Pagans and Christians in the City

Pagans and Christians in the City is an excellent book. It focuses on the broad sweep of Western Civilization, looking at the interplay between pagan religion and values and Christian religion and values. While Christian values may have supplanted those of the Roman Empire, it appears that many of those same values have made a resurgence in modern times. The book is weakest when it tries to tie these trends to the modern day culture wars, where the author's more conservative views become abundantly obvious. Nevertheless, I would highly recommend the book. It opened me up to a broad vision of what might be the overarching storyline behind Western Civilization and has helped me to better understand some of the trends motivating today's underlying social tensions.

I chanced to be reading Professor Steven D. Smith's “Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac” during the height of the Black Lives Matter Riots (“BLM”) of 2020. As a Catholic, I had noticed the odd behavior of white BLM activists engaging in behaviors that I associated with my faith tradition. For example, there were confessional liturgies where what activists would recite in unison their apologies and guilt for their “white privilege.” We had discussions that accused whites of an “original sin” of racism. What finally clinched it for me was an SJW activist on Facebook discussing how she spent 15 minutes and 20 seconds - the time George Floyd had been knelt on by a Minneapolis police officer - recreating in her mind the second by second experience of Floyd. For any Catholic acquainted with the Stations of the Cross, what she was doing was an obvious analogy to contemplating the Sorrowful Passion of Our Savior.

So, as I'd never seen before, the leftwing BLM movement was shot through with familiar religious impulse and imagery, but, yet, somehow different than what I was familiar with.

Professor Smith's book seems to provide the key to understanding our present moment. His thesis is that human beings are inherently religious but two forms of religion war with each other. One religious impulse places the divine in this world and looks for ultimate fulfillment in this “immanent” world. The other places religious source and fulfillment “out there” beyond nature in the supernatural and “transcendent.”

Classical paganism was the model of “immanent” religiosity. Gods were those who could be bargained with and dealt with because their concerns involved the present world since there was no other world. Why was the pagan world so saturated with sex such that images and statues of phalluses and priapism were everywhere? Because sexual orgasm was the closest that an immanent religiosity could come to transcendent experience in this world.

Of course, immanent paganism was displaced by transcendent Christianity, which reoriented values to a transcendent God and a transcendent final goal. Goods came with this reorientation as Smith explains:

“On the positive side, however, a fair assessment would likely credit Christianity with helping to bring about many of the features of modern civilization that are most valued—including respect for the dignity of the individual,53 human rights,54 the commitment to equality,55 and concern for the poor.56 These ideas and ideals, foreign to ancient paganism, reflect the biblical claims that humans are made “in the image of God,” that God has infinite concern or love for these creatures or children (even “the least among them”),57 and that God gave himself for human beings.”

On the other hand, a sense of dislocation - of being not “at home” in this world - also came with the transcendent religion:

“The pagan orientation, in short, accepts this world as our home, and does so joyously, exuberantly, worshipfully. (Or at least that is one part of the pagan orientation; we may encounter other, darker aspects as we proceed.) The transcendent monotheism of Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, disrupts this comfortable sense of being at home. Though created and sustained by God, the world is now also separated from God—a separation aggravated, in Christian doctrine, by the Fall. Christians (and also Jews) effectively undid the pagan sacralization of the world, and instead effected a “desanctification of nature,” as Heschel explained.56 As a result, Assmann observes, the monotheist “does not feel entirely at home in the world any more.”57 Judaism and Christianity are religions “of distantiation, in contrast to religions of complete immersion in the world.”58”

Of course, neither form of religion is perfectly “transcendent” or “immanent” at all times and all places for all persons.

Immanent religion favored a unified, holistic ethos. Public, personal and civic mores and ethics were unified. All people shared the same mores and ethics because all were part of a single city and there could be nothing greater than the city and the gods who it worshipped. The gods, however, were not going to cause division because they were propitiated by the city.

Transcendent religion is not unified or holistic. Transcendent religion postulates that the city is a temporary and imperfect thing - and always will be - with one's perfect home to be found outside of this reality. Transcendent religion in the Christian version postulated a “Two Cities” political philosophy. One city was the city of this world to which one owed political allegiance but over and above that city was a greater City to which one owed total and ultimate loyalty. This “two city” political philosophy could and did engender conflict; it is not for nothing that the first time a Roman empire was forced to do penance for doing his job and slaughtering people was the Christian Emperor Theodosius who was required to perform a public penance by Bishop Ambrose.

After exploring the sociology and history of paganism and the rise of Christianity, Smith looks at the current situation and finds that secular thinkers are uncomfortable with mere immanence. They truly desire values that transcend this circumstance or that circumstance that they can ground their philosophical systems in. By and large, in my opinion based on Professor Smith's discussion, this project has been largely a failure and an obvious effort to smuggle the valuations most desired by thinkers such as Dworkin into their schemes on ad hoc basis.

However, despite the failure to transcend the immanent as an intellectual proposition, secular thinkers, who exalt the immanent and despise the transcendent that might limit their cathedral building have been very successful in capturing elite culture. Professor Smith turns his attention to two areas- sex and religious freedom - where he demonstrates that the values of the transcendent have been displaced in favor of the values of the here and now. Concerning sex, Professor Smith writes:

“In recent decades, however, activists and lawyers in the “progressive” camp have worked—with considerable success—to reconceive and reconstruct the Constitution as an instrument that can be used to resist and invalidate the earlier civil religion and its manifestations. In this context, therefore, the struggle has not been to transform a Christian element into a pagan one, but rather to capture what had previously been a more neutral framework or arrangement for governance and turn it to the cause of secularism or immanent religion. This development is especially portentous because, insofar as it has succeeded, it has transformed a revered and previously inclusive authoritative artifact—the Constitution—into a partisan weapon, and has thereby undermined the ability of that authority to hold together a community increasingly divided between “orthodox” and “progressive” constituencies.”

Concerning religion, Professor Smith notes that there has been a trend against the accommodation of religious practice as the State has come to take over more and more of the territory of society. Just as Christians in pagan Rome could not do business in the marketplace without offering a sacrifice to pagan gods, Christians today cannot do business unless they sacrifice to progressive gods of transgender and homosexual rights. The only space for Christians is “outside the walls” and that space is shrinking as the State grows:

“There is precedent for such a position. In ancient Rome, Christians often lived and practiced, and were largely left free to live and practice, outside the walls of the city. That is where the Christian catacombs were located, for example, where Christians often buried their dead. And in the confessional states of early modern Europe, dissenting religious communities were sometimes permitted to meet and worship outside the city walls.132 This was religious freedom—of a tenuous sort, to be sure. It was far from full inclusion. But the faithful could live out their faith, as long as they were willing to pay the price of staying out of the public sphere. It was a steep price; still, religion has often fared worse. As noted, the successful completion of phases one and two would leave the contemporary devotees of transcendent religion in a similar position. Considering the alternatives, many might be satisfied with—even thankful for—this sort of free space “outside the walls” in which to practice their faith.133 But then a third phase may set it. In this phase the city swells and the walls are moved outward, so that the space for the free practice of transcendent religion becomes ever more cramped.”

As in Rome, the war is being fought symbolically. Why are we seeing today (July 2020) such attacks statues of Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Catholic Saints and Jesus Christ? Why the most recent attacks on Catholic Churches? The answer is that today, as in Rome, the party that controls the symbols, particularly the transcendent and constitutive symbols, controls the culture.

And, thus, we return to “two cities” political philosophy. Are people who believe only in the here and now, who think that this place is our home, who think they can build a utopia, going to allow people to dissent from their utopia based on their allegiance to a transcendent God?

Not likely.

Smith observes:

“Indeed, as we have seen, the basic conception of the community as under or subject to a higher authority (from which the rest of the accommodation logic follows at least naturally, if not quite ineluctably) has been reiterated repeatedly through the course of American history. Conversely, as that conception of the community comes to be displaced by a secular conception—“secular” in the immanent and positivistic senses—the acknowledgment of such a higher authority will come to seem offensive, unacceptable, almost incomprehensible. Deference to a higher power will now seem an impermissible relinquishment of the community's complete sovereignty.92”

So, down come the statues of Lincoln, Douglass, Catholic Saints and Jesus.

Interestingly, I found an article in Communio - Augusto Del Noce on Marx's Abolition of Human Nature
Carlo Lancellotti - which argues that Western Bourgois culture in its long war with Communism incorporated Marxist elements, including an abandonment of the transcendent. So, similar diagnosis but different etiology.

What is to be done? I think Professor Smith's book is very useful for putting together the threads of the current situation. What appear to be momentary, episodic or insane discrete events are actually unified into a malignant whole. We have to be careful about how far we can take the “pagan” language. Smith points out the modern pagans are not the ancient pagans. They are not worshipping immanent gods and their form of paganism is not likely to revive a common civic life, except in the way that the Soviet Union with its mandatory parades, voting and propaganda simulated a civil life. We can see this in the way that our Work Leftists turn on and crush dissenters in its midst.

Perhaps the answer is to focus on the transcendent and the goods that the transcendent bring and evangelize those good.