NOVAE MILITIAE

Another great contribution from Anthony Esolen: http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2006/02/gaia_loves_me.html .

Some may think Esolen is being unnecessarily provocative and mean-spirited here, but I would answer that Esolen is merely highlighting what is the darkest aspect of Wicca and other forms of Neopaganism: their lack of a basis by which good can be distinguished from evil.  In the end it's all about Nature with its beautiful side and its deathly side being two complementary parts of a pantheistic whole.  As I wrote in my article, The Puerility of New Age Paganism ( http://novaemilitiae.squarespace.com/periodic-musings-blog/2005/12/4/the-puerility-of-new-age-neopaganism.html  ) :

Like drugs and radical politics, the new religions are rooted in irrationalism, which is why they will no more deliver the promised goods than LSD and leftist politics did. Religion scholars point out that if the underlying pantheism of these religions is true, moral nihilism and anarchy follow. If God is metaphysically diffused in everyone and everything, then he is in Pol Pot, nuclear weapons, birth defects and earthquakes.

Jewish columnist Don Feder put the problem with Aquarian religion succinctly:

You don't get goodness from Earth worship. Nature's ethical lesson is sovereignty of the strong and utter indifference to suffering. You don't get virtue from self-adoration, a cardinal tenet of the New Age, which leads to narcissism and the exploitation of others. You don't get morality by standing in a mystic circle . . . handling magic stones or playing Merlin. All this does is allow the devotee to feel spiritual without absorbing the moral lessons of traditional religion or practicing sacrifice and self-restraint.

Another Jewish writer puts the problem in somewhat different but related terms: "If the universe and its processes are birthed by the (female) deity, . . . then nature and its cycles are held to be an expression of the divine will. In such a cosmology, good and evil lose all meaning, everything being good in its proper time."

This all might be dismissed as the biased analyses of outsiders, were it not for the fact that even neopagan writers such as Wiccan author Starhawk (a.k.a. Miriam Simos) seem to admit as much: "The nature of the Goddess is never single . . . . She is light and darkness, the patroness of love and death; . . . She brings both comfort and pain."

To her credit, Starhawk faces up honestly to the obvious problem stemming from such a belief:

Theologians familiar with Judeo-Christian concepts sometimes have trouble understanding how a religion such as Witchcraft can develop a system of ethics and a concept of justice. If there is no split between spirit and nature, no concept of sin, no covenant or commandments against which one can sin, how can people be ethical? By what standards can they judge their actions, when the external judge is removed from his place as ruler of the cosmos? And if the Goddess is immanent in the world (including human beings), why work for change or strive for an ideal? Why not bask in the perfection of the divinity?

If the total immanence of the pantheistic deity espoused by Aquarians means that light and darkness, love and death, and comfort and pain are all equally manifestations of the divine, why indeed not bask in that "perfection?" Starhawk attempts to deal with her self-created dilemma: The neopagan love for life, she asserts, implies a high environmentalist ethic. The Goddess, while immanent, "needs human help to realize her fullest beauty." Justice, she adds, "is an inner sense that each act brings about consequences that must be faced responsibly."

This, of course, is all shameless question beginning. If the goddess is equally manifested by evil (darkness, death and pain) as well as good (light, love and comfort), then why are corporate polluters to be considered wrong or immoral? Why the drive to "realize beauty" when the ugly and base are just as much part of nature as the beautiful and the lofty? And if the goddess by logical implication is equally at work in Hitler as well as Mother Teresa, to whose values are we to be held "responsible," since there is no "external judge" to arbitrate between them? Clearly, Starhawk has not successfully defended neopagan pantheism against the charge that it leads to moral nihilism. And we understand well the puzzlement of Catholic philosopher Alasdair McIntyre over just why anyone chooses to be a pantheist.

Just as we understand why Esolen sees all this to be the philosophy of "numbskulls."   Why should a neopagan grieve over the "small ones as they stiffen on the bier?" 

Look not for the tender heart

Should your little child depart:

Heart and head of stone are hers,

Image of her worshippers.

Where, in the defense that Starhawk sets forth, is a basis for saying it really does matter "whom we swindle, slay, or screw?"

Yes, it is indeed a religion "fit for fools and feminists."  If saying so is provocative and mean-spirited, so be it.  We have Elijah as our guide in our provocation and mean-spiritedness, and Jesus as our Lord, whose life, ministry, death and glorious resurrection gives us not only a basis for the distinction between right and wrong, and good and evil, but also for the hope of eternal life upon an Earth more glorious than the most ardent Earth worshipper could imagine.  That is the Blessed Hope we have as we grieve over the small one who stiffens on the bier.