by Joshua Shaw

Lewis’ re-imagination and revitalisation of the pagan experience in Till We Have Faces and the rants of the early Apologists appear at first opposed. The one presents the gods of ancient religion from the inside, while the other presents them from the side of Christ’s triumph A.D., that is, ‘in the year of our Lord,’ anno domini. In fact they are complementary.

If my own experience reading these texts is at all representative, the thunder and fulmination of the early apologists come to us as something strange, exaggerated, and, at bottom, unintelligible. Not that we, in abstract, do not affirm the truth of “rational theism” over against pagan “polytheism,” but this is only half of the equation. Christianity comes to us enfleshed in buildings, humans, living images of eternal realities; paganism is a dead concept and as such no longer has purchase on our imagination. We no longer feel nor fear the strength of the gods who are no gods.

In this post we will look at paganism from the outside (Eusebius) and in the next from within (Lewis).

Eusebius and the Victory of Christianity (Pax Christiana)

To begin to feel the threat of paganism, it may be useful to look at one of the many rants against the myths and cults and mysteries we find in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica, which are, as I take it, seriously meant (for introduction to Eusebius and his works see here). That is, I do not think that Eusebius’s apologetic is grave-digging to revive ancient enemies nor again just a fossilized way of talking. So serious and sickening are these realities that Eusebius must use “their own domestic witnesses,” lest his reader find his report incredible. To this end he either cites (in the first four books) pagan historians, e.g., Diodorus Siculus, Dionysus of Halicarnassus; pagan philosophers, e.g., Plutarch, Porphyry; or, as one interesting exception, a convert, Clement of Alexandria. All of these, however, win credit with his hearers because they speak of paganism from within.

When one reads Clement, Origen, and Eusebius, the impression from their writings is that not “signs and wonders” but rather the turning of thousands of barbarian peoples from the “abyss of idol worship” to the “confession of the one true God and the life aflame after Him” was the true miracle (δύναμις) of Christ’s coming. Indeed, Eusebius goes so far as to say, since the monarchy of Augustus Caesar, which coincided with the birth of Christ,

…till this very moment you would not see, as formerly, cities at war with cities nor nation battling with nation or at least not the affairs of life (βίον) consumed in the chaos of the archaic [peoples] … when demons tyrannized all nations and men busied themselves with worship of them … lusting maniacally to war with one another … (and) to enslave one another and sack cities by slow attrition …  but then together with the most pious and peaceful teaching of our saviour the ancient polytheistic error was cleansed and the strife of nations from then on (αὐτίκα) took respite from their ancient woes. … Which very thing I suppose is the greatest proof of all that the power (δυνάμεως) of our savior is divine and ineffably sublime. (PE I. 4, 5)

This pax Christiana did not stop, but, as Eusebius later argues, evils like human sacrifice, the most brutal forms of temple prostitution, and human trafficking all came to an end “when the gospel teaching of our Lord reached its full bloom in the time of Hadrian” (PE IV.17, 4-5). Against this backdrop of moral progress due to the “teaching of our savior,” Eusebius sets his whole argument about the pagan religions and philosophies which preceded (on the healing properties of Christ’s teaching, see Athanasius here, sect. 10.1).

To him it was a plain fact that Christianity had brought much tangible goodness into the world because, in virtue of its principles, every Christian knew “to receive all men as of the same race and by the law of nature to recognize even in the supposed foreigner (ξένος) a brother and someone truly akin to oneself (οἰκειότατον)” (ibid. §11). What appears at first glance a simplistic argument, appears on mature reflection carefully constructed: the provinciality and plurality of a world dominated by polytheism, a world at war with itself, is replaced in Christianity by a single people who acknowledge no distinctions of class or sex or race when it comes to the application of the golden rule. Thus oneness (ἑνώτης) resonates from the metaphysical unity of the Godhead on the highest rung to the love of one’s neighbor on the lowest. But what world did this Christianity transform?

The World Before and the ‘Nobler’ Doctrines

In Books I-III of the PE Eusebius has tried to show (Book I) that the earliest peoples (Phoenicians and Egyptians) actually worshipped men who were famous for some evil during their lives and divinized afterward (though some had admittedly done some good, like the invention of the alphabet or music); after this (Book II) he tries to show that later people worshipped various parts and pieces of the visible world which provided them some benefit or comfort (everything imaginable is discovered in the writings of Diodorus Siculus to explain the worship in Egypt of, say, the crocodile); and finally (Book III) he shows that the allegorizing –“explaining away”–of the later philosophers “did violence to” (βιάσασθαι)  myths as they originally were written and understood (of which, as before noted, there was in fact a historical hard core and a sleazy one at that–the legendary sexual escapades of Zeus and Hercules, as well as the deviant sexuality of Attis and others played not small role here).

The attempt to see in popular worship a hidden worship of “invisible principles or powers of the Nous which made and permeates all things” was, according to Eusebius, both elitist and false. Elitist–because one required a certain special code to “read” the idols and interpret the myths. (Eusebius often sarcastically calls Porphyry, the source for much of this, his clever ἑρμηνευτής, interpreter.) False–because, as was mentioned, there was no legitimate basis for the allegorizing and further the very distinctions are “in fact confused even if in theory distinguished” (PE IV.5, 1-3).

When this argument comes to a head in Book III,  Eusbius says the following:

But the argument turns back on itself against those who, as if through some machination, escape the shameful and mythical narratives about the gods to the sun and moon and the rest of the parts of the cosmos. If indeed Hephaestus were to them fire and the principle of warmth, Poseidon the essence of moisture, Hera the air, and Rhea again the earth which is mountainous and rocky, while Demeter were that which is productive and flat…they are therefore again convicted of calling the creation divine (κτίσιν θεολογοῦντες) rather than the creator and the handiwork of the universe but not the craftsman–all this falling precipitously and dangerously to the evil of their own head. But if they do not claim to divinize the visible matter (σώματα) of the sun and moon and stars nor again the perceptible parts of the cosmos, but His invisible principles (δυνάμεις) in them, Him who is above all things (there being indeed one God who fills all things with manifold workings (δυνάμεις) and who passes through all things and who governs all things immaterially and invisibly, Him they reasonably profess to worship through the things which have just been mentioned ), why then at long last do they not dismiss these shameful and absurd mythologies about gods as lawless and godless (ἀσεβῆ), and even destroy these very books themselves as containing wicked (δυσσεβῆ) and licentious material, instead praising to the sky the one and only and invisible God in himself (γυνμῶς, ‘nakedly’) and purely and without any sophisticated ornamentation? This it would be necessary for those who knew the truth to do instead of dragging and casting down the most reverent appellation ‘God’ into the shameful and lecherous language of mystery, nor should they to lock themselves up in in small chambers and recesses of darkness and the edifices of men, as if they would find God within, nor again in statues made of lifeless (ἀψύχους) matter would they suppose it necessary to honor divine powers (δυνάμεις), nor again would they think that doing so amid mud rank with blood and filth and the blood of dead corpses would please God. Wise and deeply knowledgeable in all these things, as if released from the bonds of error, they would share their natural theory (φυσικῆς θεωρίας) with all men, not merely proclaiming to all not to worship visible phenomena, but to marvel at the invisible maker of all visible things and him alone, to worship his invisible and immaterial powers (δυνάμεις) immaterially and invisibly… (PE III. 13, 20-24)

Eusebius is long-winded, and does not stop here, but the point is made. If the allegorizers (i.e., mainly the Middle- and Neo-Platonists are meant) wish to be consistent, they should not stop with allegorizing away the filth of the old pagan myths, but, admitting that their more august (σεμνότερα) theologies have no real anchor in the old myths, they should burn the books and lead the masses away from the evil in them.

Lest we think this is merely a hackneyed trope, it is well to remember that the work of the PE was begun during the last great (and perhaps only explicitly anti-Christian) persecution of Diocletian (303-c. 313-15 depending on where one was in the Empire). To this severe persecution of Christianity Porphyry–the ostensible target of the Praeparatio–was thought to have given an intellectually earnest manifesto in his Contra Christianos.

Paganism (a conglomeration of the mythological legends, cultic practices etc.) really affected the lives of normal people; intellectuals like Porphyry had vouchsafed it a respectable reputation among the cultured; the Emperor Diocletian (and later Julian the Apostate) had thereby gained a carte blanche for dealing with the Christians as he pleased.

Paganism was real to them; what is it to us? We’ll get Lewis’s answer in the next post.