Word: paganization
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...resulting flurry of indignation included both factions. Wrote Layman Alan Frost of Folkestone: "Such a view can only be based on the presumption that England is still a Christian country . . . Is it not time [to see] that England is pagan, and that missionary methods are the only ones which can be used?" A Lancashire correspondent had a pointed argument for the other side: "St. Augustine told Bishop Julian that if he refused to baptize children the men would spit in his face and the women would throw their sandals at his head. Take note that women are wearing sandals again...
TOURISTS from the U.S., swarming through Italy this summer in greater numbers than ever, keep coming across ancient deities in Renaissance dress. Because U.S. culture has little indigenous pagan art-largely confined to Indian reservations and museums-Americans are often somewhat shocked to find pagan gods at ease in Christian churches and palaces. But the shock soon turns to delight, for Renaissance artists could make the gods seem as at home in church as children at a party, and use them for the greater glory of Christianity (see color pages...
Actually, the pagan gods died, as gods, long before the collapse of the ancient world. Cicero's De Natura Deorum treats them as 1) historical personages. 2) cosmic symbols, and 3) allegories. Thus translated from the realm of blind faith to that of reason, they became deathless elements in the heritage of Western man. Yet in medieval times they led a shadowy life indeed. The church treated them as peasant superstitions (the Roman pagus was a country district), or turned them into demons. Satan, for example, inherited hooves and horns from the great god Pan. It remained...
Parnassus in the Vatican. Agostino Chigi, the Rockefeller to 16th century Rome, was a firm believer in astrology (a pagan holdover), yet pious too. The meaning of the decorations he ordered for his burial chapel in Rome's Church of Santa Maria del Popolo is obviously that the lives of men are subject to the planets, which are in turn subject to God. Raphael, who painted the pagan divinity Galatea for Chigi's palace, also made the Vatican shine with Christian and pagan subjects, depicting the company of the saints and a synod of ancient sages opposite...
Raphael is too sweetly radiant for modern taste, which prefers the mystery of Leonardo or the power of Michelangelo. But he, more than either of them, blends pagan joy in life with the loving-kindness of Christianity. Through Raphael's genius the old gods were reborn into a gentler, better world than the classical-an achievement that marked the apogee of Renaissance...