Epstein, History, And Human Nature

And: Shaw's Triumph; God & Telos; Humanities' Woke Captivity; Nixon Vs Deep State

Here are two tweets to consider. The first, by Paul Anleitner:

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about the Epstein accusations:

We only find them morally reprehensible because of Christianity.

Before the spread of Christianity, “civilized” Greek and Roman elites openly flaunted underage s*x slaves. This was normal.

Emperor Hadrian built an entire city in honor of his favorite boy.

We’ve heard for decades that Christianity is a barrier to moral progress, but if you undercut the moral foundations of Christianity from the West, culture reverts back to pagan norms.

And this response, from Paul R. DeHart:

If one reads Tom Holland’s Dominion, David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions, Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People, or Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin…or Friedrich Nietzsche, this is precisely the conclusion one reaches. Indeed, look at the life and philosophy of Michel Foucault for both a moral frame that cuts the other way. You can accuse Christians of hypocrisy. But you have to accuse pre Christian pagans of, well, consistency in their sexual exploitation of the young. Thank God pagan morality was overthrown. Those who think otherwise haven’t studied the matter with any care. As Sarah Ruden argues, all that stuff about women and head coverings was actually about stopping exploitation of unmarried woman, which was endemic and pervasive in the Roman culture from which his converts came.

I’ve read all those books, and on this them, particularly recommend Ruden’s Paul Among The People. She’s an academic classicist who sets out to defend St. Paul from accusations that he’s a sex-hating bigot. She writes in stunning detail about how Paul’s teachings on sexual morality were received as completely liberating by lowborn women and male slaves of that time. They were treated by the Romans as Epstein treated young women. I was a Christian when I discovered the book, right after its 2010 publication, and though I agreed with Paul’s teachings, naturally, I had no idea at all how socially revolutionary they were in their day. I once cited Ruden in this 2013 essay about how the decline of Christianity is affecting the erotomania of our culture:

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

I can’t recommend Sarah Ruden’s book highly enough. And, the other night, shortly after my return from Norway, I re-watched Robert Eggers’s 2022 film The Northman, which is very violent, but worth watching if you can handle that sort of thing, if only because he treats Viking pagan religion seriously. Here’s a clip of the scene in which the young Viking prince Amleth is initiated into the religion of his tribe. Though he concedes that that particular scene is the most fictionalized one in the film, Eggers, who is not a Christian, made a point of being true to what the Vikings really believed, and how they lived. Here’s an interview with Eggers, in which he talks about what he and his Icelandic screenwriter got right about Viking history and religion, and where they improvised. And this is from a New Yorker profile of Eggers about the movie:

“The Northman” might be the most accurate Viking movie ever made. “This is kind of a dream for me,” Neil Price, an archeologist at Uppsala University, in Sweden, who worked on the film, said. “I doubt that I will ever encounter someone who has the eye and the concern for it that Robert does.”

And this:

One day last fall, Blaschke texted Eggers, asking what he was most afraid of. Eggers gave three answers: being alone; being ambushed and stabbed to death; and surrendering to the occult. “I have met a lot of, like, occultists and witches and hippies who have a way of thinking that, like, I would want to be able to go there but would be afraid to,” he told me. His films function as a cage, a form of protection from himself. “I can explore it in my work fully and fully commit to being, like, inside it, without getting lost to it and never being able to come back,” Eggers said.

As with the first time I saw The Northman, I finished it this time with a prayer, thanking God for sending Christ to save those people from their violent religion of vengeance and sacrifice. Their world, that of the Vikings, is more true to unredeemed human nature than the one we created from Christianity. But it’s important to remember that we cannot re-create Eden, that there will always be something of the wild man in us. That the skull always exists beneath the skin. This is a lesson of history:

I once asked Eggers why all his films are set in the past. He directed me to a quote by John Dryden, the seventeenth-century poet: “For mankind is ever the same and nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered.”