The ancient pagans believed their gods were real, because they took so long to make them up that they forgot having done it.  Although today’s neo-pagans, who make up their gods all at once, don’t have that excuse, they only half-know that they are doing it.  Sometimes, as in the feminist goddess cults, the devotees seem to be practicing a weird make-believe.  Sometimes, as in Satanism, it is hard to tell what they think they are doing, for in theory they are worshipping evil, but in practice they are worshipping pleasure.  Sometimes, as in what might be called Saganism, they are trying to invest things that are very, very big, like the material cosmos, with the awe that should be given to their Creator.

With some exceptions, at this point in history most neo-pagans don’t know that they have gods.  When they say they don’t believe in God, they mean they don’t believe in that god.  In fact each gives everything for some dream of vastness, wealth, excitement, sex, control, irresponsible gratification of the will, or some other vain thing, all without knowing that this is worship.  How long the delusion of having no gods can persist, I don’t know.

It is strange that neo-pagans think that the God of whom Jews and Christians speak is just another lie of the poets, as Jove was.  I call it strange because the first canon of the rational mind is that there are reasons for things.  Moreover there has to be a First Reason, because an infinite regress of reasons for things is no reason at all.  Ultimately, then, whatever does not have to be must depend on something that does.  This First Reason, the God of Jews and Christians, is the One who does have to be, the necessary reality on whom all other reality depends.

To reject this God, then, is to say that there don’t have to be reasons for things, that in the end, nothing has to make sense.  And let us be very clear:  No one who believes that things don’t have to make sense has any business saying that anything at all is true or false.  For how would he know?

To come back to Jove:  Pagan religion didn’t believe in a First Reason.  Though Edith Hamilton writes that “the terrifying irrational has no place in classical mythology,” this is itself a myth.  Classical mythology was more or less explicit about nothing making sense.  It didn’t picture the First Reason creating all things from nothing and then calling all things back to Himself.  Rather it pictured the gods themselves coming from the void.  Since everything was held up by chaos, ultimately nothing was held up at all.  All light was drawn back to that unreason like dark homing pigeons.  Let us give the Greeks and Romans this:  They tried not to speak more of their dirty secret than they had to.  Though the Norsemen, their minds filled with Ragnarök, could hardly speak of anything else, let us give them some credit too:  They were brave about it.

If nothing has to make sense, then reason is no more than a special case of unreason.  We ought to recognize this state of affairs, because our own materialists are in the same pickle.  Matter doesn’t have to be, so if you are a materialist, believing in nothing but matter, you must believe that things that don’t have to be just are – that no explanation is needed.  Question:  “Why is there something and not rather nothing?”  Answer:  “Hey, whatever.”  And so causes, effects, and explanations creep from the womb of darkness.  Sanity perches on a twig at the edge of a chasm.

Though the pagan philosophers came from the same pagan culture, the greatest of them – Plato, Aristotle, some of the Stoics – did not view reason as just a special case of unreason.  In this, their radicalism has been underrated.  They grasped that reason rules.  Some of them even fought through to the realization that if this so, then yes, there must be a First Reason.  Though merely as a convenience, sometimes they borrowed pre-existing names like “Jove” for the First Reason, they were well aware that if God was this, then He was far from the Jove of the poets.

It never occurred to them that one could know the First Reason face to face, any more than the characters in a story could know the author.

But what if He made Himself known?

In the city of the philosophers, St. Paul said to some of these men, I see that you acknowledge the Unknown God.  Let me tell you Who He is.

Instead of enjoying his vocation, he thinks that his vocation is enjoyment.

Novelist and writing teacher Claire Messud, addressing the class of 2020:  “You’ve been asked to work harder and longer than students in past generations, and there has been increasingly little space for the immaterial superfluities that make life worthwhile – sitting outside with friends, talking, the breeze tickling your skin; listening, eyes closed, to the rhythm of the tides; reading War and Peace, or a cookbook, or a poem.”

Yes, that’s what we keep telling them.

Professor Messud has got the symptom right:  There isn’t much silence, stillness, and quiet in our students’ lives.  But have students really been asked to work harder and longer than students in past generations?  I concede that this may be the case in the natural sciences.  But in the liberal arts?

Judge for yourself.  In early America, when our schools of higher education were just getting started, all students at Yale and Harvard studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.  They read the classical authors in the original languages, which is how they learned history.  They learned to master mathematics, classical logic, geography, natural science, ethics, metaphysics, and the discipline of argument, then called rhetoric.  They recited, discussed, and engaged in disputations.

Those were undergraduates.

Today, core courses have been almost entirely replaced by distribution requirements – choose one from column A, one from column B, and one from column C.  Much of the curriculum has been politicized, and the pragmatist notion that skills are more important than facts is accepted without question, as though it were possible to learn skills without the facts to use them on.  Though my own institution has higher than average admission standards, many of my students read at what used to be considered high school level.  By empowering them to evaluate their own teachers, the universities put weapons in their hands to punish the few who do work them hard. 

The lives of our students do lack quiet -- chiefly for the same reason the lives of their elders lack quiet:  It is a choice.  For when the soul becomes silent and still, it may hear its thoughts, and if you live in a certain way, such thoughts are disturbing.  The favored solutions are constant busyness, continuous noise, and trying to do many things at once.

I love my students, and I am not maligning them.  Some of them are very bright and earnest, and would love to be taught the liberal arts, but we are not teaching them.  Every now and then a student visits my office to say, “I’ve come to realize that I’m not getting a real education.  How can I become an educated person?”

If you are that kind of student, I tell you now:  Don’t settle.  Don’t settle for what we spoon feed you.  Don’t listen to those who tell you how hard you have been challenged.  There is so much more!  It’s not too late.  With guidance and strong motivation, you can still receive an education.  The one fatal error is to suppose that we will give it to you without a fight.

Opening quotations from Claire Messud,

“A Moment for Inward Pilgrimages,”

The Wall Street Journal

(2-3 May 2020), p. C3

I mentioned in a previous post that some people think we ought to practice social distancing not just while the epidemic runs its course, but from now on.

In a world in which more people than ever before think that when you die, you’re nothing but worm food, it’s hard to resist the idea that this sort of hysteria is connected with other common ones.

Fear of death, of course.  Fixation on control of self.  Fixation on control of others.  Avoidance of things that threaten such control, such as marrying and having children.  Obsession with bodily satisfaction, bodily beauty, and bodily perfection.

Not to mention abortion, suicide, and all that sort of thing.  Sometimes even things that seem opposites grow from the same root.

Now I’ve seen everything:  Boutique rioting.

A crowd floating down Austin’s famous Sixth Street.  Young men holding hands with their girl friends, strolling along and looking.  Every third person taking a video or selfie.

And in the background, a store being looted.

The mayor says he is pleased that some of them are wearing masks.