The thesis of Molnar’s intriguing book can be stated quite briefly. In his own words, ‘the pagan worldview persists behind the Christian worldview and … favorable circumstances, among which the most important is the fading of Christian truth as symbolized myth …, allow it to manifest itself with a renewed vigor’ (p. 60). Molnar detects just such a revival of paganism in 20th-century culture.
Molnar begins by analysing the conflict between Christianity and the paganism of pre-Christian Hellenism. He does so by painting contrasting pictures of the pagan sage and the Christian saint. This is a refreshing approach to familiar material and gives a useful alternative to the usual concentration on the intellectual components of Christianity and paganism. Chapter 2 perceives a re-emergence of paganism in the intellectual tendencies of 14th- and 15th-century catholic Europe. Molnar focuses in particular on the inroads into European thought made by Averroism and negative theology.
Taken together, chapters 4 and 5 provide us with a thumbnail sketch of neo-paganism (Molnar’s term for the 20th-century revival of elements of pagan thought). It is contemptuous of monotheism and the notion of a divine monarch: gods are mere expressions of the human condition. Instead it favours a return to a pantheistic worldview and its corollary, a cyclical view of time. Where it differs from pre-Christian paganism and classical Hinduism is in its assessment of man’s place in the universe. For the pagan sage and the Brahmin the ultimate meaninglessness of reality suggested that ‘salvation’ was by withdrawal from reality. For the neo-pagan the same ultimate meaninglessness encourages him to identify a human élite with the Absolute: thus the future is created by the will of a select band of heroes and illuminati.
Nietzche remains the outstanding spokesman of neo-paganism but Molnar claims that its influence pervades our culture thanks to the work of such men as Levi-Strauss, Jung, Hesse and Heidegger. As evidence he points to what he sees as its influence in the social sciences, natural science and literature. This points to a major weakness of his analysis. The phenomenon called neo-paganism is so diffuse that Molnar has to build up his picture of a neo-pagan from a wide variety of writers and scholars of quite contradictory outlooks. In spite of this, his book serves as a useful reminder of the dangers of accommodating Christianity to secular culture.
The pivotal chapter 3 and the concluding chapter set out his explanation for the perceived retreat of Christianity in the face of a renewed paganism. He argues that Christianity, insofar as it has set faith and reason in opposition, has favoured the development of a stultifying rationalism. The victory of Christianity involved the desacralization of the world and the suppression of the mythic imagination in favour of belief in the supernatural. The present revival of pagan thought is in large measure a reaction against the very successful rationalist heresy of Christianity.
Molnar is right to insist-that genuine Christianity rests on the interdependence of faith and reason and that in order to resist the pagan temptation the churches need to re-affirm their faith in the supernatural. However, his idea of what constitutes genuine Christianity will not commend itself to evangelical readers: he bemoans the passing of a traditional Roman Catholicism in which Latin was a sacred language, priests were sacred men mediating between God and the laity, and the consecrated host was transubstantiated. In short, his answer to the powerful appeal of neo-pagan beliefs and symbols is a return to Tridentine ritualism.
