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27 Iyar 5769 - May 21, 2008 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Shema Yisrael Torah Network
Shema Yisrael Torah Network

Opinion & Comment
The Pagan Roots of Modern Thought

by Mordecai Plaut

Part 7 - Final

Abstract: Modern intellectuals, especially those who base their world view upon science, pride themselves on being totally separate from the sphere of religion. They believe their view of the world to be based on empirical data and built up with reason alone, leaving them entirely distinct from all religion. This pride is unfounded. In fact their approach and conclusions are grounded in one of the major old- time religions, namely, paganism.

Many of the ideas, and probably all of the intellectual skills, that characterize the modern secular world were once integral parts of a way of life one of whose prominent features was the worship of idols. All of the Western world is built upon the foundation of paganism. Although paganism and Christianity were open rivals for hundreds of years, eventually they seemed to have made their peace. The truth is that the conflict moved underground, and paganism eventually triumphed so thoroughly that important characteristics of the ancient religious world are no longer familiar or even understood.

We are discussing how the non-religious ideas of paganism were adopted first by religious Renaissance figures, but later they undermined the entire edifice of Christian culture. The Church actively resisted the religious elements of paganism, but did not perceive the secular elements as being the threats that they really were. In this final part we discuss some of the specifics of those threats.

* * *

Sensuality, for example, though it proved ultimately hostile to Christianity, was condemned by it in terms that were far from adequate to provide a long term means of controlling it sufficiently. The best proof for this is the life led by so many clerics that was dominated by sensual pleasures, even as they were supposed to rise above them. Even making a generous discount of their criticism, the centuries of clerical critics of all kinds cannot have wholly invented the phenomena they wrote about. The simple fact that some sons of the Church found it possible to live within the Church a life of utter sensuality — and especially since such a life was against what the Church officially taught — shows that the Church had not managed to control sensuality.

(This is not the case in the Torah tradition. Virtually no generally recognized Torah scholars within the accepted tradition were even accused of excessive concern for material pleasures, and none of anywhere near the excesses that were imputed to the Church clergy.)

Gay writes (p. 224, The Enlightenment, An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism (volume 1), by Peter Gay, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1977), "The clerks who guarded Christian culture . . . [did not see that] the threat of paganism to their world view was not contained in some specific philosophical doctrine, although it was most obvious there, but in the whole intellectual posture implicit in ancient writings; in the worldliness, the critical detachment from myth, the disenchantment that marked many works of antique imagination as strongly as it marked many works of ancient philosophy."

There is a clear movement within Western thought. Criticism of the Church becomes stronger. The love for pagan learning and the commitment to it becomes ever more pervasive, and slowly works itself more and more deeply into the foundations. At first this process was the work of those who regard themselves as true sons of the Church, but eventually their heirs in the Enlightenment declared war on all religion and especially Christianity.

Desiderius Erasmus, a Dutch humanist whose life and work spanned the Reformation, was a great critic of the Roman Catholic Church but remained firmly within it during his entire life. A man with extensive knowledge of classic writers (he produced many new editions of them, among other works) he was a very able critic of the traditional targets of greedy monks, empty ritual and primitive superstitions that riddled the Church. He strove mightily to reconcile the ancient writings with Christianity, yet what Peter Gay calls "the cumulative pressure exerted by two centuries of Renaissance scholarship and criticism, a pressure for the displacement of religious emotion from the center of life" (p. 274) was prominently evident in his writings.

Printing certainly was a boost for the humanists. Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca were printed many times in the first years after the invention of movable type, though Christian works were also very popular. (Gay, p. 281)

The Reformation, beginning with Martin Luther in 1517, was certainly an effect of the press of pagan learning. All the major figures of this vast critical movement were accomplished scholars and fully familiar with the writers of the past. Many Protestant writers were strongly critical of the ritual elements of paganism that persisted in the church, yet they themselves did not hesitate to draw on the cultural content of the pagan writers.

The ideas that were stressed in their new formulations were individualism and a return to ancient sources — though to them this meant the ancient Christian and Biblical sources. Still, the dissent was very deep and resulted in criticism and even religious wars that thoroughly undermined the authority of the Church in both the secular and the moral sense. The reformers insisted that the Church was deeply flawed, and they successfully challenged its authority as a result. There can be no doubt that the process helped allow the more general condemnation of all religions that took place some 200 years later in the Enlightenment.

The Invasion of Pagan Ideas

From the time of the Enlightenment, a period that includes the American and the French Revolutions as well as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, tracing the transmission of pagan culture and ideas becomes much more complicated. From that time on, the ideas that originated with the pagans became a full part of the Western Heritage and tracing their influence and development in the modern world becomes much more difficult and a considerably larger job.

It is easy to track the location and progress of a vial of medical dye as long as it remains wholly contained in its original container. Once it enters the body of a recipient, it spreads all around, in some areas very prominent, in other areas much less so. But the substance is much more difficult to trace, especially if one wants to know about all of it, and an account of its presence becomes much more complex.

Though some pagan ideas and approaches had penetrated well before the eighteenth century, from then on they are no longer identifiable as distinct from the main stream of Western culture, and rather they are full "flesh of their flesh." All culture and intellectual life in general is wholly given over to the legacy of the Greek and Roman pagans.

This is not to say that here is the end of the story. Far from it. Once it entered and took over, paganism never looked back. In the modern world, it proved fruitful and dynamic far beyond the ancient imagination and provided the context and basis for tremendous change in virtually every aspect of human life — some of it positive, some of it decidedly negative.

Up to this point, the stream of pagan culture is distinct enough to recognize without any knowledge of its nature. After this, it loses its independent identity as it becomes dominant and a part of the main stream.

End

Part 6

References

The History of Western Education, by William Boyd and Edmund J. King, 10th edition, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1973.

The Greek Ideal and its Survival, by Moses Hadas, Harper and Row, New York, 1966.

How to Develop Self Confidence and Influence People by Public Speaking, by Dale Carnegie, Pocket Books, 1956.

The Enlightenment, An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism (volume 1), by Peter Gay, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1977.

The Enlightenment, The Science of Freedom (volume 2), by Peter Gay, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1996.

The Structures of Everyday Life (Civilization & Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Volume I), by Fernand Braudel, Harper and Row, New York, 1979.

The Perspective of the World (Civilization & Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Volume III), by Fernand Braudel, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992.

Plato - Translated by Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press

From Dawn to Decadence, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to Present, by Jacques Barzun, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2000.


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