2 days ago
Why Christianity might face the same fate as Paganism
In the spring of 2023, the Royal Household issued invitations to the Coronation of Charles III and Camilla featuring an unexpected crowned head – that of the Green Man. Had the King, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, embraced paganism? The folklorist Francis Young dispelled the chatter, explaining in The Spectator that the Green Man was just 'a personification of the natural world' – and that, as a coherent figure, he had been invented in 1939 by Lady Raglan, one of Young's less scrupulous predecessors in the field.
Young knows everything about everything you never quite knew you wanted to know. And in Silence of the Gods, his impressive new history of the end of European paganism, he does so while conveying a dizzying level of doubt as to whether anything of interest is knowable with any certainty at all. Who exactly, for instance, were those 'pagans' against whom Henry of Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV of England, mounted crusades in the Lithuania of the 1390s? How did the legend of the werewolf come to be especially entwined with the folk customs of what was to become present-day Latvia? Having drawn one's attention to such tantalising questions, Young, a scholar immune to the temptations of flowered but delusive byways, at times refuses to answer them neatly.
Silence of the Gods treats lesser discussed regions of Europe – the Baltic world, the Volga-Ural, Lapland/Sapmi, Finland and, in a more clement aside, the Canaries – over their long, transitional and little-documented Early Modern years. We're taken from the Christian-conversion processes initiated in the late 14th century to residual and local rituals that, in a handful of cases, by way of the potent crucible of 19th-century nationalism, have trickled into living memory.
Young makes an irrefutable case that Lithuania, in particular, ought to be a great deal more studied and considered, whether by scholars, general readers or even contemporary policymakers. For, of all the voices that surface within Young's lightly technical, fundamentally clear prose, I was most struck by that of the Polish lawyer Paweł Włodkowic, who in 1414 established the juridical principle, uniquely advanced in its day, that pagans should not be massacred simply for being pagans.
'It is an error,' wrote Włodkowic, 'completely intolerable, that Christians should gather there to do war against the infidels solely because they are infidels, or because it is said that their goal is the spreading of the Christian Faith, for under the colour of piety impieties are committed.' Upon this rock was founded the political and ecumenical miracle that was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as, Young persuasively adds, 'the modern world of human rights and international law'.
Yet of this brilliant moral jurist's personal character or individual life, we hear nothing. The same goes for the whole extensive galère of Grand Dukes, Jesuit or Lutheran missionaries, 'pagan' rebels, antiquaries, witch hunters and Romantic nationalist litterateurs upon whose evidence Young draws. Such restraint is hardly incompatible with this book's paradoxical quest. Young traces 'the urge to personify' within religious traditions who have left scarce traces of those personalised details. The names and portfolios of Pagan deities here seem to be linguistic corruptions of Christian saints, or Classical parallels misapplied by the Christian scholars recording 'pagan' practices.
Such austerity demands a high level of readerly commitment. But it delivers, by the end of this concisely expressed, conceptually meaty book, a substantial reward. The argument at which Young arrives is both consistent and plausible; that the 'pagan' religions of Europe, faced with Christianity's aggressive expansion, entered a third, 'creolised' state. New ideas grew out of, or alongside, Christianity, without being convincingly Christian – an active, 'creative response' to the new, confessional faith's incursion.
In an epilogue that reads as startlingly topical, Young proceeds to the next logical query – in the face of dominant European secularism, are we now beholding a 'creolised' transformation of Christianity in turn? (You only need to look to a doctrinally vague 'surf church' in Porto, Portugal, for proof.) Young again displays his knack for identifying a haunting question, without committing to a definitive or simplistic answer. But he does leave one parting insurance policy – 'human religiosity is full of surprises' – which allows room for the recent and intriguing speculation that Gen Z might be warming towards Christianity after all.
