In On Being a Pagan, the multidisciplinary French thinker Alain de Benoist critiques the Judeo-Christian worldview, not just in its manifestations in Judaism and Christianity, but also in some of their modern, secularized offshoots, and articulates his vision of a “new paganism” loosely inspired by historical European paganism.
Along the way, Benoist makes several points that should be taken to heart and contemplated by anyone with a serious interest in the theological side of paganism/polytheism/animism/whatever you want to call it.
In a glowing passage that recalls the ancient Germanic conception of time, he writes that, since the past is a dimension of the present that is transformed by it, “[the revival of paganism] is a question of referring to the ‘memory’ of paganism not in a chronological way, so as to return to an ‘earlier time,’ but in a mythological way, to seek for that which, through time, surpasses time and still speaks to us today. It is a question of connecting to something that cannot be surpassed rather than to something that has been ‘surpassed.'”
The foremost trait that he criticizes in monotheism, and which he finds to be the crux of that entire worldview, is its dualism, its insistence on dividing the world into incommensurable, black-and-white halves: God (“uncreated being”) versus the world (“created being”), good versus evil, the sacred versus the profane, and so forth. He notes that this dualism is absent in paganism: “in ancient Europe the sacred was not conceived as opposed to the profane but rather encompassed the profane and gave it meaning,” and “[t]he divine is immanent in and consubstantial with the world.”
As many other writers on this topic have noted, paganism’s absence of dualism and its polytheism (a pluralistic theology) lend themselves to an attitude of tolerance and a respect for pluralism in human affairs. Benoist notes that “European paganism rests on an antagonistic pluralism of values. In its most immediate manifestations, polytheism is the expression of this antagonism, which never terminates in irreversible opposites and a radical dualism but naturally resolves itself in a harmonious whole.” It is a worldview that is, in Nietzsche’s famous words, “beyond good and evil,” and consequently refreshingly free of moralism and crusading.
Benoist’s discussions of this aspect of paganism go further than most and include much more nuance. For example, he describes how, when one’s enemy is viewed through the lens of absolute good and evil, one’s enemy seems like the very embodiment of the principle of evil, and the conflict can only end by his extermination or conversion. In paganism, with its plurality of norms, an enemy tends to be treated as the specific person or group that he is or that they are, and the conflict is viewed as simply a conflict of personal interests that will end when that circumstantial dispute is resolved, at which point the enemy will cease to be an enemy and is left free to go about his life as he chooses. The enemy is therefore even capable of being honored as a worthy adversary – an attitude we find over and over again in the heroic literature of ancient Europe.
Along similar lines, he critiques the Bible’s view that power is inherently evil: in the Bible, “[t]he ‘just’ are not just in one part and weak in another. They are just because they are weak, by very virtue of this weakness, just as the powerful are evil by very virtue of their power. So it is not the weak that are touted by the Bible as much as weakness itself.” Freedom, the ability to direct the course of one’s own life, and justice, the fulfillment of mutually agreed-upon rights and duties, cannot be assumed; they must be won, and this requires power.
However, as perceptive and stirring as these insights are, they occur within the context of an overarching conceptual framework that leaves much to be desired. For Benoist, “man is the law of the world and the measure of all things; he simultaneously expresses the totality of the world and the very face of God.” “Man does not ‘discover’ what was there before him. He founds and creates the world by the meaning he gives to things.” “Alone of all the animals, man’s actions are not predicated by his membership in a species.” “Gods are made in the image of men, for whom they offer a sublimated re-presentation.” And finally, “there is no need to ‘believe’ in Jupiter or Wotan… gods and beliefs may pass away, but the values remain.”
Consider the collective import of these quotes, which are representative of a large body of such statements made throughout the book. Given their ubiquity, placement, and the uncommon passion with which they’re delivered, the reader is left with no doubt that they constitute the very heart of what Benoist is expressing here.
I would be the first to admit that there’s a pinch of truth embedded within some of these quotes. As Nietzsche, whom Benoist quotes frequently and approvingly, points out, truth is perspectival, which means that all of us have some modicum of creative agency in shaping our realities. But Benoist forsakes this Nietzschean perspectivism and carries his arguments to the point of being simplistic and crude subjectivism. This is all the more ironic since the dichotomy between the “subjective” and the “objective” is one of the pillars of the Judeo-Christian dualism that Benoist so forcefully denounces. Furthermore, as the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has shown, the process of perception involves an intertwining between perceiver and perceived, such that, in the last analysis, it’s impossible to tell the degree to which any given impression comes from ourselves or from that which we perceive. When humans make statements about gods or animals, therefore, those statements necessarily originate as much from the gods or animals as from the humans. Humans are creators, certainly, but only co-creators in the world’s tireless creation of itself.
And what of Benoist’s view that the gods are superfluous, and only the values they represent are truly important? This reduces divinity to the level of the profane – that which can be questioned and debated. But if the sacred – that which cannot be questioned or debated – is “immanent in and consubstantial with the world,” in Benoist’s own excellent formulation, then to turn around and assert that it’s only actually “immanent in and consubstantial with” human caprices is antithetical to both the letter and the spirit of historical European paganism. Such a view reinstates the same stale, monotheistic dualism, the only differences being that humanity rather than God is now “uncreated being,” and that divinity slips into the “created being” category.
Benoist equates the nonhuman parts of the visible world – animals, plants, mountains, rivers, winds – with a biologically deterministic “nature,” setting up a false (and quintessentially Christian) dichotomy between “nature” and “culture” (which, of course, is an extension of the dichotomy between the created/objective and the uncreated/subjective). “He [Benoist’s pagan] does not deify [the world]… but makes it a place where the deity can emerge.” Again, this is pure subjectivism. Historical paganism had no concept of this rift between “nature” and “culture;” there were aspects of what we today would call “culture” that were seen as being immutable and heritable, while aspects of what we today would call “nature” were seen as being quite mutable, with shapeshifting being an extreme but obvious and actually quite commonplace example of the latter. The nonhuman world had elements of “culture” just like humanity has elements of “nature.”
At bottom, what Benoist is proposing is really just humanism, the view that “man is the measure of all things,” with a few trappings of paganism added to the mix in an attempt to create the impression that this humanism satisfactorily answers the most primary and primal philosophical questions. (“Why is there something rather than nothing?” Because Man created it!)
In a later essay entitled “Thoughts on God,” Benoist revealed that “I have not personally had any experience of the divine (I am the opposite of a mystic). … As I have a theological mentality, the interest I bring to belief systems is of a purely intellectual order.” This is a very telling comment, and probably explains much of Benoist’s disregard for divinity. It would be inane to criticize his lack of experience in and of itself, but for someone with no experience of divinity to write a book about theology is the equivalent of someone who has never even planted or watered a seed writing a book about gardening.
The heart of paganism is the intersection between the numinous and the flesh – all the flesh that comprises this outrageously greater-than-human world, which subsumes humanity the way a beach subsumes a grain of sand. By dismissing or devaluing both the spiritual and the animal, and attempting to reduce both to the ultimately frivolous whims of a single, ultimately frivolous species, Benoist’s brand of paganism consigns itself to a relatively superficial level. While Benoist rightly criticizes “[paganism’s] reemergence under… puerile forms,” On Being a Pagan, despite its many praiseworthy insights, ultimately represents paganism in yet another “puerile form.”