A Hearty Cheer for Paganism!

We can learn from Athens, but Athens would be wise to pause and realize that she needs Jerusalem too.

Paganism and Christianity have not always gotten along. When either group is given state power, both have fallen for the temptation of persecuting their enemies. Still, good pagans could speak the truth as Saint Paul witnesses and Christians owe a debt to high pagans like Heraclitus and Plato for creating a vocabulary in the Greek language that helped explain God’s revelation to the world. No complex set of ideas is so wrong that it does not have something to teach us and no set of ideas is so good, true, and beautiful that people cannot mess them up.

Don’t get me wrong: paganism is wrong generally. Christianity is true generally, but I know more than one pagan with a better handle on some truths than I have particularly.  I was reminded of my admiration for what paganism gets right when reading a modern pagan on King Arthur. The essay is illuminating and I was honored that the author chose to interact with a summary of a lecture I recently gave at The Saint Constantine School.  If the essay misunderstands my point, this is probably due to a lack of clarity on my part.

Mr Beckett says of my essay:

This is a Christian reading of Arthur’s story, but it is a reading that is not grounded in the teachings of Jesus or in the Kingdom of God that is in your midst or even within you. It is a reading based in the hopes of a rapture that always disappoints and in an apocalypse that never comes.

Yet my views are grounded in the teaching of Jesus and the idea that the Kingdom is in our midst and in me. Tonight I went to the one, holy, catholic, and orthodox church and saw that Kingdom in action. I also see it alive in the face of baby Beatrice, just born to two colleagues. We are winning, but winning does not mean, ever, political power and wealth. There are eras where those blessings are possible, but those times are in some ways more dangerous than the hard times.

Orthodoxy has no rapture and the apocalypse has come, is here, and will come. This is the tension of reality: Justice is here, but not fully realized. Someday it will be. This has been lived in the life of God’s people. The Church during the Soviet Union was just as triumphant as it was under the Tsars or Putin and particular members were and are less compromised!

The author misses the fact that the Kingdom is here and is always winning, just not externally. The Kingdom is here as surely (and perhaps more certainly!) when a martyr goes to the stake under a pagan emperor like Julian the Apostate as it is when the pagan Constantine sees the sign of a cross. In fact, I (generally) agree with much of his point. We cannot own holy things. Times are tough, but humanity has survived worse.

It is not surprising that I agree, because modern paganism is mostly ideas borrowed from Christianity and then given a “pagan” religious twist. The problem for pagans is there is very, very little left of authentic religious paganism from the druids and the Celts. Just as some Christians can turn “Celtic spirituality” into a term for anything they like in modern Christianity while rejecting what they do not like, so Western pagans have taken (mostly) Western Christian stories, images, and ideas and tried to blow dry the waters of baptism off them.

It does not work.

Take the Holy Grail. Let’s be plain: the Holy Grail is the cup of Christ. If you wish, you can hunt about for pagan antecedents, but in the stories of our childhoods, the grail is holy because it is the cup that held the Blood of Jesus. There is no pagan grail. There are pagan images of which we have traces in literature, but they are thin and to flesh them out ends up borrowing the parts of Christian genius one likes and dispensing with the uncomfortable Christian bits.

The story of Beowulf is a prime example. If there was a pagan “Beowulf,” he has long ago vanished. The story we have is Christian and simply stripping the obvious religious bits out leaves Christianity without the religious vocabulary. So it is with the “pagan” essay, I am interacting with. Leave out the pagan terminology and you have some Dallas Willard mixed up with a bit of Charles Williams.

There is nothing substantial there that is not Western Christianity and hurrah for the essay for being so Christian. I agree with most of it, but there is precious little paganism in it, because we know precious little about Celtic paganism. The contrast with Christianity is illuminating. Jesus was real and in space and time. He rose from the dead: it is reasonable to think this is true and there is only one God as the high pagans like Plato realized. We have records and writings from followers of Jesus within thirty years of His death.

Sadly, this is not true for Western paganism. There is little or nothing left, just rooting about in Christian stories and literature to recover what people at the time rejected and so did not save.  As a result, any Christian can agree with all the hopeful bits of modern “paganism,” but not with the bleak bits. Narnia isn’t less Christian, because CS Lewis never says Jesus. Modern pagan versions of Arthur are simply Christianity with some other parts thrown over the top. Dig very deep and you are back to the Christian bards, because that is all there really is.

Sadly, if you get rid of Jesus, hope fails. According to the Christ-less Arthur story, there is not a once and future king that ends injustice, there is no end to history. Things will go on and on and on and on . . . and sadly we live in a down time. History is cyclical and what has been will be again.

Nonsense.

History begins in creation and ends in redemption.

We may not live to see the Once and Future King with our physical eyes, but we will live in bliss with Him forever. Someday, He will fully return, but even if we do not live to see it, see it we will when we live again. As for now, the Kingdom of God was, is, and is to come. I am jolly now, because Jesus is here now. What is better is that best reason and best experience says that Jesus will come in the flesh and time will be no more. 

If told to cheer up, because someday for a short time things will be better, I say: “No.” Christianity says: “Things rot at the moment, but they also are deeply good and someday all the rot will be gone.” We have all the hope that modern pagans can muster and so much more. We don’t own the holy objects, but we think the Holy is here and someday will be here to stay.

We win now even if not visibly, but someday the consummation will come. “Down times” are times of great injustice when men choose evil: Mordred over Arthur. Someday full justice will be done, that is hopeful. Meanwhile, in my community justice is done now. The sign of the Cross appeared and ended interesting paganism and I fear attempts to revive it have never done much better than Julian: borrowing our best ideas (the Trinity) and ending up conquered by the pale Nazarene.

If I were not a Christian, I would surely be a high pagan, but I hope I would not be a pagan that was really a Christ-less Christian. That is unworthy of a glorious tradition, now mostly lost.