On Being a Pagan Paperback – January 1, 2005

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.

Don't be fooled by the goofy wizard on the cover of this fantastic book: it's definitely not a Llewellyn book and it's certainly not for the fluff bunnies, monkeys or fairies (although these strange creatures could benefit immensely from studying it's content between naked romps around the fire pit!).

Alain de Benoist delves deeply into the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity and ancient paganism, analyzing what differentiates them in philosophical terms by expounding his research and thinking on such themes as space & time, monotheism & polytheism and good & evil. He explores Nietzschean ideas like nihilism & will to power and proposes that a return to paganism in a renewed form is the solution to rid our culture of the rotting corpse of a God who's stagnant moralistic taint has infiltrated our society's secular institutions. de Benoist makes a compelling case when he examines how these defunct values influence everyday things such as politics, wars, sexual mores and an obsession with safety and well-being.

This book sheds cleansing light in dark places, lifts old stones and reveals the insects that scurry and hide! A must read for any self-respecting pagan who is looking for more than fantasies, parties and hugs from their path.

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.

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.