A recent article in The American Spectator claims that a significant number of Italians (and other Europeans) are actively and unironically worshipping ancient pagan Graeco-Roman gods. They pray to them, burn incense, and offer sacrifices.
My first question is — have any of them actually read Ovid, Virgil, Homer, Hesiod?
Do you remember from your 10th grade reading of Homer's Odyssey what the primary quality of the Olympian gods was?
Capriciousness.
They did whatever they felt like: They changed constantly, they broke their word, they lied and manipulated, they were often immoral perverts.
They could not be trusted. They were not good.
Your pietas — your piety, doing your duty to the gods — in fact had little to no effect on how the gods treated you. You were on your own.
Did you offer your daughter as a human sacrifice so the gods would help you go beat up the Trojans for stealing Helen, the Greeks #1 babe?
Too bad.
Agamemnon tells his daughter Iphigenia he's arranged for her to marry the warrior-hero Achilles; she shows up excitedly for the wedding, but finds the altar is not the kind she is expecting.
Nice, dad. Talk about giving the bride away.
And what happens when the Greeks arrive in Troy and lay their siege, all paid for in advance by Iphigenia's death? They get bogged down in a nightmarish decade-long war. After ten years of gory, futile fighting, it takes Odysseus's ingenious plan (commandos in a hollow horse) to finally win.
But before this, "many thousands go down to the land of the dead" (Iliad 1). And for what? The entire war starts, ultimately, over a soap-opera dispute among three goddesses — Juno, Aphrodite, and Athena — as to which is the hottest.
It's like a TikTok video from the past.
Oh sure, sometimes a god would favor their "favorite" — Venus jumps in to help her demigod son Aeneas, founder of Rome. But often the gods actively thwart human desire. Sometimes almost as a tease. It is not uncommon for a god who favors you to turn against you — or vice-versa. No matter how pious you are.
The gods are never quite pleased, are they?
Such stories could be repeated ad infinitum, as any good classicist will tell you. In fact, the gods themselves are not actually in charge — that would be the Fates, three terrifying sisters who (like most females in the ancient world) spent their days working with textiles.
In this case, the "textile" was the thread of a person's existence: Klotho spun out the thread of your life, Lachesis measured it, and Atropos came with shears to cut you short when the Fates had decreed it was your time to die. There was no appeal. Even the gods defer to the Fates, often arguing with them, but never winning.
And if you offended the gods or goddesses, they would send down the Furies — ladies even scarier than the Fates — who carried the anger, the "fury" of the gods, and tortured you with agonies beyond description.
When Priam, the King of Troy, and his wife Hecuba clung to their altar to Zeus as the Greeks breached the palace, the whole family cried out to their gods, but they did not answer.
Their son Polites was butchered in front of them by Achilles' son, and Priam was dragged by his hair through his son's blood and slaughtered in front of his helpless wife and daughters.
The gods do not hear; they do not answer; they do not save.
Caprice. To be capricious means to be reliably unreliable. Why anyone ever bought a Chevy Caprice (produced in Detroit from 1965 to 1996 and quite popular) is beyond me.
The god Saturn sexually mutilates his father with a scythe, and devours his own children out of jealousy. Zeus is married to his sister — and then spends much of his time seducing a long catalogue of demigoddesses, nymphs, and humans, often disguising himself as a bull, cuckoo, or swan. Dionysius (Bacchus to the Romans) is the god of drunkenness and immorality. It's worse than reality TV.
The technical Greek word for all this is Eww.
Two thousand years later, folks with iPhones, master's degrees, and Teslas consider these characters worthy of … worship? To repurpose the words of the Apostle Paul in Athens, these modern pagans are worshipping an "unknown god."
This is why the Gospel was so radical in the 1st century AD, so revolutionary — and so appealingly beautiful to many pagans in the ancient Mediterranean, whose gods were vindictive, unreliable perverts.
Most importantly: This is the pagan 1st-century world into which the Living Word bursts, cradled in a feed-trough out in the sticks of Judea.
The Incarnation does not present some twisted Olympian family of perverse, squabbling, untrustworthy gods. Instead, there is one God, holy, merciful, and entirely trustworthy. The Creator and Author of a perfect and ordered universe, a world which is distorted by the Fall of Man, yet governed by a secret providence that actually intends good for the rebels, and calls for them to repent.
Repent of what?
Mostly, to repent of idolatry — the worship of that which was not the one true God.
Here was One who, instead of demanding that we sacrifice our sons and daughters for a futile war, sacrificed His own Son, for His glory, our benefit, and a peace that surpasses understanding. The contrast is staggering, then and now.
And yet some folks are wondering, "What would Zeus do?"
It may seem inconceivable to you that even a small number of 21st century Europeans — the dominant culture of the technological West over the last 500 years — could unironically return to worshiping pagan deities of the distant past.
What was that about a dog returning to his own vomit?
What does this tell us about modern humankind?
- First, we are irreducibly religious. We must worship something, for that is what we are designed to do. Worship simply means giving appropriate attention to God. If we do not do that, we will nevertheless continue worshiping — but we will exchange the proper object of worship for something else, anything else.
- Second, Europe, the cradle of Western Christendom, is exhausted. Culturally, economically, spiritually exhausted. Everything replacing submission to God results only in another failed system.
- Third, material success and comfort never satisfies in any ultimate sense. These things are part of God's common grace to all, and study, diligence, and hard work can indeed improve man's lot in many ways. We now live in a dream world of technological pleasures available on command. But this does not satisfy. It cannot. We are more than matter.
- Fourth, people are lost and hungry. Hungry enough spiritually that some at least are willing to engage in worship of something that they know is not true. By the time we arrive in late Antiquity the Greeks and Romans no longer actually believed in the pantheon of their gods (Cicero was writing about this even before the birth of Christ). They still went through the cultural motions of their rituals and still conducted business, social and financial, in their temples, but no one took the gods seriously. The Cultural Myth had been replaced with a culture built on Myth but now grown beyond it. The capricious gods were dead; man was on his own.
Now, some souls are using their iPhone apps and Tesla guidance to arrive efficiently and on time to a pagan worship service. Because they have to worship.
They can't not.
