted to an onslaught on customary beliefs and social relations. It spread beyond India to completely disparate audiences: Sogdian merchants, Greek kings, Chinese emperors, Tocharian nomads. The early Christian fathers were well aware of the distinctiveness of the Buddhist message. Clement of Alexandria called Buddha a man of “extraordinary sanctity” while St Jerome claimed that Buddha too had a virgin birth.
Since then there have been subsequent revelations: the revelation of Gabriel to Muhammed, Nationalism, Marx’s Scientific Socialism, the Idea of Progress itself. What these revelations all have in common is a vision transcending time and space, a vision that attacks the creeds and social relations of localized communities.
For most human history, anti-pagan revelations were adopted consciously by elites and imposed on the masses, who accepted them through inertia as a veneer over their traditional folkways. If anything, the power of national states, industrialized production, and mass communication have finally obliterated the paganism of old. The old customs are meaningless, and personal relationships distorted by the subservience of private life to economic rationales. Pleasure seeking is no longer the escape from daily toil as presented in the peasant celebrations depicted in a Brueghel painting. It has transformed into an imposed, psychosexual torment in the absence of genuine leisure. Revelation has become hyperreal, permeating every aspect of daily existence; we are exhausted and overwhelmed by its constant reiterations, especially when multiple visions of revelation are irreconcilable. Everyone is now exiled to Babylon, desperately awaiting the arrival of Cyrus.
