Part 3
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.
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People have, since time immemorial, made music by singing and playing musical instruments. Music is not new. But the attitude towards music in the past 200 years or so is quite different from what it was, say, 1000 years ago in the West.
In the past, music was important, but it was always an auxiliary, an accompaniment to life. People sang when they were happy and sometimes when they were sad, but the singing was a temporary release or expression of what they felt. Someone could, even in those times, be dedicated to music, but it would like someone who is dedicated to being an air traffic controller — an extremely important occupation and worthy of someone with better-than-average abilities, but by no means the kind of pursuit that is "mature and dignified and worthy of the best attention of the best minds."
For the past 200 years, producing music has been treated as on a par with the highest human activities, and even listening to music (while doing nothing else) has considerable prestige: it is considered a suitable subject for the attention of the best minds, though perhaps not the best attention of those minds. Composers of outstanding skill are considered great people for this reason alone, however many other failings they had or have. This attitude is traceable to our Greek heritage. It is not a constant of human nature.
All the arts were once considered auxiliaries to life. The artist was expected to serve the needs of the world, which are moral needs. "Virtue is inseparable from good art. It is taken for granted that a work reveals the artist's soul as well as his mind. But what is more important, the work of art must by its order mirror the hierarchical order of the world, which is a moral order. Whether by intuition or by convention, the artist must know how to convey this reality. . . . That all art must be moral is the rule until the 19th century when it cuts loose from moral significance, from regard for virtue in the maker's character, and from the expectations of the public." (From Dawn to Decadence, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to Present, by Jacques Barzun, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2000., p. 67)
This is the position that art occupies — and must occupy — in a world ordered by religion. Art will be useful and perhaps important insofar as it serves the moral order which is the real order of the world. The heritage of the Greek and Roman pagans upsets this relationship.
The Wisdom of the Ancient World
The ancient world upon which much of Western civilization is based, meaning mainly the Greek and Roman civilizations, was pagan. Paganism is often thought of as a simplistic and primitive belief system. However the ancient world of Greece and Rome was not primitive. It is true that it was not advanced in technical fields compared to modern civilization, but in literature and philosophy and allied fields, the educated people of those ancient civilizations were at least as sophisticated and advanced as our best. The writing (and thinking) of Homer or Aristotle or Cicero has nothing simplistic or primitive about it.
It is a common mistake to think of ancient paganism by analogy or along the model of current pagans. The surviving pagans in our times are truly primitive people and they are not in any way comparable to the pagans of yore. A prominent pagan like Cicero was much more similar to someone like Bill Clinton or Buckminster Fuller or Ralph Waldo Emerson than to a member of a tribe of the Australian Outback.
With the notable exception of significant portions of modern civilization, mankind has always had an accepted and assumed attitude towards the transcendent. In the West, this was mostly Christianity from 330 (when Constantine proclaimed Christianity to be the religion of the Roman empire), until modern times at some point in the past 200 years when Christianity lost its place as an essential part of the educated consensus. However, it is not well known and certainly not well understood that paganism was an integral part of the Western intellectual space prior to Christianity.
I shall not attempt at this point to identify the critical basis of this intellectual space — whether it was the pagan beliefs themselves or one or several of its other elements. However I do want to clarify that there was an entire view of the world in those days that included paganism and idolatry as well as other important components. After the early stages of the rise of Christianity, when competition developed between the old learning and the new one represented by Christianity, the older system was called "paganism" and we shall follow that terminology here, while remembering that what is intended is an entire system of learning in the arts and science that was, however, in those days, shot through with paganism (in the more narrow sense of belief in multiple gods) as we will show in more detail below. Also, the pagan system was far from monolithic and there were considerable differences and disputes between different pagan thinkers.
Some of these other components of the pagan world of old were grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music, which were called the seven liberal arts. Philosophy was definitely included, in the sense of a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and especially knowledge of the abstract and spiritual components of the world. Not the least part of the pagan culture was literature including the Greek and Latin classics such as Homer and Virgil.
Pagan skills included the ability and the desire to organize and systematize. It is not just grammar, rhetoric, dialectic that come from the Greeks, it is the mindset that can produce such skills and knowledge, and, just as important, the mindset that includes an inclination to produce such things.
Everyone knows how to use language. The Greeks codified this knowledge in grammar. Some people are naturally gifted speakers. The Greeks analyzed what makes them enjoyable and persuasive and set down this knowledge in rhetoric.
All of these formed a part of the world of what was then called paganism, and most of the knowledge and intellectual skills that we have nowadays is descended from or developed upon the foundation that these areas had in the Greek and Roman worlds.
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