THE PAGAN HEART OF TODAY’S CULTURE, by Peter Jones

A Brief Book Summary from Books At a Glance

by Steve West

 

Summary

 

This booklet looks at how postmodernism, Gnosticism, and polytheism combine to produce the New Spirituality that is having such a significant influence in our contemporary culture. Gnosticism flourished in the 1st through 4th centuries, and postmodernism flourished in the latter part of the 20th Century and into the 21st. Strangely, these worldviews connect and help us understand our contemporary pagan society.

Postmodernism refers to a rejection of philosophical and rational modernism (i.e., it rejects the intellectual commitments of the Enlightenment). In the Enlightenment, Reason was set up as an ideal, and religion was dismissed as superstitious nonsense. Postmodernism rejected this Enlightenment view and rejected as false all totalizing ideologies and absolute metanarratives. Postmoderns engage in deconstruction, working to undermine any claim of absolute or objective truth. In doing so, they use reason, make an absolute truth claim, use circular reasoning, and contradict their own premises. Given the atrocities and wars of the 20th century, postmoderns have made tolerance an ultimate virtue, and this has included tolerance of various forms of spirituality.

Postmodern spirituality rejects both atheism and classical theism. When religion is deconstructed and objectivity rejected, then everything can be god (i.e., pantheism is the preferred view). God is seen not as a transcendent being but as an immanent Spirit, and any individual can have special, immediate communion with the spirit-god. We know this god not by revelation but through mysticism and mystery. Nature is divinized, and worshiping Nature is seen as the approach that will save us from the environmental crisis. Those who are trying to lead us forward in this progressive way are actually leading us back to pagan mysticism and pantheism. The worship of a divinized, pantheistic Nature is referred to by some as the Perennial Philosophy. . . .

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