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Subject:      Re: Inklings Discussion
From:         Sam Dodsworth <sam@aristos.demon.co.uk>
Date:         1997/07/30
Message-Id:   <OaQFKCAoG23zEwsr@aristos.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups:   alt.books.inklings,alt.books.cs-lewis,rec.arts.books.tolkien
[More Headers]

In article <33DD8CFA.3C93@unity.ncsu.edu>, Dan Knauss
<dpknauss@unity.ncsu.edu> writes
>n.
>
>They would not agree because they don't really know what Paganism
>is--and by extension, they don't know what Christianity is. 

        Christians don't know what Christianity is? I sense an impending
dodgy redefinition of terms...

>Original sin
>is rather irrelevant, because Christianity is even more of a symptom of
>Original Sin than Paganism. 

        Well, that was my point: I'd expect a Christian to see Original
Sin as the disease, paganism as the symptoms and Christianity as the
cure. That's very different from the the sort of continuity you seem to
be talking about inasmuch as the cure, to borrow Lewis' terminology,
came from outside the Total System.     

>Pure Paganism is human civilization in the
>absence of systematic religious beliefs. 

        Hm. So what term should we use to describe the systematic
religious beliefs that most people associate with the term "pagan"? And
wouldn't a culture of atheists or agnostics count as "pagan" within your
definition of the term?

>"Higher" Paganism delineates
>the upper stages at which these systematic beliefs are formed.

        Upper stages of what? And what has "Higher" paganism got to do
with it? I'm genuinely confused here.

>Christianity, like everything else, arose in this manner,

        What manner? What are you talking about? I'm still confused.

> and what I was
>saying was that Christianity's modern form cannot be understood entirely
>apart from its ancient roots. 

        Of course, it's perfectly possible that the "ancient roots"
don't go any further back than the foundation of Christianity -
particularly if you believe that Jesus was the son of God. God, after
all, might easily decide to introduce something new to the world without
having to draw on ancient paganism. 

>If Christianity is the adult, then
>Paganism is the baby. A lot of people try to pretend they were never
>infants or silly young creatures because the memory embarrasses them,
>but they are being quite silly themselves and possibly hurting their
>psyche in the process of repression. So it goes with any Christian who
>can't come to positive, faith-affirming terms with their Pagan past and
>its persistent legacies.
>
        A nice analogy, but it's only an analogy. Do you have examples
of the sort of damage that is or could be caused by Christians
forgetting their pagan roots? 

>> 
>> >Annoying as it is to many Christians unaware of
>> >their true roots, Lewis was quite right to joke about his participation
>> >in the legacies of Pagan blood-rites when taking communion. (From a
>> >letter to Sheldon Van Auken rpt. in Van's 1st book.)
>> >
>>         For this to be true you need an example of "pagan blood-rites"
>> from the Middle East in the appropriate time frame. Do you have one?
>> I've never been really convinced by claims of Christian borrowing from
>> Mithraism, if that's what you have in mind.
>
>I was merely quoting Lewis, and he probably had Mithratic cults in mind.
>What you think of their influence on Christianity is doubly
>irrelevent--it was Lewis' claim, and secondly, you provide no reasons
>for not being convinced.
>
        I read the claim as more yours than Lewis', inasmuch as he was
joking and you are not. And why "probably" Mithraism if he didn't say as
much? As for my point...some people seem to regard it as established
that Christian ritual (which they usually confuse with the religion
itself) is largely borrowed from Mithraism. I just wanted to make it
clear that I'm skeptical about those claims and would require some kind
of supporting evidence before accepting them. The reason for my
skepticism is that the evidence I've previously been presented with was
distinctly thin, being limited to assertions that (a) Mithraic
ceremonies probably involved a meal of some kind and (b) Mithraic
temples look a bit like some early Christian chapels. 

>My view is this: symbolic rituals never get invented out of thin air.
>Their is always a cultural source that can in turn be traced back to
>another source and another and another. This only attests to the truth
>of the myth as Lewis migth say--the truth of natural (and through
>nature, pan-historical) revelation.
>
        What, never? Is it turtles all the way down, then? It's also
worth asking if the borrowing of ritual forms implies a continuity of
underlying beliefs. I'd say that there's no necessary connection,
myself. Nor am I convinced that such continuity, if it existed, would
imply an underlying universal revelation. Language, after all, is part
of a similar continuity (and indeed one might say that ritual is simply
a subset of language) but not even Chomsky assumes that it's the
reflection of a single universal tongue.

Sam Dodsworth (sam@aristos.demon.co.uk)
"I rather like the sex shop. What makes it more sexist than, say, the 
 toy shop?"
                                                - Wildcat