The “Sin” of Humility
by Thomas Fleming
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Humility is the great moral skandalon (stumbing block) of Christianity, in much the same way that Christ—the God who became man, suffered, and died a humiliating death—was the skandalon to the Jews. Thus it is a little amusing to read the complaints of so many uneducated neopagans—most of them anti-Semites—against Christian humility. Their reaction is exactly that of the well-bred Jew of Jesus’ time.
The virtue of humility is praised throughout the New Testament. The texts of the Gospels are studded with admonitions, parables, and tales, all designed to inculcate this teaching: the banquet at which we are not to take a seat of honor, the Pharisee who thanked God he was not like other men, Christ’s washing the feet of his disciples, the Roman centurion, used to giving orders, who thought himself so unworthy that it was not fitting that the Lord should enter his house. St. Paul’s epistles constantly warn against getting puffed up or people who think they are something—a marvelous phrase in Greek, where the word for something is the monosyllabic unaccented word ti.
The natural man, the old Adam—whether Christened or not—rebels against humility. What, am I supposed to put myself on par with a Third World savage or an effeminate neopagan? In one sense, yes. None of us is perfect as Our Lord would have us perfect. We all fall short, not just of the glory of God but of the human glory we were created to enjoy. If we wish God to forgive our failings, then we must not be too proud to forgive the failings of others: “Forgive us our debts/trespasses, as we forgive our debtors/those who trespass against us.”
This is, admittedly, a different moral universe from what is portrayed in most pagan literature, Homeric (though not Vergilian) epic in particular. Homer’s heroes are passionate and self-willed men, worthy even of some respect from the vastly more powerful gods. Yet this contrast is somewhat misguided, as it is sometimes stated, if it is intended to be a contrast of civilizations. In the first place, Homer is rather like the Old Testament of the Greeks, and the code of the Homeric warrior—”always do the best”—undergoes a good deal of refinement at the hands of poets and philosophers. Euripides and Menander, no less than Aristotle and Epictetus, would have had a good deal to say about some of the behavior of Homeric heroes—the lying of Odysseus, for example, the cruelty to captives.
But even within the context of Homer, there is a moral code that condemns excessive self-assertion. The quarrel between the equally arrogant Agamemnon and Achilles, with which the Iliad begins, is not a good thing for the army that suffers untold casualties as a result. Agamemnon, at least, comes to his senses, but Achilles is implacable, as his friend and comrade Ajax points out in the Embassy scene. In fact, he has become a monster, who hopes that the Greeks and Trojans will kill each other and leave only himself and Patroclus to sack Troy. Even the gods are afraid to interrupt his bestial mistreatment of Hector’s corpse.
Achilles temperament is characterized by hybris, an overweening self-confidence and self-importance that treats social equals with contempt. This is the great sin of Greek popular morality, the subject of countless tragedies. A man who behaved this way on the streets of Athens—slapping a citizen or pushing him—might be taken to court for hybris, as Demosthenes did to an enemy.
For Aristotle, who is one of the best guides to Greek folk wisdom, the proper attitude is a mean between self-effacing meekness and strutting arrogance. His student Theophrastus brilliantly portrays what the Greeks disliked in this quality of arrogance in his character sketches of men who are obnoxious, ambitious in petty matters, ungenerous, arrogant, and oligarchic, that is, domineering. Such types are simply not gentlemanly, what the Athenians called kalos kai agathos, fair and brave.
Later schools of philosophy went further in the direction of Christianity. The great Neoplatonist Plotinus sometimes sounds like a Christian saint, in his understanding and forbearance. It is arrogance—the arrogance of the Gnostics—that gets him angry. The Epicureans, who strove for untroubled peace of mind, avoided self-assertion, while the Stoics, whose morality so often anticipates Christianity, reminded themselves and their listeners and readers of how unimportant even the most lofty and powerful men are. The Stoic code is seen to best advantage in the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who did his duty completely and spent most of his adult life in the field against the savage Germans, when he would have vastly preferred to be at home with his books. This superb man, nonetheless, tells himself over and over both to be worthy of his family and his job and not to let his position as divine ruler go to his head. The most nearly Christian Emperor was also a persecutor of Christians, whom he believed to be stubborn and arrogant.
There are differences, albeit not vast, between the highest pagan understanding of humility and the Christian teaching. For Plotinus, the Epicureans, and the Stoics, the point to humility is that it frees the mind from unimportant distractions, to gain wisdom and understanding, and to live a philosophical life. In this, they were perhaps a bit freakish by ordinary standards, and it was even more bizarre for ordinary Christians to practice the extraordinary virtues of the philosophers—the point that Justin Martyr makes in his apologia addressed to Marcus Aurelius. The Christian is humble out of his love and gratitude to his God and saviour whose virtues he wishes to emulate and with whom he wishes to spend eternity. Still, serious decent pagans and good Christians outwardly behaved in much the same way. The late 4th century aristocrat Paulinus of Nola, was a very saintly man but, even after his conversion, he also remained every inch a gentleman.
By the time of Constantine, as pagans and Christian moralities converged, the more obvious contrast was with the northern European barbarians. In the Greco-Roman view, Celts and Germans acted like children. Livy portrays the Celts as strutting and boasting and threatening great deeds before a battle, but when they are stoutly resisted by more disciplined Romans, they flee in disarray. Caesar, admittedly disingenuous, portrays Ariovistus the German as boastful, and this is a constant theme of ancient writers, There is, admittedly, an element of propaganda in this, but since the barbarian nations did not learn to read and write, it is their own fault if we only hear the Roman side of the story. The Germans were bigger and generally stronger than the Romans, but the civilized discipline of the Romans prevailed against the German berserkers time after time. Even in the sixth century, Justinian’s armies eliminated the Gothic Kingdom of Italy. When the Goths surrendered to Belisarius at Ravenna, they apologized to their women, claiming that the vastly larger Roman army was made up of huge warriors. When the the small army of Eastern runts marched into the city, the women reviled their brave German husbands, brothers, and sons.
The Germans are a great nation, and they have made very important contributions to our common civilization. Some of their accomplishments must be due to their robust vigor and native talents, but they did not learn to put those talents to good use until they were civilized by the Roman Church and Roman civilization. Even crazy Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor’s son whose hatred of Catholicism knew no bounds, confessed that Luther had unleashed the Germans from classical civilization and given them license to return to their native swinishness. This is much too harsh, both on Luther and on the Germans, but that was the opinion of the leading guru of neopaganism.
As Christian moral theology was developed, it had to take account of the nuances of situations–and of our barbarian ancestors’ propensities to self-love and arrogance. St. Thomas, in his discussion of humility in the Summa Theologiae, takes up the argument that humility is not a virtue because it is not recognized as such by Aristotle. He points out that Aristotle’s account of the virtues has to do with civic life, which concerns man’s subordination to man, while Christian humility is the subordination of man to God. This is a brilliant and concise way of making an important statement. Insofar as Christians hold important social or public positions, whether as Pope or Emperor or as officer or father, they have a duty to maintain a position that we have a duty to respect. What could be more lordly than the procession of Pope and cardinals in St. Peter’s, and yet those same princes of the Church are supposed to humble themselves to their confessors. A father may not think himself “better” than his sons, but he is in a position of authority and must insist upon his sons’ respecting that authority. In this way, it is entirely possible to maintain a complex hierarchy—and no hierarchy was more complex than what developed, East and West, in the Christian Roman Empire—while celebrating humility as one of the main virtues of Christian life.
St. Alphonsus has a fine treatment of superbia (pride) in Book V of his Theologia Moralis. Here is a crude summation of some of what he says, Alphonsus defines pride as “an inordinate (that is disproportionate) appetite for one’s own preeminence (excellentia)” of such a sort as does not wish to be subject either to God or to one’s human superiors. Pride is not complete so long as it does not reject property authority, divine or human. HeSD distinguishes between venial and mortal acts of pride. Mortal sins include expressions of pride aimed at harming our fellow men or are directed against the love of God. (Neopagans take care!) . Pride is a mortal sin when someone laps up praise for something that is a mortal sin. When someone introduces new customs or fashions into a commonwealth, foreseeing that by his example he would be imposing a moral necessity on others that they make expenditures beyond their ability and later would be unable to feed themselves or satisfy their creditors, he sins gravely, but it is only a venial sin if someone dresses extravagantly out of mere lightwittedness. It is also a sin to pretend, out of pride, to vices that one does not actually practice (such as the neopagan metrosexuals who claim to be playboys.)
Humility remains a stumbling block for even the most virtuous of pagans, but it is by no means an insurpassable obstacle to a pagan appreciation of Christian civilization. Even Gibbon admired great Christians like the last Constantine or Pope Leo IV, who defended Rome against the Saracens. What I suspect is really going on, when young neopagans—mostly urban metrosexuals—attack Christian humility is that that they are yearning to escape from their position as peripheral males and think that in the Wagnerian myths that can embrace a manhood they will never attain. In any event, their attack on Christian humility is as ill-informed as it is malicious, and there is a serious question whether it is useful to do any business with people who, without taking the trouble to learn anything, insist on reviling the religion of their supposed allies.
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1 Comment by James Kabala on 9 October 2009:
An outstanding post. Will this be the first in a series as earlier indicated?
2 Comment by robert on 9 October 2009:
The problem (and the excellence)in introductions such as this is that it leaves so little to be said. Dr. Fleming nailed down what needed repeaired and then simply walked away like the happy and hidden souls of old.
3 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 9 October 2009:
Yes, this is only the opening shot. We have then to consider whether Christianity is a religion of pacifism and defeatism, whether it contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, whether Christians came be robust warriors in defense of hearth and home and the West, how Christianity has degenerated since the Enlightenment, what are the objectives of the neopagan movement and what positive contributions have they made to our civilization, etc. etc.
Oh, there is so much to say, even about humility. I have only scratched the surface. Indeed, I posted it originally without the penultimate paragraph taking off from the Summa.
4 Comment by M.A. Roberts on 9 October 2009:
Do you think the order that Christian humility sustains was previously sustained by hubris, with slight differences? When we think of someone too big for his britches, we think of a man who is overconfident and lacking humility, whereas the Greeks saw a man lacking hubris (putting himself on par with the gods).
Here is Aristotle’s take on humility from Book IV of the Nicomachean Ethics (trans. by William David Ross):
“Such, then, is the proud man; the man who falls short of him is unduly humble, and the man who goes beyond him is vain. Now even these are not thought to be bad (for they are not malicious), but only mistaken. For the unduly humble man, being worthy of good things, robs himself of what he deserves, and to have something bad about him from the fact that he does not think himself worthy of good things, and seems also not to know himself; else he would have desired the things he was worthy of, since these were good. Yet such people are not thought to be fools, but rather unduly retiring. Such a reputation, however, seems actually to make them worse; for each class of people aims at what corresponds to its worth, and these people stand back even from noble actions and undertakings, deeming themselves unworthy, and from external goods no less. Vain people, on the other hand, are fools and ignorant of themselves, and that manifestly; for, not being worthy of them, they attempt honourable undertakings, and then are found out; and tetadorn themselves with clothing and outward show and such things, and wish their strokes of good fortune to be made public, and speak about them as if they would be honoured for them. But undue humility is more opposed to pride than vanity is; for it is both commoner and worse.”
Also, do you think that the Christian sentiment of humility has been turned into something it is not (egalitarianism)? The pagan and Christian West, for instance, has a long tradition of hospitality toward strangers, but this sentiment has recently been exploited by elites regarding immigration, turning a code that largely dealt with guests and traders into a carte blanche acceptance of immigration. Likewise, with a quick legerdemain, I see this concept of ‘humility’ quickly morphed into ‘egalitarianism’? Would you think this part of the post-Enlightenment condition?
Regarding neopagans, although I have not noticed this here or at Takimag (where I find the conversations to be civil), I’ve elsewhere met neopagans who have had a somewhat ambiguity, if not hostility, toward having children. I think that the case can be made that procreation was even more important for the pagans. Their religion was an ancestral one, where the continuity of the tribe (and family gods) was of the utmost importance. The stories of the early Christian ascetics – even stories of a man and wife refusing to copulate – appeared odd to the pagans. That said, Christianity did not take the ascetic route, and European Christianity produced robust families – much more so than secular Europe today is producing.
5 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 9 October 2009:
My basic view, which I have argued in the past and am putting at greater length in a work I am finishing, is that Christianity takes for granted the pagan substratum–kinship, loyalty, patriotism, duty, marriage, the moral order–but then elevates the whole onto a higher plane. From this point of view, the decent pagan and Jewish morality is merely refined by Christianity, not overturned. Thus the warnings of Sophocles and Aristotle against hybris are taken to a higher level in rejecting spiritual pride. I think St. Thomas would agree with Aristotle that it is a mistake to reject the good things that we can use in pursuing a happiness that is fulfilled in the contemplation of the good or God, but Thomas would insist that the highest life is the monastic life that encourages such contemplation from an early age.
It is clear both from Acts and from early Christian writings that it took a while for Christians to figure out that Christ did not intend everyone to live as if they were denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven already. He is happy to take part in a wedding, thinks it a good idea to raise a friend from the dead (why bother, if life doesn’t mean anything?), and to sit down to dinner with tax-collectors and sinners. It is as if he were leading two lives, the life of God and the life of a good man, and it took some time for institutions to develop that could accomodate both modi vivendi.
You are absolutely right about the perversion of humility into social equality. Paul tells us to respect every authority and enjoins obedience to wives, children, and slaves. It is not a doctrine of equality, far from it. Christians take the world as they find it and try to repair its deficiencies without overturning the social order. I am happy to get into some of this later, since I have a chapter that discusses the real Christian view of immigration and have put some of the argument into Chronicles.
6 Comment by robert on 9 October 2009:
After Achilles engages in the excessive acts of cruelty with the corpse of Hector, he experiences something akin to justice or mercy or humility when faced with Priams daring request for the return of his son’s body for burial. It is often the case that only after pride has run its savage course and the ego completely exhausted, that one becomes prepared for what is sometimes termed the “saving grace.” or that turning or conversion to something other than the “self-ish” desires. This turning is often accompanied by a humility born out of a genuine love and gratitude which is much differnet than false piety.
7 Comment by Grumpy Old Man on 9 October 2009:
Sometimes Dr. Fleming’s opinions leave me somewhat bemused, but this essay is a gem.
In Orthodox practice, at the start of Lent, there are “forgiveness vespers.” It is customary for each member of the congregation, from small children to the priest and deacon, to individually bow and ask forgiveness of each other participant. Hierarchy is not thereby undermined; in fact, it is strengthened. I find this one of the most moving services of the church year.
8 Comment by Kirt Higdon on 9 October 2009:
It seems to me that humility is incompatible with egalitarianism since the humble man admits that many are his superiors – in authority, accomplishments, talents, virtues, etc. As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn pointed out more than once, egalitarianism arises from pride, the refusal to admit that anyone is better than you and the consequent desire to pull down those who are. Thus democracy arises from egalitarianism since no natural hierarchy can be admitted, but every individual must submit to the sheer weight of numbers. This is the ideology – in practice, of course, most democracies are disguised oligarchies.
9 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 9 October 2009:
An addition:
St. Alphonsus has a fine treatment of superbia (pride) in Book V of his Theologia Moralis. To crudely sum up some of what he says, Alphonsus defines pride as “an inordinate (that is disproportionate) appetite for one’s own preeminence (excellentia)” of such a sort as does not wish to be subject either to God or to one’s human superiors. Pride is not complete so long as it does not reject property authority, divine or human. HeSD distinguishes between venial and mortal acts of pride. Mortal sins include expressions of pride aimed at harming our fellow men or are directed against the love of God. (Neopagans take care!) . Pride is a mortal sin when someone laps up praise for something that is a mortal sin. When someone introduces new customs or fashions into a commonwealth, foreseeing that by his example he would be imposing a moral necessity on others that they make expenditures beyond their ability and later would be unable to feed themselves or satisfy their creditors, he sins gravely, but it is only a venial sin if someone dresses extravagantly out of mere lightwittedness. It is also a sin to pretend, out of pride, to vices that one does not actually practice (such as the neopagan metrosexuals who claim to be playboys.)
10 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 9 October 2009:
” . . .obnoxious, ambitious in petty matters, ungenerous, arrogant, and oligarchic” It strikes me as a pretty good description of the American ruling class
11 Comment by Kevin J. Jones on 9 October 2009:
“In the Greco-Roman view, Celts and Germans acted like children.”
In wartime perhaps. But didn’t moralists like Tacitus praise the reputed virtues of the Germans as a contrast to Roman decadence?
Salvianus, an admirer of Paulinus of Nola, also followed Tacitus’ lead.
12 Comment by JD Salyer on 10 October 2009:
As usual, Dr. Fleming’s reflections provide much-needed relief from frustrating foolishness. Better yet such foolishness can be used as an opportunity for education — the discussion of Thomas’ views on hierarchy & humility in particular.
Regarding the connection of classic paganism with Christianity, a passage from Josef Pieper’s Guide to Thomas Aquinas made me do a double-take when I first came across it a while back. (To my understanding Pieper is both substantive and a reliable commentator.)
“Multis gentilium facta fuit revelatio.” According to Pieper, “this was an opinion that Thomas pronounced many times”, and St. Thomas “saw no difficulty in assuming that the Sibyls, say, had spoken under an “inspiratio divina”.
Pieper concludes by saying “is is important for us to grasp the full implications of ‘God’s speech’ sounding and resounding through the mythical traditions of many nations.”
Pieper also states that Plato’s effort to discern the true meaning embedded in the “sacred tradition of the myths as lore descended from a divine source” really is “theology in the strict sense of the word”.
If Pieper’s reading of Thomas is accurate, it’s surprising to me that it isn’t more widely circulated — both by those intent on building upon it on one hand, or on the other by those who would be scandalized by it & regard it as one more point against Catholicism.
As to Achilles, I heard (from a source who struck me as fairly competent) that in Homer’s description of “the wrath of Achilles” he uses a word for “wrath” which is elsewhere only used for the gods.
The narrative seems to pretty clearly censure Achilles’ behavior, as Dr. Fleming points out. If my memory serves me faithfully, Achilles himself repents of his stubbornness, albeit too late.
13 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 10 October 2009:
Pieper was one of the finest minds of the 20th century, though the unpretentious simplicity and clarity of his style may lead some unwary readers into thinking he was not profoundly learned, which he was. Nothing could be more important to this discussion than the frank acknowledgment of the pagan contribution to Christian theology–a subject we shall take up in another discussion. Without the tools and arguments provided by Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, Christian theology would not have been able to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity, much less defend it from heretics.
μῆνις is, indeed, typically used of the god. I am not completely sure why Homer would have used it. Perhaps the obvious explanation is true, that Achilles is the son of a goddess–though surely he has a less impressive divine genealogy than Sarpedon–and acts in a superhuman way. Perhaps it is one of those words that can originally apply to humans, such as [w]anax, lord, but is later restricted to gods. Perhaps there is a bit of both going on in the Iliad, but the effect on the Greek reader would have been the same.
14 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 10 October 2009:
Several people have asked why is it that so many neopagans fail to resemble the robust Odinists of yore. Is this phenomenon peculiar to non-Christians? Certainly not. The boys of my generation refused to grow up–look at Bill Clinton or watch The Big Chill for confirmation. Nonetheless, they were far more aggressive than today’s 30-something males. Some of this has to do with what George Gilder was talking about in the 1970’s–the smothering effects of being raised in a society where fathers are away much of the time and boys are brought up by mothers, school marms, and social workers. George was writing before the feminist revolution had taken over institutions, which are far worse today than they were 30 years ago. An interesting theory has been proposed recently in the UK, where “scientists” have suggested that women on the pill come to prefer less manly men, and David Derbyshire (any relative of John?), writing in The Daily Mail, illustrated the problem by examining the decline manliness in film stars from Steve McQueen to Johnny Depp and worse. I looked at the comments to see what the ladies had to say, and one of them–bless her poor pathetic heart–ridiculed the article and suggested that Derbyshire had never seen macho man Brad Pitt. Well, there you are. In this context, an aging 60-something ex-Hellenist is closer to John Wayne,.
15 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 10 October 2009:
Thanks to Kevin Jones for pointing out the weakness in my argument that I had deliberately concealed. In the case of Salvian, he was simply deceiving himself. His praise of the moderation of the Germanic invaders, plainly contradicted by the rest of the evidence, was designed as a slap against the traditions of the once-pagan empire. You hear the same sorts of stuff today from anti-pagan fundamentalists and evangelicals. Tacitus is a bit more complicated. The Germania is a literary work of ethno-mythology, which preserves a good deal of what the Romans and Greeks believed they knew about the Germans. How much Tacitus actually knew first hand is a matter of conjecture. What is clear,however, is that he uses the Germans as a foil for his hatred of the empire, which he regarded as tyrannical. Everything the Romans were and should are now the virtues possessed by the Germans. Still, it is true, that in trying to make a point emphatically, I left out the nuances. But if you want to pursue what even semi-civilized Romans felt about the various Germanic tribes after the invasions had been consolidated and not much was left of the old civilization, just read Gregory of Tours on the Franks or Paulus Diaconus on the Lombards. One partial exception is the Visigothic King Theodoric, who, until he began to get brutal in old age, did his best to maintain the Roman order and defend it with his German troops. This is a long and complicated story, but in general Italian elite opinion was divided, though the tide must have shifted with the judicial murders of two leading Roman collaborators with the Goths, Boethius and his father-in-law. In any event, the experiment did not outlast Theoderic. We’ll take this question up later, since it is an important one. There is a new book, which very unconvincingly tries to whitewash the barbarian invaders.
16 Comment by Lone Racer on 11 October 2009:
Re Fleming @14: A very brief comment:
I’d wondered about the perpetually declining manliness of film stars myself for many years, but just recently I’ve started to change my mind (perhaps out of hopefulness). The new Bond guy seems more masculine than his several, post-Connery predecessors; the career of Gerard Butler of 300, who seems genuinely manly (and not merely well-muscled) is moving briskly; Russell Crowe (who in real life is undisciplined and a whiner, but whose screen presence is definitely not metrosexual) continues to make money. These guys are all under-45, though over 40, so maybe they’re just a blip: I can’t think of much masculinity in the 30-something crowd. Lots of pretend tough guys: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Dicaprio (which is really funny), etc.
17 Comment by Koenraad Elst on 11 October 2009:
A religion should not be defended with achievements that aren’t its own eventhough it benefited from them. But in apologetics, this is done all the time, sometimes in good faith. The Christian East-Romans benefited from a military-organizational superiority but had inherited it from their Pagan predecessors. Belisarius’ defeat of the Goths in Ravenna had nothing whatsoever to do with a Christian-Pagan contrast. The Romans and the Goths fighting over Ravenna had both been Christians for generations. As I learn here from Dr. Fleming, the clumsier Germanic strategy had long survived conversion to Christianity, just as the more sophisticated Roman strategy had. And so had the Roman preparedness for war and the Gothic reluctance to admit defeat. In this respect, baptism made no difference.
18 Comment by robert on 12 October 2009:
“What I suspect is really going on, when young neopagans—mostly urban metrosexuals—attack Christian humility is that that they are yearning to escape from their position as peripheral males and think that in the Wagnerian myths they can embrace a manhood they will never attain.”
Yes, there is much to this description of the current state of affairs. This prolongation of adolecense is a sad problem because there is no initiation to maturity left within the culture and so few actual mentors at the University level as to be non existent. The development of the emotions and body without the intellect leads to the boorish, Rambo-type, street gang thug, while the development of the intellect without self-sacrifice leads to the eternal adolescent shifting from one curiosity to the next. The mind open at both ends, never convicts, loves or wraps around anything worth giving one’s life for and therefore the discovery that one must lose his life to find it, is never revealed or introduced to our consciousness. When archaeologists dig in the rubble of our cultural centers (Colleges, Churches, Hospitals and Neighborhoods) or what is left of them five hundred years from now, surely they will conclude from all the prophylatic devices, court records and prescription drug accounts that we were a people who lead unconsummated lives.
19 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 12 October 2009:
I believe I am entirely in agreement with Dr. Elst, a noted student of the ancient civilzations of India. My point is not at all to denigrate the achievements of pre-Christian and non-Christian peoples. I wish I could persuade him not only to take an active part in this discussion, by introducing us to the other great Indo-European classical civiization and by giving us an occasional article for the magazine.
On the subject of the Goths’ tactical failures, read Procopius on the siege of Rome. It is a magnificent account. Although the Goths vastly outnumbered the Romans, neither side had enough troops either to invest or to defend the whole circuit of walls. The Goths had learned enough siegecraft to build towers, and the Roman civilian population panicked. When Belisarius mocked them, they grew angry and mocked him. He asked for a bow and shot, in sequence, two men off the towers. Then he got serious and told his men to shoot the draft animals pulling the towers. The poor dumb Goths had failed to notice that the Romans also built in protection for the beasts. The Germans ended up being quite simply the best soldiers in the world, but in the 6th century they still had a great deal to learn. Christianity had not unmanned either the Goths or the East Romans.
20 Comment by robert on 12 October 2009:
“A religion should not be defended with achievements that aren’t its own even though it benefited from them.”
Dr. Elst,
In the West there is too little recognition that the largest despository of cultural treasures in the way of Wisdom and human understanding is in its own religious tradition. This is not only an academic point but a point of a contemporary Western contrast with some of the other ancient religions that modernity is now clashing with such as Hinduism and Islam. Two of the best english speakers on this aspect of Religious Traditions is Ananda Coomaraswamy from the East and Rene Guignon from the West. It is peculiar in our age that so much emphasis is placed on footnotes and credit for originality whereas “Traditionally” the goal of education was to enter into the truth whose existence was eternal and independent of its history of being recognized or ignored by mere mortals. In such times one can be asssured that principles of education have been reduced from the love of Wisdom for her own sake to a chronological history of ideas and a competition for pride of place in speaking about her.
What a contrast to the the ancients who “prayed and prudence was given to them” or “they pleaded and the spirit of Wisdom came to them, beyond health and comeliness they loved her, deemed riches as nothing compared to her, …. etc.
21 Comment by Patrick on 12 October 2009:
Neopaganism is at its core the glorification of the self at the expense of others. This type of paganism started in the skepticism of the Renaissance and picked up momentum during the Reformation and the emergence of the new men. As Christianity took four centuries to dominate the old pagan culture, neopaganism is finally triumphant after centuries of undermining the old Christian virtues and values. Christians now find themselves fighting a rear guard action against a dominant force that controls schools, media, business and even families. No better archetype of this dominance and decline of humility is Donald Trump – a boaster par excellence, intellectually incoherent, a nasty personality,and reeking of bad manners and worse values. The juxtaposition of St. Francis, as the Christian model for the Middle Ages, and Trump as post-Christianity’s ideal man and model is indicative of the deep slide of true humility in our civilization.
22 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 12 October 2009:
#16. Lone Racer. The manly film stars you mention are all British and British Commonwealth people. None are Americans. It is important that this is recognised when you discuss the subject.
23 Comment by Samuel Bass on 12 October 2009:
Belisarius was a Christian general and Justinian a Christian ruler. Would a pagan society have allowed Gelimer the Vandal to walk through the streets of the old Rome, rather than being dragged like Bodicaea during a triumph? Gelimer was pensioned off and died in peace (if unmanfully) at a reasonably old age. But of course both sides in Justinians wars against the Germans were Christian–albeit the Germans were heretics. And the armies of Belisarius included Germans as well, Goths and Heruli. While Belisarius may have lacked domestic authority, as a general he was eminently virtuous in every sense. I think his achievements can be put fairly and squarely on the Christian side of the ledger.
24 Comment by R. McCabe on 12 October 2009:
Gentlemen, thanks for this fascinating discussion. Dr. Fleming, thank you for leading.
Mr. Roberts @4 leading into Patrick @21, I can only confirm your suspicions based on my experiences. Neopagans have been led in no small part by the GLBT “community”. Many have elevated dogs and pets and even “sexiness” above children, many scoff at motherhood (and fatherhood) as something important. But perhaps more alarming is the trend among neoChristians, even some Catholics. Many here have been led by corporate culture and capitalists and view children as part of a well thought-out plan. The chance to experience the joy and mystery of God’s plan for us is lost on these neoChristians, who stop having children as soon as they can’t imagine sending extras to private universities. Is it a stretch to compare neoChristians with the old pagans?
I do not know how far this conversation should be stretched, but was there a concept in pagan culture for meekness? It seems when Christian humility fails — when we do not defend and uphold our inhereted culture — it fails into meekness.
25 Comment by Allen Wilson on 12 October 2009:
I am reminded here of a certain twenty year old with whom I worked several years ago. A radical vegan, he wore dreadlocks which stank, talked like he was from L.A. even though he was from Arkansas, and condemned his own family as being nothing more than ‘rednecks’ (one wonders what they thought of him). He once said that we really needed a ‘Buddhist president’ as if that would solve everything.
He once made the statement, ‘The Christians stole philosophy from the Pagans’. As if the pagans had been living happily on earth and then, suddenly, out of the blue, space ships from a distant star landed, strange creatures called ‘Christians’ emerged, ran out and grabbed a pretty gilded object called ‘philosopy’ and flew off, back to their own planet, leaving the poor Pagans behind to cry for their loss after so many centuries of hard work.
I responded that the converts to Christianity had themselves been Greeks or Hellenised peoples who lived in what was essentially a Greek world, and that most of the early Christians had been Pagans, and many of them had learnt philosophy before they converted to Christianity, and so when they converted, they brought their philosophy with them into Christianity. It was already theirs all along, and they didn’t ’steal’ it from anyone.
That shut him up and stopped what was about to become a display of ant-Christian bigotry.
He suffered from college ‘teaching’, of course, drummed into his brain by ignorant, lying Marxist scumbags. Even so, he was a perfect example of a problem that moderns have suffered from since before Gibbons, and that is the idea that there is some kind of dichotomy between Christendom and the Pagandom that preceded it. Early Christians and Pagans did not live in separate universes, they were part of one civilisation, and the Christian culture of the later Roman world did not suddenly replace the older Pagan culture, rather, the Pagan culture slowly became Christendom. There was continuity, not dichotomy. Modern neo-pagans cant see that because of their anti-Christian bigotry and because of their ideological, fundamentally anti-Western, view of history.
It’s no coincidence that anti-Christians are usually also anti-Westerns nowadays.
26 Comment by Allen Wilson on 12 October 2009:
Perhaps I should have used ‘discontinuity’ instead of ‘dichotomy’ above.
However, it’s easy to see where the real historical and cultural discontinuities are, and what caused them:
Western Europe: between the old Western Empire and the Mediaeval West, caused by the barbarian conquests.
North Africa, the Middle East, and Persia: between the Christian and Zoroastrian cultures and Mediaeval Islam, caused by the musim conquest.
Greece and Anatolia: Ancient, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Greece and Anatolia on the one hand, and modern Greece and Turkey on the other, caused by the Turkish conquest.
27 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 13 October 2009:
Belisarius is undoubtedly a great soldier and a man of Christian virtue, who had to work under less than propitious circumstances. Justinian was a great ruler, but suspicious of merit to the point of paranoia. As for Belisarius’ domestic problems, it is hard to judge. Procopius gives three versions of history and the two extremes–his glorification of Justinian’s building program and the Secret History–gave alternately the whiff of sycophancy and revenge. His Histories of the Wars are more balanced, and for that reason I stick to them. In the older conventional view of Byzantine history, the awful Byzantines are chided for their cruelty in blinding deposed rulers or rivals, when in fact it was only Christian charity that kept a new ruler from killing potential rivals as the Ottomans would later do.
The argument that Christians “stole” their philosophy from the Greeks goes back to the first (perhaps only) serious and honest critic of Christianity. This was Porphyry, the principal disciple of Plotinus. He more or less despised Judaism, and he resented the way in which Origen applied the allegorical style of interpretation to the OT Scriptures to make them compatible both with Christian charity and with reason. This technique was pioneered by Greek philosophers who tried to make Homer and the myths conform to an enlightened and humane philosophy. I do wish Christians had not succeeded in destroying the texts of Porphyry–how effective he must have been–because from what we have, he was a fine philosopher, who strove mightily against the Neoplatonic descent into magic. If I recall correctly, Augustine includes him in a remark about Platonists who appear to have been inspired by God.
Meekness, for the Greeks, was almost always regarded as a vice.
28 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 13 October 2009:
I should add to my response above what I had intended to say, before getting side-tracked by Porphyry. It seems to me that there are two common mistakes that reinforce each other. The first is the mistake of obscurantist and Judaizing Christians who are opposed to all things Greek and think that every ignoramus should be able to read a translation of the Bible and invent his own religion. This naturally inspires loathing in non-Christians, who then take these impostors as examples of authentic Christianity. As AW has quite correctly said, Christian theology is an outgrowth of Greek philosophy. Philosophy is like mathematics, a means of finding truth and evaluating reality, and as in mathematics, truth–whether the Pythagorean theorem or the principle of non-contradiction–is valid, whatever the religion or intentions of the thinker. That is why there can be no real dichotomy between “science” and “religion,” any more than it makes sense to have a dichotomy (as opposed to a distinction) between poetry and music.
29 Comment by robert on 13 October 2009:
“Early Christians and Pagans did not live in separate universes, they were part of one civilisation, and the Christian culture of the later Roman world did not suddenly replace the older Pagan culture, rather, the Pagan culture slowly became Christendom. There was continuity, not dichotomy. Modern neo-pagans cant see that because of their anti-Christian bigotry and because of their ideological, fundamentally anti-Western, view of history.”
Yes it is much like our own times in which a once Christian, initially British but always European, culture is repeatedly mugged and beaten into submission with “new ideas” until retreat and ignorance becomes the new way of life. The neo-pagans described above by Mr. Wilson lack the intellectual foundation for anything other than the instinctive reactions of a disgruntled minority. Some of them are proud of their ant-christian attitudes because as Dr. Fleming said very well they have been inspired by a bible religion that engenders “loathing in non-Christians, who then take these impostors as examples of authentic Christianity.” They are blocked by their imagination by having known so few Christian intellectuals who had any authentic courage or charity and they are blocked intellectually because most of their education lacked any aspect of the musical or poetic which is the normal or humane way to approach the mysteries of life. Admittedly it is not the only way –philosophy and theology are also serious “ways” to truth but for most of us music and poetry (not the sissified, exhibitionist crap popular at recent inaugurations) is the normal path. Plato knew Homer by heart as would have most of his students such as Aristotle. (Just as most people of the Western culture knew the Gospels.) I would imagine most kids today would be hard pressed to even recite the Ten Commandments let alone know if they were violating them, which in turn makes the first psalm unintelligible and the words of Christ just more pious cliches of another historical Rabbi.
30 Comment by Sean Scallon on 13 October 2009:
“mostly urban metrosexuals—attack Christian humility is that that they are yearning to escape from their position as peripheral males and think that in the Wagnerian myths that can embrace a manhood they will never attain.”
They wish to be Thors and yet know they are Dilberts. One feeds upon the other until it becomes both self-destructive and pathetic at the same time, the would-be warriors of Michigan Ave. looking for a Fight Club and a Project Mayhem so they don’t have to go to Afghanistan.
31 Comment by robert on 13 October 2009:
Sean,
I agree with you but we must all admit that you can’t give what you don’t have, and what we have remaining of the “best and brightest” is a great indicator of all that we have lost. There have been a few, some professors right here at Chronicles, who attempted to pass on something of what they were given but most of them did not. The only thing we can do at this point is try and keep the crowd at the door until nightfall and then hope for the best.
32 Comment by Jonathan Gress on 13 October 2009:
Dr Fleming I think hits the nail on the head with respect to Christian humility and the skandalon it offers to pagans and Jews. The context of pre-Christian notions of virtue is necessary to keep in mind. St Paul and Christian ascetics ever after constantly use military and athletic metaphors to illustrate the ascetic feats required of true Christians. Theophylact in his explanation of St John’s Gospel concludes from one passage that God only approves of a strong and manly disposition. Courage and stamina were taken for granted as virtues: what the Church taught was that this courage must be applied not (just) to overcoming our worldly enemies, but our spiritual ones, i.e. the fallen passions.
33 Comment by Charles on 14 October 2009:
Well, as an “un-educated… effeminate… Anti-Semite” pagan I must unfortunately admit that Dr. Fleming has some true (although generalized)observations on the many faults and follies of the current hodge-podge of individuals that make up what most would consider neopagandom. Although I must ever so humbly ask (as un-pagan as that may be) that you fine learned men at least try to acknowledge the difference between degenerate new-age universalists, and those who actually value their own past, present, and future while living in a civilization that knows the value of nothing. After all, I don’t think Dr. Fleming would appreciate me lumping him in with the Mormons ect.
Escapism, anti-intellectualism, and a cheesy over emphasis on the warrior class remain some of the most visible faults of modern paganism. As well as those who only carry the label as Anti-Christian reactionaries who define themselves by the people they despise.
The boastful and arrogant nature of Western Indo-European pagans, both ancient and modern, stands not so much in contrast to humility as it does to guilt. A folk with too much pride may have its own delusions and faults to deal with, but it is a much healthier state to be in than to have an underlying guilt for ones very existence, not to mention how the concept of original sin has been morphed by the counter culture into full blown ethno-Masochism.
Oddly enough, we both find ourselves living in a world amongst the ruins, where the only hope for any kind of meaningful resistance lies in the catacombs.
For those of us who have been raised by the baby-boomer generation, there is no nostalgic reminiscing about “Things I Miss” concerning the old America. Perhaps this reminiscing is almost as pathetic and futile as those urban metrosexuals who fantasize about times of yore and actually transcending their perpetual adolescence. Luckily for me, when a people are stripped of everything they have, what is left is not the proletariat, but the folk. Not the collectivist and purely materialist concept of the folk used by totalitarian governments in the recent past, but a holistic, organic, and adapting people that exist on a material, cultural, and spiritual level.
34 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 14 October 2009:
First off, I am grateful to Jonathan Gress, for his spot-on comment. This is an essential insight into Christianity from the beginning, namely,, that Christ and his disciples take pre-Christian virtue as a given. Paul, for example, says in choosing deacons, they must be responsible family men who take care of their dependents, because even the gentiles do that. Thus, we are not to give up these pre-Christian responsibilities and virtues but to perfect them. This is the context that enables us to avoid some of the more pernicious modern heresies, such as Marxism and feminism and pacifism.
I am also grateful to Charles, the first sensible neopagan to have sent in a comment in a long time. Perhaps I should point out that I admire several neopagan or pro-pagan writers, dead as well as alive. And it is my hope to create a fruitful and productive dialogue with a younger generation. What I always tell my would-be pagan friends is that traditional Christianity–Catholic, Orthodox, and traditional Anglican–has incorporated much of what was best in paganism and kept the exuberant spirit of polytheism alive in the reverence paid to angels and saints at local shrine. The cult of St. Demetria of Eleusis is by no means exceptional. This is a topic to be taken up separately but I do want to recommend strongly a brilliant book by Maurice Barrès, La colline inspirée, which somewhat fancifully traces the history of a hill from Druidism to a Catholic shrine. When I read snippets in French class, oh some 45 years ago, I was enthralled. Don’t bother to look up Barrès on Wikipedia, because they will undoubtedly describe him as a ultra-rightwing extremist anti-Semite. Finally, let me say, that my own preparation to become a Christian began in a deep respect for Greek paganism and in the study of Plato and Aristotle that led me to conclusions that while they do not require Christianity but are certainly compatible.
35 Comment by Allen Wilson on 14 October 2009:
I have always steered clear of Christian sects which reject – or even fear as somehow satanic – the Greek, Roman, and various North European pagan heritages that are our birthright as Westerners and as descendants of ancient Pagans. It seems to me that we should be able to respect and value the best of that heritage, and use the worst as lessons to learn from. If we reject them, then we may as well destroy all archaeological sites as well, destroy the Colliseum and Parthenon, and burn the mummy of Tutankhamun. We would become as Taliban Moslems.
No man ever had perfect fathers. Do we reject grandpa, never visit his grave and never mention him to his grandchildren because he was a Baptist and not a Presbyterian, and he sometimes got drunk? Why then reject Aristotle or the myths of the Gods of Valhalla?
As for modern pagans, I never believed that true paganism could ever be resurrected, but I’ll let others discuss that if they must. However, if they were sensible and practiced the moral and civic virtues of the Greeks and Romans, I would prefer real pagans as neighbours than, say, Marxists, nihilists, Muslims, self-styled witches or Jehovies, or anyone who eats dogs.
36 Comment by Pete Marconi on 14 October 2009:
A brilliant piece. I eagerly anticipate the follow-up.
37 Comment by Lone Racer on 15 October 2009:
This was a very interesting essay, but there is a great ’skandalon’ to my proper and full appreciation of it; namely, Dr. Fleming directs several jeers at people whom he calls “neopagans”, but nowhere does he define this term, or even provide representative examples of it. I have no idea to whom he is referring.
What is a “neopagan”? Does it refer to a modern believer in pre-Christian deities? But if so, how can the atheist Nietzsche be so classified (he was much too intelligent to rid himself of Christ, only to return to Odin, Loki, etc)? Or does it simply refer to any modern Westerner of whatever intellectual orientation who rejects Christianity (eg, Betrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, HP Lovecraft, etc)? And who in the world are the “anti-Semitic, metrosexual” neopagans? I have never seen “anti-Semite” and “metrosexual” conjoined in a description of the same person, with the possible exception of the late Jorg Haider.
I’d like to offer some additional, substantive comments, but I need some clarification first. Thank you.
38 Comment by robert on 15 October 2009:
“Or does it simply refer to any modern Westerner of whatever intellectual orientation who rejects Christianity ?”
This is what neo-pagan refers to in the context it is being used if one understands “rejection” as a positive attack or positive desire to be rid of it. Faith is a theological virtue that must be bestowed or given, it is not an acquired virtue like temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence, etc, therefore there is a distinction between the apostate and the man without faith. The word modern and Westerner used together is a meaningless term today. A Westerner in the cultural sense would be an individual sustained or nourished (by way of inheritance, custom, habit and daily practices — perhaps even by intellectual study if one could still find such a teacher) by his past which would include, Greece, Rome, The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, The Word Made Flesh and its subsequent history of acceptance and/or rejection. Modern, on the other hand, is whatever one says it means — a pluralverse of ideas, a collection of Diversity rather than University, a five fingered foot, artificiality as a legitimate substitue for reality, materialism, rationalism, communism, socialim, a new world order, a new “way, a belief in endless progress, etc… Neo- pagan and modern are very similar terms as they have been used in this discussion, therefore it might be helpful to view the Neo-pagan as the grandchildren of the neo-modernist since a man who believes in nothing will soon die or else begin to believe in something. That is to say, the neo-pagans are men and women sick and tired of the nihilism and despair they have inherited, and therefore groping around in the dark towards something that resembles light. I have great respect for them when they are honest and even pray they find what they are seeking. The smart alecks among them like Chris Hitchens, Dawkins, etc.can go to hell. I hope this helped a little.
39 Comment by Allen Wilson on 15 October 2009:
What we seem to be dealing with here is people who either reject Christianity on principle or who know nothing of it yet fear it because they think it might take something away from them, such as intellectual freedom, free will, or personal or sexual freedom. A lot of them dont want nosy preachers and amen-ers telling them how to live. Neo-pagan is used to describe them because they are somewhat unknowing and perhaps disconnected heirs of those who revived neo-paganism during the middle ages, after many and varied mutations of belief, practice, and ideology over the centuries. How the Mediaeval neo-pagans resembled the original neopagans of the Roman era, or how closely, I cannot say. Probably not much more than modern neopagans resemble the Mediaeval ones.
It doesn’t seem as if we’re dealing with consistent relationships or philosophical lineages, and certainly not consistency of belief – or constistency of lack of belief – among modern neopagans.
40 Comment by robert on 15 October 2009:
Mr. Wilson,
I think you are correct and simply offer the following quotation for your thoughts. It is the gift of the wise man to see further in the dark, this was written some 75 years ago and seems to be holding true for his country as well as Europe in general. Whether it is the prologue to our own future, I leave for the readers to decide.
“The modern attack will not tolerate us. It will attempt to destroy us. Nor can we tolerate it. We must attempt to destroy it as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Truth by which men live. The duel is to the death.
Men sometimes call the modern attack “a return to Paganism.” That definition is true if we mean by paganism a denial of Christ’s truth: if we mean by Paganism a denial of the Incarnation, of human immortality, of the unity and personality of God, of man’s direct responsibility to God,and all that body of thought, feeling, doctrine and culture which is summed up in the words Christian Culture, then, and in that sense, the modern attack is a return to Paganism.
But there is more than one Paganism. There was a Paganism out of which we all came_the noble, civilized Paganism of Greece and Rome. There was the barbaric Paganism of the outer savage tribes, German, Slavonic and the rest. There is the degraded Paganism of Africa, the alien and despairing Paganism of Asia. Now since, from all of these, it has been found possible to draw men towards the Christian doctrine, any new Paganism rejecting the Church now known would certainly be quite unlike the
Paganisms to which the Church was or is unknown.
A man going uphill may be at the same level as another man going down hill; but they are facing different ways and have different destinies. Our world, passing out of the old Paganism of Greece and Rome towards the consummation of Christendom and a Christian civilization from which we all derive, is the very negation of the same world leaving the light of its ancestral religion and sliding back into the dark.”
41 Comment by Lone Racer on 16 October 2009:
It seems this thread is petering out. Too bad. I’d really like to have said a few things. I’ll keep cloes watch for the next time this topic rears it’s head.
42 Comment by TJF on 16 October 2009:
I am reading this in New MExico and will start work on the next installment. For this discussion, a neopagan is someone today in the postChristian West who says he believes in paganism and wants to eliminate or reduce Christianity and replace it with some form of paganism. Obviously they do not really believe in the gods they do not worship and are mostly no better than milk-and-water Nietzscheans
43 Comment by John Mitchel's last laugh on 16 October 2009:
The most interesting part of this article is this: “Even crazy Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor’s son whose hatred of Catholicism knew no bounds, confessed that Luther had unleashed the Germans from classical civilization and given them license to return to their native swinishness. This is much too harsh, both on Luther and on the Germans, but that was the opinion of the leading guru of neopaganism.”
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.
44 Comment by JD Salyer on 16 October 2009:
My schedule has finally allowed me to check back in. I thank Dr. Fleming for his observations regarding Pieper — I’ve been meaning to read the Meaning of Leisure but, well, haven’t had the leisure.
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?
45 Comment by Samuel Bass on 16 October 2009:
Last Laugh, I am no Anglophile, but to suggest that Protestant England has played no positive role in preserving what should be preserved overlooks the rather colossal achievements of English literature since the establishment of Protestantism. Shakespeare and Milton, George Herbert, Swift and Browning, to name a few, count for nothing? As for German Protestantism, Bach and Handel don’t strike me as examples of recrudescent Saxon barbarism. Nor do they reek of the Aesir.
46 Comment by Jonathan Gress on 16 October 2009:
One more thing occurs to me. Dr Fleming provided a very interesting anecdote from the conquest of Ravenna by the ‘runtish’ Roman army from the Goths. It should be mentioned that the Goths were by this time also Christians, albeit Arian heretics. This is actually worth bearing in mind when we talk about the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire: it was, in the later centuries of the process, just as much a continuation of the internal Christian dispute between Arians and Orthodox as it was a simple matter of foreign barbarians invading civilized Rome.
47 Comment by Samuel Bass on 17 October 2009:
Indeed, Mr. Gress, it was mentioned (at #23) that the barbarians, though explicitly the Vandals, were heretical Christians. It also occurs to me that a neopagan, Robert Graves, had his go at Procopius and Belisarius. While Graves was pleased to insert paganism into the hero’s own household, he nonetheless portrayed Belisarius, though not Justinian, as a Christian exemplar.
48 Comment by robert on 17 October 2009:
” to suggest that Protestant England has played no positive role in preserving what should be preserved overlooks the rather colossal achievements of English literature since the establishment of Protestantism. Shakespeare and Milton, George Herbert, Swift and Browning, to name a few, count for nothing? ”
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.
49 Comment by TJF on 18 October 2009:
The point, if Mr. Bass will but read the plain words on the page, was to cite the godfather of neopaganism on the subject of Germanism. Their other hero, Adolf, also ridiculed the Nordicists in the movement. And who in his right mind would describe English literature, written in a predominantly romance vocabulary borrowed from Latin and Norman French, as Germanic? The point of this discussion has nothing to do with the virtues of any one branch of Christendom, only with the refutation of aspersions made by, for the most part, ignorant neopagans.
50 Comment by Samuel Bass on 19 October 2009:
To these plain words on the page was I responding, Dr. Fleming:
“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.
51 Comment by Jonathan Gress on 19 October 2009:
Thank you, Mr Bass, for pointing out that my observation had already been made in your previous post, which I missed. And I very much appreciate your other observation in that post, that the Christian Roman conquerors of the Goth heretics were far more civilized in their treatment of the conquered than their pagan forebears would have been at a triumphal procession.
52 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 19 October 2009:
Dr. Fleming,
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.