Parousal

A C Grayling is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, an organisation now most notable for its anti-Pope rally at which there were more people on the platform than in the audience. It has only very recently stopped campaigning against Christmas as a public holiday, as it now often claims that it never did. It is still battling on over Easter, but it has sold the pass.
However, while the list of Honorary Associates is a catalogue of contrived eccentrics, it also bespeaks certainly the best-connected, and therefore also presumably the richest, voluntary organisation in the English-speaking world.

Anyway, Grayling was at it again in yesterday's Observer, showing his age (although, to be fair, even he is not actually this old) with sub-Dan Brown stuff about how the early Christians expected the parousia to happen in their lifetimes, only adopted Hellenism after that had failed to come to pass, got their morality from the Pagan Greeks as a sort of borrowing or theft, you know the sort of rubbish. He must know that none of it is true. But he also knows his audience. He declines to point out which of slavery, pederasty, infanticide and the games he wishes to bring back from the era about which he so enthuses. But that is probably because wherever the influence of Christianity has declined, these things have indeed re-emerged as endemic and respectable. Such is certainly the case in the Postmodern West.

Nor, of course, did Grayling mention that the natural-scientific method, as we now understand it, only arose because the Medieval Church condemned, by Her own authority in interpreting the Bible as Divine Revelation, the theories of eternalism, cyclicism, animism, pantheism and astrology that had resurfaced in their Aristotelian forms. Science presupposes, but cannot prove, the existence of a rationally investigable order in the universe. It derives that presupposition from Christianity.

Scientism is itself a form of Postmodern relativism, destroying the intellectual and cultural basis of science as surely as radical pluralism is self-invalidating in its own claim to be an absolute truth; as surely as radical eclecticism is self-invalidating in its refusal of the mediation of whole systems of thought by whole cultures, even including the whole radical eclectic system as mediated by the whole radical eclectic culture; as surely as historicism is self-invalidating in its denial of the enduring validity of any truth, even including the asserted truth of historicism as a proposition; and as radical pragmatism is self-invalidating in its failure to recognise the fundamental human need to be more than pragmatic alone. There are certainly those who say the natural-scientific method is just another meme. I do not believe that any more than A C Grayling or Richard Dawkins does. But I both know how to counter it (which Dawkins apparently does not, although Grayling must) and am prepared to do so.

Catholicism is the fullness of the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire, each of which now exists only as Christianity, of which Catholicism is the plenitude. Judaism and Islam are Semitic reactions against this, the former no less than the latter, and if anything even more so, since it explicitly denies even Prophethood to Jesus. There are also reactions by ostensible appeal to the Classical tradition apart from the Church. The Church without which, as much as anything else, the Classical literature would have been entirely lost.

And the initial recapitulation makes possible the endless identification and inclusion of the (ontologically identical) true, good and beautiful elsewhere, a making possible which depends on the loss of no part of the fundamental Biblical-Classical synthesis. Neither Christmas nor Easter derives from any pagan festival at all, whatever some middle-brow pub bore may identify himself by telling you. But it matters not a jot that, uniquely, the English word for Christ's Passover has such an origin, and it is only to be expected that they meet the human need for winter and spring festivals respectively. That need is of God, and it is for God. God duly provides for it by, in, through and as His Church.

Of course churches throughout the world, and not least throughout Europe, are built on converted communities' pre-existing holy sites. Of course there are shrines of Our Lady and the Saints where once were centred the cults of all manner of Saint Paul's elemental spirits, which are Saint John's fallen angels. Even if certain folkloric practices may, in some corrected form, have been carried over, nevertheless no properly instructed member of the Church is thus practising any such cult, while the Church, as such, actually cannot do so. There are, however, no such folkoric continuations in these Islands. As it happens, next to nothing is known of the pre-Christian religions here, and the charge of paganism is a purely Protestant one against things that are Medieval, and usually Late Medieval at that.