[Greetings, friends, from Austin! I’ve returned from the Symbolic World Summit in the coastal town of Tarpon Springs, Florida. Before visiting, I had never heard of the town and certainly had no clue that it prides itself on being “Greece in Florida,” boasting the highest percentage of Greek Americans anywhere in the United States. With authentic Greek restaurants peppering every street, neoclassical architecture, and a heavy Greek Orthodox influence, the entire experience—from the food to the people—reminded me of my time on the Mediterranean island of Santorini.
As a brief aside on how Tarpon became so Greek: Apparently, around 1903, a Greek sponge buyer named John Cocoris started introducing cutting-edge equipment and harvesting methods used by expert sponge divers in Greece. When word spread of Cocoris’s antics, a flood of Greek sponge divers poured into the coastal town and earned Tarpon Springs another nickname: the “Sponge Capital of the World.”
But back to why I was in Tarpon in the first place: the Symbolic World Summit hosted by Jonathan Pageau. The conference was attended by around 500 individuals and featured intellectuals, authors, and speakers like Jordan Peterson, Dr. Martin Shaw, Richard Rohlin, Nicholas Kotar, Vesper Stamper, etc. The theme was “Reclaiming the Cosmic Image.” As you might guess from the title, many of the talks touched on ideas I’ve been wrestling with in my essays here (see On Things Gone Missing and On the Discarded Image for two examples).
Of the many talks and topics, one in particular—introduced by Dr. Martin Shaw—caught my attention more than others. It was the idea that society seems to have returned to the days of the Unknown God. As soon as the words left Dr. Shaw’s lips, my mental tributaries activated and sent illumination to the far edges of the branching neural network. Associations and insights—what we sometimes called epiphanies—came online. To explain everything that happened inside me at that moment… to understand the context, significance, and implications of living in an age of the Unknown God, we must go back to Ancient Greece. The place that Tarpon Springs echoes of.
It is there that we begin today’s essay.]
The Unknown God
When Paul arrived in Athens in 51, he found an altar dedicated to an “Unknown God”—an altar he references while giving a speech in the Areopagus before the Athenian elite. The story is chronicled in the Biblical book of Acts 17:22-34.
Many have speculated on the identity of this Unknown God (the Agnostos Theos) and the nature of its significance in Ancient Greece. In 1913, Eduard Norden put forth that, in addition to the twelve principal gods of Olympus and many other minor deities, the Greeks often appealed to an “Unknown God.” To date, evidence of this Unknown God and how important it truly was to the Greeks has been sparse, but we do have references to it by Paul (in Acts) and Philostratus (in The Life of Apollonius).1
For now, we’ll focus on the account of Paul in Acts. As Paul begins his speech to the Athenians, he starts by appealing to their love of an “Unknown God” and tells them he knows the God they are worshipping:
And Paul, having stood in the midst of the Areopagus, was saying, ‘Men, Athenians, I behold that in all things you are very religious. For passing through and beholding your objects of worship, I even found an altar on which had been inscribed:
TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’
Therefore whom you worship not knowing, Him I proclaim to you.’
Continuing on, Paul tells the Athenians that his God is the Lord of all—making every nation of men from one original man:
The God having made the world and all things that are in it, He being Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in hand-made temples, nor is He served by hands of men as needing anything, Himself giving to all life and breath and everything. And He made from one man every nation of men, to dwell upon all the face of the earth, having determined the appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, to seek God, if perhaps indeed they might palpate for Him, and might find Him.
Trying to build trust, Paul then appeals to a few of the poets already in the Greek (Pagan) imagination:
And indeed, He is not far from each one of us. ‘For in Him we live and move and are.’ As also some of the poets among you have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’ Therefore, being offspring of God, we ought not to consider the Divine Being to be like to gold or to silver or to stone, a graven thing of man’s craft and imagination.
In making these references (to Epimenides and Aratus, respectively), Paul approached the Athenians with a language they recognized, trying to make the case that the Christ and God he spoke of is something they’ve seen (incomplete) glimpses of in their own culture. In their gods, they’ve come to know certain aspects of the one true God; in their heroes, they’ve seen the redemptive qualities of Christ at work. Working to bring his point home, Paul finishes with his most controversial point—the resurrection of the dead:
So indeed God, having overlooked the times of ignorance, now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He set a day in which He is about to judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He appointed, having provided a guarantee to all, having raised Him out from the dead.’ Now having heard of a resurrection of the dead, some indeed began to mock him, but some said, ‘We will hear you concerning this again also.’ Thus Paul went out from their midst.2
Why did the Greeks mock him? As Athenians, his audience would have been intimately familiar with Aeschylus’ Eumenides and other works which, in their view, had settled the point… resurrection was impossible.3 But Paul’s implied reference to Eumenides also worked in his favor, for the Greek imagination was familiar with the idea that the Eumenides were not new gods at all but the Furies in a new form, just as the Christian God was not a new god but rather the god the Greeks already worshipped as the Unknown God.
Keeping this all in mind, we are now equipped with the background necessary to ask the question: what did Martin Shaw (and the others at the Symbolic World Summit) mean when they referenced that we live in the age of the Unknown God?
They simply meant that our post-Christian society seems, in some ways, to have slipped back into something like pre-Christian Paganism. We see this in the rise of Stoicism in recent years—a philosophy that started around 300 B.C. and flourished until the 3rd century A.D. (when Christianity became the official religion of Rome). We see it also in the rise of the worship of nature and the use of plant medicine ceremonies.
The ancient Pagan belief systems were built around ritual, “magic,” and the worship of natural forces—either in the deification of nature or the elevation of force (as in the Iliad). In the modern world, this looks like those who worship the world, or nature, as the highest (like those who worship Gaia or Mother Earth)—and those who idolize science and Mammon in their love of power and wealth.
Of course, it isn’t exactly the case that we have relapsed into Paganism, at least not in its previous form. “[H]istorical process [does not] allows mere reversal.” That “is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan... The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.” ”4
There’s no denying that when we look around honestly, we see that we are, once again, living in a world with many gods. In this way, we are like the pre-Christian Pagans. For some, it’s nature and Mother Earth. For others, it’s science or wealth or power or Mother Ayahuaska.
But there is (at least) one key difference between us and the pre-Christian Pagans: where they at least recognized they were worshipping gods of a sort, we seem to insist there are none. Where their world was still enchanted with the idea that there were forces outside their understanding at work, ours is dull. “The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not…” ”5
The Importance of Our Pagan Past
“It looks to me, neighbours, as though we shall have to set about becoming true Pagans if only as a preliminary to becoming Christians…” (C.S. Lewis, Christmas Sermon for Pagans, p. 33 (published in Strand Magazine, 1946).
Since at least the days of Nietzche, Weil, and C.S Lewis (1920s), we’ve been hearing of our loss of something vital. Often, the problem gets diagnosed as something like the Death of God. Christians nod their head in assent at this diagnosis and then add Pascal’s mention of a “God-sized hole” in the human heart to support their case. “If only we could simply go back to the days of Paul, Boethius, or Dante, then all spiritual wounds plaguing the human heart would be healed.”
But this ignores something very important: if the Christian believes in Christ, then they must believe that there was a reason he chose to come at a particular time in history. That something about the days leading up to his arrival was a preparation to fully receiving him. That something about Paganism—with all its myths and legends—was necessary to be fully Christian.
When we talk about the things that we have lost, it is not just religion; it is also our connection with our Pagan past that preceded Christianity. We cannot revive Christianity without first fertilizing the fields of our minds with things that made Christianity possible. We need our roots from Athens as much as we need our roots from Jerusalem. Without the Ancient Greek poets, there would be no Paul; without Plato and Aristotle, no Augustine, Aquinas, or Boethius. There is no Dante without Virgil.
For his part, C.S. Lewis also believed that knowledge of the Pagan and classical authors was an essential prerequisite for the experience of true Christianity. It is only in all the intimations of Christ that came before Him that we can come to see Christ more clearly. Our hearts and our minds must be prepared to see Christ. And it must be prepared by the Pagan ideas and the best of what came before and led up to Him.
Today, we live in a culture where popularized science and political views want to close us off from mystery and wants us to believe that science has settled, or will settle, everything. That this world is the only one there is and the only forces at work in the world are those we can see, touch, and outline with logic. We live in what Lewis called a “a tiny windowless universe… [with] no distant horizons, no mysteries.”
Sure, the room we’re in may be well-lit by the fabricated bulb of science, but without windows, we see nothing of the world beyond to which we belong.6 Drawn like moths to a false flame, we have gathered in a room and turned almost entirely away from the real thing.
Say whatever you want about the pre-Christian Pagans. At least they didn’t do that.
“[I]t is a much greater proof of wisdom and sobriety to speak well of the gods, especially at Athens, where altars are set up in honor even of unknown gods.” Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 6.3.
Acts 17:22-34.
“But when the dust has drawn up the blood of a man, once he is dead, there is no return to life.” Aeschylus, Eumenides, line 647. In making these references, Paul is saying something that contrasts directly with Greek tradition, which thought that bodily resurrection was impossible. This is why, when Paul references it in front of the people of Athens, they scoff at him.
C.S. Lewis, De Descriptione Temporum Inaugural Lecture from The Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University, 1954.
C.S. Lewis, De Descriptione Temporum Inaugural Lecture from The Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University, 1954.
See also https://gratefultothedead.com/2013/10/23/c-s-lewis-on-pagan-philosophy-as-a-road-to-christian-faith/.
As a Neo-Ancient Hellenic polytheist, I'd say this is dead on
As a Christian who studies Ancient Greek Literature and Myths for their degree, I am SO grateful for the insights from this post! Thank you for writing and sharing it.
Personally I believe that at the core of most any religion is something so very human - and that people tried to express it in the means they had. As I am surrounded by a lot of atheist friends, I cannot help to repeat what a priest ended a sermon with last Advent Season (conerning the uncertainties of life); "We do not know better. But we can hope better." And if faith brings me nothing but that it is I win, I believe.
Yet to turn past the teachings of my own religion, to understand other cultures and their morals, their ways of worship and how they explained the world... I believe it can make us so, so much more human. It can create a beautiful bond of connection.