On the Pilfering of Festivals

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat. Certain atheists don't like it much and would rather celebrate... well, what do atheists celebrate? The illusory epiphenomenon of consciousness? Chesterton:

I would not read the works of Comte through for any consideration whatever. But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day.

...There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy. Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered it. They have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world's merriment to rally to.

Defy an atheist. Party today.

...OK, flippant. Tho if atheists want to make headway they could do worse than take GKC's advice. And, from what I can see, are doing far worse than taking GKC's advice. Non-religious festivals can and do occur - the Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, Martin Luther King Day, Independence Day; we celebrate Guy Fawkes day to commemorate an oppressed minority trying to blow up politicians - although what's actually celebrated is that the politicians survived and that some members of the oppressed minority got brutally tortured, which seems a little awry to me. But atheism doesn't (as far as I know) do much to push this kind of holiday, and certainly had little to do with their origins. (I can't imagine in what language Dawkins/Hitchens type atheists could venerate MLK - a Christian minister who framed his agenda in specifically religious language, and he's supposed to be some kind of hero? So much for religion being a blight on the world.)

My actual point, whereof I desired to write: there will doubtless be talk, as there always is, of What Everybody Knows To Be True, namely that Christianity shamelessly stole all paganism's festivals, with "all" apparently meaning Eostre and Yule (and the harvest festival being kept as well, but people don't care about that as much these days). Two minutes' thinking is enough to throw this dubious assertion into question, and I feel vaguely ashamed that I never did, until I read Mark Shea's cheerful demolition of this thesis.

The obvious problems to the assumption (as I made it) are: (1) Why would a religion that started in Palestine and later became the state religion of the Roman Empire steal a festival - Eostre - belonging to the northern barbarians? (Answer: it didn't. Easter was what the Jewish Passover turned into in Christianity, which is why it's called pascha in Latin and Greek, and something similar in a lot of other tongues too. If you do not believe me, look up what Easter is called in other languages - the links from the wikipedia article are helpful here. Only in a handful of Germanic languages is there a [vowel]-st-[vowel]-r name pattern.) (2) Did the pagan liturgical calender really consist chiefly of praising the sun in the depths of winter, springtime fertility frolicking, and partying a lot when the harvest came in? Because if so, then yes, Christianity ripped off Paganism wholesale; but if not, then the Christian calender was shaped by a Christian agenda as to what should be celebrated and what not; and where certain themes occurred that had Pagan counterparts, Christianity allowed some continuity of tradition in the specific holidays. Not really a big deal.

The reason it never occurred to me to ask these questions, I confess, was because I thoroughly approved of festival-theft, and was very disappointed to find that What Everybody Knows was not, in fact, true. I approved because Paganism had some things worth keeping; and compared to the modern world's approach, Christian thievery was positively respectful. Yule/Sol Invictus was a festival of hope reborn, of the sun reappearing, of winter losing its grip. From a Christian perspective this hope prefigures, or echoes, the hope of Christ. (The parallel with Sol Invictus may be overstated, though - in the Mediterranean basin, where the winter was less brutal, it wouldn't have had the meaning that Yuletide did. This is probably why the Romans got along without it so long - Sol Invictus didn't appear until the 3rd century AD.) Easter was a festival of renewal and rebirth, which dovetailed reasonably well with the remembrance of the death and resurrection of Christ. Thus, there was some thematic continuity. The Pagan may be irritated by the Christian religion replacing their own, but I would have said that at the least, we found things in their religion worth stealing and upgrading. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; there are points of contact; something was preserved.

Now consider the modern Western world.

The Holiday Formerly Known as Christmas is not about light shining in the darkness, and the darkness overcoming it not. It is not about looking up into the dark winter sky and declaring that its time is passing, that winter is a fever about to break. If there is hope, it is the hope of presents (no, by any means, a bad thing). Christmas isn't just commercialised, it now breaks out in the superstores in October, or even earlier, and the bland consumerist cheapening of the Christ Mass constitutes a period of mortification longer than any in the Christian calender.

But, to do it justice, The Festive Season still has some core of recognisable good - "for the family", "the Christmas spirit", and so forth - a remnant drive to love and generosity that is worth praising. Easter? Easter is now about chocolate.

In comparison to this, I would regard it as a point in favour of Christianity that it stole pagan festivals, if the degree to which it did so weren't so overstated. Modern life has produced any amount of Cool Stuff that we ought to be grateful for, but its inability to preserve anything it didn't create is pitiful. Recall Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse - the Christian English had kept the pre-Christian White Horse from becoming overgrown, but the Pagan Danes had neglected it; and Alfred's condemnation applies to the modern remains of Yule and Eostre, as well:

Therefore the curse is on you,
on you and all your kings,
not for a fire in Ely fen
or that your gods are nine or ten,
but that only Christian men
keep even Heathen things.

And now to find coffee.

EDIT: I should confess that I was never one for affixing too much importance to holidays and traditions of great antiquity, at least when I was younger, tho I loved carols and affirmed the significance of what was celebrated; we always spent Christmas and Easter with relatives, and I've never yet attended church at Christmas as a result. But it always bothered me that people say "ZOMG Xianity stole pagan festivals" as if it somehow discredits the Christian festival, or is in any way a Bad Thing rather than a flaming indictment of modernity by comparison.