Pagans never existed, argues James O’Donnell in his new book on pagans. The blunt self-contradiction of this premise gives both a good taste of the revisionist and polemical aims of O’Donnell’s Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity and also an accurate sense of the book’s curt self-satisfaction, incompleteness, and inconsistency.
The stage is set with a survey of classical religion in broad thematic strokes: the local character of ancient deities and the tendency toward syncretism; the transactional and formulaic character of ancient religious practices; the quasi-human nature of the gods and the relative unimportance of a transcendent divine realm; even a curious indifference to the question of whether religion was true in any logical or philosophical sense. All this is tackled in a flamboyant prose style packed with solecisms and embarrassing slangy asides (“did everyone really believe that the gods got high on barbecue smoke?”). O’Donnell makes it a major point to remind the reader that traditional deities do not in reality exist (“The action was always, unquestionably and unarguably, undertaken in vain, with regard to its stated purposes”), emphasizes the “preposterous creation” of the Egyptian god Serapis, and generally presents any process of religious reinterpretation—from Augustus’s refoundation of Roman rituals to Second Temple Judaism to the Council of Nicaea—as an act of bad faith ripe for debunking.
Whereas many past historians have discerned a final death-struggle between Christians and pagans in the third and fourth centuries, O’Donnell argues that no
