The Spirit of Paganism

Commencement Address for the Class of 2024 at The Habersham School

To be human is to stand at the fork of only two possible roads: the Christian faith and paganism.

“There is now nothing before us,” writes G.K. Chesterton, “but the choice between two paths which both return to the past. We can return to some sort of Catholic fellowship, or we can return to some sort of pagan slavery. There is no third road.”

The incarnation of God in the womb of Mary, his life of sorrow, his passion, death, and victory over the grave are either true or untrue.

If true, then all reality finds its origin, meaning, and final end in Jesus Christ. If untrue, then beneath the glamorous spectacle of the cosmos is an empty void, a yawning abyss, and a pith of vanity. 

If God became man, then man must love, obey, and follow Him. If He did not, then man may do as he pleases to whom he pleases.

The myth of a society unified on humanistic, secular principles is foolish. There is no neutral ground between the city of God and the city of man, between the body of Christ and that nefarious body politic allied with his enemies. These cities contend for the heart of the world, and man must choose to whom he will be loyal.

Many speak as if the choice between these cities lies far before you, but, whether you have known it or not, you have enlisted in this combat already, and have begun to sow the seed of your love and your loyalty on one side or the other.

Your graduation from Habersham provides a moment, a pause in which you may examine the choice you have made, for once receive your diplomas, turn your tassels, and throw your hats, each choice counts for twice its weight.

Let us therefore examine these divergent roads.

Paganism is characterized by three qualities: amnesia, despair, and the lust for power.

In the end of the fifth century AD, Christian Rome fell to those tribal pagan hordes which we call the barbarians. These Gothic tribes saw no intrinsic value in Latin learning, and took no steps to preserve it unless they fed their own personal desires for material pleasures and political power. 

In this age of social upheaval, the Christian philosopher Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy while in prison on false charges of treason. In the Consolation, Boethius imagines that he is visited by Lady Philosophy, the personification of wisdom herself, who seeks to heal Boethius of the spiritual disease of sorrow.

Boethius’ sorrow is caused by the futility of seeking happiness in wealth, honor, glory, power, or pleasure. True happiness, for Lady Philosophy, is to become like God through participation in His knowledge and love. 

Boethius does not see these rival conceptions of happiness only in the hidden battlefield of the human heart, but all about him in the conflict between Christian empire and pagan barbarism. The life of the mind, the pursuit of virtue, the value of the arts–these are sustained only in a society which sees the created order as proceeding from God’s love, an order which God himself died to save. 

Without these dogmatic bulwarks, man descends into petty competition for money, fame, and control. Why? Boethius gives the reason, in the voice of Lady Philosophy, “Now…I know the cause, or the chief cause, of your sickness. You have forgotten what you are.”

Amnesia is the first quality of paganism. The pagan is the one who has forgotten, who has no past, who is unaware of the words and deeds of his ancestors.

He has lost the answers to life’s basic questions. Ask anyone in the workplace, the street, the coffee shop, the academy, or even the church: what is a human person? What is the meaning of life? What makes our actions good and meaningful? Why is there something rather than nothing? 

While some may acknowledge the importance of these questions, few think they can be answered. Even fewer think they already have been. 

But this is the classical Christian view. For Habersham, and, consequently, for you, if you embrace it, there is a tradition of insights about God, man, society, ethics,and eternity that have been passed down from Homer to Plato to Augustine to Dante to you. Modern man has simply forgotten them.

At Habersham, you have engaged in an act of counter-aggression against the force of cultural amnesia–that is, recollection. You have labored together in a communal act of remembrance, of following the breadcrumbs of the Great Books back to the lost paradise of the good, the true, and the beautiful. You became in small part the memory of the world, seeking to salvage that which transcends the passing, the ephemeral, and the expedient. 

Amnesia regarding foundational truth is not a self-contained problem, but leads into the more dangerous problem of despair. 

When man forgets what he is and seeks what cannot make him happy, he does not simply find himself ignorant and disoriented. Rather, when he cannot understand the cosmos he inhabits nor quiet his longing for joy, he will quit the search for both and will wallow in the carrion comfort of despair.

Blaise Pascal expresses thus the situation of modern man: “We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness.”

To despair is to terminate any pursuit of higher truth behind the curtains of appearance and change, a cease and desist on all activity which seeks to obtain lasting gladness. It is to throw in the towel on the game of life, and to choose the pleasure of fantasy and the comfort of complacent deception over the weight and toil of the real world.

Therefore, as the father says to his son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, so I say to you:

“When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy [there] then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you.”

Man does not rest in his despair. Man continues to live, and, if he cannot have truth or happiness, some other pursuit will compel him; namely, what St. Augustine calls “the lust for power.”

Augustine writes that, “this is the characteristic of the earthly city, that it worships any god who may aid it in reigning victoriously…over the earth not through love of doing good, but through lust for power.” 

When man forgets Christian truth and falls into despair, he always seeks total rule as a substitute for happiness, and this total rule is inextricably linked to the evil one.

While contemporary people seem allergic to imperialism, slavery, totalitarianism, and the trapping of sacrifice and polytheism, the spirit of the old pagan chieftain remains. 

What is modern technology if not a ritual summoning of the old gods of nature, abortion and euthanasia if not human sacrifice, contemporary gender ideology if not a thinly veiled national cult, and the feverish imposition of all these things on their principled opponents other than the long shadow of bloodlust and conquest reimagined?

The city of man has always been the manifest outworking of the spirit of paganism, of an amnesiac disregard for all that has come before, a consequent despair over the very possibility that life is a meaningful or intelligible, and a final, default pursuit of self-glorification and manipulative power.

The city of God, however, is the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church. The Church is the city of God and the image of the Heavenly Jerusalem. This city is characterized by three very different virtues. 

Against the pagan tendency toward amnesia, despair, and the lust for power, the Church, and Habersham as her embassy, deploys the virtues of faith, hope, and love.

Faith is “the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” Theologically, faith is the assent of the spirit to the revelation of Christ.

However, faith is also a fundamental relationship to creation, one which places primary importance on those truths behind and above empirical observation – that is, the historical and the transcendent.

Our faith is an act of memory. When all the world forgets, we remember –remember Him by whom all things were made, remember that it was Him who created and therefore names us,  remember our own primordial disobedience through which death and suffering entered all, and remember that blessed day when Christ transformed our greatest sin into eternal salvation.  

The primacy of memory in the Christian tradition is the reason why it is the last haven of true learning in the West. “He who wishes to learn,” writes Aristotle, “must believe.”

The assertions that old books are indispensable, that tradition has authority, that morality and meaning are not artificial constructs, that self-knowledge is only possible within the narrative of God’s providence–these are the building blocks of wisdom. The virtue of faith is the first vital step against the pagan amnesia which threatens, like the river Styx, to wash over our world.

Yet, knowledge of the truth and memory of the past are lifeless unless they grow into two further virtues: hope and love.

Hope is the bulwark of the Church against despair. It is not, however, a blind, naive optimism in the face of the world’s suffering, a juvenile coping mechanism for dealing with habitual disappointment, or a practice of vague wish-making and finger-crossing in the face of an ambivalent, distant God.

Hope is simply to live as if no act is so reprehensible, no situation so dire, no hour so dark, and no sorrow so deep that God may not suddenly crash in upon it with his grace.

Hope is to believe in what Tolkien calls the eucatastrophe–that is, “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears.” He says, “it is a sudden glimpse of Truth…it perceives…that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.” 

For Habersham and those behind its cause, hope is the certainty that the pursuit of learning and wisdom is an objective good, a stable vessel of God’s grace in society, and a perennially worthwhile endeavor. It is the conviction that though schools like Habersham may be small, possessed of few material resources, and generally ignored by the world, the Lord will use her to radically transform our community and beyond.

So armed against amnesia and despair, the Christian finally opposes the lust for power by the law of love. 

Those who love ask not “How can this world be used for my pleasure” but rather say “what a wonderful thing that this world really exists”. They look on the created order with joy and rapture and say after their God, “It is very good.” They look at the brokenness, shame, and spiritual hunger of their fellow men and find themselves willing like their Lord to suffer any humiliation, loss, pain, or sorrow on behalf of those they love. 

Seniors, your education at Habersham has been one of love. Love is the one thing needed, the one metric by which a life is measured, and the singular commandment which our Lord gave us. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.” In the words of Dante’s Purgatorio, “Love is the true seed of all merit and for all things to be atoned.”

Class of 2024, “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.” Let us reject the prince of this world, his pomps, and his works. Let us set aside our modern inheritance of amnesia, despair, and lust for power. Let us lay hold instead of faith, hope, and love.