Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  Indeed, it may seem that the fully realized modern pagan city would in fact be a vast improvement over the ancient one. The Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon was able to imagine second-century Rome as a “golden age,” as we saw in chapter 3, and as the most enviable period in the history of humanity—but only by studiously neglecting to notice or dwell on the vast slave populations, the ubiquitous brothels staffed by desperate and downtrodden women, the lethal savagery of the gladiatorial games, the widespread practice of infanticide, and the dismal tenement housing afflicted by fire and filth and disease. In our own times, by contrast, the pagan city would be one that has renounced slavery, has declared an equality of men and women, and has condemned (though not actually eliminated, alas) not only physical violence but also harassment, bullying, and microaggressions. Moreover, spectacular advances in economic productivity, technology, and medicine afford modern citizens a level of flourishing unimaginable to their distant predecessors.

  And yet we also saw, in the first chapter, that T. S. Eliot (whose thesis has guided us through this book) took just the opposite view. Eliot favored a city based on a renewed Christian vision, but he recognized that most of his audience would find that vision prima facie unenticing, or worse. People would come around to the Christian view, Eliot thought, only after contemplating—seriously contemplating—what the alternative of “modern paganism” would actually entail.4 The suggestion may seem improbable; on the contrary, as we have just been reflecting, modern paganism may seem distinctly alluring. Still, we have stuck with Eliot this far, and we may as well finish by considering his suggestion—by reflecting on what a city framed by modern paganism would entail, and by pondering whether that is in reality the sort of city we would want to adopt as home.

  Longing for Home

  Writing in the mid-twentieth century, the novelist and physician Walker Percy remarked on “Western man’s sense of homelessness and loss of community.” Percy discerned in contemporary man a “sense of homelessness in the midst of the very world which he, more than the men of any other time, has made over for his own happiness.”5 Surely not everyone feels this sense of homelessness, or feels it with equal intensity. Or perhaps the condition has become so familiar that many hardly notice it anymore, or hardly manage to conceive of any different condition; people who have never known a home may not feel its lack. And yet, some such implicit or submerged sense of homelessness or alienation arguably underlies the recurrent communitarian aspirations of modern progressivism—on which more in a moment.

  This condition of homelessness, or this yearning for community, might plausibly be diagnosed as the product of two of the three main existential orientations we have considered in this book: the Christian or transcendent orientation, and the orientation of positivistic secularism. Conversely, the third orientation we have considered—the orientation of immanent religiosity or “modern paganism”—might seem to supply the remedy for this sense of homelessness.

  Thus, as we saw in chapter 5, by making “eternal life” the transcendent goal and God the transcendent authority, Christianity left human beings as “resident aliens,” no longer fully at home in the world.6 The “disenchantment” of the world described by Max Weber7 and associated with modern secularism may seem to have completed this process of alienation, leaving human beings isolated strangers stranded in a purposeless world. As we saw in chapter 9, this bereft condition has been evocatively described and lamented (or reveled in?) by thinkers like Bertrand Russell, who urged that in a meaningless world we must proceed “on the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”8

  But as we also saw in chapter 9, the revival of immanent religiosity bids to offer a remedy for this condition, reassuring us that sacredness, sublimity, and meaning are real after all—all the more real and accessible because they are no longer sloughed off onto an unattainable transcendent source or deferred to some future state. Rather, these qualities are intrinsic to this world, and to this city. We need not look to some other sphere for meaning and comfort; we can realize these values here and now. The immanent religiosity of modern paganism promises to consecrate this world, this life, and this city in a way that has not been possible since the Christian revolution.

  In short, the revival of immanent religion and the restoration of the pagan city amount to an invitation to come home—to come back to the home that was lost with the Christian revolution. It is a compelling, almost irresistible invitation. But is the invitation genuine? Or is it bidding us to indulge in a kind of fantasy?

  Yearning for Community. The pagan city of antiquity enjoyed a fraternal solidarity that the city has not exhibited since the emergence of Christianity. Or at least so modern admirers of antiquity have supposed. To describe the ancient city as unified and fraternal may seem a hopelessly naive idealization, to be sure. Do we have any reason to suppose that the vast hosts of slaves—Spartacus and his brethren—or lower-class plebeians, or subordinated women, felt any civic solidarity with the rich and aristocratic males whose lives of opulence they supported? Still, the ancient city was unified at least in the sense that its citizens and subjects could be counted on to give whatever civic allegiance they felt to the city, unqualified by loyalties to some other, foreign or transcendent sovereign. Moreover, among themselves the various pagan or polytheistic cults enjoyed a kind of unity of mutual acceptance and respect.

  As we saw in earlier chapters, this solidarity was lost with the ascendancy of Christianity. Or at least Christianity aspired to subvert the monolithic solidarity of the pagan city. Now the citizens’ allegiance was, or was supposed to be, divided. They were loyal to the city, yes, but their higher and stronger commitment was to the heavenly city, or the city of God. Moreover, far from respecting and cordially embracing the diversity of religious beliefs and practices, Christians condemned pagan cults (and also unorthodox Christian sects) as damnable error and heresy.

  Both political philosophy and constitutional jurisprudence over the last few decades have exhibited a desire to overcome the divisions introduced by Christianity and to recover, in modern form, the civic solidarity of antiquity. Rather than attempt any general survey, let us notice this aspiration in two important progressive thinkers. The first is the most influential political philosopher of recent times; the second is a well-known and respected legal scholar.

  By reputation, the political philosopher John Rawls was a secular and individualistic thinker who attempted to screen religious beliefs out of political deliberations and who was criticized for giving insufficient weight to humans’ communal character.9 But both labels—secular and individualistic—underestimate the complexity of Rawls’s thought. Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel report that “those who have studied Rawls’ work, and even more, those who knew him personally, are aware of a deeply religious temperament that informed his life and writings.”10 At one point, Rawls had seriously considered entering a seminary to study for the Episcopal priesthood.11 His religious and communal inclinations were exhibited in his senior thesis, written as a precocious Princeton undergraduate, entitled “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community.”12 The thesis adopted as a “fundamental presupposition” the idea that “there is a being whom Christians call God and who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ.”13 “Man is dependent on God,” the young Rawls affirmed, “and . . . everything is a gift of God.”14 This theistic presupposition had communal implications: “the universe is a community of Creator and created.” And this communal dimension needed emphasis, Rawls thought: “the flavor of the times seems to point to a revival of ‘communal’ thinking after centuries of individualism.”15 Robert Adams remarks that “clearly there is nothing that Rawls commends more highly in the thesis than community.”16

  As it happened, Rawls entered the military, not the priesthood, and (as he explained in a later personal statement)17 his Christian faith dissipated in the carnage and terror of World War II. But his commitment to community persisted,
and the religious dimension of his thought persisted as well, albeit in a transformed and more subtle form. The fundamental goal of Rawls’s theorizing, as is true of liberal political philosophy generally, was to figure out how, in a pluralistic world, citizens of different views and values could live together peacefully and in accordance with their various conceptions of the good life.18 Rawls, however, was conspicuously unwilling to rest content with arrangements or compromises that might work pragmatically but would amount to a mere “modus vivendi.”19 His ambition, rather, was to articulate the basis for a more genuinely united community—a community bound together not merely by negotiated mutual self-interest but by commonly shared principles of justice, and by a public discourse in which all could participate on equal and respectful terms.20

  But how to achieve this unity in the face of de facto differences in the citizens’ fundamental moral and religious views and commitments? The ancient city was able to maintain the kind of unity Rawls sought because the various pagan or polytheistic cults were already inclined to take a relaxed attitude toward truth, as historians have emphasized,21 and to cheerfully suppose that their superficially diverse deities were probably just the same set of gods going under different names, or at least were members of a common pantheon. So, bracketing the vexing cases of Judaism and Christianity, religious fraternity came naturally, so to speak; the “overlapping consensus”22 that Rawls sought was a cultural fact, not a philosophical artifice or a legal prescription.

  In the modern Christian or post-Christian world, by contrast, that kind of natural unity is no longer available. So how is the genuine community to be achieved? And how is the disruptive force of Truth (about which humans can never seem to agree) to be tamed?

  Rawls’s answer (and that of other like-minded liberal theorists) was, basically, to distance the political community from divisive Truth by constructing a civic sphere from which transcendent religion and other potentially disruptive “comprehensive doctrines” would be excluded. Citizens might retain their religious or philosophical convictions for private purposes, but upon entering the civic sphere they would put aside these rival “comprehensive doctrines” and would deliberate with mutual respect under the canopy of a shared “public reason.”23 In this way, the unity and community that came naturally to the ancient pagan city would be reconstructed artificially, so to speak—by constructing walls around a core civic sphere and keeping Christianity and other strong faiths and philosophies outside those walls. Although screening out the doctrines associated with a transcendent faith like Christianity, however, “public reason” would not preclude appeal to immanent values of the kind favored by Ronald Dworkin and supported by his “religion without God.”24

  In a similar spirit, legal scholar Robin West has exhibited a yearning for community from her earliest scholarship in the 1980s. In an article called “Jurisprudence and Gender,” West advocated a feminist jurisprudence centered on the claim that in contrast to men and the masculine, which are characterized by separateness, individualism, and competitiveness, women and the feminine are constituted by “connectedness”—a relational orientation grounded in the experiences of sexual penetration, pregnancy, menstruation, and breast feeding.25 This orientation to connectedness meant that the feminist project put special value and emphasis on community—an emphasis, West said, that is desperately needed in the world today.26 Later, in a Harvard Law Review article, West looked to the Czech author and political leader Václav Havel for a vision of a “liberal, tolerant, diverse community” that might guide American constitutional law.27

  Recently, West has again promoted the communitarian ideal in opposition to Supreme Court decisions upholding particular rights—to church autonomy, to religious exemptions, to gun ownership, to parental rights to direct the upbringing of children—that, as West views the matter, permit citizens to “exit” from “our civil society” and its norms.28 These rights, West contends, “splinter our communities. They divide us up every which way. . . . They move us, inexorably, . . . from an aspirational ideal of e pluribus unum, to that of e pluribus pluribus.”29

  The ideal, and the yearning for community, are the more powerfully and poignantly apparent because West presents her position in terms of an ostensible description of American community that, measured against the actual conditions of contemporary life, partakes more of fantasy than of reality. Thus, at a time of increasing (and increasingly acrimonious) polarization,30 West talks over and over of a community united by “shared” values and commitments.31 (If these commitments are indeed “shared,” one wonders, why are so many thousands or millions of citizens seeking to “exit” from them? And why does West need to implore that their “exit” be blocked?) West describes a community grounded in an ostensible “social contract,” but, unlike some social contract theorists, she makes no effort to explain how citizens have or could be deemed to have (constructively?) consented to that contract; nor does she attempt to expound the terms of the contract. Communities are, to be sure, “imagined,” as we saw in chapter 10, but in this instance the imagining seems to reside entirely in the wishful thinking of West and a few like-minded theorists.32

  But however distant it may be from contemporary realities, West’s community presents an alluring vision—one consonant with the image of the ancient community (with its “mild spirit of antiquity”)33 that inspired thinkers like Gibbon. “Our civic society,” West says, is “less insulting, less hurtful, more inclusive, more fully participatory, more generous, and fairer” than alternatives.34 It promises “a world of equal opportunity and full participation that is free of racism and sexism and their related effects.”35 It is “a national community of broad based participation and civic equality.”36 Who would not want to live in such a community—if it existed?

  Can Modern Paganism Support Community? But does modern paganism contain the resources needed to support the kind of rich community envisioned by thinkers like Rawls and West?

  Here the differences between ancient and modern paganism become pertinent. Ancient paganism, as we saw in chapter 3, was predominantly public and communal in nature. It was manifest in spectacular temples and noisy processions, in public sacrifices and auguries. And all citizens were expected to participate in rendering sacrifices and libations to the gods, including the divinized Caesars; indeed, the pervasiveness of these ceremonies—in the forum, in the games, in the marketplace—made it nearly impossible to avoid participation.

  Modern paganism, by contrast, lacks these communal elements. As we saw in chapter 9, modern paganism, as reflected in Ronald Dworkin’s “religion without God,”37 is more a sort of philosophical sanctification of experiences, judgments, and commitments that individuals are free to have or not to have. It is mostly of the type that Marcus Varro classified as philosophical religiosity, as opposed to the mythical and civic forms, and it is thus predominantly personal in character.38

  Vestiges of the old “civil religion” remain, to be sure—presidential inaugurations, Fourth of July gatherings (with fireworks and parades), Constitution Day programs. But the American civil religion was Christian or biblical in character, as we saw in chapter 10. Modern paganism (and the “progressivism” under which it travels) is accordingly more suspicious than supportive of civil religion.39 Consequently, both in its occurrence and in its aftermath, a presidential inauguration today is more likely to be divisive than unifying. In short, present paganism, unlike its venerable predecessor, seems more conducive to a “bowling alone” type of religiosity than to a communal one.

  What about the language or discourse of political community? As we have noticed, philosophizing like that of John Rawls is animated by the aspiration to sustain a “public reason” that all citizens can join in on equal and respectful terms—a discourse cleansed of the strife and offensiveness associated with more “sectarian” voices. It aims to achieve this laudable goal by screening out potentially divisive “comprehensive doctrines” (like Christianity) from public decision-making
.

  So, how has this project fared? It is frequently observed that public discourse today seems both more shallow and more bitterly contentious than in times past.40 And, upon reflection, these disappointing results should not be surprising; if notions of “public reason” cannot be held solely responsible for this condition, they have likely contributed to it.41 After all, people whose deepest convictions (embodied in their “comprehensive doctrines”) have been declared inadmissible in public discourse will understandably feel excluded from public deliberations, and alienated from the city governed by such deliberations. In addition, as basic beliefs and commitments are screened out of public decision making, there is less and less discursive and rhetorical material to work with as people attempt to reason together and to persuade each other.42 Sometimes purely utilitarian or pragmatic desiderata will govern, and people will be able to argue about those—about whether free trade or protectionism will better stimulate the economy, for instance. But with regard to the most basic human concerns (concerning life and death, for example, or sexuality, or marriage), what are people supposed to say when their fundamental principles have been ruled out of bounds in the debate?

  It can happen—indeed, it increasingly does happen—that the main or only rhetorical resources that remain will appeal to the one thing that everyone can still agree on—namely, that it is bad or wrong to act from hatred, bigotry, or a mere desire to harm. Consequently, public debate on all manner of fundamental issues increasingly degenerates into clashing accusations of hatred or bigotry, delivered with a cultivated righteous indignation. In this respect, both the United States Supreme Court and the United States Civil Rights Commission have recently set a depressing example.43 And thus the aspiration to construct a community grounded in and guided by an elevated and respectful public discourse from which divergent and divisive “comprehensive doctrines” have been excluded leads instead to a shrill and shallow cacophony in which opposing parties can do little other than accuse each other of being racists, sexists, homophobes, and bigots.44