'Pagan' traditions

Image by Jonathan Pageau

Every year, when we celebrate one of the festivals of the Church, articles explaining how some tradition or feast day is really not Christian at all and is just pagan. In many cases, these claims turn out to be false or historically tenuous, put together by people who are just a little too happy to take a jab a Christianity. But in other cases, the festival or tradition does reflect and may have originated from a pagan practice.

The problem with this is at least two-fold. In the first instance, Christians in the early centuries of the church were so careful to keep their faith pure that, for example, they would not even offer a pinch of incense to Caesar at risk of martyrdom. Thus, it seems highly unlikely that such people would appropriate 'pagan' traditions willy-nilly. 

There is also a certain attitude which assumes that Christians had no traditions of their own, nothing to offer the world, and so behaved in a purely parasitic manner. This is manifestly absurd - the Christian story, that Christ ended death, is unique - it is not present in any other culture or religion.

Second, there is an unspoken assumption that traditions are in themselves arbitrary, and legitimacy arises only from chronological primacy: basically, it's all arbitrary, but if you got there first, you're the 'real' deal. This mirrors our fetishization of artists today: someone comes up with a new style and all the imitators are regarded as inferior to the original. The problem with this perspective is that it assumes there is no meaning intrinsic to the world, but rather that it is all imposed. The only true patterns are not those of meaning and relationship, but only of mechanics and physics.

Unfortunately for this point of view, patterns of meaning are basic to intelligibility. Unless there were 'intrinsic' patterns of meaning, nothing in the world would be intelligible. Seeing patterns is thus essential, and you can be better or worse at seeing particular patterns. When you encounter an unknown subject, it appears chaotic and lacking order, until you are introduced to the key or main patterns it follows. Often, people only understand part of a subject, only seeing some of the pattern and go on to make great errors. Therefore, we must see all traditions and festivals as attempts to articulate and participate in particular patterns. Rituals are the compressed re-enactment of a particular pattern of meaning, and festivals are rituals at the social level. More than that, a way of life is an attempt to embody a particular pattern or ideal of humanity: festivals are simply more concentrated points of meaning in life.

Now we can make sense of the claim about the 'pagan' roots of Christian traditions. Pagans are responding to particular ways in which reality is patterned. They see the cycle of the year, the harvest in autumn, the planting in spring and so on, and respond by emphasizing these patterns in festivals. They can see a meaning there and attempt to articulate it. But they didn't see the whole pattern. Pagan religions often have a aimless or tragic end to the world built in (e.g. karma and Ragnarök). They didn't know how to resolve the problem of death, although they tried with such things as sacrifice. Nevertheless, they grasped some elements of the truth. Christianity provided the universal answer to the problem of death. But since Christianity moves from the point, the universal, the Jew out into the world of the every particular Gentile thing, it encounters parts of particular patterns that don't contradict the universal, but indeed, express it. This is the meaning of love, that it permits a lower thing to exist in its own right, so long as it agrees with the universal.

Christianity therefore did not adopt pagan practices on an ad hoc basis. They excised such practices as human sacrifice, orgies and other things that did not fit with Christianity. They contextualized traditions, bringing them in to participate in the wider pattern of the Christianity. Thus Halloween and All Saints can reference the 'fruits' of Autumn, Christmas the turning of the dying day, and Easter the new life of spring. This is part of what is meant by Christ filling all things, and so Christianity becomes the cosmic story that encompasses all of reality.