Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States

Paganism and Christianity


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"Heathenism is religion in its wild growth on the soil of fallen human nature, a darkening of the original consciousness of God, a deification of the rational and irrational creature, and a corresponding corruption of the moral sense, giving the sanction of religion to natural and unnatural vices."* Although the heathenism (or paganism) of the ancient Gentiles was a "darkening of the original consciousness of God," as the church historian Philip Schaff states, the pagans did not go into a complete coma. The majority of their ways and beliefs were corrupt, to be sure; but there was always a "remnant," both of their people and of their beliefs, that still possessed some fragments of the truth. Given that, it may be worth our time to gain a better understanding of the similarities (in thought or belief) that are sometimes found between Paganism and Christianity (due to that lingering consciousness of God), as well as the numerous differences that nevertheless sharply separate the two ways of life.

When we say we should "understand" the ancient pagans, however, we certainly do not mean it in the way a modern college professor would. He would likely say that we should understand and respect their beliefs as the primitive components of a "world religion" that humanity has followed since the beginning of time and of which Christianity is one of the latest and dominant "expressions". The single explanation that one will almost invariably hear in a modern university regarding the relationship between Christianity (along with all the other "religions") and paganism is that the former simply descended and evolved from the latter—we still believe in spirits and miracles as our predecessors did, but we have just fit them in a more sophisticated mold. This sort of view obviously give paganism the upper hand; but the perspective of the present essay seeks to take a radically different turn on the question.

We must begin our brief discussion with a word of caution. When we speak of "paganism", we are always referring to the ancient form of religion which the majority (non-Jewish) of the world adhered to long ago; that is, we are referring to the typical Greek, Roman or Egyptian mythologies that pervaded the world before the advent of Christ. We are never speaking of the modern forms of "paganism"--that new-age occultism which seems to be only a more Satanic imitation of the old paganisms, admixed with recent forms of nihilism and black art. The old pagans were, in a sense, more innocent; they were more genuine in their error. That is, they adhered to (we can hardly say "believed") their wild mythologies more out of ignorance of the truth than out of direct antagonism to it. A schoolboy who does arithmetic wrongly does not have to be seen as wholly incompetent if he was never taught the right way to add and subtract. The "pagans" of today are quite different. They are pseudo-pagans; they follow paganism not because they have never heard the truth but because they have heard and hated it.

Let us begin with the most vexing question: what is the reason for the several apparent similarities between Christian belief and old pagan mythologies? We will not mention them all; let us focus on one peculiar god of the ancient Egyptians named Osiris. What makes Osiris special is that every year he would mysteriously die and then rise again around springtime. The ancient Egyptians attributed to this the annual rising and falling of the River Nile. Osiris's death caused the Nile to recede and subsequently all plant life with it; and his rising from death caused the Nile floodwaters to return again, restoring life to the fields of Egypt and its people. The coincidence here is quite obvious, and it is one any anxious atheist would jump on: the only people today who believe in a God who can die and rise from the dead are the Christians. One may find a number of other such parallels between Christian belief and Pagan myth--which become dangerous only when put in the hands of a clever atheist.

The reason many Christian thinkers have given for such apparent coincidences is that they are, in fact, not pure coincidences. As St. Augustine puts it: "If we read of any foreigner—that is, one neither born of Israel nor received by that people into the canon of the sacred books—having prophesied something about Christ…it is not incongruous to believe that even in other nations there may have been men to whom this mystery was revealed and who were impelled to proclaim it, whether they were partakers of the same grace or had no experience of it." Or as Schaff charitably says, "Through all heathenism there runs, in truth, a dim, unconscious presentiment and longing hope for Christianity." In short, it is the idea that although the fullest illumination of God's plan has been revealed to His chosen people—initially the Jews, and later the Christians—some measure of the divine light was granted to all men. For by the mere fact of being born human and in the image of God, it is difficult to think that any race of men could live in complete darkness, without at least some traces of the truth, without some inklings of who God really is.

In wondering how the pagans frequently got so close to the truth so ahead of their time, we ought to consider another point beside the above. When a person makes an apparent prediction about future events, it may be due to one of three reasons. The point will be made clearer with examples. (i) A man says that there is a yet unknown planet on which it rains exactly twenty-five days of the year and which passes through seven different seasons; then a century later, after man has advanced significantly in space travel, some scientists find such a planet with exactly such a climate. This makes the prophecy simply by supernatural ability. (ii) An author who knows nothing about meteorology writes a story in which it strangely rains only every other month of the year in a certain country; and one year that actually takes place in that country. This would be an instance of mere luck. The author, without any foresight or intention, has made a prediction about the future out of pure coincidence. (iii) A great geologist living in the tenth century says that the ideal body of land would be roughly half the size of Europe, roughly rectangular, located near the equator, permeated by plenty of rivers and soil, and mostly isolated from the eastern half of the world that is infested with war and disease; and the ground of such a place would yield abundantly for its people and they would grow strong and prosperous. Then seven centuries later, America is born. What led to the third man's prediction was not in the least luck but insight and knowledge. By considering the real nature of life he was able to conjecture that a hypothetical country with such physical parameters would be inclined to prosper.

Let us take another example brought up by a relatively modern writer. Plato in his Republic argues that righteousness is often praised for the rewards it brings—honor and fame, and the like—but to see it in its true nature we must separate it from all these and strip it naked. Plato asks us, therefore, to imagine a perfectly righteous man treated by all around him like a perpetrator of wickedness. We must picture him, still perfect, while he is bound, scourged, and finally impaled (the Persian equivalent of crucifixion). At this point the Christian reader stops in astonishment. What is this? Another lucky coincidence? No: Plato is talking about the inevitable fate of goodness in a wicked world. Considering the innocent nature of goodness and the deranged nature of wickedness, he was impelled to state the general law that goodness will be pursued until destroyed in a world overrun by wickedness. This is simply nothing other than the Passion of Christ; it is the very thing of which the Passion was the supreme illustration. Plato did not come up with this allegory because he was lucky but because he was wise.

In short, what we are saying here is that when an ancient writer (such as Plato) said something that took on a greater meaning in the light of fuller knowledge (such as our Lord's death), it is often because the greater truth, which the writer did not know, was intimately related to the truth he did know. By reading his words in light of that fuller truth, we are not casting on his words some arbitrary meaning but are just extending his meaning in a direction congenial to it. As in the case of Osiris, we may say (if we are intent on aiding the pagans) that the myth is not purely accidental. It could firstly be a spark of that divine revelation vouchsafed to all men. And it also could be a thoughtful pagan's understanding that, in the sequence of night and day, in the annual death and rebirth of the crops, in the knowledge that a seed must be buried before it grows—a man must undergo some sort of death if he would truly live. Even more, that the death and life of the world would be perfected only by the death and life of the God Who rules it.

Thus we should have no qualms in recognizing that some parts of the old heathenism occasionally looked like Christianity. There is equally no fear in recognizing that some of the teachings of our Lord seem similar in essence (though not altogether the same) as the axioms of various sages in earlier times, as Plato or the Buddha. This is because since (as we firmly believe) Christianity is true, it could avoid all coincidence with every other religion only on the supposition that all other religions are one hundred percent false—a claim that most would find untenable. As a recent scholar puts it, "Yes. From these resemblances you may conclude not "so much worse for the Christians" but "so much better for the Pagans."

Yet, however charitably we may speak of the pagans and offer kind explanations for their errors, we must observe that the differences between Christianity and ancient paganism are multiples of times greater than their vague similarities. The first and most profound distinction between the Christians (and the Israelites) and the old pagans was that the former believes in one God while the latter believes in a multiplicity of gods. In the creation-myths, the pagan gods have beginnings, and most of them have fathers and mothers. There is no question of self-existence or eternity—they are, like us, creatures or products of forces outside their control. They have bodies and senses like mortals, only in colossal proportions; they share our virtues as well as vices, only in magnified forms. They eat and drink, and wake up and sleep; they are under the restraints of time and space. Thus, the gods bore no real resemblance to the One God. They were more of "supermen" than of divine beings; they had the strength of angels, not really of a God. Thus the difference in belief between God or the gods is not merely a matter of arithmetic. As someone once said, "'The gods' is not the plural of "God"; God has no plural."

We must add a parenthetical paragraph here to note that in all of pagan literature there is a single instance in which the writer apparently confesses and praises a single God of the universe. It is in the Hymn to the Aten, written in the 14th century B.C. by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. He was somewhat of a religious revolutionary. By some stroke of grace or genius, he broke away from the polytheism of his fathers and insisted on the existence of a single deity. In the Hymn to the Aten, he describes the Aten as "lord of heaven and lord of earth," and the one "who gives breath to sustain all that he has made." The whole tone of the work is praise to a single god who created all that exists and rules over it with power and care. As a piece of religious writing, it is remarkable in its originality; the closest the ancient heathen world ever came to an understanding of the one God. It has even been compared to Psalm 104. For better or for worse, nothing came of Akhenaten's reforms; after his death, his son (Tutankhamen) returned Egypt to her old ways of worship.

We may move on to the differences between the pagan versions of Christ (Osiris, Balder, etc.) previously mentioned and the Christ Himself. As C. S. Lewis once noted, the pagan stories are all about someone dying and rising, either every year, or else nobody knows where and nobody knows when. But the Christian story is about a historical person, who was born and grew in cities that are still on our maps, whose execution can be dated pretty accurately under a named Roman magistrate, and whose disciples and followers have continued down to the present day. It is more than simply the difference between truth and falsehood. It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and hazy dreams of it on the other. It is like watching something come gradually into focus; first it hangs in the clouds of myth, vast and vague, then it condenses, grows small and hard, into a historical event in first century Palestine. The pagan 'christs' were but abstract notions; the real Christ was as tangible as a man skirting the Sea of Galilee.

This leads us to our next difference. The old pagans never used history or archeology in their myths because they scarcely felt the urge to "prove" anything; we cannot say that they "believed" in their mythologies in any real sense of the word. If we could get inside the mind of a peasant pagan living about 2,500 years ago, we would probably find him speaking of the gods not as sovereign beings ruling the world with a master plan, but rather as whimsical forces, like earthquakes or hurricanes, sometimes striking out against mankind, and sometimes not, more interested in hurting men then in helping them—all according to their various godly moods and to a lesser extent according to the actions of humans themselves. The pagans more feared the gods than believed in them.

This explains another profound difference between them and us. The pagans had no sacred scriptures; they had nothing in the way of a "doctrine" to adhere to; instead of the careful preservation of doctrinal statements which the Jews accomplished by the writing and meticulous copying of their beliefs, the myths of the gods expanded and fluctuated rather haphazardly. The gods came and went; they did and said things which no one could explain why; and their opinions or principles were rather inconsistent. By extension, the pagans had very little concept of heresy; how could one speak falsely about religion when no one was quite sure of what the religion said? However, when one comes to Christianity, one meets with a deluge of theological writings and sermons, world councils and discussions of faith, and even an official and exact creed delineating all the precise articles of Christian faith. The Christians had something definitive to believe; and they felt so strongly as to its importance that any considerable deviation from it was sure to sentence a person to exclusion from the Church.

Finally, we must mention one of the most startling distinctions between paganism and Christianity: morality. We should remember that despite all the favorable points we might find in paganism, most of the Church Fathers believed precisely what was expressed in the Psalms: "The gods of the nations are idols" (96:5), and every idol was considered possessed by a devil. This is because some of the practices performed for the gods were truly devilish. The worship of the heathen god Molech required one to kill his own children and place them in the arms of the idol while it was heated; and the Canaanites worshiped Baal and Ashtoreth by performing unnatural acts of fornication. It is to the eternal discredit of the pagans that their crude beliefs led them to perform the most inhumane and barbaric acts committed by man both to themselves and to their children. Human nature found its worst potentials expressed in the occult practices of some of the ancient paganisms.

Besides corrupt worship, the whole world of the pagan gods themselves is blighted by vice. The gods are involved by their marriages in perpetual jealousies and quarrels. They are full of envy and wrath, hatred and lust, and they prompt men to crime, cruelty, and adultery. St. Augustine bemoaned the treacherous vices which the Roman pagan plays would teach their audiences: "I myself, when I was a young man, used to go to the sacrilegious entertainments and spectacles; I saw the priests raving in religious excitement…I took pleasure in the shameful games which were celebrated in honor of the gods and goddesses. And on the holy day of her [mother of the gods] purification, there were sung before her couch productions so obscene and filthy for the ear…so impure, that not even the mother of the foul-mouthed players themselves could have formed one of the audiences" (City of God ii, 4).

Against such a dark background emerged the pure and luminous teachings of Christianity. God seeks not the sacrifice of one's children, not even of bulls and goats—but the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving is what He delights in. Rather than hatred, one is to love his neighbor and his enemies. Rather than jealousy, one is to always seek the other's well-being. Rather than adultery, one is to sincerely love his own wife. The pagan gods provided men with examples only of selfishness, strife, and pride; they often proved worse than their worshipers. But Christ comes as the incarnation of Truth, of goodness and purity, and provides us with both the means and the strength to pursue perfection.

Thanks be to God, He did not leave the nations to wallow in ignorance forever. For when "the fullness of time" had come, God sent forth His Only-Begotten Son, "the desire of the nations", to redeem the world from the curse of sin and to establish the kingdom of righteousness and love. In Him culminate all the previous revelations of God to Jews and Gentiles; and in Him are fulfilled the deepest desires of mankind for redemption and reconciliation with God. For these reasons, the nations received Him with joy when He was preached to them. Even the greatest and most proud of the old civilizations—Egypt, Greece, and Rome—were compelled to bow in humility when they found the Greatest Teacher of all their religion and wisdom: Jesus the Christ.


* Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church. Vol. 1 Eerdmans Printing Co., Michigan, 1995.


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