Christianity and the problem of the gods

What to do with dead deities?

‘Pan is dead’ (1911) by George Washington Lambert

What happens to the pagan gods under Christianity? This might seem a simple question, with a simple (and indeed obvious) theological answer. Christianity is a monotheistic faith, so it dispels belief in the old gods, who are thenceforth banished to the realms of mythology, fiction and cultural memory. But what might seem a straightforward approach to most of us is not really very old at all, and it owes much more to the Enlightenment than it does to ancient Christian tradition. It is also not as simple a solution as it seems, and involves many assumptions. The difficulty we face is that an Enlightenment way of looking at the problem of the gods – which is really not much older than the 1690s – has become so dominant in our way of thinking that it has obscured how the early Christians actually treated the gods.

In one way, the problem of the gods is a subset of the broader issue of ‘legacy religion’: when a society has changed its religion, how does it process the significant and inescapable cultural inheritance of a ‘false’ religion? Can we still revere ancestors who worshipped false gods? This has been a major issue in many cultures, not least in Reformation England – to what extent, for example, should chantry chapels filled with tombs of the ancestors of noble families be preserved in a country that had renounced the doctrine of purgatory and prayer for the dead, and where chantries were abolished? In practice the chantry chapels mostly survived, albeit refigured as mausoleums – a compromise with ‘legacy religion’. We find similar compromises with pre-Christian religion in 19th-century Sápmi, for example. Sieididi that had been sites of reindeer sacrifices were seldom destroyed after the widespread triumph of Pietist Lutheranism, but the reindeer bones remained there and the sieididi continued to be respected even if they were no longer sites of worship. There is also, of course, the phenomenon of consciously repurposing places sacred to a former religion for new forms of worship – but it should be noted that this is a practice that can be interpreted in more than one way. When pagan temples were turned into churches in late antique Rome, was it a triumphalist act of supplanting the old gods, or a gesture of compromise? Given the fairly fundamental differences between pagan and Christian uses of sacred buildings, the former seems more likely than the latter. Elsewhere in Christianised Europe, the motivations could be more complicated.

Underlying all of these behaviours is always the question ‘Just how wrong were the ancestors?’ To what extent can they be excused their pagan ways? Were they merely ignorant and deceived? In some cases, such as in the royal family of Kyivan Rus’, pagan ancestors were literally dug up and their dead bodies baptised; the ‘retroprojection’ of Christianity into the pagan past was one way of processing that unbaptised history – the miraculous arrival of the image of Our Lady of Candelaria on Gran Canaria and her veneration by the pagan Guanches is an example of such a story. Even in Rome we have the celebrated legend of the Ara Coeli, supposedly set up by Augustus so that sacrifice might be offered to ‘the Son of God’ whom Augustus saw in a vision, as an infant held out by his mother. The Ara Coeli legend, along with the story that the Sibyl announced the birth of Christ, belongs to a group of stories about the Christian message manifesting through the mouths of pagans. Perhaps the best-known of all these tales is recounted by Plutarch in On the Obsolescence of Oracles, when the sailor Thamus is commanded by a mysterious voice drifting across the ocean near the Ionian Islands to announce on the island of Paxi that ‘Great Pan is dead’.

Christian commentators interpreted this ‘death’ of Pan as happening at the moment of the birth of Christ, who dispelled the authority of the gods. As Milton put it,

Nor all the gods beside

Longer dare abide,

…

Our Babe, to show his Godhead true,

Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew.

On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity is great poetry, and modern readers might be inclined to regard Milton’s descriptions of ancient gods fleeing before the birth of Christ as colourful metaphor for the demise of paganism. But there is no reason to suppose Milton did not literally believe in the reality of the pagan gods. Most Christians of the period who had the learning or the leisure to think about the subject did; in doing so they were faithful to Scripture, whose approach to the ontological reality of entities worshipped by pagan peoples is rather ambiguous. While declarations that idols are mere stocks of wood, unable to respond to prayers, can (and have) been interpreted as denials of the ontological reality of pagan deities, it seems more likely (in the light of other pronouncements that the gods of the gentiles are demons) that for Israelites of the Old Testament era the futility of idols was down to the powerlessness of unworthy subordinate spirit-beings to animate idols or respond to pagan prayers.

The ancient Israelites were self-evidently not ontologically exclusivist monotheists of the kind that many modern Christians are, affirming the existence of God and excluding the existence of any other spiritual being (rather like the Sadducees of the New Testament). For such believers even angels and demons are just pictures or metaphors, let alone the gods of the peoples. Stephen Roberts famously described atheism as ‘believing in one god fewer’ than a theist, and this reflected a prevailing cultural view of monotheism as a sort of rationalist atheism with a single deity bolted on. But neither the ancient Israelites nor the Pharisees of the New Testament thought like this – and nor, for that matter, did the Church Fathers. What we have that they lacked is an inbuilt predisposition to kneejerk ontological rejection of anything we either can’t see with our own eyes or haven’t been brought up to believe in. God? OK, maybe, who knows. But other powerful spiritual beings? For most people in modern Britain, this might as well be the realm of Dungeons and Dragons. Yet for pre-modern people the question of ontology barely arose; it went without saying that the world was swarming with spiritual powers. The really important question – the salvifically important question – was the relative status and organisation of these spiritual powers.

It is the nature of this spiritual organisation (or re-organisation) in the light of the economy of salvation inaugurated by Christ that Paul and the author of the Letter to the Ephesians wrestle with in passages such as Romans 8:38, Galatians 4:3 and Ephesians 6:12 – where we hear of elemental powers of the cosmos, principalities, rulers and so on. This language has been much debated by New Testament scholars, but it seems clear it is broadly influenced by Middle Platonist cosmological speculation, and it may be that we are looking at a very early Christian cosmology still marked by uncertainty and in flux. Even if its exact meaning remains rather opaque, Paul’s cosmology is more complex than the simplistic dualistic narrative of demons as fallen angels canonised by the Fourth Lateran Council so many centuries later.

According to this dualistic narrative the gods of the pagans are not non-existent, but they should be understood as demons who deceived people into worshipping them as deities (and perhaps inhabited statues of the gods and worked deceiving wonders). The coming of Christ brought an end to their power. This is one way to interpret Milton’s poem. But Milton, as a great Classical scholar, was well aware of the paradox thrown up by adopting this view. If the gods of Olympus were mere masks worn by morally degraded fallen angels, irrevocably evil beings cursed by God, how could anyone justify studying the literature of the ancients in which the gods were honoured, played key narrative roles, and rewarded virtue and punished vice? How did the principle of the authority of the ancients, so cherished by the Renaissance, square with the fact that to study the pagan Greeks and Romans was to study a society of people systematically deceived by demons? What value could such a corrupted and demon-haunted culture and civilisation possibly have?

The problem of the gods was the problem of simultaneously affirming the nullity of the old gods while glorifying the Graeco-Roman civilisation over which those gods presided. One classic fudge was to focus on certain ‘exalted’ individuals who appeared to question conventional views of the gods, such as Socrates and Aristotle, and to argue that the ‘best’ of the Greeks and Romans perhaps never really believed in the gods at all, and therefore somehow escaped the clutches of their demonic power and managed to cultivate true virtue. The gods, then, should largely be received as metaphors and personifications – only the vulgar peasantry who made their libations in the fields were superstitious enough to be under the direct deception of the demons who wore the masks of Zeus, of Hera, of Athena and Aphrodite.

This sort of ‘exalted pagan’ rhetoric wore thin pretty quickly, but fortunately Scripture and tradition furnished alternative approaches. Plutarch’s story of the death of Pan pointed to the possibility that the gods had a place in the economy of salvation that preceded the coming of Christ, but lost that place once Christ dethroned them. After all, not every reference to ‘the gods’ in the Old Testament is a negative one, and it was possible to believe that in times past God had allotted spirits to rule over the Gentile nations of the world – the Book of Daniel seems to hint at such an arrangement, and one possible interpretation of Paul’s speculations is that he was reaching for similar ideas. The point is not the non-existence of the gods of the nations but their subordination to divine sovereignty (‘Worship Him, all ye gods’ (Ps. 97:7)) and, later, the lordship of Christ. What that meant, of course, was that anyone continuing to worship pagan gods after the coming of Christ was depriving the one true God of the honour due to him, and therefore committing sins of idolatry and false belief. But it rendered the status of paganism before Christ rather more ambivalent. Indeed, following Paul in the Areopagus, some even speculated that pagans had occasionally been worshipping the true God without realising they were doing so.

This was one way Classical scholars could reconcile their deeply held Christian beliefs with the cultural prestige they accorded the writings of pagan authors. Indeed, ‘reconciliation’ understates the interpenetration of Christian and pagan religiosity that was possible in medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Latin poetry, whose authors often fashioned their own strange cosmologies, where the God of the Bible sat alongside Muses and Olympians and somehow the whole crew rubbed along. Poetry is not theology, of course, but it is hardly possible to commit to such conceits with literary conviction unless you have some idea how it might all work. Ironically, theologians’ emphasis on the incomparable qualitative difference between the one true God as the ground of all being and the puny deities of the past made it easier for those pygmy gods to persist in defanged and sanitised forms. The stronger the Christian God and the more complete and unassailable his triumph, the greater the opportunities for the old gods to re-emerge as harmless symbols, ciphers, personifications, poetic devices and so on. A whole discipline, mythography, developed for the study of the gods - although typically mythographers drew a distinction between the gods as worshipped (who might be considered demonic) and the gods as stories, as characters in myth, who might be considered acceptable (and even edifying) for study.

The problem of the gods was never resolved. It was a cultural and theological problem simultaneously too difficult to solve and too unimportant (in the absence of any actually living pagans) to bother expending much intellectual energy on. Over time, it became a series of (more or less convincing) rehashed rhetorical conceits and a source of slightly naughty frisson in literature, and by the end of the 17th century a new theological approach to the problem emerged as it became thinkable to deny the existence of any spirit-being other than God himself. Thinkers such as Bekker, Hobbes and Spinoza opened up the possibility of a purified theism (and, eventually, deism) where the rabble of godlings, demons and angels was finally banished – to the point that it could easily be forgotten that there had ever been a problem of the gods at all. The consignment of the gods as story to the realm of myth had arguably already prepared the way for this wholesale denial of their ontological reality.

I am not proposing a solution to the problem of the gods. It is an age-old and difficult cultural problem for Christians. But it is worth pointing out that the ‘re-supernaturalisation’ of mainline Christianity we are experiencing in the 21st century – where belief in angels and demons, for example, is once again on the way to becoming normative – leads inevitably to the re-opening of the problem of the gods. Where supernaturalist Christians are interested in re-enchantment and civilisational reconstruction the problem is especially acute; they must grapple yet again with the same questions about the value, moral worth and ontological status of the writings of the ancients that faced the Christian humanists of the Renaissance. Some are managing this better than others, but it feels at times as if the intellectual resources of the present time are unequal to relitigating such fundamental issues. In all of the recent online discourse about The Odyssey, for example, it frustrated me that no-one seemed to be raising the question of whether the Greek gods were real. Still lulled asleep by the presuppositions of the Enlightenment, few have yet confronted this question. But whatever approach people choose to adopt, I would caution against simplistic and reductive solutions to a problem that – albeit unsolved, and maybe because it is unsolved – has proved tremendously fruitful for culture and literature.