- "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death." [Lethe Greek Mythology: The river of forgetfulness, one of the five rivers in Hades.]
---A.C Swinburne
(Swinburne as a voice of new and resurgent 'paganism' and opposition to the 'projects of Judeo-Christianity'.)
A few useful notes:
- The more common meaning of classical Latin paganus is 'civilian, non-militant'. Christians called themselves milites, members of Christ's militant church---'enlisted soldiers' in the war of Christ against temporal powers, paganistic and 'devilish' powers, and attached to non-Christians the term used by soldiers to all who were 'not enlisted in the army'.
Heathen is from an old English word that may have meant 'not Christian or Jewish', and came from a word indicating simply those who dwelled on the heath.
'Pagan' was equated with a Christianized sense of 'epicurian' to signify a person who is sensual, materialistic, self-indulgent, unconcerned with the future and uninterested in sophisticated religion.
G. K. Chesterton wrote: "The pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself. By the end of his civilization he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything else." (Chesterton as one defending the Christianizing mission and seeing in paganism a sort of dead-end).
St Augustine wrote The City of God, with the alternative title 'De Civitate Dei contra Paganos: The City of God against the Pagans', in which he claimed that whilst the great 'city of Man' had fallen (the seizure of Rome by the pagans in 410), Christians were ultimately citizens of the 'city of God.'
Interesting to consider that, even with a temporal loss (the invasion of Rome by the pagans in 410), he flipped the notion of the Christian project up to an abstract height, and from this conceptual height offered a way for the 'battle' to carry on.
Diebert wrote: "Perhaps you're too much enthralled with
form here. And perhaps you're explaining them through a warped senses of what the signs might have meant at the time. Two observations which might help: first of all the image of humbling, reducing and outward surrender was very common as Christian ceremonial custom. To have some "heathen" participate in that means nothing in particular but the fact he's now participating in Christian culture and its particulars. And secondly, the language of bowing and humbling is still high on power, understood by all parties involved. The dynamics were actually pretty well understood by the pagan rulers. It wasn't anything new, perhaps only more powerful (in significance at least) than the dynamics they were used to themselves. It therefore was also very attractive for the heathen nobles (hence the wildfire of conversions in general)."
Frankly, one of the only things that can be said to 'enthrall' me is a teenage girl, 17 or so, with black curly hair and skin the color of dark cinnamon, naked on a bed with a virginal white sheet, so excited she rubs her legs together, waiting there for me with sopping haunches.
THAT enthralls me. Oh and that aroma, that delightful aroma: like when you crush a fresh rosebud between your fingers and sniff them all day long.
L'ivresse!
The forms of Catholic conception just don't quite do it, nor stories from the Christianization of Europe. ;-(
That
by the way...
What you have written above denies, I think, one main thrust of the Christianizing mission. One need only dig up a few examples to offer a counter-picture.
For centuries, the Church has essentially demanded not just cerimonial bows, but has inculcated generation upon generation of children to bow down before a certain concept of God, and to establsih as a supreme virtue service to that 'God' (which is of course also a temporal power, but one that claims a 'link' to that abstract Christian city floating over the world).
In any case, I am speaking of very broad trends with no focus on particulars. The original commentary had to do with Bob's comments to David about emasculation. I suppose it is possible that humanism also was a factor and influence in this 'feminization', but I simply cannot get away from the early Christian sensibility of loving-kindness, community, sharing, and worship, as describing essentially 'the pap' that David so much hates and resists...in favor of some other, indefined 'masculinity'. (Nietzschean phallus, theatrical hikes up Lone Mountains, etc.)
My own view is that David's position, on one level---perhaps an unconscious 'subliminal' level?---arises from a neo-Romantic longing for the former, 'pagan' relationship to Life. Yet, it is a conflicted longing because it is also a position of detesting 'the world'. (That is why I sometimes see it as essentially Christian). So, the manouvre is one where 'Buddhism' is privelaged as a sort of
exalted paganism, which also receives support from extremely advanced intellectualism a la Nietzsche, Weininger, etc.
Still, it
IS hard to envision a 'real man' within the Christian/Catholic worldview. Everyone in a certain sense becomes womanly in laying their life and masculinity at the feet of the Savior.
This whole territory is pretty complex...hard to sort through.
Diebert wrote: "The point I tried to make was that the Roman Catholic pap was just a roll-in replacement of the pagan pap. The only relevant power lies in the erected structure, the empire, the Church, the complex web of allegiance, lied down by earlier emperors who appear quite pagan actually, or involved in mystery cults or philosophies with not that much in common with the Church dogma that grew out or on top of the conquest."
I can't agree. The roll-in was in many senses the city against the country, the sophisticated culture (sic) against the culture bound to the earth in 'paganistic' ways. There could be no unified pagan structure to resist (masculine) Christian culture, not in Europe, and not among 'country people'. Surely a power structure, whatever power structure, will be a dominant force. But it really seems to me that what the Church represented is something dynamically different.
