On the Dissidence of Western Identity
As matters stand today, with heterogeneous New Age cults, religions and various trends, fads and revival groups popping up around all different kinds of concepts, ideas, religions, diets like veganism etc., the heavily manosphere-centred movement of refashioned Stoicism embodies the innate impetus for a return to an original European way of life and thought. Let us avoid the same fate that afflicted Germany and Europe at large in a world where God had died: resorting to spiritual and physical deviations that are all but foreign to the soul of Traditional Europe.
Since the West definitely has somewhat lost a connection to its supposed spiritual core of Christianity with an absolute objective moral truth to cling to, we find ourselves hard-pressed without any real perspective that we exclusively can call ours. What happened to the natural lifestyle and outlook on the world, exuding all that’s good, just, brave and beautiful? A world of reified heroicism, if you will?
Times have changed. Alternatives sprang up in the desperate need to fill an integrated spiritual hole.
One broad strand in the philosophical tradition has been to find a universalist route to societal and moral meaning and demeanour (Kant, Hegel et al) which one may attribute, at least in part, to stemming from Christian universalism itself.
Even observing things in terms of a global world with some sense of unity of order, or a designated Christian world, is modernistic to the core. Humanistic atheists have carried this core idea with them, since humanism has strong Christian roots.
However, whereas other distinct cultures and civilizations (China, India etc.) have their own clearly defined essentialist truths and perspectives on such things as religion, love etc. Western universities and educational institutions struggle to grapple with naming some axiomatic European principles of being. For ourselves, with a broken sense of self, we can pick and choose from various cultural fruits (Vedic spiritualism, judo, veganism, Wicca, Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Zen Buddhism etc.) In the relentless search for objective truth, one may have forgotten to stand one’s ground to appeal to some discrete European perspective, that is particular to ourselves and no one else.
As to the idea of Judeo-Christian values as the bedrock of Western civilization, as is commonly invoked among Christian conservatives and public intellectuals like none other than the nascent Jordan B. Peterson, one can’t help but perceive the conspicuous Armageddon de l’esprit occidental, the dual dissidence between Paganism and Christianity in our tradition.
Paganism consists of cherishing the beauty of life, rational inquiry, philosophy/wisdom, tribe, kinship and religious nature (paganus originally referred to heathen people inhabiting the Roman countryside). Christianity followed suit, displacing the native faith of the Europeans with an imported religion, imposed on them through bribery, murder, persecution, crusades, institutions, threats etc. and other times freely accepted, with or without the people’s approval. Polytheistic “pantheism” couldn’t be completely eradicated, though, so martyrs and saints galore came to light.
That is not to entirely discredit the mass conversion that indeed followed after Constantine’s toleration, sanction and public support of the Christian belief system which he promulgated. For instance, to advance in the ranks of the complex hierarchical structure of Roman bureaucracy, being a Christian pretty much became indispensable. A great deal of churches and edifices were built and entertained in the entire empire under his watch, in particular in Constantinople, with some Pagan temples to smoothen the religious transition of the empire. Some intervening moments in Church doctrine, like the first ecumenical council at Nicaea, attempted to clear up some internal doctrinal discord that had already been sown at this point viz. the Arian controversy as well as formalizing certain theological-liturgical details of concern.
I believe that a multitude of factors were at play because of which Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire.
First of all, several people became detached and alienated from the imperial cult and official Greco-Roman belief structure over a longer time period. An integrated pax deorum with civic polytheism allowed a remarkable degree of free religious practice, but did not necessarily support the unity the empire needed. Trying to assimilate deity names from different religions, like Lenus Mars in the thorougly Romanized Gaul, didn’t work wonders everywhere, partly because colonization wasn’t equal everywhere. Even the native Romans, people from Latium and Italians in general grew complacent with their native religion of Roman gods. Although religious tolerance and the assimilation/equalization project of Mars, Jupiter etc. with deities from other tribes and cultures in the empire provided stability for some time, the Roman Empire remained still a manifold amalgamation of people and interests that didn’t help in the way of ruling a humongous empire from Gibraltar to Armenia.
Secondly, as mentioned previously above, there were several advantages to joining the new religion on the block in the context of going up the echelons of Roman society and its judicial administrative structure. Hence a truly tremendous amount of people converted to it: it is estimated by academics that by Constantine’s death in 337, 50% of the population was Christian. By the the time of Theodosius’ passing, that number had risen to nearly 90%, or possibly a bit lower.
Contrary to what I’ve seen floating around popular historical/academic circles, femicide among Roman and Greek babies was not as common as currently believed. The infamous Greco-Roman practice has been well-known for centuries, in both academic circles and in the popular conscience. It is an important subject to tackle, as many refer to it as a credible reason for why Roman women converted to Christianity. They could then have passed their faith down to their children. There’s little empirical evidence to back this claim up: epigraphic, papyrological (written) and archaeological sources show otherwise, should we trust Walter Scheidel’s convincing line of argument on the subject. However, that’s not to dismiss the existence of the practice altogether. Scheidel’s work on this subject is getting somewhat dated, notwithstanding his fascinating insight that Roman boys more often than Roman girls were victims of infanticide. The source material is still diminutive and limited, though.
Thirdly, some people were forcibly converted to Christianity paralleled by persecutions of Pagans, altar smashing and confiscations of treasures from sanctuaries of yore. The last people who held out were primarily the traditional Italian aristocratic/senatorial elites in Rome who had a vested intellectual and ancestral heritage in Greco-Roman religion and the more Pagan countryside, where local deities for water, wind, harvesting and other natural elements and lifestyles predominated. In some isolated communities, fervent Paganism survived as long as into the late 900’s in the case of Byzantine Peloponnesus. Theodosius also played his part by outlawing the Olympics and making Christianity the only allowed religion in the empire. Justinian closed down Plato’s Academy in 529, marking the end of an epoque.
Fourth, several slaves, beggars and poor people in the Roman Empire living on the margins of subsistence, who by far made up the vast majority as opposed to the elite and middle classes (who, according to estimates made by Josiah Ober, may not have made up anything more than perhaps 12% of the populace), found more solace in believing in an eternal afterlife of bliss and liberation from earthly drudgery than having to succumb to a defeatist Stoic mentality where they find themselves passively accepting their place in a hierarchical cosmos where they received the short end of the stick. Otium, in the sense of the Ciceronian moderate extravagance of a quotidian glass of wine and reclining in one’s study for the pastime activities of writing philosophical letters and dedicating themselves to the intellectual disciplines, was far beyond their reach.
