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The Spirit of Paganism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2024

Raffaele Pettazzoni
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Extract

The antithesis between paganism and Christianity is usually resolved, in current opinion, into the theological antithesis between polytheism and monotheism. But a religious life means more than mere theology, and one has the right to ask oneself what is, in reality, the religious character of paganism.

Between polytheism and monotheism, the enotheism of Max Muller (and of F. W. J. Schelling) is not a mean term, and still less a moment of transition from one to the other, for the simple reason that it is situated on a different plane. In the fervour of prayer, under the impulse of devotion, the believer is so absorbed in the thought of the God he is adoring at that very moment-this is described as enotheism-that for him, at that moment, it is as if no other god existed. This will not prevent him, at another moment, from consecrating himself with equal fervour to the adoration of another god. The famous Egyptian hymn inspired by the religious ideas of Amenophis IV, and which invokes Aten, the Sun, as “sole God,” is just as far from true monotheism with its absolute negation of every divine being except the One, as are the Vedic hymns in which Indra is celebrated as the god “besides whom there are no others” (Rig-Veda, VI 21.10; cfr. I 81.5; 165.9; IV 30.1; VII 32.23).

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 3 , Issue 9 , January 1955 , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © 1955 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1. Cf. J. Seznec, La survivance des dieux antiques. Essay on the role of mythological tradi tion in Humanism and in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1940), with the remarks of B. Croce, in La Parola del Passato, 1946, pp. 273-285. See also M. Simon, Les Dieux antiques dans la pensée chrétienne in Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 1954, pp. 97-113.

2. Augustin., Enarrat. in Psalm. CXV (XCVI), 4—5: Migne, Patrologia Latina, Vol. XXXVII, p. 1231.

3. See my article: "The Pagan Origins of the Three-Headed Representation of the Chris tian Trinity," in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1946, pp. 133-151.

4. In the trilingual inscription of Xerxes the term daiva is rendered in the Accadian text by limnu (ilâni), that is "the wicked (gods)." According to E. Herzfeld, "Xerxes' Verbot des Daiva-Cultes," in Archeologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, VIII (Berlin, 1937), 73 ff., the allusion is to the gods of the Iranian peoples of polytheistic religion not adhering to the monotheistic Zoroastrianism.

5. With the exception of religions with secret mysterious rites of which I have recently written in: LesMystères grecs et les Religions mystériques de I'Antiquité, in Cahiers d'Histoire mondiale, 1954.

6. See the article "East and West" in my Essays on the History of Religions (Leiden, Brill, 1954).

7. R. Pettazzoni, La Mitologia Giapponese, Introduction (Bologna, 1929).