The pagan temptation.

The Program Temptation

by Thomas Molnar(Eerdmans, 201 pp., $11.95)

I CAME UPON this book the same weekI began reading C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia to my children. What a happy coincidence! Won't their encounter with a Golden Lion and a cunning White Witch, whose spell of perpetual winter without Christmas is broken at the cost of Aslan's blood, be just the thing to help them overcome the evil enchantments of a paganism that, on Professor Molnar's showing, haunts the age like a recurring bad dream? Paganism remains the one real rival to the faith of Christianity today. What better imaginative antidote to it than Lewis's fairy tales: so many splendid stories strewn with glints of that Other Story, about which, to paraphrase his great friend Tolkien, there never was a tale told that men would rather find was true? To go to Narnia is to discover anew the immense and sundering truth of the Christian Tale, which the desiccated of our time have been too long without hearing.

Thomas Molnar doesn't put it quitelike that in this sober and scholarly critique of the pagan world view. But his thesis is perfectly consonant with the aims of the baptized imagination, i.e., to recover and renew a sense of vision appropriate to men who have been redeemed. Indeed, to the extent men believe the extraordinary claims set out in the Gospels, books like this one need not be written.

What The Pagan Temptation doesset out to do is demonstrate the dangers that an etiolated Christianity courts in its unwillingness to anchor itself to the solid rock of its ancient credal traditions. Under the circumstances, argues Molnar, the attractions of a resurgent paganism become increasingly manifest. The pagan temptation is not something that sprang full-blown out of some cultural vacuum: "Among the shocks that led to its development and strength . . . perhaps the most powerful was the surrender of the Christian churches to nihilism and the forces of decomposition.'

Look around, he invites, and see ifthe churches have not fallen into headlong retreat, madly profaning the very tablets entrusted to them by God.

The scene in any city in the Westernworld, and increasingly in the countryside as well, persuades us that religion has been thoroughly and systematically excluded from the active life of the citizenry. Old churches look like museums, new ones like factories. Priests and nuns look like busy bureaucrats, particularly since they hardly ever display signs of their sacred calling. Sermons, like newspaper editorials, deal with political, social, and economic issues. Christian schools imitate secular ones . . . In no sector of government, law, economic life, or the media--or even literature and art--can one find traces of civilization's Christian component.

What predictably follows upon widespreadinstitutional religious collapse is plain enough: The hunger for certitude regarding the heavens, human life, and conscience having been neglected by their priests and bishops, people not unnaturally turn to other sources, of which the most persisting have been pagan and occult:

Today, the occult penetrates the lowereddefenses of the Christian tradition, and those whom it persuades are the masses of men and women who miss the sacred symbols that used to be present everywhere as identifying signs of their civilization. They feel malaise at the apparent absence and unreality of the supernatural, which through many centuries translated itself into the language of symbols.

When the whole point of modernitybecomes that of progressive desacralization --a world in which, to cite one of its chief architects, Karl Marx, "all that is solid melts into air'--is it any wonder people turn to alchemists and astrologers who lay claim to powers that even ideology cannot dissolve? An infatuation with technology and science at the expense of faith and the sacraments will certainly lead to enhanced efficiency, but it can yield no ethos on which the soul will find nourishment. At least the shamans and the yogis promise curative magic for all that ails us.

Of course, one trouble with a returnto paganism is that no one can go back there any more. Once the Incarnation happened, and the whole sensational story of a God Who made the world living and dying in that same world in order to raise it to the dignity of a sacrament, paganism became insupportable. It exists only as temptation now. "One of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity,' observed Chesterton in a piece of apologetics unsurpassed in this century, The Everlasting Man, "is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilization has been able to be really human.' Before Christ there was, at best, only the vast and healthy sadness of heathen men; but Christ having come, the great god Pan must die, and for men to try and revive him now would only mean their death. "A void was made,' said Chesterton, "by the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology.' It is to the distinct credit of Thomas Molnar that he shows us in this earnest and able book the peril we face in re-opening that void which Christ came once and for all to fill.