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Translated from the French and with the introduction by Tom Sunic
This article was first published in April 1996, in Chronicles; A magazine of American Culture Given the ongoing armed conflict between Israeli troops and Hamas-led Palestinian militants in the Gaza strip, it may be useful to reexamine the Biblical origins of total wars and the nature of modern totalitarianism.
Tom Sunic
Can we still conceive of the revival of pagan sensibility in an age so profoundly saturated by Judeo-Christian monotheism and so ardently adhering to the tenets of liberal democracy? In popular parlance the very word ‘paganism’ may incite some to derision and laughter. Who, after all, wants to be associated with witches and witchcraft, with sorcery and black magic? Worshiping animals or plants, or chanting hymns to Wotan or Zeus, in an epoch of cable television and “smart weapons,” does not augur well for serious intellectual and academic inquiry. Yet, before we begin to heap scorn on paganism, we should pause for a moment. Paganism is not just witches and witches’ brew; paganism also means a mix of highly speculative theories and philosophies. Paganism is Seneca and Tacitus; it is an artistic and cultural movement that swept over Italy under the banner of the Renaissance. Paganism also means Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Charles Darwin, and a host of other thinkers associated with the Western cultural heritage. Two thousand years of Judeo-Christianity have not obscured the fact that pagan thought has not yet disappeared, even though it has often been blurred, stifled, or persecuted by monotheistic religions and their secular offshoots. Undoubtedly, many would claim that in the realm of ethics all men and women of the world are the children of Abraham. Indeed, even the bolder ones who somewhat self-righteously claim to have rejected the Christian or Jewish theologies, and who claim to have replaced them with “secular humanism,” frequently ignore that their self-styled secular beliefs are firmly grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics. Abraham and Moses may be dethroned today, but their moral edicts and spiritual ordinances are much alive. The global and disenchanted world, accompanied by the litany of human rights, ecumenical society, and the rule of law—are these not principles that can be traced directly to the Judeo-Christian messianism that resurfaces today in its secular version under the elegant garb of modern “progressive” ideologies?
And yet, we should not forget that the Western world did not begin with the birth of Christ. Neither did the religions of ancient Europeans see the first light of day with Moses—in the desert. Nor did our much-vaunted democracy begin with the period of Enlightenment or with the proclamation of American independence. Democracy and independence—all of this existed in ancient Greece, albeit in its own unique social and religious context. Our Greco-Roman ancestors, our predecessors who roamed the woods of central and northern Europe, also believed in honor, justice, and virtue, although they attached to these notions a radically different meaning. Attempting to judge, therefore, ancient European political and religious manifestations through the lens of our ethnocentric and reductionist glasses could mean losing sight of how much we have departed from our ancient heritage, as well as forgetting that modern intellectual epistemology and methodology have been greatly influenced by the Bible. Just because we profess historical optimism—or believe in the progress of the modern “therapeutic state”—does not necessarily mean that our society is indeed the “best of all worlds.” Who knows, with the death of communism, with the exhaustion of liberalism, with the visible depletion of the congregations in churches and synagogues, we may be witnessing the dawn of neopaganism, a new blossoming of old cultures, a return to the roots that are directly tied to our ancient European precursors. Who can dispute the fact that Athens was the homeland of Europeans before Jerusalem became their frequently painful edifice?
Great lamenting is heard from all quarters of our disenchanted and barren world today. Gods seem to have departed, as Nietzsche predicted a century ago, ideologies are dead, and liberalism hardly seems capable of providing man with enduring spiritual support. Maybe the time has come to search for other paradigms? Perhaps the moment is ripe, as Alain de Benoist would argue, to envision another cultural and spiritual revolution—a revolution that might well embody our pre-Christian European pagan heritage?
* * *
Alain de Benoist
Nietzsche well understood the meaning of “Athens against Jerusalem.” Referring to ancient paganism, which he called “the greatest utility of polytheism,” he wrote in The Joyful Wisdom:
There was then only one norm, the man and every people believed that it had this one and ultimate norm. But, above himself, and outside of himself, in a distant overworld a person could see a multitude of norms: the one God was not the denial or blasphemy of the other Gods! It was here that the right of individuals was first respected. The inventing of Gods, heroes, and supermen of all kinds, as well as co-ordinate men and undermen— dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, devils—was the inestimable preliminary to the justification of the selfishness and sovereignty of the individual; the freedom which was granted to one God in respect to other Gods, was at last given to the individual himself in respect to laws, customs, and neighbors. Monotheism, on the contrary, the rigid consequence of one normal human being —consequently, the belief in a normal God, beside whom there are only false spurious Gods—has perhaps been the greatest danger of mankind in the past.
Jehovah is not only a “jealous” god, but he can also show hatred: “Yet, I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau” (Malachi 1:3). He recommends hatred to all those who call out his name: “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies” (Psalm 139: 21-22). “Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God” (Psalm 139:19). Jeremiah cries out: “Render unto them a recompense, O Lord, according to the work of their hands. . . . Persecute and destroy them in anger from under the heavens of the Lord” (Lamentations 5:64-66). The book of Jeremiah is a long series of maledictions and curses buried against peoples and nations. His contemplation of future punishments fills him with gloomy delight. “Let them be confounded that persecute me, but let not me be confounded: … bring upon them the day of evil, and destroy them with double destruction” (Lam. 17:18). “Therefore, deliver up their children to the famine, and pour out their blood by the force of the sword; and let their wives be bereaved of their children, and be widows; and let their men be put to death” (Lam. 18:21).
Further, Jehovah promises the Hebrews that he will support them in their war efforts: “When the Lord thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land” (Deuteronomy 12:29). “But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” (Deut. 20:16). Jehovah himself gave an example of a genocide by provoking the Deluge against the humanity that sinned against him. While he resided with the Philistine King Achish, David also practiced genocide (1 Samuel 27:9). Moses organized the extermination of the Midian people (Numbers 31:7). Joshua massacred the inhabitants of Hazor and Anakim. “And Joshua at that time turned back, and took Hazor, and smote the king thereof with the sword: for Hazor beforetime was the head of all those kingdoms. And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them: there was not any left to breathe: and he burnt Hazor with fire” (Joshua 11:10-11, 20-21). The messianic king extolled by Solomon was also known for his reign of terror: “May he purify Jerusalem for all gentiles who trample on it miserably, may he exterminate by his wisdom, justice the sinners of this country. . . . May he destroy the impious nations with the words from his mouth.” Hatred against pagans is also visible in the books of Esther, Judith, etc.
“No ancient religion, except that of the Hebrew people has known such a degree of intolerance,” says Emile Gillabert in Moise et le phénomène judéo-chrétien (1976). Renan had written in similar terms: “The intolerance of the Semitic peoples is the inevitable consequence of their monotheism. The Indo-European peoples, before they converted to Semitic ideas, had never considered their religion an absolute truth. Rather, they conceived of it as a heritage of the family, or the caste, and in this way they remained foreign to intolerance and proselytism. This is why we find among these peoples the liberty of thought, the spirit of inquiry and individual research.” Of course, one should not look at this problem in a black and white manner, or for instance compare and contrast one platitude to another platitude. There have always been, at all times, and everywhere, massacres and exterminations. But it would be difficult to find in the pagan texts, be they of sacred or profane nature, the equivalent of what one so frequently encounters in the Bible: the idea that these massacres could be morally justified, that they could be deliberately authorized and ordained by one god, “as Moses the servant of the Lord commanded” (Joshua 11:12). Thus, for the perpetrators of these crimes, good consciousness continues to rule, not despite these massacres, but entirely for the sake of the massacres.
A lot of ink has been spilled over this tradition of intolerance. Particularly contentious are the words of Jesus as recorded by Luke: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Some claim to perceive in the word “hate” a certain form of Hebraism; apparently, these words suggest that Jesus had to be absolutely preferred to all other human beings. Some claim to see in it traces of Gnostic contamination that suggest renouncement, despoliation of goods, and the refusal of procreation. In this context, the obligation to “hate” one’s parents is to be viewed as a corollary of not wishing to have children.
These interpretations remain pure conjecture. What is certain is that Christian intolerance began to manifest itself very early. In the course of history this intolerance was directed against “infidels” as well as against pagans, Jews, and heretics. It accompanied the extermination of all aspects of ancient culture —the murder of Hypatia, the interdiction of pagan cults, the destruction of temples and statues, the suppression of the Olympic Games, and the arson, at the instigation of the town’s Bishop Theophilus of Serapeum, of Alexandria in A.D. 389, whose immense library of 700,000 volumes had been collected by the Ptolomeys. Then came the forced conversions, the extinction of positive science, persecution, and pyres. Ammianus Marcellinus said: “The wild beasts are less hostile to people than Christians are among themselves.” Sulpicius Severus wrote: “Now everything has gone astray as the result of discords among bishops. Everywhere, one can see hatred, favours, fear, jealousy, ambition, debauchery, avarice, arrogance, sloth: there is general corruption everywhere.”
The Jewish people were the first to suffer from Christian monotheism. The causes of Christian anti-Semitism, which found its first “justification” in the Gospel of John (probably written under the influence of Gnosticism, and to which many studies have been devoted) lie in the proximity of the Jewish and Christian faiths. As Jacques Solé notes: “One persecutes only his neighbors.” Only a “small gap” separates Jews from Christians, but as Nietzsche says, “the smallest gap is also the least bridgeable.” During the first centuries of the Christian era anti-Semitism grew out of the Christian claim to be the successor of Judaism, and bestowing on it its “truthful” meaning. For Christians, “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22), but it is only Christianity that can be verus Israel. Hence the expression perfidi, applied to the Jews until recently by the Church in prayers during Holy Friday—an expression meaning “without faith,” and whose meaning is different from the modern word “perfidious.”
Saint Paul was the first to formulate this distinction. With his replacement of the Law by Grace, Paul distinguished between the “Israel of God” and the “Israel after the flesh” (I Corinthians 10:18), which also led him to oppose circumcision: “For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God” (Romans 2:28-29). Conclusion: “For we are the circumcision” (Philippians 3:3). This argument has, from the Christian point of view, a certain coherence. As Claude Trestmontant says, if the last of the nabis from Israel, the rabbi Yohushua of Nazareth, that is to say Jesus, is really a Messiah, then the vocation of Israel to become the “beacon of nations” must be fully accomplished, and the universalism implied in this vocation must be put entirely into practice. Just as the Law that has come to an end with Christ (in a double sense of the word) is no longer necessary, so has the distinction between Israel and other nations become futile as well: “There is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28). Consequently, universal Christianity must become verus Israel.
This process, which originated in the Pauline reform, has had a double consequence. On the one hand, it has resulted in the persecution of Jews who, by virtue of their “genealogical” proximity, are represented as the worst enemies of Christianity. They are the adversaries who refuse to “convert,” who refuse to recognize Christianity as the “true Israel.” As Shmuel Trigano notes, “by projecting itself as the new Israel, the West has given to Judaism a de facto jurisdiction, albeit not the right to be itself.” This means that the West can become “Israelite” to the extent that it denies Jews the right to be Israelites. Henceforth, the very notion of “Judeo-Christianity” can be defined as a double incarceration. It imprisons “the Christian West,” which by its own deliberate act has subordinated itself to an alien “jurisdiction,” and which by doing so denies this very same jurisdiction to its legitimate (Jewish) owners. Furthermore, it imprisons the Jews who, by virtue of a religion different from their own, are now undeservedly caught in the would-be place of their “accomplishment” by means of a religion which is not their own. Trigano further adds: “If Judeo-Christianity laid the foundations of the West, then the very place of Israel is also the West.” Subsequently, the requisites of “Westernization” must also become the requisites of assimilation and “normalization,” and the denial of identity. “The crisis of Jewish normality is the crisis of the westernization of Judaism. Therefore, to exit from the West means for the Jews to turn their back to their ‘normality,’ that is, to open themselves up to their otherness.” This seems to be why Jewish communities today criticize the “Western model,” only after they first adopt their own specific history of a semi-amnesiac and semi-critical attitude.
In view of this. Christian anti-Semitism can be rightly described as neurosis. As Jean Blot writes, it is because of its “predisposition toward alienation” that the West is incapable of “fulfilling itself or rediscovering itself.” And from this source arises anti-Semitic neurosis. “Anti-semitism allows the anti-Semite to project onto the Jew his own neuroses. He calls him a stranger, because he himself is a stranger, a crook, a powerful man, a parvenu; he calls him a Jew, because he himself is this Jew in the deepest depth of his soul, always on the move, permanently alienated, a stranger to his own religion and to God who incarnates him.” By replacing his original myth with the myth of biblical monotheism, the West has turned Hebraism into its own superego. As an inevitable consequence, the West had to turn itself against the Jewish people by accusing them of not pursuing the “conversion” in terms of the “logical” evolution proceeding from Sinai to Christianity. In addition, the West also accused the Jewish people of attempting, in an apparent “deicide,” to obstruct this evolution.
Many, even today, assume that if Jews were to renounce their distinct identity, “the Jewish problem” would disappear. At best, this is a naive proposition, and at worst, it masks a conscious or unconscious form of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, this proposition, which is inherent in the racism of assimilation and the denial of identity, represents the reverse side of the racism of exclusion and persecution. In the West, notes Shmuel Trigano, when the Jews were not persecuted, they “were recognized as Jews only on the condition that they first ceased to be Jews.” Put another way, in order to be accepted, they had to reject themselves; they had to renounce their own Other in order to be reduced to the Same. In another type of racism, Jews are accepted but denied; in the first, they are accepted but are not recognized. The Church ordered Jews to choose between exclusion (or physical death) or self-denial (spiritual and historical death). Only through conversion could they become “Christians, as others.”
The French Revolution emancipated Jews as individuals, but it condemned them to disappear as a “nation”; in this sense, they were forced to become “citizens as others.” Marxism, too, attempted to ensure the “liberation” of the Jewish people by imposing on them a class division, from which their dispersion inevitably resulted.
The origins of modern totalitarianism are not difficult to trace. In a secular form, they are tied to the same radical strains of intolerance whose religious causes we have just examined. The organization of totalitarianism is patterned after the organization of the Christian Church, and in a similar manner totalitarianisms exploit the themes of the “masses”—the themes inherent in contemporary mass democracy. This secularization of the system has, in fact, rendered totalitarianism more dangerous—independently of the fact that religious intolerance often triggers, in return, an equally destructive revolutionary intolerance. “Totalitarianism,” writes Gilbert Durand, “is further strengthened, in so far as the powers of monotheist theology (which at least left the game of transcendence intact) have been transferred to a human institution, to the Grand Inquisitor.”
It is a serious error to assume that totalitarianism manifests its real character only when it employs crushing coercion. Historical experience has demonstrated—and continues to demonstrate—that there can exist a “clean” totalitarianism, which, in a “soft” manner, yields the same consequences as the classic kinds of totalitarianism. “Happy robots” of 1984 or of Brave New World have no more enviable conditions than prisoners of the camps. In essence, totalitarianism did not originate with Saint-Just, Stalin, Hegel, or Fichte. Rather, as Michel Maffesoli says, totalitarianism emerges “when a subtle form of plural, polytheistic, and contradictory totality, that is inherent in organic interdependency” is superseded by a monotheistic one. Totalitarianism grows out of a desire to establish social and human unity by reducing the diversity of individuals and peoples to a single model. In this sense, he argues, it is legitimate to speak of a “polytheist social arena, referring to multiple and complementary gods” versus a “monotheistic political arena founded on the illusion of unity.” Once the polytheism of values “disappears, we face totalitarianism.” Pagan thought, on the other hand, which fundamentally remains attached to rootedness and to the place, and which is a preferential center of the crystallization of human identity, rejects all religious and philosophical forms of universalism.
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As long as a Jew (Jesus) remains the white man’s most important historical figure, he will remain enslaved to these Jews.
One thing that stands out in the article is that the author neglects a fundamental difference between Christianism and pagan cults: Christianism has a doctrine; Paganism does not have any doctrine.
A Christian doctrine that died with Christ and his apostles. Because shortly after, the white man hijacked Christianity and empowered it in Rome and since then Christians have dedicated themselves to killing each other or killing others simply to rob them.
Christian Doctrine is not paying tithing and attending Church.
And what came to America with the conquerors was no longer the original Christianity because it protected the crimes that were committed, even the false churches collected the tithe of the loot of the crimes that were committed.
And it is a heresy to call that Christianity.
look at the civilizations built by these “polytheistic pagans”. from the mother civilization of egypt, that then birthed both the greek and later roman civilizations that we once valued. the ruins they left behind are infinitely more advanced, than the hollowed out tourist traps, that their devolved and deformed ancestors have inherited, who that now dance for nickels in the street, to amuse tourists.
were the people that built these impressive empires primitive savages, with primitive beliefs? or were these amazing cultures, co-opted and destroyed by monotheistic (and by definition homosexual) religions, that purposefully attacked and destroyed any religion that spoke of the feminine divine. the goddess became the whore of bablyon, sex became a sin and women became the root of all “eve”il. well just look where all that got us. me, i’d rather have the goddess.
Sure, let’s go back to worshiping trees and animals, sacrificing or exposing infants, attacking and enslaving our neighbors. What fun! Even some of the pagan philosophers knew polytheism was absurd. Reality needs only one uncaused cause. The antisemitism you guys charge Christians with was no such thing. Christianity was founded by Semites, after all. Christians found they had to deal with their sworn enemies, the descendants of the Scribes and Pharisees and the Talmudic Judaism they crafted as a response to Christianity. Those among them who made genuine conversions to Christianity were welcomed. Those who persisted in Talmudism were outcasts and treated accordingly. The modern liberal, anti-Christian regimes removed the disabilities that prevented Jews from harming the societies they lived among and the Jews responded with a variety of sustained revolutionary ideological attacks on Christian societies: liberalism, socialism, communism, and the various woke attacks that are the latest manifestation of hostility.
A seasonal speculation . . . In the ancient world, if a would-be father were suspected of shooting blanks, it was not unknown for his wife to visit a temple for a (very) private audience with a priest. Any child born was seen as especially favoured by the gods; even – wait for it – as a son of God.
Could that have been the case with Mary? As it was more a pagan thing, it would have made sense to look for help in Persia, which was just up the road from Galilee and had long-established ties with the Jewish people.
The theory does explain the curious incident of the ‘Three Magi’ at the nativity. The inclusion of Zoroastrians at the birth is an odd detail for a Jewish or Christian writer to have invented. The pretty legend of their bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh may have been an elaboration of a family tradition that Persians had arrived to add a final blessing on the birth they had facilitated.
If correct, then Jesus’s father would have been Persian, an Indo-European – not a Semitic – people (so an Aryan Christ!). His genetic disposition could be one reason why he didn’t get along with the Jewish authorities.
Where’s Dan Brown when you need him . . .
I agree in part, but mostly disagree. Christianism is an apocalyptic religion. Its purpose is not to better the world. It acknowledges it will not save mankind, but only a minority of people (“many are called, but few are chosen”).
LOL.
LOL
When did the Greeks come to Europe and who gave them that name?
Who were the ‘Indo-Europeans’?
Who were the natives of Europe?
Alain de Benoist: “Pagan thought, on the other hand, which fundamentally remains attached to rootedness and to the place, and which is a preferential center of the crystallization of human identity, rejects all religious and philosophical forms of universalism.”
This does not seem to me to be true. Aristotle defines man as the rational animal, and this didn’t exclude non-Greeks. Platonism and its offshoots such as Stoicism appeared to think that reason was a universal human characteristic, and that its proper use would enable everyone, regardless of race, to come to the same conclusion on essential questions of life. For example, in Plato’s dialogue Meno, Socrates shows that even an uneducated slave boy is able to reason his way to the truth of Pythagoras’ theorem. Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, also wrote a now lost work called Republic, a response to Plato’s dialogue of the same name, which outlined an ideal state.
Of all of the bible quotes to appear in the essay missing are the most important:
20 “Moreover, you took your sons and your daughters whom you had borne to Me, and you destroyed them as sacrifices [to your man-made gods]. Were your gross immoralities so small a matter? 21 You slaughtered My children and offered them up to [worthless] idols, forcing them to pass through the [hideousness of the] fire. 22 And in all your repulsive acts and prostitutions (idolatrous immoralities) you did not [pause to] remember the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, squirming in your [newborn] blood.
23 “Then it came about after all your wickedness (‘Woe, woe to you!’ says the Lord God), 24 that you built yourself an [c]altar for prostitution and made yourself a high place [for ritual prostitution] in every square [of Jerusalem]. Ezekiel 16
Perhaps replacing the term God with “Creator” and “Father” would provide some context. Like for example when ones own children whom you created with your wife get it “created” returns from they’re prodigal ways to the home of they’re birth with destroyed lives, a son wanting to commit suicide by way of alcoholism because he can’t live with the sins of his life and the many the people he helped destroy and a daughter ruined by thousands of men, maybe then one will stop and consider the why of so much bloodshed in the Old Testament.
You know whats missing is understanding no one in that time period were atheists. The stories of the Great Flood, Tower of Babel etc etc weren’t fables and conjecture or myths. People knew for a fact that a Father Creator existed period!!! No Darwin would ever have found the courage to do what he did in our time. He would have been laughed and ridiculed out of existence. Faith wasn’t blind to those people ie: the 14 years of climate change in Egypt!!! The Melchizedek priesthood to whom Abraham gave a tenth of all he had etc etc? The problem was rebellion and treason!!! That is the story of the Old Testament period!! Paganism was a disaster for those people as it will be for ours seen again in ones own children who are rebelling against they’re own parents and for what?
a season of pleasure. Gotta love the words:
“How weakened by longing and lust is your heart (mind),” says the Lord God, “while you do all these things, the actions of a bold and brazen prostitute. 31 When you built your shrine altar for prostitution at the beginning of every street and made your high place in every public square, you were not like a prostitute because you refused payment. 32 You adulterous wife, who welcomes and receives strangers instead of her husband! 33 Men give gifts to all prostitutes, but you give your gifts to all your lovers, bribing the pagan nations to come to you [as allies] from every direction for your obscene immoralities. 34 And you are different from other [unfaithful] women in your promiscuity, in that no one follows you to lure you into prostitution, and because you give money and no money is given you; in this way you are different.”
I created these children and look at what they do to me? Maybe stop and consider the long-sufferring ways of our Father Creator and why we haven’t been disposed of a long time ago. Something which Christ Jesus had the full authority to do in the Garden of Gethsemane when he said to those trying to protect him:
“Do you not think that I can call to my Father and he can put at my disposal an entire legion of angels.”
That guy who rolled the stone away is just one of millions who could have dispatched Caesar with ease and here you all are mocking and laughing this King and worse His our Father?
I guess what awaits are the mushroom clouds instead?
The term “pagan” means literally people of the countryside. It was applied derisively by Christians to members of the traditional religions and philosophies as a slur, suggesting they were rude and unlettered. But in fact, Christians resorted to petty personal insults because the doctrines of their new faith made no impression on educated urban Romans or Greeks. It was easy for them to ridicule the silly stories told of the deities of the classical pantheon, but the mockery they received for their strange novelties was more than they could take in good humor. Christians were, after all, the new “chosen” ones, far superior to the rest because they alone possessed the magic rituals that would motivate the only “true” god to shower them with rich rewards. But Romans smelled the rat, that these promises could only be fulfilled after you died. They were equally disgusted by the strange new Jewish god-man’s bizarre fixation on monitoring the intimate details of people’s personal lives. One Epicurean earned the Christians’ everlasting ire by comparing them to foolish frogs in a little pond, croaking that the world had been made just for them.
In time Christians would co-opt pagan philosophy, adding in watered-down elements of Plato and Aristotle (who agreed that some sort of second life followed the real one) in order to give a gloss of respectability to the cult. The brilliant and popular philosopher Epicurus, for whom the central purpose of life was the pursuit of pleasure guided by reason, and who rejected both a god interested in human activity and the afterlife, was reduced to a Falstaffian caricature of a mindless hedonist and was forgotten. Yet the wide dissemination of the first rediscovered copy of his great treatise, De rerum natura (on the nature of things), provided the spark that would light the Renaissance. Familiar with the great science of classical Greece, which understood everything was composed of only two things, atoms and void, Lucretius might have been one of the influences that would have put men on the moon in 969, not 1969, had his work not been suppressed for a millennium.
Our civic heritage owes a good deal more to classical paganism than it does to Christianity. The Founders were well versed in classical studies, which was the heart of an Anglo-American gentleman’s education. Their writings and iconography are rich in classical allusions. They patterned their new republic on the checks-and-balances system of the Roman Republic. Some conversed in Latin and classical Greek at the Constitutional Convention, The national motto they had adopted five years earlier, “Annuit Coeptis” (He has favored [our] undertakings), which appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, alludes to line 625 of Virgil’s book IX of the Aeneid, “Juppiter omnipotes audacibus annue coeptis” (All-powerful Jupiter favor [my] daring undertakings). Striking down a king whose authority to rule came directly from the Christian god might qualify as quite the “daring undertaking,” as does refusing to establish Christianity as the new state’s official religion. We might also note that out other motto, on the obverse of the Seal, “Novus Ordo Seclorum (New Order of the Ages)” is from Virgil’s Eclogues, where it is the prophecy of the Cumaean Sybil that the infant Rome is destined to rule the world. And Thomas Jefferson, who proudly called himself an Epicurean, changed the course of history when he altered Locke’s austere phrase “life, liberty, and property” to something far more profound, the pledge of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” found in our Declaration of Independence.
This essay seems to have some ideas in common with multipolarity and some of the works by Aleksandr Dugin . Some good food for thought by both authors of this essay
The name ‘pagan’ (or ‘pogan’) is a Serbian word (remember that the Serbian language is the oldest in Europe). ‘Pagania’ was the area around the Neretva River which flows into the Adriatic Sea where the Serbs lived.
In the immediate vicinity is the river Trebisnjica, where in the caves the apostle Paul performed the first baptisms of Serbs and hid from Nero, before he went to Rome, where Nero executed him. The literal meaning of the word is – ‘heathen, filthy, sordid’ and it is used similarly as mentioned in #11.
The area can be seen on the map:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narentines
https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Pagania
Read the late Dr. Revilo Oliver’s The Origins of Christianity if you dare.
Observator: “Our civic heritage owes a good deal more to classical paganism than it does to Christianity.”
That very much depends on which part of “our civic heritage” you are talking about. While it’s true the Constitution was written by highly refined men who were literate in the classics, it would be a big mistake to underestimate the Christian influence on America. The ideas of Christian theologian John Locke inspired the Founders, and he derived his notion of inalienable human rights from the Bible. America can’t be understood without this, and there is no such notion in paganism. Also, the country was settled by Christian fanatics, and this fanaticism for “human rights” ultimately resulted in a Civil War to free the negro slaves and make them citizens and voters, a truly lunatic decision inspired by Christian fantasies, and one from which the country still suffers. Then too, we have the Puritan John Winthrop’s idea, again derived from the Bible, that the new country was to be “a city on a hill” as described in Matthew 5:14, a phrase that has echoed down through the centuries and been repeated by many presidents to justify by so-called American exceptionalism numerous foreign wars in the name of “human rights”. For these and other reasons, and despite the much-exaggerated demise of that religion, it’s still fair to describe America as the most Christian country in the world.
Paganism is of course not remotely intellectually credible.
The pagan gods were obviously mere humans writ large, the product of a failure of the imagination to conceive of intelligent beings that are truly fundamentally different from humans. Thus the pagan gods have every human flaw and vice, and no virtue that humans themselves lack in kind if not in degree. Contemplating them with their silly squabbles, lusts, blunders, and feuds is in no way uplifting, but rather squalid.
It’s all so silly. Gods of this and that. How were the jurisdictions decided and agreed upon? How to explain away the overlaps and shifts of jurisdiction (who is the sun god again – Apollo or Helios?), especially the propensity to accept and incorporate “new” gods from other cultures. And then the deification of human rulers? And then the Roman Senate being able to REVOKE posthumous divine status? And then every single thing having a spirit – not just a god of the forests, but of THIS forest, of THIS tree, of every rock? Every pebble? Ludicrous.
You can see how much more intellectually attractive monotheism was.
And how much more morally and emotionally attractive Christianity was. Obviously, being desirable has no bearing on whether a claim is true, but it certainly has an effect on being accepted.
And compare the obvious cosmic injustice of paganism — where the gods have no love or concern for humanity as such, and eternally torture Prometheus for giving us fire. Where they callously whip up devastating wars (such as the Trojan War) over petty spite. Where all the dead regardless of virtue or vice in life end up identically as shades in the gloom of Hades, or as the highest reward, experience eternal stupid drunken gluttony and mindless slaughter in Valhalla.
Compare that to being told that the divine creator of the vast universe personally loves you as an individual like a father loves a son, so much as to be willing to be tortured to death to save you from eternal punishment and to give you eternal happiness.
Paganism would have collapsed regardless of Constantine, and he threw in his lot with the Christians because it was obvious what the long term wiser course was.
The whole Jesus birth story is a fake, made up, modified and plagiarized from pagan religions!
The case for Christianity has its strongest argument here:
It’s still a weak case. Christianity rejects actual human sacrifice, but only because it practices human sacrifice in effigy thru the death of Jesus. The ancient religion of Zoroastrianism, which predates Christianity, rejects on principle the notion of a God who takes bribes. Such a lofty moral ideal remains foreign to Christians.
It should be noted that Greco-Roman polytheism had also done away with human sacrifice. So Gerry is not really arguing against Alain de Benoist, he’s arguing against the Aztecs and Canaanites of 500 and 3000 years ago.
If it is silly to believe in an infinite number of gods, then it is silly to believe in one God.
Existence is a miracle. What more reason do you need to believe?
The pagan gods are not the creators of the world, but fellow inhabitants of it. Monotheism has the Frankenstein problem: “O God, why did you create me, made to want what I cannot have?” Darwin answered this question. Recognition of the amorality and indifference of the universe is a refutation of Christianity, but not of paganism.
Myths are childlike. This is a beautiful thing. Those of a childlike mind may take them literally; adults should learn to interpret them. The gods are the friends of man. It is plainly false to say that they have no love or concern for humanity. What is in it for Thor, that he protects us from the frost giants? The gods often quarrel with each other and work at cross-purposes — as above, so below.
Constantine endorsed Christianity because Rome had degenerated in his time to an Emperor and his slaves, for which the Christian religion is entirely appropriate.
From the perspective of a materialistic atheist, any belief in the supernatural, including in divine spirits, is silly.
But it’s not just a simple totally credible / totally non-credible dynamic. There are degrees of “silliness” and plausibility. An Unz commenter’s claim to have one attractive girlfriend may be questionable, but more plausible than another commenter claiming to have hundreds.
A single incorporeal creator spirit that is the cause of all existence and with an awareness beyond human comprehension is MORE plausible than a gaggle of shifting, contradicting, and overlapping “gods” of this and that, with entirely (and shabbily) human outlooks, motivations, and actions — as I explained and illustrated in detail in my prior post.
Perhaps. Even if so, that does not refute the greater attraction of Christianity, and the inevitable doom of paganism competing with it in the “marketplace” (even without coercion).
Yes, this is, broadly, what paganism portrays. My point is that it clearly reveals the man-made origin of paganism; paganism’s inability to even imagine anything that is not merely human, or a magnified aspect of humanity. Whereas Abrahamic monotheism’s deity seems more alien and inscrutable, vaster and less contained, more credible as something fundamentally different from as well as greater than human.
The giants are a threat to the gods, not just men. The Edda specifically states that if it were not for Thor and his hammer, the giants would overrun Asgard, the dwelling place of the gods, making a farcical cross-dressing quest to retrieve the stolen hammer necessary. And at Ragnarök, the giants are part of the forces that destroy the homes of the gods as well as of men.
I don’t see that as a problem.
Christianity and Islam, at least, answer it readily – because God is the ultimate source of all goodness and happiness, therefore man longs for maximum unity with God, living in a state of paradise in which all things are in accordance with God’s wishes. However, because for a rational being to meaningfully choose God, he must also have the ability to choose otherwise – to sin, which prevents and delays this happiness, creating a longing for the not yet attained. The Christian doctrine of original sin’s claim of an inherently corrupt nature and inclination of man for which God is the only remedy ultimately also relies upon a prior freely-made choice in the Fall of Man rather than blaming God.
Some strains of Judaism, especially before the Enlightenment, were similar to this (such as asserting both an inclination toward good and toward evil); today it is more difficult to make any claim about Judaism as a whole.
Many (especially Christians and Jews) also view “evil” as a good that is pursued or realized beyond an appropriate point, at which point it infringes upon some other good that it should yield to. And therefore such longing is merely an error in chosen emphasis on the part of the man in question. Or a confusion of a specific longing (such as the pseudo-nostalgic bittersweet pain caused by beautiful art) with the ultimate source of happiness that longing is truly for – God.