Essay

Belief

Creed

Paganism

11 August 2024

10 min read

Are we Secular, Christian or Pagan?

After the Paris Olympics, Graham Tomlin wonders whether a full-on secularism could veer back towards a modern paganism.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Paris' Pantheon temple displays a flag and banners.

Temple of a nation: The Pantheon, Paris.

Fred Romero, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Nicola Olyslagers is an Australian high jumper who recently won silver at the Paris Olympics. Gearing herself up for one of her final jumps, she lifted her hands and eyes to the heavens at which point the BBC commentator said: ‘and so, she looks to the gods for help as she prepares to jump’.

All very dramatic. Except that is exactly what she was not doing.

Olyslagers is a devout Christian. She found her faith aged 16, and regularly speaks of it in public. Her pre-jump routine was not a prayer to the gods of the pagan pantheon, an appeal for a slice of luck or good fortune, but a prayer to the God of Jesus – a commentator who had done their homework might have been expected to know that.

In such a public display of devotion, she is far from alone. A feature of this Olympics is the number of athletes who have worn their faith on their sleeves, from Adam Peaty to Gabriel Medina, in the most famous surfing photograph of the games. Every night you see someone thanking God, crossing themselves, advertising their faith – not mainly as a plea for victory, but as Ashley Null points out elsewhere on Seen & Unseen as a way of handling the ups and downs of elite sport.

When you place these public professions of Christian faith next to the row over the opening ceremony, it raises an interesting question. During that ceremony, Christians around the world were upset at what looked like a parody of the Last Supper. Olympics organisers then claimed that the offending scene was not intended to mock the heart of Christian worship but was a reference to Dionysius and the feast of the pagan gods, connecting the modern Olympics with its roots in the pagan world of the classical period.

If it was a reference to Dionysian pagan feasting, the opening ceremony was perhaps a more telling sign of the direction of our culture than we might think, and one that might cause Christians even more concern than a second-rate mockery of the Last Supper. Because it clarifies a choice that our culture might face as our era proceeds.

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Gabriel Medina celebrates his surfing gold medal.

A surfer stands in the air, above a wave, with his board beside him.

In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, T.S. Eliot gave a series of lectures in the refined setting of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, which were eventually published as The Idea of a Christian Society. In it, he laid out a stark prognosis:

“The choice before us is between the formation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one."

Eliot thought that his society was neither fully Christian, nor fully pagan, but ‘neutral’. Yet he feared that could not last long. Such ‘political liberalism’ was in danger of fostering its own demise by an indiscriminate refusal to make moral value judgments and decide between versions of the good. As he watched the rise of fascism in Europe, which stood on the verge of the most destructive war in its history so far, he made a significant claim: that the only alternative to what he saw as a pagan totalitarianism was a Christian society.

Closer to our times, a similar thought has occurred to other influential figures. The feminist writer Louise Perry recently mused over the idea that our society is re-paganising, citing the moral conundrum over modern abortion. Despite not being a practising Christian, she sees abortion bearing uncomfortable similarities to pagan infanticide, a sign that we are heading back to a moral scheme with a strong likeness to pagan valuations of human life. The Jewish feminist writer Naomi Wolf has done the same, in an extraordinary essay. Despite a tendency to veer into conspiracy theories too easily, she makes a compelling case that as the Jewish-Christian ethos that underpinned western society has receded, what has emerged is not a benign neutrality, but dark powers that used to lurk in the background of Old Testament religion:

“the sheer amoral power of Baal, the destructive force of Moloch, the unrestrained seductiveness and sexual licentiousness of Astarte or Ashera — those are the primal forces that do indeed seem to me to have returned… or at least the energies that they represent — moral power-over; death-worship; antagonism to the sexual orderliness of the intact family and faithful relationships — seem to have ‘returned,’ without restraint.”

The Nazism to which Eliot referred, as we now know, was a dead end - literally. We console ourselves today with the thought that we have left such extremes behind, that the idolatries of fascism and communism were defeated in 1945 and 1989 respectively, and that we now inherit a secular liberal democratic space which is happily neutral and keeps the peace between different claims to truth – an advance on either paganism or Christianity.

That may be true, but as Rowan Williams pointed out, there is a difference between ‘procedural secularism’ – a non-dogmatic role for the state in helping keep equilibrium in a society where there is no common agreement on truth, and ‘programmatic secularism’, which imposes a distinct set of values on society which tend to inhibit religious expression and denies anyone the right to claim their religious perspective is ultimately true.

The makers of the Olympic opening ceremony, without a trace of irony, justified their creation by saying that it was celebrating French Republican ideas of inclusion, freedom, human rights and so on – the liberty, fraternity and equality of the French Revolution, which was in turn, born out of the French Enlightenment. This was full-on programmatic secularism on display. It was a classically libertarian view of freedom, the absolute freedom to choose what we do with our lives, of individual self-expression, with no overarching, universal idea of the Good, which of course is one particular understanding of what freedom means. It is distinct, for example, from an older view of freedom as gradual liberation from (and therefore the disciplining of) some of our conflicted inner impulses that are deemed destructive of the soul or of society. Secular liberalism that parades itself as self-evident, the opinion of all right-thinking people, is so often incapable of seeing how for others - Muslims and Christians for example - it is anything but self-evident. There are many across the globe who are not content with an overarching moral scheme which insists on telling them that their belief is a private matter rather than a distinct transcendent truth.

So, what if the opening ceremony was a paean to French values, rooted in the French Enlightenment? And what does that have to do with paganism?

The first volume of Peter Gay’s monumental two-volume work on the Enlightenment was subtitled: “The Rise of Modern Paganism.” He pointed out how the philosophes of that same Enlightenment - Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, for example - loved Cicero, Lucretius and the rest. Every educated person at the time studied Greek and Latin, yet these men went deeper to revive pagan ideas, culture and sensuality. They wanted an undogmatic religion, with lots of options, just like paganism – and definitely not the dogma of Christianity. Behind its apparent rationalism or tolerance, the Enlightenment was, for Peter Gay, “a political demand for the right to question everything, rather than the assertion that all could be known or mastered by rationality." It was a rejection of a single creed, in favour of multiple ways of life and belief. The era harked back to the classical past, seeing itself as a completion of the Renaissance, finally leaving behind the vestiges of religion that the Renaissance still retained. The Enlightenment was, Gay argued, not so much the birth of a new rational age, but effectively a renewal of an ancient pagan sensual pluralism.

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The argument that paganism is returning has a weak and a strong form. The weaker form is that we have returned to a kind of pluralism where there are many objects of worship under an overarching scheme that denies any of them ultimate truth or value.

Paganism was essentially pluralistic. Pagans believed there were many gods who inhabited the universe and who demanded allegiance. Pagan worship was a kind of bargain, whereby if you paid your dues to the gods by offering sacrifices to them, especially the local ones of your city, they would look after you and ensure that things went well. Yet the language of ‘gods’ is confusing. What pagans meant by ‘gods’ was not what Jews or Christians meant (or mean) by ‘God’. Pagan gods belong to nature. They do not transcend it. Pagan gods were objects within the world, rather than the transcendent source of all things, existing precisely beyond physical reality. As St Augustine pointed out, paganism took the good gifts of God and turned them into gods – objects of devotion that they were never meant to be.

If paganism was pluralistic, with numerous objects of worship, none of whom could claim absolute allegiance and who ruled over the lives of their devotees, then modern pluralism bears some distinct similarities. A pluralist public space where each of us is entitled to hold our own sense of what is sacred to us, what is of ultimate value, and where no one perspective is favoured as the one, large distinct truth, gets pretty close to a modern kind of paganism.

Of course there aren’t too many temples to Bacchus, Aphrodite, Tyche or Plutus on street corners in Paris, New York or London. Yet these were the gods of wine, love, chance and wealth. It is hard to deny that the draw of addictive substances, the lure of sex, the hope of a lottery win, or the desire to be rich do not dominate lives in our world.

There is an old saying that you can tell what someone worships by asking what they would sacrifice most for – or, to put it differently, what they think will make them happy. Worship and sacrifice always went together, whether in the Jerusalem Temple in the Old Testament, in classical paganism, or even in Christianity where St Paul urged the followers of Christ to ‘offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.’ Equally, you can tell what a culture worships by the buildings it puts up. If the classical period put up temples to the gods, the Middle Ages put up cathedrals for the worship of the Christian God, our city skylines testify that we put up countless temples to Mammon.

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Canary Wharf skyscrapers, London.

Skyscrapers loom under a dark sky and are reflected in a river in the foreground

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The stronger form of paganism, identified by Naomi Wolf suggests that darker, older forces are coming back to haunt us. There is an argument that paganism never really went away. It continued to lurk in the corners of European societies as books such as Anton Wessels’ ‘Europe: Was it ever really Christian?’ showed.

Leslie Newbigin, perhaps the greatest Christian missiologist of recent times, spent most of his life as a missionary in India before returning to the Enlightenment-shaped west in the 1980s. As he did so, he looked back on the idea of a secular society in which there were no commonly acknowledged norms., “We now know”, he argued, “that the only possible product of that ideal is a Pagan society. Human nature abhors a vacuum. The shrine does not remain empty. If the one true image, Jesus Christ, is not there, an idol will take its place.”

In the UK, we seem about to head down the road towards ‘assisted dying’. The story of Canada should give us pause. Ever since it legalised euthanasia in 2016, stories continue to emerge of people asking for death over such problems as hearing loss or a lack of housing, or feeling they are a burden on their families or the state, and where not just old people are candidates for death – there are now calls for unwanted babies to be killed – we are back with infanticide. In Quebec and in the Netherlands, one in 20 deaths now are self-chosen. In Belgium, such deaths have doubled in the last 10 years.

If Louise Perry and Naomi Wolf were among those to spot a re-paganisation of culture, it is no accident that both were women. Paganism was bad for women. Tom Holland’s book Dominion was born out of the insight that our world is very different from the classical pagan one. A world where entertainment meant watching wild animals tear the flesh off slaves, where unwanted babies were routinely abandoned, where masters could have sex with whoever they wanted, and could effectively rape young female slaves was a very different world from ours, where such behaviour is criminalised. And for him, the difference was Christianity.

The problem was, as the early Christians pointed out, that the gods enslave. If you give yourself over entirely to drugs, sex, money or Dionysian pleasure, ultimately, they will rule your life, enslave, and destroy you, as many an addict has discovered. We were never meant to give ourselves to such temporal things – only God, they said – the transcendent source of all goodness - can satisfy and liberate from destructive desire.

Maybe Eliot was right. It takes a long time to put down religious roots. Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism are only recent imports to Europe and so have shallow roots here. Both Christianity and paganism have gone deep into our soil. Secular pluralism, especially the ‘programmatic kind, always veers backwards towards another version of paganism. And so, European culture only really has two options – the paganism that lasted for centuries before the arrival of Christianity, and the Christianity that replaced it.

The Olympics offered us two paths. The one offered by the creators of the opening ceremony, the other by the athletes who see a higher goal than a gold medal or earthly fame. The creators of the opening ceremony may not have intended an attack on Christianity. Yet they were happily acclaiming something which Europeans left behind long ago. And we should pause before we celebrate that.

Weekend essay

Attention

Creed

Generosity

17 November 2023

8 min read

Your attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity

Eighty years after her death, Simone Weil’s wisdom is a vital challenge to today’s attention economy. Justine Toh explores her life and thinking.

Justine Toh

Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, Australia.

A monotone street mural of a young woman looking fiercely at the viewer.

Street art image of Simone Weil, Berlin.

Your attention is a fragile thing.

Trouble is, we only learn this after it’s been frayed – as realised by anyone who’s ever emerged, bleary-eyed and regretful, from watching one too many Instagram reels. Not that our inability to look away is entirely on us. In an attention economy, trillions of dollars are to be made through exploiting our attention. It’s why some, like social critic Matthew Crawford, call upon us to preserve the “attentional commons” by treating attention as a public good like fresh air and clean water. His point: let’s use the not-so-renewable resource of our attention wisely. Be careful about what you pay attention to.

If you struggle with sustained focus – and, given corporate assaults upon it daily, how could you not – then it’s even more vital that you, well, attend to the life and work of Simone Weil (1909-1943).

The French philosopher, labour activist, and not-quite-Catholic mystic wrote passionately about the importance of attention and even the “miracle” of its occurrence when directed, deeply and lovingly, towards another person. Reading Weil against the chronic distraction of our times – the real product flogged by that attention economy – makes clear that even eighty years after her death, Weil couldn’t be more relevant.

But for Weil, ideas needed to be lived and experienced.

Weil’s life was short and difficult – often by choice. She grew up the younger sister of math prodigy André Weil in a comfortably middle-class, non-observant Jewish family in Paris. She had a first-rate education that set her up for a fairly cushy life as a teacher. But an encounter with then-classmate Simone de Beauvoir suggests a saint-in-waiting quality to the teenage Weil. Ever the idealist, she desired to feed the world’s starving millions. De Beauvoir, who recalls the exchange in her biography, was disinterested: finding the meaning of mankind’s existence was more important, she declared. “It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry,” retorted Weil.

They weren’t empty words, either: Weil often did go hungry out of solidarity with suffering others. (Indeed, her refusal to eat more than her French compatriots under occupation likely hastened her death). But for Weil, ideas needed to be lived and experienced. Her determined attempt to identify deeply with the plight of working people meant she put herself forward for repetitive, fatiguing factory work or manual labour on farms, even though, sickly and clumsy, she often became a liability.

There were other misadventures too: frustrated attempts to assist the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and, later, the French resistance during WWII. Few of these endeavours were fruitful but Weil was nothing if not committed to doing something, anything. Even if the outcome was uncertain and one wasn’t exactly fit for the task.

For Weil, to attend well to other people meant making their welfare and wellbeing central to our concerns.

It is in Weil’s writing about attention that we glimpse, perhaps, something of what drove her to put herself at the (frequently extreme) disposal of other people and causes she fervently believed in. In a now-famous essay on school studies, Weil makes a startling claim: the point of school is to teach us to pray – by which she meant: to attend, deeply, to whatever is before you.

The idea was that students would apply themselves to an endeavour that wouldn’t reveal its secrets so easily. As Weil saw things, wrestling with algebra and trying to follow its impossible logic simultaneously flexed and trained, if you like, our attentional muscles. Even if the equation was still impenetrable after an hour, “this apparently barren effort,” Weil declared, would still bring “more light into the soul”. Teaching students to persist through difficulty, she believed, would pay off far beyond the mastery of any school subject. It would, in fact, prepare people for the real business of life: paying attention other people. Not least because, as we learn soon enough, they can be way more infuriating than maths.

Even though Weil casts attention as prayer, God wasn’t to be the singular object of our attention. The plight of our neighbours was also to fill our gaze. For Weil, to attend well to other people meant making their welfare and wellbeing central to our concerns and bestowing on them the honour, love, and dignity they were due. It meant granting them the strange compliment of being real – or being a real person in the way we experience ourselves as real people – and then putting our own real selves at their disposal. This is why Weil called attention the “rarest and purest form of generosity”. It required the attentive person to, in a vivid phrase borrowed from Pope Francis, “remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other”.

The experience of suffering and misfortune seems to exile someone from the rest of humanity, to undo them in some essential way that strips them of their humanness.

But the power of this attentive gaze goes still further. It has the power to rehumanise the dehumanised. As Weil writes:

The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.

The experience of suffering and misfortune seems to exile someone from the rest of humanity, to undo them in some essential way that strips them of their humanness. Weil would go on to describe such a state as one of affliction – one she experienced, firsthand, as a factory worker. In a letter known as Spiritual Autobiography, she writes of the exhausting and gruelling nature of the work:

“There I received for ever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron which the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves.”

Affliction, then, is the person reduced to a “thing” by the experience of suffering and oppression. But here is the transformative power of attention: it is precisely what enables someone to recognise that the afflicted other is a person “exactly like us”.

Take, for instance, Weil’s reading of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, a tale perhaps broadly familiar to some. It describes an act of unexpected and radical compassion by a Samaritan, a social and ethnic outsider to a Jewish man robbed and left for dead.

Christian commentators often pay close attention to the attentive care the Samaritan shows to the beaten man: for them, the true test of the Samaritan’s neighbourliness. But Weil has a different focus. For her, the critical moral act was the fact that the Samaritan paid attention. He stopped and looked at the man who had become less of man and, nonetheless, gave “his attention all the same to this humanity which is absent”.

Weil calls this an act of “creative attention… [that gives] our attention to what does not exist.” Everything that then follows – the Samaritan pouring oil on the man’s wounds, taking him to a place where he will be cared for, and paying in advance for his keep – is almost beside the point, because it all depended on this first act. To be a neighbour, suggests Weil, is first of all to see.

Perhaps this is why Weil writes that paying attention to the suffering of another “is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” Attention, then, enacts a kind of a resurrection because it can bring the almost dead back to life.

The power of paying attention is that it can transform a lump of anonymous, misshapen flesh lying by the side of the road into the other person who is “exactly like us”, the other person who is as real as we are. The person who requires, from us, all the compassion we would wish to be shown if we were set upon by robbers on a lonely road.

Our entire attention economy is organised around helping us avoid the demands of other people. How many of us have retreated to the comfort of our screens to soothe our social anxiety

We’ve travelled a long way from where we started: with our difficulty focusing in an age of distraction and the all-too-familiar experience of giving our attention – which, as Weil has taught us, also means giving ourselves – to things that don’t always deserve it. But our own travails with attention have much to learn from Weil’s account of the moral, political, and spiritual charge of attention.

For one, she illuminates for us the determined inattention of our time. Our entire attention economy is organised around helping us avoid the demands of other people. How many of us have retreated to the comfort of our screens to soothe our social anxiety, or to numb the guilt we feel at failing to show up for people? It turns out that the loss of our focus and ability to concentrate is just the tip of the attentional iceberg. Also at stake is our ability to be present to the people we love, and even to be present to ourselves – and our pain.

Beyond that, there are many contemporary equivalents of the man of Jesus’ parable, first afflicted by suffering and then afflicted by the ease with which that suffering can be ignored. I write from Australia, in the recent aftermath of a defeated referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament: an invitation, issued from the nation’s first peoples to their fellow citizens, to see their unique circumstances and grant them representation over policy matters directly affecting them. Lives are in the balance: the life outcomes of Aboriginal people are drastically worse than other Australian citizens. Now, to the loss of language, culture, country, and pride, comes a further blow: they will not be listened to, either.

They are not the only people we struggle to see. The lady with Alzheimer’s Disease, the illegal immigrant, the victim of family violence, the modern-day child slaves forced to mine cobalt to power our smartphones. It is profoundly difficult – and costly – for us to see them and recognise their claims upon us. To love others, as Jesus once enjoined his followers, as we love ourselves.

The vulnerable have always risked being overlooked and ignored. But Weil gives us eyes to see all this – and asks that we do not look away. “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world,” she writes, “but people capable of giving them their attention.”