Interesting though not very searching article on paganism and its replacement of Christianity in yesterday’s NYT by Christopher Caldwell. The author starts from a new book by Chantal Delsol, La fin de la chrétienté, which argues that we are living through the end of Christian culture or civilization. This turn of events would be undoing what Christians did to Roman culture, namely the “normative inversion” of its ethics and values, and their surreptitious borrowings from pagan culture. I would put a plural and talk of pagan cultures, with multiple centers and customs. We would be re-paganizing and our “undoing” would be a sort of sweet revenge on the undoing of Roman values in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era… I note that when the author defines Christian culture, he is thinking of art, philosophy, and lore, not of the beliefs on which everything else was anchored. A sideline is that the “woke” culture of today and its erosion of values—many or most based on Christianity—is somewhat rued by Delsol.

The article doesn’t go into the politics of pagan and Christian kingdoms. The beliefs in Christ and the historical claim they rested on made it difficult and paradoxical but not impossible to develop a political system in which kings and elites rode on the coattails of the re-structured divinity. Think of the representations of Christ Pantocrator as conveying the power of kings and the renewed dream of empire. Political and military power stemmed from the Bible and trinitarian god, but the meanings of the messianic claims made it contradictory and self-defeating, in the long term at least, to hold onto the Biblical God and its crucified messiah as the origin of power. As Marcel Gauchet has long been saying, the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not reject everything Christian. They rejected the contents, not the forms. They subjected Christianity to its own secularized power. They still held to the structures and formal concepts of Christianity when they justified the industrial revolution and its abuse of labor, the imperial and colonial adventures, or progress, as religious-like necessities stemming from the popular will but no more from a divine creation and incarnation. Most of this ontological framework collapsed by the end of the twentieth century, or so we are given to think. Modern ethics and moral claims lost the two main grounds they have had in the past two millennia. Now, they have to be moored in something else than Christian theology and liturgy, and in something else than national values. Human rights? One would like to believe that reason alone, if open and aware of its limits, could do the trick. But can it attract many people and give them the disciplined passion that divine and national religions provided?