On Being a Pagan [Paperback]

Alain de Benoist (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2005

In this small masterpiece, the great French thinker Alain de Benoist claims that only the pagan deities of ancient Europe offer a spiritual recourse to the present religious malaise. The guilt, the fear, the narrow petty-bourgeois obsession with well-being, and the self-loathing love of the Other that has left Western man defenseless before the destructive behaviors of our nihilist age derive from the alien belief system that Christianity introduced to the West. They are not part of the pagan spirit that lives still in the Rig Veda, the Iliad, or the Edda. Benoist helps us rediscover these ancient wellsprings and the fonts from which future greatnesses may again flow. But let the reader be warned, his On Being a Pagan proposes no folkloric or New Age "return to the past," but rather a Nietzschean recurrence in which the future bears all the promise of our distant origins—and thus of another great beginning.

—Michael O’Meara, author of New Culture, New Right (First Books, 2004)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Alain de Benoist was born on 11 December 1943. He is married and has two children. He has studied law, philosophy, sociology, and the history of religions in Paris, France. A journalist and a writer, he is the editor of two journals: Nouvelle Ecole (since 1968) and Krisis (since 1988). His main fields of interest include the history of ideas, political philosophy, classical philosophy, and archaeology. He has published more than 50 books and 3000 articles. He is also a regular contributor to many French and European publications, journals, and papers (including Valeurs actuelles, Le Spectacle du monde, Magazine-Hebdo, Le Figaro-Magazine in France, Telos in the United States, and Junge Freiheit in Germany). In 1978 he received the Grand Prix de l’Essai from the Académie Française for his book Vu de droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (Copernic, 1977). He has also been a regular contributor to the radio program France-Culture and has appeared in numerous television debates.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Ultra (January 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0972029222
• ISBN-13: 978-0972029223
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #687,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pleased, February 2, 2006

By 

Edward R. Clark (Baton Rouge, LA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On Being a Pagan (Paperback)

As one used to Julian and Sallust, I always searched for a pagan philosopher who could take the thought of the ancient world into the modern, and joust with the predominant Judeo-Christian gestalt. Benoist is the man for this. His arguments in favor of a pagan world view are a welcome antidote, and have a high seriousness sadly missing elsewhere.

As an instructor of Classical thought, I was specifically looking for a work that would take that thought into the modern world. This work answered that need.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars European critique valuable but insufficient, December 30, 2008

By 

T. Kalamaras "Scrivener" (Midwest USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: On Being a Pagan (Paperback)

Wonderful a book as this is, as I read and reread it I wonder more and more how much of it is really about "paganism" versus middle-eastern monotheism, than how much it is a sort of contemporary continental European critique of American Protestant culture.

A true French scholar like De Benoist has wise things to say and critique of American Protestantism. But he attributes those faults to an imagined and overstated "Judeo-Christianity" that does exists less as a unitary Western social reality, but rather as a perceived ideological construct that enthusiasts of Europa have been chucking rocks at since Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche the "alien creed" called "Judeo Christianity" is one more Protestant than Catholic, one that is more a product of Post Reformation "De Hellenization" of Christianity that is the essence of Protestatism particularly more extreme versions deriavative of Calvin and Zwingli. De Benoist does not seem to make the crucial differentiation that Evola did when he admitted the Roman Catholicism is not the same religion as Protestantism.

Though De Benoist does admit that the idea of a Man-God like Christ is a thing that is very "Greek," in a word, he overstates the Semitism of Christianity. He uses the geographic metaphor of the desert to compare the monotheistic idea with its vast universal inevitability. In this he doesnt take stock of the subsidiary and syncretic nature of Roman Catholicism that is very tolerant of local difference without loing dogmatic order and hierarchical discipline.

De Benoist also fails to address the extent to which Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics were incorporated into Christianity by Augustine and Aquinas. Hellenism already was operating on a universalistic metaphysics even before Constantine, and in the time of the Empire the dualistic Mithraism was the rival of early Christianity. Where is the accounting for the failure of paganism in the late Empire? Not here.

De Benoist is a good critic and this is an invaluable read for people of European ancestry who want to authentically engage their religious traditions and not just pretend that they started with Constantine. But by the same token we need to understand what has happened since then. Likewise we can't pretend that we can just recreate the lost mysteries or accomplish the heroic spirit of our ancestors by drinking mead from horns in oak groves. We need real religious community that provides a feasible way out of our bad situation and neither pagan revivalism nor insufficient cultural critique alone will accomplish it. Indeed we should consider the religions of our ancestors, but to jump past a thousand years of European Roman Catholic unity right on back to the pagan days is perhaps to do a big disservice to a not inconsiderable part of our own heritage.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Book Of The Year, April 3, 2005

By 

Kevin S. Schemerholtz (Sunny Oakland, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On Being a Pagan (Paperback)

This dense, extremely erudite, and well researched book brings the European New Right's finest and most challenging ideas together and points them in a new direction. If you like Spengler, Heidegger, Evola, and Nietzsche, and want to see how they still have a great deal of impact - then look no further. This superb text is an example of the very highest in contemporary writing and thinking about religion, culture, and politics.