The Wild Reed: Ed Simon on Why We Need a Pagan Theology

Ed Simon, executive director of Belt Media Collaborative and the editor-in-chief for Belt Magazine, has written a fascinating piece for Aeon in which he advocates for a “new paganism,” a revitalization of our relationship with nature by which we can more fully “immerse ourselves in the wonders of the universe.” Following, with added images and links, is an excerpt.

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There is something romantic in the idea of paganism, of embracing the ocean and atmosphere, the day and the night, the Sun and the Moon. An acknowledgement not of abstractions, but of that which one is capable of seeing and hearing, of touching and tasting. Regardless of our own supposed dominion over the environment, we’re ultimately still very small when compared with the grandeur of nature. Because of that clear fact – which is neither doctrine nor axiom but simply observable reality – nature deserves some portion of our pious supplications. There is a spiritual perennialism of genuflecting before something in the Universe so much bigger than yourself, of offering your prayers towards something so tangibly visible. Because of that, even if I’m not a pagan, often I think that I’d like to be. I’d like to consider which spiritual values are conveyed across centuries of time, and what might be enduring about something like paganism.

First, this requires us to define what exactly the word “paganism” means – no easy matter. In the classical world, paganism was contrasted with Judaism and Christianity; it originally constituted the polytheistic folk religions of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but to which later definitions would expand to include cultures as disparate as the Egyptians and the Celts, the Norse and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. There is a natural flattening in this regard, a reductionism that merges together a tremendous diversity of cultures and belief systems into one homogeneous whole: pagan. Yet there is paradoxically a risk in not acknowledging the similarities as well, in not identifying what is distinctive about the ruptures, first of Christianity, and then its child – modernity.

. . . “It is crucial to stress right from the start that until the 20th century people did not call themselves pagans to describe the religion they practised,” writes Owen Davies in Paganism: A Very Short Introduction (2011). “The notion of paganism, as it is generally understood today, was created by the early Christian Church . . . a label that Christians applied to others, one of the antitheses that were central to the process of Christian self-definition.” Where Christianity was abstract, paganism was concrete; the former marked by rationality, the later by emotionality; the first defined by scripture and doctrines, the second by sensuality and rites. To be a Christian was to be connected to an eternal beyond, while the pagan dwelled within the mucky particulars of the natural world.

All of this, of course, is gross simplification, which was the intent of those Church Fathers in the early centuries of Christianity who drew such a distinction, ignoring the intrinsic sensuality implicit within the death sacrifice of the gospels, as well as the philosophical foundations of the Greco-Roman religion. Most importantly, however, was that Christianity understood humanity as separate from an intrinsically fallen nature, and that we are tasked with dominion over the fish of the sea and the beasts of the field. All of creation was intended for us. This way of approaching the natural world predates the scientific and industrial revolutions, though those later developments supplied the technological means of finally establishing that desired dominion. But the justification for that dominion itself was always implicit within those much older Western religious ideals. Now, as our envionments fail, precisely because of that noxious belief in our supremacy over nature, how much more shattering is the perceived failure of meaning we now face? In our present epoch, what then would it mean to reject that rejection, to re-embrace a variety of paganism? Not necessarily the worship of some arcane, dead pantheon, but to supplicate before a seamless nature of which we’re an integral part? Most importantly, a nature that we can observe with our own eyes?

Over the past two centuries – and perhaps longer – there has been an epistemological and cultural shift that has been referred to as disenchantment. Whereby our reality once thrummed with a glowing meaning – where every rock and stream, tree and animal, was endowed with a sense of the sacred – it became drained of transcendent significance, it became disenchanted. Left behind was what the Church understood as a fallen world, and which today positivist philosophy interprets as an inert material one, but the result was the same, what the 18th-century philosopher Friedrich Schiller called the “de-divination” of the world, and what the 20th-century German sociologist Max Weber (who is most associated with the concept) called “de-magicisation.” The political theorist Jeffrey Green describes disenchantment as marking the “retreat of magic and myth from social life through processes of secularisation and rationalisation.”

But in this “Just So” story of when the gods made their flight, it can be difficult to identify who is at blame. One version blames positivist interpretations of science that reduced all of experience to base materialism, but the Protestant Reformation is often seen as the beginning of such disenchantment (especially by Weber). A good claim could be made that Christianity itself was responsible. There is a story in Plutarch that an Egyptian mariner once heard an echoing declaration that “The great god Pan is dead!” For the Church Fathers, this legend has long been associated with the birth of Christ, but it’s also a convenient allegorical illustration of the ways in which the new faith cleaved previous relationships between divinity and nature, humanity and the environment. Disenchantment at its core is depaganisation.

Though depaganisation included the muting of the oracles and the smashing of idols, in the broader sense it meant the loss of a direct human connection to the divinity of nature. When the term “paganism’ comes to mean only a particular set of stereotypical associations – Dionysian rites and Orphic mysteries, Astarte columns or Druidic stone circles – it can serve to obscure some of the metaphysical import that those things more deeply represent. For my purposes, we can define paganism even more inexactly, but paradoxically with more utility.

What paganism most broadly imagines is a particular relationship between immanence and transcendence within nature, and this relationship generates a certain enchanted meaning of which there is a deficit in the contemporary world, at least among those supposedly worldly, educated, secular and agnostic folks such as myself. In an experience of transcendence, a person is able to connect themselves to a unity above and beyond our reality; with immanence they comprehend the divinity within the material world. What this union offers is a synthesis of the sacred and the profane, what Michael York in Pagan Theology (2003) describes as the abolition of “any true hierarchy between the temporal and the permanent, between the physical and spiritual, between this-world and the otherworld.” Such paganism rectifies the very philosophical doubts and scepticisms that engendered disenchantment in the first place. After all, one can hardly be an atheist when it comes to the Sun, the Moon, the wind, the rain, the ocean, the soil.

To be clear, paganism need not be read literally here as referring to acolytes in the Temple of Artemis or pilgrims to Delphi (though it certainly doesn’t preclude those examples either). One could be a pagan Christian, a pagan Jew, a pagan Muslim, a pagan atheist. When I use the word “pagan” in this context, it refers less to whatever arbitrary deity you supplicate before, or indeed if you bow towards any god at all, than it does to an approach of worshipfulness towards enchanted reality itself. In this regard, paganism is an approach to observable experience, a manner of psychologically re-enchanting materiality, physicality and nature with a divine significance. If scientific positivism and religious fundamentalism both find a concreteness in abstraction, by assuming a unitary reality, whether it’s God or physical law, then paganism rather finds abstraction in concreteness, seeing the very essence of spirit in the sound of a babbling brook, the moss on the side of a tree, or a sunset over Manhattan.

. . . Today, where a crisis of faith manifests in those cursed siblings of meaningless nihilism and fervent fundamentalism, and humanity’s relationship to nature is so inequitable that our economy, technology and industry threatens ecological apocalypse, how useful would it be to have a pagan theology, a new expression of divinity and the sacred commensurate with our current ruptures and crises?

– Ed Simon
Excerpted from “A New Paganism”
Aeon
May 1, 2023

The Wild Reed

Thursday, May 04, 2023

Ed Simon on Why We Need a Pagan Theology

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