I hope this is not a distraction, but I happen to be reading Mill's "On Liberty" and have come across a passage that goes to our topic here, and upon which I'd be grateful to hear your opinion, with a view also to using it (your opinion) as a guide to approaching Mill in general.

He starts by saying, as do you, that St. Paul assumes a pre-existing morality: ... "namely that of the Greeks and Romans; and his advice to Christians is in a great measure a system of accommodation to that; even to the extent of giving an apparent sanction to slavery."

But then, says Mill: ... "Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; Innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good ... It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life: in this falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially selfish character, by disconnecting each man's feelings of duty from the interests of his fellow-creatures ... ." And again: "It is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established; ... ."
Further, ... "even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, highmindedness, personal dignity, even the sense of honour, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognised, is that of obedience."

He doesn't mention humility by name, but I wonder if he sees "obedience" as analogous? Is he correct in his assertions, as to the paramountcy of obedience in Christianity, and as to its deleterious effects? I have to admit, I've usually worried more about my lack of obedience to Christ's and the Church's teachings than about my shortage of humility. I think, rather than a hindrance, in so far as I have been capable of such obedience, have I attained to the virtues Mill mentions above.

"Only when cultural and linguistic Germans (and that includes Anglo-Saxons and English speakers) return from Germano-Protestant culture to that civilization and its religious heritage will their culture once again play a major positive role in preserving what should be preserved.". These were the words of John Mitchell's Last Laugh. If I furthered any derailment of the discussion, then I ask forgiveness.

Not much. Shakespeare wrote for a still Catholic culture in ideas and habits(probably was one but we don't know for sure)
and the puritan, Milton, has hardly any audience today. But you are right about American culture being a protestant thing. The problem is that there has never been a kind of Christianity that you desire in which one could affirm two or three sacraments or ideas and ignore the rest of it. Yet, one thing that most of us share today with the enemy is a desire to be rid of the Catholic Thing.

In my view one of the highest attributes of the ancient pagans was a reverence for the familial line. It eludes me how one can claim to revere one's ancestors by sneering at the creed they lived (and often died) by as a corrupt "slave-morality".

In any event, the only folks I might consider as modern "noble pagans" are those who would never even think of self-consciously calling themselves "pagan".

On another note... hopefully this doesn't come off as, I don't know, being flippant with substantive material: Would the figure of Oedipus be relevant to questions of pride & humility, vis-a-vis the pagan conception of such traits?

It seems to me that Oedipus' pride & willfulness functions as a virtue, driving the hero toward both justice and truth -- regardless of obstacles & attempts at dissuasion by his wife/mother, Tiresias, etc.

Yet the consumation of this pride-driven effort (the truth) utterly demolishes his pride -- the price for the salvation of Thebes?

Perhaps my best friend is the son of two German natives; his family still speaks almost as much German as English in their parents' home. His fluency in German means that he has never read any German language writer in translation. Over the past few years, Nietzsche has become very interesting to him, in part because he feels that Nietzsche's prose is marked by a type of poetic brilliance. Not long ago, he read whatever Nitezsche has written noted above, which led him to call me. I had been making the same case to him that Nietzsche makes about Germans and Germanic culture.

The idea came to me not from reading Nietzsche, whom I have read only in part and never any part twice, but from studying the Reformation, most specifically from reading Jaroslav Pelikan. My insight was that what Luther achieved most was to free cultural Germans (in the main) from the legacy of Latin civilization, which meant they would regress back toward the ethos of pagan Germanic culture.

That was done not with Luther's concoction of sola fide, but with his adoption of Herman as German archetype. Luther redubbed the Germanic leader we know from Latin as Arminius Herman and presented him a great German hero to be emulated in his time: fight all things Roman and Latin. Perhaps Luther sensed that sola fide by itself would never inspire what he hoped and so he stumbled into playing the ethnicity card; perhaps ethnic/national hatred is what drove the Saxon Luther all along. What seems clear is that once he began to present his 'reforms' as being about the rather noble and innocent and put upon Germans rejecting the decadence and greed and the tyranny of Rome, past and present, he found it easier to draw followers, especially ambitious German princes and their soldiers, which were required to back the radical students and young professors who had been drawn to Luther the way the same types were drawn to Herbert Marcuse in the America of the 1950s and 1960s.

Luther did indeed free Germans to return to their cultural roots, which are as antithetical to any vestiges of Western Christendom as they were to Gaul and Rome and Constantinople. As noted above, it took Germans, slowly, being civilized by becoming Latinized Christians for them to produce all the great culture from German speaking areas that is central to Western Civilization. Only when cultural and linguistic Germans (and that includes Anglo-Saxons and English speakers) return from Germano-Protestant culture to that civilization and its religious heritage will their culture once again play a major positive role in preserving what should be preserved.