Word: paganization
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Manhattan last week might be proud of its "three miles of Christmas trees" along Park Avenue, but that pagan procession of lights was dim and chill compared with the magnificence of the Nativity Plays which almost every Renaissance Italian witnessed. Machiavelli mentions one so elaborate that its preparation kept all Florence busy for six months...
Soul & Body. High point of The Apostolic Fathers is the "Letter to Diognetus." Written in the form of a letter to a pagan to describe "this new group or institute" which calls itself "Christian," its moving characterization of the sect is still a counsel of perfection. Excerpt: "Christians are not different from the rest of men in nationality, speech or customs; they do not live in states of their own, nor do they use a special language, nor adopt a peculiar way of life. Their teaching is not the kind of thing that could be discovered by the wisdom...
...many at the auction, Doré's paintings looked like tremendously outsized Sunday school chromos darkened by varnish and dirt. In the general murk, Moses could be discerned gesticulating at Pharaoh, a sad-faced monk daydreamed over an organ, pagan gods fell in a heap beneath a cross, and Paolo and Francesca embraced in hell. Critics wondered how the great illustrator could possibly have turned out such daubs...
...Dare to be yourself," wrote Andre Gide in his diary at 22. "My mind is becoming voluptuously impious and pagan. I must stress that tendency." If he felt like a pagan, he still acted like a Protestant; he carried a pocket Bible everywhere with him. But he was always seesawing between the assurances of prayer and the doubts of spiritual confusion. Twenty-one years later, he confided to his journal: "Catholicism is inadmissible. Protestantism is intolerable. And I feel profoundly Christian. . . . From day to day I put off and carry a little farther into the future my prayer...
...vegetables that they need. Sister Superior Clodagh's prayers are interrupted by flashbacks to a love affair. Sister Ruth does not renew her vows (which are renewable annually in this Order); she pours herself into a red dress and makes a maddened dead-set for the Englishman. The pagan atmosphere is too much for the nuns; by the time the rains set in, they forlornly abandon St. Faith's for the convent back in Calcutta...