But then, as we have seen, many educated Roman pagans of late antiquity would likely have said much the same thing. The gods are real, yes—but not literally, as depicted in the myths. Rather, they are symbols of the sublime reality that animates the world and manifests itself in nature.25
Consequently, as to whether the Renaissance was predominantly Christian or pagan, the historical evidence can yield different interpretations, depending on the perspective and commitments of the historian. Burckhardt, whose seminal book gave impetus to modern thinking about the Renaissance, suggested that in response to pervasive corruption in the church, many or most Italians had largely lost their Christian faith. How could they not have? “That the reputation attaching to the monks and the secular clergy must have shattered the faith of multitudes in all that is sacred is, of course, obvious.”26 And Burckhardt perceived a strong, genuinely pagan dimension to much of the thought and art of the period. “This [Renaissance] humanism was in fact pagan, and became more and more so as its sphere widened in the fifteenth century.”27
True, public shows of Christian religiosity by rulers were common enough. But in the spirit of Edward Gibbon, Burckhardt supposed that these were mere matters of political calculation, not of genuine Christian belief.28 And even “the worship of the saints among the educated classes often took an essentially pagan form.”29 The pagan tendencies manifested themselves, among other ways, in the widespread respect among many Renaissance figures for astrology, and for omens and auguries.30
Maybe. And yet the thinkers of the time did not admit to having declined (or ascended) from Christianity back into paganism. When they were accused of having done so, as sometimes happened, they responded with denials, and with defenses asserting their Christian orthodoxy.31 The defenses might have been duplicitous, as the Burckhardt-Gibbon–Leo Strauss type of interpretation would intimate. But can we really be so sure?
Thus, other historians have emphasized the continuing commitment to Christianity by influential Renaissance figures. Charles Nauert contends that Renaissance thinkers like Petrarch and Ficino, while challenging medieval scholastic methods and conceptions, remained sincere and committed Christians.32 Indeed, they were seeking to recover not only the pagan past but also the purity of the Christian past, which they believed to have been cluttered and corrupted during the darkness of the Middle Ages.33 “The inherent and general irreligiosity of Renaissance humanism is a creation of nineteenth-century historians,” Nauert argues, “both secular liberals (who approved) and conservative Catholics (who were aghast), but not of the Renaissance itself.”34
There is surely material in the record to support this interpretation as well. After all, Christian themes are as pervasive as pagan ones in Renaissance writing and art, maybe more so. Alongside the exuberant paintings of Venus, Bacchus, Cupid, and Apollo, there are also countless more pious Madonnas, Pauls, Peters, and Jeromes—not to mention, of course, numerous paintings and sculptures of Jesus lying in the manger, later ministering, dying, reviving, ascending, and reigning as the triumphant lord and judge of the world. There is the Last Supper of Leonardo, and Michelangelo’s celestial ceiling in the Sistine Chapel (which, to be sure, also features a few sibyls peeking in around the edges). And it may be surprising—or, to some, disappointing—to learn that artistic geniuses like Botticelli and Michelangelo, as well as avant-garde Renaissance scholars like Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, were all friends, admirers, and even at times disciples of Savonarola, the apocalyptic Dominican who mesmerized the cultured citizens of Florence with his fire-and-brimstone preaching and led the city in bonfires of books and other worldly vanities.35
Burckhardt, though stressing the loss of faith in reaction to corruption in the church, acknowledged the age’s “fanatical devotion to relics”36 and the ongoing “need felt for the sacraments as something indispensable.”37 He acknowledged as well the “epidemics of revivalism, which few even among the scoffers and the sceptics were able to withstand.”38 Of Alfonso, King of Naples, Burckhardt remarked on “how strangely Christian and pagan sentiment . . . blended in his heart!”39 The same might be said of many a Renaissance artist, thinker, or politician.
So it should not be so surprising to learn, for example, that Botticelli could revel in pagan imagery for a time and then move back to more sober Christian themes.40 Or that Pico della Mirandola, after writing daring and learned humanistic works that were condemned by the church as heretical, would later seriously consider giving up his villa and his concubine with the aim of becoming a monk and, like Saint Francis, making a barefoot pilgrimage through the towns of Italy (100, 209). (Unlike Francis and Augustine, who had struggled with similar temptations and aims, Pico never quite mustered up the faith or the will to act on this resolve.)
Lorenzo de Medici (“the Magnificent”), de facto ruler of Florence, might “involve himself in the affairs of Venus to an astonishing degree” (as Machiavelli put it), with both women and men (4, 84). He might write clever, bawdy ballads (37); conspire against the preacher Savonarola; and energetically promote pagan productions in Florentine art and writing. But then he would turn to composing religious verse, and worry that perhaps he had doomed both his soul and his city through excessive worldliness (93, 105). And on his deathbed he would call in his nemesis, Savonarola, and plead with the fanatical priest to take his confession and absolve him of his sins (4–10, 124–25). (The priest complied.)
So then, was Botticelli a Christian or a pagan? What about Pico? Lorenzo? There is no way for us—and probably there was no way for them—to be certain. Burckhardt offered his interpretations, as others have done, but he acknowledged that the matter is inherently conjectural, and he aptly concluded: “The movements of the human spirit, its sudden flashes, its expansions and its pauses, must forever remain a mystery to our eyes.”41 Was the Renaissance itself pagan or Christian? Perhaps the most accurate answer would be . . . yes.
The historian Paul Johnson thus discerns in the Renaissance “the first great cultural war in European history.”42 In a similar vein, Paul Strathern suggests in a recent study that the conflict in Florence between the radically spiritual Savonarola and the exquisitely worldly (but also deeply pious) Lorenzo the Magnificent was in reality “a struggle for the soul” of Florence. Lorenzo died in 1492; Savonarola survived and flourished as a leader in Florence—for a few years anyway, until political fortunes shifted and he was condemned and burned in the Piazza della Signoria. (Thousands of visitors walk over the spot almost every day as they enter the renowned Uffizi gallery to view the Florentine masterpieces—some pagan and some Christian.) And so the “struggle for the soul” raged on.
And on. And on. Strathern observes that the conflict that unfolded in Renaissance Florence “has continued to reverberate down the centuries—first in Europe, then in America, and now finally through the world the struggle continues. It is nothing less than the fight for the soul of humanity.”43 At least officially, we might say, Christianity maintained its ascendant position; underneath that official Christian canopy the eternal struggle persisted—in society, in the souls of Lorenzo and Botticelli and their contemporaries, and in the hearts and minds of their descendants.
The Indictment of Christianity. A yearning or at least admiration for the pagan past is evident not only in poetry and the visual arts, but also in the historical work of Edward Gibbon, Ramsay MacMullen, and many others. But this work also exhibits a different and darker though even more familiar way in which paganism has survived its ostensible defeat by Christianity. In addition to happy, exuberant, wistful recollections of the “merry dance of paganism” (as Heine put it) that had been repressed, there has also lingered in the Western memory a deep and persistent resentment—sometimes a hatred—of the institution that repressed it: Christianity.
A fair and comprehensive assessment of the effects of biblical religion on Western civilization would surely recognize both negative and positive contributions. On the negative side, as Jan Assmann and others have indi
cated, Judaism and Christianity introduced a new kind of intolerance into the world. Careful in his judgments, Assmann does not fall into the familiar simplistic depiction of tolerant paganism and intolerant Christianity. Pagan religion, he says, could support violence and oppression. And paganism deserves no credit for tolerance: insofar as pagan religions were largely unconcerned about truth, they had no cause or opportunity to manifest tolerance: there was nothing they needed to tolerate.44 Even so, Assmann thinks it must be acknowledged that Judaism and Christianity, with their more exclusive and ambitious concerns and claims about truth, introduced a new form of intolerance into the world.45 “The world of the primary [polytheistic] religions . . . was filled with violence and aggression in the most diverse forms, and many of these forms were domesticated, civilized, or even eliminated by the monotheistic religions as they rose to power. . . . Yet neither can it be denied that these religions simultaneously brought a new form of hatred into the world: hatred for pagans, heretics, idolaters and their temples, rites, and gods.”46
The depiction of Christianity in particular as intolerant, usually in cruder and less discriminating terms, is pervasive in Western culture. The theme was aggressively promoted in the eighteenth century by Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume and Edward Gibbon, and it is emphasized perhaps even more vehemently by contemporary historians including Ramsey MacMullen, Charles Freeman, and Jonathan Kirsch47 (not to mention in more popular treatments by authors like Dan Brown). Oxford historian Averil Cameron observes that
ancient historians have customarily been wary of committed writing on early Christianity, of the “hidden agenda”; ironically, however, it has often been the practice to write in academic books about the period of the Christianization of the Roman Empire from an opposite but equally committed point of view. Whether viewed from the rationalist or the overtly Marxist perspective, the advance of Christianity is seen as bad in itself. . . . It is surprisingly hard to escape from the pervasive association of Christianity with ideas of “decline,” “authoritarianism,” and “irrationality,” which tend to be expressed in words such as “gloom” or “twilight.” From a deep-seated habit of privileging the classical, Christianity is relegated to the realm of the irrational, that which we do not ourselves care to accept.48
A closely associated indictment emphasizes how Christianity has been and is sexually repressive:49 it spoiled and crushed the “sexual paradise,”50 as Norman Cantor puts it, of the Roman Empire. We have already seen this complaint in Kyle Harper’s lament concerning the change wrought by Justinian’s implementation of Christian sexual ethics. “Gone is the warm eroticism of the Pompeian fresco, vanished is the charmed sensuality of the Greek romance.”51 Instead we find only “the haze of ruin and violent puritanism.”52
These accusations have their historical bases. There were of course the Crusades, and the inquisitions (and one critical reader urges that these should be mentioned more frequently and underscored in these pages). On the positive side, however, a fair assessment would likely credit Christianity with helping to bring about many of the features of modern civilization that are most valued—including respect for the dignity of the individual,53 human rights,54 the commitment to equality,55 and concern for the poor.56 These ideas and ideals, foreign to ancient paganism, reflect the biblical claims that humans are made “in the image of God,” that God has infinite concern or love for these creatures or children (even “the least among them”),57 and that God gave himself for human beings.
Thus, while declaring that modern science has rendered the Christian worldview untenable,58 the French philosopher Luc Ferry explains that by contrast to “the Greek world [which] was fundamentally an aristocratic world . . . founded on slavery,” Christianity “introduce[d] the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”59
In his history of secularism, likewise, Graeme Smith asserts that “ideas of individual human worth and dignity, shared public reason, the progress of human society through history, and the ability of humanity to investigate its world, can all be traced to Christian theological sources.”60
This part of the Christian or Judeo-Christian legacy is often overlooked or downplayed, however, especially among more educated critics, in favor of an emphasis on Christianity’s ostensible intolerance and repressiveness. In this vein, University of Pennsylvania sociology professor Ross Koppel remarks that “on a macro level, the net effects of religion and faith are . . . a few thousand years of horrible wars, genocide, slavery’s ideology, sexual exploitation, torture, devaluing others as not human, terrorism, and organized hatred.”61 From a detached perspective, Koppel’s assessment of “net effects” may seem grotesquely distorted, to the point of being grimly comical, but it faithfully reflects (and is made possible by) a proclivity on the part of many in the intelligentsia to remember only the negative contributions of transcendent religiosity while taking the positive contributions for granted.
And in a sense, this tendency to accuse or blame is predictable; it is, arguably, simply the reverse side of the more positive recollections of paganism considered a few pages ago. If classical Rome was a “golden age,” as Gibbon contended,62 and if classical paganism was joyous, exuberant, beautiful, and inclusive, then it is natural enough to feel a profound resentment toward the force that suppressed that splendid world—namely, Christianity—and to attribute the opposite qualities to that historical force.
This negative and accusatory inference from the positive evaluation of paganism became conspicuous in the period we call “the Enlightenment.” Consequently, in his admired and admiring history of the movement, Peter Gay interprets the Enlightenment as “the rise of modern paganism.”63 And how exactly were the Enlightenment thinkers “pagan”? Primarily, in Gay’s telling, in their forceful criticism and rejection of Christianity. “The most militant battle cry of the Enlightenment,” Gay explains, “ecrasz l’infame, was directed against Christianity itself, against Christian dogma in all its forms, Christian institutions, Christian ethics, and the Christian view of man.”64 The Enlightenment amounted to a “great campaign against Christianity.”65
This hostility to Christianity was conspicuous both in the movement’s most celebrated figure and in its leading English-speaking representative. Of Voltaire, Gay explains that
the torrent of pamphlets that poured out . . . in the last sixteen years of Voltaire’s life reveals a distaste for Christianity amounting almost to an obsession. Interpreters who restrict l’infame to intolerance or fanaticism or Roman Catholicism shrink from a conclusion that Voltaire himself drew innumerable times, in these frenetic years: “Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.” This is the central message of Voltaire’s last and most intensive campaign: he repeats it with endless variations, with blasphemies, playful absurdities, and sometimes obscenities. Nothing was safe: the Trinity, the chastity of the Virgin Mary, the body and blood of Christ in the Mass, all are cruelly lampooned.66
Gay perceives a similar if more subdued agenda in David Hume, “the complete modern pagan.”67 In his work on religion, Hume compared pagan polytheism and Christian monotheism, giving distinctly higher marks to the former. Polytheism is intrinsically “sociable,” Hume argued, while monotheistic religions such as Judaism and Christianity are inherently dogmatic and intolerant. Such intolerance was manifest in “the efforts of priest and bigots” as institutionalized in “the Inquisition and persecutions of Rome and Madrid”—institutions that take “fatal vengeance” on “virtue, knowledge, love of liberty,” and thereby “leave the society in the most shameful ignorance, corruption, and bondage.”68 The dying Hume lamented that he had not been more successful in freeing his countrymen from “the Christian superstition,” and he worried that the English were “relapsing into the deepest Stupidity, Christianity & Ignorance.”69
So successful were th
e Enlightenment thinkers in associating Christianity with ignorance, stupidity, and intolerance that the association, subtly or aggressively reinforced by later thinkers like Marx, Neitzsche, and Mill, and by journalists like H. L. Mencken (who was, as a recent history recalls, “implacably hostile to anything that might reflect favorably on Christian faith”),70 has become almost an axiom, in many literary or intellectual circles at least. Later authors and polemicists (like Professor Koppel) have been able to confidently rely on that axiom largely free of risk or charge, so to speak.71 Rodney Stark identifies a number of “notorious falsehoods” about Catholic history in particular that “are so mutually reinforcing and deeply embedded in our common culture that it seems impossible for them not to be true.”72 Writers and intellectuals can sound this sort of anti-Christian theme, thereby signaling their sophistication and their sympathy for freedom, tolerance, and “reason,” without fear of being seriously challenged by their peers. Indeed, they can reiterate the venerable theme—and have been reiterating it—over and over, for decades and even centuries, and in doing so, ironically, can still somehow suppose themselves to be exhibiting a kind of avant-garde courage and independence of mind.73
Still, we might ask: Is hostility to Christianity enough to make one a “pagan,” as Gay implies? Our Enlightened friend Edward Gibbon would likely have dissented. Gibbon deprecated Christianity, as we have seen, but he was equally ready to object to the “superstition” that he perceived in pagan religion.74 To qualify as “pagan,” we might think, at least as we have been using the term, an opponent of Christianity would also need to exhibit an orientation toward a more immanent religiosity.
Pagans and Christians in the City Page 29
