On September 19th, Academic Agent wrote a piece critiquing Christian Nationalism, spurred on by a book titled just that by Andrew Torba, and he created controversy on the right with the following claim,
“Religion does not matter to the fate of civilizations. I can hear the shocked gasps from here because such a sentiment seems to be sacrilegious. Note, I am not saying ‘religion does not matter’, I am saying ‘religion does not matter to the question of the fate of civilizations’.”
I am very thankful to AA because, by creating this flashpoint, he opened up a space for me to comment on the long going discussion about Christianity on the right. For a long time now, the question of what should guide the right, Christianity, Paganism, or a secular attitude, has been the subject of many fierce debates and controversies. Often the question is broken into sub-questions such as, “does Christianity raise birthrates? Is Christianity the best defense against liberal morality? Would Europe and America have been better off if they were not evangelized?” AA, critical of Christianity’s ability to save the West from its present state, continues in this line of argument:
“The third most populous Christian nation in the world is the dreaded Mexico, filled with people that many would-be supporters of Christian nationalism would presumably wish to keep out of the USA. Why has Christianity failed to produce the 1950s USA, so nostalgically remembered by Buchanan and co, in Mexico or the Philippines? What has Christianity done to tame the savagery of the Congo? In this article, I am going to advance the argument that Christianity is a non-factor in the fate of civilizations.”
At the core of the argument over Christianity’s place on the right is the assumption that Christianity is one of many religions, and we can choose which religion, out of the many options, will best serve our current political struggle. Should no religion adequately raise birth rates, uphold morality, or strengthen resolve, then we can turn to race, class, or other identities. It is not just non-Christians that have this assumption, many Christians, unfortunately, believe Christianity to be one of many religions. Now, this is not to say that these Christians are not pious, they often believe that while Christianity is one of the many world religions it happens to be the only true religion, but this assumption is still mistaken. A hero of mine, Father Alexander Schmemman, who we will look at in depth later, was attempting to fight this assumption in the 1970’s, and the fact that he would have to devote much of his corpus to combating this assumption means that it had been around long before him, and its persistence to today, I believe, has led to the current debate about Christianity.
Against the belief that Christianity is one religion out of many, Schmemann, amongst others, argues that Christianity is primarily a sacramental way of life, and is only secondarily a religion. By “secondarily a religion”, I mean that Christianity is only secondarily concerned with matters of morals and rituals, whereas its primary concern is living life sacramentally. Christ Himself tells us, “Seek first the Kingdom of God”, and by first He meant first. Soren Kierkegaard puts it well,
“Shall I seek to secure a position that corresponds to my abilities and strengths, so that I can be effective in it? No, you shall first seek God’s Kingdom. Shall I give all my fortune to the poor, then? No, first you shall seek God’s Kingdom. Shall I go out and proclaim this teaching to the world, then? No, you shall first seek God’s Kingdom.”1
Using one’s abilities, helping the poor, and preaching the Gospel are all certainly good things, but these are secondary to Christianity, these are Christianity’s religious functions. The primary concern is to first seek the Kingdom of God. Christianity’s secondary concerns are like priestly vestments that adorn the Faith with many good and beautiful things, but to mistake Christianity for these things is like thinking the vestments, and not the man, is the priest. Yet, too many Christians have made this mistake, and, having persisted for decades in Christian circles, has culminated in the following paragraph:
“Why dwell on this issue? It is to recognize that the nature of our struggle is political, which is to say ‘worldly’, as much as it is spiritual. The spiritual struggle is the one we all face: against the daily humiliations of the modern world, constant attacks on all that is decent, constant attacks on our people, and, above all else, against the constant lure of nihilism. Christianity cannot be reduced to mere utility — it is more than whatever worldly ends we may have today and must finally resolve always in affirming salvation in the name of Jesus Christ — but insomuch as it has a narrow purpose for our struggle, it may provide many men and women with the ‘steel’ required in the spiritual battle against modernity. However, as I have argued, for the political struggle, it is and will always be neutral. The famous phrase from the Bible is ‘Render unto Caesar’: thus, when in Rome, the Christians lived as Romans – in fact that phrase ‘when in Rome’ was Christian in origin: St Ambrose’s advice to St Augustine. The conversation of the Roman emperor to Christianity was not achieved by political struggle, but rather through birth rates and other purely evolutionary means as well as a litany of errors on the part of the Roman elites. When Caesar became a German warlord, Christians became warlike and somehow found justifications for murderous conquest; when Caesar became a conniving merchant, Christians found arguments to justify commerce; and when Caesar became an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion officer, the church dutifully flew the rainbow flag. When the new based order comes, so too will the church become ‘based’ as it was under Mussolini or Franco. As de Gobineau argues, this adaptability is Christianity’s ‘greatest innovation’. But what survives the process is Christianity itself while civilizations can come and go like so many seasons. Christianity ‘does not belong exclusively to any civilization. It did not come to bless any one form of earthly existence; it rejects none, and would purify all.’[14] Our political struggle is for Western civilization specifically, it cannot be for Christianity-in-general, or else we would not mind a hostile take over by Africans and Mexicans so long as they went to church. If Western civilization falls, Christianity will endure through African bishops or converts in China. Therefore, the only natural conclusion is that one whose primary mission is for the furtherance of Christianity-in-general is engaged in a different struggle from our struggle.”
Christianity is interpreted to only be a system of morals and rituals, and since what has gone by the name “Christian morality” has often changed in contents and its rituals have evolved, it cannot matter to the fate of civilizations because each civilization, be it Roman, Spanish, Italian, or Woke, imprints upon Christianity its own morals and rituals. Even asking the question, “Does Christianity matter to the fate of civilizations?”, invites us to identify Christianity with its secondary concerns. Should someone affirm the opposite of AA, arguing that Christianity does matter to the fate of civilizations, and then make the case via moral or economic arguments (as some Hamiltonian friends of mine do), this affirmation would nevertheless remain an identification of Christianity with its secondary concerns.
Christianity, contrary to the common misconception, is first about seeking the Kingdom of God. When the Word became Flesh, when the eternal God who made all things took on a body, reality was fundamentally changed forever. Whatever divide between sacred and profane that existed prior to the Incarnation, whatever strict distinction existed between the divine and human that only allowed Man to relate to God via right belief and right practice, was shattered when the sacred became profane, when the Divine became human. Since Christians affirm the Incarnation, since we do not accept the divide between sacred and profane, we are able to see life as such as sacramental, and seeing life as sacramental is the first step in seeking the Kingdom of God. Understanding life as sacramental means, among other things, that every meal is eucharistic, every interaction with water is baptismal, and every act a liturgy. Christianity has often been reduced to its religious functions, the universal human phenomena of morality and rituals, but its core is the sacramental life, the life only made possible through the Incarnation. Looking at the sacraments of eucharist, baptism, and liturgy in general I hope to demonstrate the sacramental essence of Christianity, and, if successful, also the error in reducing Christianity to just another world religion.
*Disclaimer*: I am not a theologian, and everything I say here should be interpreted as my reading of Father Alexander Schmemann. Should I say anything contrary to the Faith, this is on me. While I am normally hesitant to speak definitively about the Faith, preferring to caress rather than grab the subject, since I know how little I know, the article put out by AA is one more in a recent string of attacks upon theology and the reduction of Christianity to its economic, or political, utility. Having only seen rebuttals to AA that affirm this error, I felt the need to throw my hat in the ring. But, once again, “if my right hand offends, cut it off.”
I) Life as Sacramental
A) Eucharist
Sacraments are too often thought of as a vending machine that dispense Grace if preformed in the right way, by the right person, and at the right time. Like right belief and right practice, there is a proper place for sacramental reverence, but to think of eucharist or baptism as a ritual done to get something in return (Grace) is to reduce the sacrament to what it does for me. Grace cannot be utilitarian. Father Schmemann writes in the beginning of his chapter about eucharist in For The Life of the World,
“The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended. They realized also that this ascension was the very condition of their mission in the world, of their ministry to the world. For there in heaven they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when, after this "liturgy of ascension," they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the "joy and peace" of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses. They brought no programs and no theories; but wherever they went, the seeds of the Kingdom sprouted, faith was kindled, life was transfigured, things impossible were made possible…
To leave, to come .... This is the beginning, the starting point of the sacrament, the condition of its transforming power and reality.”2
Sacraments raise us up to heaven, so that we may come down to earth. Being raised up to heaven, we do not leave the world but see the world as it really is. The world is offered up to God, and then received back by us. Two of the seven sacraments will be looked at here, although at the end we shall see that there is potentially an infinite number of sacraments because life itself is a sacrament.
Schmemann says that before technical disputes about the elements and words of institution,
“The Fathers called "eucharist" the bread and wine of the offering, and their offering and consecration, and finally, communion. All this was Eucharist and all this could be understood only within the Eucharist.”3
“Eucharist” is the offering of bread and wine, their consecration, and the partaking (communion) of the bread and wine. Why bread and wine? Because food is our life; without bread and wine we die. To offer food before God is to offer Him our life. Why are we offering our life to God? Because, as the word “eucharist” indicates, we are thankful to God who gave us life.
“For we already know that food is life, that it is the very principle of life and that the whole world has been created as food for man. We also know that to offer this food, this world, this life to God is the initial "eucharistic" function of man, his very fulfillment as man. We know that we were created as celebrants of the sacrament of life, of its transformation into life in God, communion with God. We know that real life is "eucharist," a movement of love and adoration toward God, the movement in which alone the meaning and the value of all that exists can be revealed and fulfilled. We know that we have lost this eucharistic life, and finally we know that in Christ, the new Adam, the perfect man, this eucharistic life was restored to man. For He Himself was the perfect Eucharist; He offered Himself in total obedience, love and thanksgiving to God. God was His very life. And He gave this perfect and eucharistic life to us. In Him God became our life.”4
Once our life is offered before God, once Christ offers Himself before The Father, the bread and wine are consecrated. During consecration, love, forgiveness, and joy pours out.
“The Eucharist has so often been explained with reference to the gifts alone: what "happens" to bread and wine, and why, and when it happens! But we must understand that what "happens" to bread and wine happens because something has, first of all, happened to us, to the Church. It is because we have "constituted" the Church, and this means we have followed Christ in His ascension; because He has accepted us at His table in His Kingdom; because, in terms of theology, we have entered the Eschaton, and are now standing beyond time and space; it is because all this has first happened to us that something will happen to bread and wine.”5
Beginning before we enter the church building, beginning in confession, in which we get up from our falls and try again to follow Christ, beginning in our very commute to church, in the prayers leading up to receiving the Eucharist, in the kiss of peace, and the Eucharistic Prayer, the faithful become the Church, we consecrate ourselves to God, and because we are consecrated we become capable of receiving Christ’s body and blood. We then, having received Christ’s Life, after offering our own life to Christ, symbolized with bread and wine, partake of the Eucharist. We are what we eat, and in eating the flesh and blood of Christ, by eating Life Himself, we become Life.
What happens during the Divine Liturgy is a more dramatic and fuller expression of what happens at every meal,
“But this is not an "other" world, different from the one God has created and given to us. It is our same world, already perfected in Christ, but not yet in us. It is our same world, redeemed and restored, in which Christ "fills all things with Himself." And since God has created the world as food for us and has given us food as means of communion with Him, of life in Him, the new food of the new life which we receive from God in His Kingdom is Christ Himself. He is our bread because from the very beginning all our hunger was a hunger for Him and all our bread was but a symbol of Him, a symbol that had to become reality. He became man and lived in this world. He ate and drank, and this means that the world of which he partook, the very food of our world became His body, His life.”6
Food and drink are symbols of Christ, as they are life pointing to Life. Christ’s very body and blood was constituted by the food and drink of this world. The sacrament of eucharist makes obvious what is not obvious, it teaches us that there are no such things as “profane” meals and “sacred” meals, because all meals are given to us for life, by Life, and that our hunger for life is a hunger for Life himself. While there is a difference between the bread and wine offered up on Sunday and the bread and wine eaten at a restaurant, the difference is the same difference between Christ’s humanity and ours: the former is perfect and what the latter ought to be.
B) Baptism
As eucharist reveals to us what food and drink really is, baptism reveals to us what matter really is. Baptism is not the vending machine; it is not magic water that makes someone a Christian or assures him of his salvation.
“Baptism, by its very form and elements--the water of the baptismal font, the oil of chrismation--refers us inescapably to "matter," to the world, to the cosmos. In the early Church the celebration of baptism took place during the solemn Easter vigil, and in fact, the Easter liturgy grew out of the "Paschal mystery" of baptism. This means that baptism was understood as having a direct meaning for the "new time," of which Easter is the celebration and the manifestation. And finally, baptism and chrismation were always fulfilled in the Eucharist-which is the sacrament of the Church's ascension to the Kingdom, the sacrament of the "world to come."7
Chrismation is a sacrament in the Orthodox Church that is preformed alongside baptism and is the anointing of the newly baptized. Unlike confirmation in the Latin church, the Orthodox do not separate chrismation from baptism and, as such, baptized infants are chrismated and, following chrismation, receive eucharist.
Before baptism, the catechumen, the person about to be baptized, is asked to renounce Satan, to denounce dark and irrational powers and Satan is exorcised from him or her. In the case of infants, a sponsor, a godparent, fulfills this task (although the child is the one exorcised). Exorcism, Schmemann says, means, “to face evil, to acknowledge its reality, to know its power, and to proclaim the power of God to destroy it. The exorcisms announce the forthcoming baptism as an act of victory.”8
Entering in the Christian life, the catechumen begins with the renunciation of evil, a proclamation of God’s power to destroy evil, and the commitment to fight evil. Opposed to a magic rite that saves a soul, baptism is the beginning of the fight for one’s soul. This does not negate its importance, but affirms its necessity, for how could salvation be won if one does not renounce Satan and all his works, affirm God’s power, and declare oneself a soldier for Christ? Christianity is not about comfort, but spiritual warfare. Those who mock the Faith for being “a fairy tale for those afraid of the dark” are profoundly ignorant…the Faith is, above all else, a commitment to confront, fight, and conquer the dark.
Following the exorcism and the profession of Faith (the Nicene Creed), comes the blessing of the water.
“Baptism proper begins with the blessing of the water. To understand, however, the meaning of water here, one must stop thinking of it as an isolated "matter" of the sacrament. Or rather, one must realize that water is the "matter" of sacrament, because it stands for the whole of matter, which is, in baptism, the sign and presence of the world itself. In the biblical "mythological" world view-which incidentally is more meaningful and philosophically consistent than the one offered by some "demythologizers"-water is the "prima materia," the basic element of the world. It is the natural symbol of life, for there is no life without water, but it is also the symbol of destruction and death, and finally, it is the symbol of purification, for there is no cleanliness without it.”9
Why is water blessed? Because water symbolizes matter as such. When the baptismal water is blessed by the priest, the priest is blessing the whole cosmos. Blessing the water, like the blessing of the bread and wine at eucharist, is giving thanks, and lifting up our hearts in love and joy. As said at the beginning, sacraments are things offered up to God and them received back by us, and by offering up water to God we are, symbolically, offering up the whole cosmos, and we then receive the cosmos as it truly is, as the presence of God.
Following the blessing of the water, the catechumen is emersed in the baptismal font three times, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The catechumen is emersed into the cosmos as it ought to be, as something that makes present Christ, and when he or she emerges, the catechumen enters new life. As Christ was in the tomb for three days before He rose, so the catechumen is submerged three times before he or she rises to new life. Put into a white robe immediately after emersion, the robe of a king, symbolizing that man is once again the king of creation, the newly baptized Christian receives chrismation.
“In the Orthodox Church, what we call today the second sacrament of initiation-that of chrismation (or confirmation) -has always been an integral part of the baptismal liturgy. For it is not so much another sacrament as the very fulfillment of baptism, its "confirmation" by the Holy Spirit. It can be distinguished from baptism only insofar as life can be distinguished from birth.”10
Being anointed with oil, as kings were anointed by the priest in the Old Testament before assuming rule, symbolizing that the newly baptized Chrisitan will fulfill the kingly vocation appointed to Adam, while also being the oil that the departed were anointed with prior to burial, symbolizing the new Christian’s readiness to die to sin, the newly baptized is confirmed. Not in the sense of an outward “stamping” of the newly baptized by some external force, but to confirm man as man,
“To be truly man means to be fully oneself. The confirmation is the confirmation of man in his own, unique "personality." It is, to use again the same image, his ordination to be himself, to become what God wants him to be, what He has loved in me from all eternity. It is the gift of vocation.”11
Thus, in baptism and chrismation, which is inseparable from baptism in the Orthodox Church, both cosmos and Man are blessed, offered up to God, and given back to us. In being given back to us, cosmos and Man are revealed as they are. In baptism the cosmos is revealed to be saturated as God’s presence, as something irrefutably good, as Moses tells us in Genesis. In chrismation, Man is shown to be the prince of creation who is prepared to die to sin, the very sin that was rejected in baptism. As the eucharist showed food and drink to not only be life, but Life Himself, so does baptism show matter to presence God at all times.
C) Liturgy
For the Orthodox, “liturgy” is synonymous with “the Divine Liturgy.” Many other traditions have a similar association, not to the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom celebrated by the Orthodox Church each Sunday, but to a structured corporate worship. To say that all of life is liturgical in this context is to say that all of life is a corporate worship. While partly true, we are not always engaged in corporate worship, and often what we do is not easily recognizable as worship. How does my morning routine fit into this description? I wake up, go for a run (assuming it’s the week), come back to shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, and then drive to work. How does a family picnic fit into this description? Taking this understanding strictly, I would have to be praying, or maybe chanting a hymn, whilst doing all this. Aside from morning prayers (which I often shorten out of laziness), or blessing the food before the picnic begins, there is no prayer or chanting in either of these events. Further, if I were to be praying throughout my morning routine or the picnic, while I would be looking up to God, which is a very good thing, I might miss the grey outlines of buildings as I run through town in the early morning or miss the story my cousin was trying to tell me at the picnic.
Outside of the context of explicit worship, liturgy has a broader meaning. To identify liturgy only with prayer is to fall into the pre-Incarnational distinction between sacred and profane,
“This is the reduction of the liturgy to "cultic" categories, its definition as a sacred act of worship, different as such not only from the "profane" area of life, but even from all other activities of the Church itself. But this is not the original meaning of the Greek word leitourgia. It meant an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals -a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It meant also a function or "ministry" of a man or of a group on behalf of and in the interest of the whole community. Thus the leitourgia of ancient Israel was the corporate work of a chosen few to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah. And in this very act of preparation they became what they were called to be, the Israel of God, the chosen instrument of His purpose.”12
Understood in this fashion, my morning routine is a liturgy because it is what prepares me, an individual, to be united with my collogues at work, with whom we become greater than the sum of our parts and become [name of vocation]. The family picnic is also a liturgy, because the individuals are united into a whole, through the breaking of bread (we can see eucharistic themes already), a single family is made out of many unique persons. What separates the Divine Liturgy from these other two liturgies is that in the Divine Liturgy, the faithful become the Church.
We said that understanding liturgy as worship is partly correct. Part of its correctness is correctly identifying the worship present in the Divine Liturgy. The other part of its correctness is that in many, but not all, liturgies there is an affirmation of God’s Goodness, and this is worship. To celebrate being in a family is to look at the world and say with God “it is good.” It would be impossible to have a family picnic without believing that it is good that family exists, both my family and family as such. For, if I thought it was not good that families exist, why would I participate in, or let alone plan a family picnic? Going any further would repeat what I said here, so I will stop at that.
Life is liturgical because all throughout life we are being united to one or another corporate bodies, and in being so united we become more than we are. Not all liturgies are good, for surely there are corporate bodies we ought not belong to. Pornography, for instance, might be one such liturgy that unites us with the actor(s), the producers, and the other viewers—always an unsettling thought—and makes all of us into a corporate adulterer. Yet, some liturgies are holy because they affirm the goodness of God. Sometimes a holy liturgy involves icons, incense, prayers, and hymns, and sometimes it involves a grill, hotdogs, blankets, and family. The difference between Divine Liturgy and other liturgies, to repeat our refrain, is that Divine Liturgy shows us what everyday liturgies really are.
II) That Religion Cannot Save
I hoped that having looked at eucharist, baptism and liturgy, you will, if not agree, at least understand the claim that Christianity is not primarily a religion, but a sacramental way of life. It is not about fertility rates, or being a good person, but drawing near to Christ and seeing that all of creation proclaims His glory. Even the rituals of Christianity, the Church’s sacraments, are only secondarily “rituals”, because they are always pointing outside themselves and to reality as a whole. To evaluate Christianity’s importance to civilization (which invites the temptation to utilize it) by looking at Mexico’s economy or crime rate (or Byzantium’s success) is to take the religious vestments of Christianity for its sacramental core.
Yet, I want to go one step further. Religion does matter to the fate of civilizations…it often leads to their decline. A system of morality and rituals, if not accompanied by a sacramental view of the world, becomes the political plaything of Machiavellian forces. World religions teach that adherence to dogmas and living morally is the path to salvation, contrary to the Christian teaching that Christ’s Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection is what brings salvation. As soon as adherence to “a system” is made necessary for salvation, ideology begins to emerge. If the sacred and the profane are separate categories, which is only possible if we either deny the Incarnation or treat it as only an academic subject to write treatises about, then it becomes possible to develop a system that deals exclusively with the profane. And why not? That sacred stuff is “over there”, and while important, as AA says, it does not interfere with the “down here” of politics. When people call Communism or Fascism a religion, they are more right than they know. Adherence to these systems, which might acknowledge the sacred, but which insists on a separation between it and the profane, become the yardstick by which one’s salvation is determined. It is no surprise then, that “being based” has become the same as “being a good person” within the online rightist sphere. Sure, you have folks like Evola that supported the fascist cause and were no doubt spiritual, but Evola only touched on the universal phenomenon of religion, never transcending it and transfiguring religion through a sacramental life.
Ideology is religion, and ideology has only led to bloodshed. So, to the extent that religion (divorced from sacramentality) has something to do with the fate of civilizations, it has a negative effect.
As an Orthodox Christian, I do believe that a nation becoming Christian will thrive. In the Old Testament we see that Israel prospers when she is faithful to God, but when she falls into idolatry then she is invaded, conquered, or her children are taken away. We believe that the Church is Israel, and that when I read the Old Testament I am reading about the Church before Christ. So, unless God decides to change, then we can say that the Church will thrive so long as it is faithful to God. Put in the language of nations, and this gets a bit tricker because no nation is the Church, and sometimes suffering is beneficial, we can say that a Christian nation will be better off than a non-Christian nation. A Christian nation will see all food and drink as sacramental, meaning meals would be holy events. Like we said about liturgy, this does not mean every meal will come with incense and the Cherubic Hymn, but it will mean giving life the proper reverence it deserves. It will not look like eating McDonalds on the way to work, and it will not look like factory farms where animals are pumped with antibiotics because of how unsanitary the conditions are. A Christian nation will treat all matter as holy, as baptismal, and will be stewards of its environment. It will not look like landfills and oil spills. A Christian nation will see all humans as princes of creation, and thus all humans will have dignity and respect. It will not look like women being exploited in pornography, men being sent to die for Senator’s stocks, and it will not look like weaponizing immigrants for the purpose of electoral dominance.
Yet, Christianity makes nations better not because of these things, but because these secondary fruits follow the primary fruit: reconciling oneself to the Creator of all, Whose creation does not simply point to Him as Maker, but presences Him at all times. When the right discusses Christianity, we need to do so on Christianity’s own terms and not by misunderstanding it to be yet another system of morals, dogmas, and rituals.
A Note on Paganism
This post is a bit longer than usual, it might even be my longest one, and that is because I intended to write a piece about Schmemann for a couple weeks and when AA posted his essay, I decided to incorporate that into a large piece. There is also another post I was going to make, one critiquing paganism, but partly because AA mentioned the Christian/Pagan debate, and because in the days following AA’s article there has been some exchanges between the Christian and Pagan right, I decided to incorporate that critique into this article. Yet, in the age of competing attention spans, I will make it a brief critique and not drone on for much longer.
In light of what has been said above about Christianity, my main criticism of paganism is that it is devoid of sacramentality. Like a vending machine, rites are put in and rewards are taken out. Unlike the Christian eucharist, in which the offering is done primarily out of thanksgiving to God, pagan offerings are done primarily to receive something in return. Odysseus, for example, only offers libations to gain something, be it safe travel or communion with the dead.13 Often these scarifies are very specific in detail, making it the equivalent of magic: if you follow the instructions just right, with no deviation from them, then you will have the promised effect. Yes, Christians do ask God for things, but the sacramental core of Christianity is thanksgiving to God. Paganism is mere utility; it is the attempt to appease higher powers so they will favor us. To flip Nietzsche's assessment around, paganism is truly slave morality because it is all about bribing those stronger than you to help your sorry state. Opposed to the slave morality of paganism, Christianity is a master morality, for the Christian knows that Man was made prince of creation, and that the core of Christian worship is to look at the world, with God, and say "it is good", as a prince would look over his domain, affirm its goodness, and thank his Father the King who bestowed His son the kingdom.
Despite some modern pagans claiming that Christians de-sacralized the world (we cut down sacred trees and so on), it was the pagans who did so. Even before the first Greek or Nordic met a Christian, they made the gods into vending machines and their way of spirituality was one of utility. It took Christianity’s spread throughout Europe to let nature be an epiphany again, to let worship be something other than an exchange. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the pagan gods do not exist, but it does say over and over that the Lord God is the only god to be worshiped. Why is this? The Lord God is beyond such petty bribery,
“For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward” (Deut 10:17, KJV).
Only the Lord God, whose proper name is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is worthy of worship, and this is, among other reasons, because He does not trade favors for wine poured upon a rock or an ox offered upon an altar. Further, we become that which we worship, which is why Saint Paul says to the Corinthians,
“19 What say I then? that the idol is any thing, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is any thing?
20 But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils.
21 Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils.” (1 Cor 10:19-21)
Saint Paul is affirming the existence of pagan gods, whom he calls devils (other translations use the term “demons”) and says those that eat of pagan sacrifices will become like the pagan gods. Why does he call them devils/demons? First, they cannot be the Most High God, for God is above being bribed for favors and thus these beings must be lesser being. Second, these lesser spiritual beings, aside from being bribable, commit all sorts of nasty acts in pagan literature, such as rape, incest, and castrating their fathers, acts so nasty that many pagans themselves, like Socrates, refused to worship them. Opposed to these demons, when Christians commune and drink out of the eucharistic chalice, since we are what we eat, and since we are eating of the Most High God and not of demons, we become like Jesus Christ. Christians and pagans are playing the same game as it were. We both recognize the existence of spiritual beings, but the Christian choses to only worship the God of gods, the only One worthy of worship, whereas the pagans worship any and all spiritual beings but the Most High God.
Does any of this “prove” that paganism is false? No, and I don’t know how it could. My critique is simple. First, pagans utilize worship and desacralize the world. Second, although both pagans and Christians agree that there are many gods, the Christian choses to worship the God of gods and, in so doing, becomes like Him. We Christians have nothing to do with lesser gods and certainly not the ones portrayed in pagan myths.
If you want a world of sacrament, a world re-enchanted, and to serve the God beyond all gods, then the Church is where you need to be.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Translated by Bruce h. Kirmmse. The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses. Princeton University Press. Princton, New Jersey. 2016. 17
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Crestwood, New York. 1998. 28
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Crestwood, New York. 1998. 34
Schmemann. For the Life of the World. 35
Schmemann. 37
Ibid 43
Ibid 68
Ibid 70-71
Ibid 72
Ibid 75
Ibid 76
Ibid 25
Book 11, lines 25-30.
A Response to Academic Agent
This was a great read. Modern people fail to understand why Christianity grew as it did, and this article clears up the picture, while it offers fruits for thought. The main point kind of goes along with my recent article commenting on Cohen's song/poem Steer Your Way, which after a careful read laments the disenchantment and desacramentation of the world.
I really like this article. I have to come back to it and digest it bits at a time, but I recently had the desire to read the Westminster Shorter Carechism with a similar (if not similarly articulated) framing. The idea that the Christianity is not a religion but a way of being that seeks the kingdom of God. And that this seeking reorients a person in this world as signified by the first question of the catechism: What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.