Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Paganism in the Medieval Catholic Imagination

In the years since the publication of Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home, several initiatives have been organized within the Catholic Church to explore practical avenues for explorations and implementations of the moral ecotheologies expressed in that document. One such event was the 2019 Synod of Bishops on the Pan-Amazon Region, a meeting broadly dedicated to addressing the specific ecclesial, social, and ecological needs of communities in the Amazon basin which produced several working documents that build on Francis' vision for an "Integral Ecology" while addressing pastoral particularities of the region. In response, various forces from within the Church condemned these documents as heretical by virtue of its supposed "pagan" and "pantheist" content. While high-placed clerics Cardinal Raymond Burke and Bishop Athanasius Schneider argued that these synodal documents had diminished the uniqueness of human dignity and endorsed nature-based spiritualities by emphasizing the unity of Creation and evoking the figure of “Mother Earth,” critics in the Catholic media sphere asserted that the document’s generally positive framing of Indigenous lifeways amounted to an endorsement of pre-Christian pagan religiosity.

These accusations call attention to an emergent debate within the modern Church that merits concern and exploration. How has it that one faction of the global Catholic community seems ready to embrace a moral vision which accounts for the non-human, the ecosystemic, and the culturally particular while another element of the community feels doctrinally justified in their condemnation of such theologies based on their allegedly “pagan” character? If contemporary scholars of Catholic moral theology hope to understand this debate and take steps towards a fruitful deepening or resolution of the conflict, we must examine the historical role of “the pagan” in the Catholic imagination.

Over the last 2000 years, the idea of the pagan as a nature-worshiping religious “other” against which the Church reified its institutional identity gradually developed across the pages of theological and pastoral literature. Though there are many moments in this conceptual history which shed light on the eco-ethical debates of today’s church, there are few so illuminating as the Early Middle Ages – a period in which missionaries began to extensively document and compare their encounters with the pagan and newly-Christianized peoples of central and northern Europe. The depictions of paganism found in this body of pastoral literature are as mysterious as they are intriguing, obscured by hagiographic valorizations and cultural mistranslations but rife with surprising glimpses into the religious lives of rural populations that stood astride the border between true paganism and true Christianity. In works like the letters of Pope Gregory I, the treatises of Martin of Braga, and the sermons of Caesarius of Arles, we see a religious landscape in flux, shaped by the forces of syncretic creativity, ritual fluidity, and encroaching orthodoxy. The “paganism” of Catholic imagination first found its roots in this landscape, as did the earliest liturgical forms of Catholic ecotheology.  If we are to understand the role of nature-based spirituality, syncretic religious formations, and Indigenous Catholic theologies in the present day, we must first understand the role of “the pagan” in Medieval Catholic pastoral literature.

To that end, this paper will identify and explore three common qualities consistently associated with the imagined pagan “other” of the European Early Middle Ages which merit particular attention in light of current Catholic eco-ethical concerns.  First, many pastoral texts written about and for medieval European audiences depict pagans as culturally backwards and morally degenerate. As we will see in works like the sermons of Caesarius of Arles, clerics in this period often framed so-called pagan practices like seasonal revels and divination as indicators of personal or cultural vice, characterizing pagan practitioners as fundamentally lacking in the Christian virtue and decorum of their more civilized urban counterparts. Second, there is a tendency in this genre to directly associate rural pagans with the natural world. This is done both linguistically and theologically; in works like Martin of Braga’s “De Correctione Rusticorum” (“Reforming the Rustics”), missionaries observed a profound spiritual relationship to trees, springs, and entire landscapes among the peasants of Europe. In addition to an outright condemnation of their allegedly idolatrous worship of these elements, figures like Martin imagine their quasi-pagan parishioners to be inordinately attached to natural elements and irrational in their reverence of the land. Lastly, many works of pastoral literature and correspondence from this period indicate a lack of clear distinction between an unadulterated paganism and religious forms which reflect Christian/pagan syncretism. Over the course of the medieval period and Christianization efforts grew in geographic scope and efficacy, the matter of labeling a given individual or community “Christian” or “pagan” became more complicated. As we will see works like the correspondence of Pope Gregory I with European missionaries, the lack of clear boundaries between Christian and pagan religious identities and practices in this period had a profound effect on emergent clerical notions of pagan alterity. Having explored these three “ways of seeing” European pagans in the medieval period, the paper will conclude with an invitation to consider how these framing continue to inform Catholic visions of paganism – and nature-based spiritualities more broadly – today.