At 10:57 AM 9/25/99 -0400, you wrote:
>On a time, as the poet said, I came to believe that the word "pagan"
>derived from "pagus", the term for the circumscription headed by a
>"civitas". Is that correct?
that's what i learned in graduate school from books as well as teachers.
> Secondly, that the term "pagan" came to be
>attributed in the western reaches of Europe within the frontiers of the
>Roman Empire to rural populations who remained partly non-Christian after
>the cities were converted, and that, with the usual mixed and often
>hostile attitudes characteristic of antiquity's urban population or its
>leaders toward working farmers (one fully transmitted to us along with the
>opposite or georgic tradition), it soon developed an essentially
>pejorative meaning. Is that also true?
yes. with the added benefit of being able to turn the tables and call the
philosophers "pagans", a reversal of meaning that truly must have boggled
the minds (and infuriated) the major losing party at the time of the
germanic invasions -- the non-xn elite.
>And thirdly, that the formal
>Christianization of western Roman rural folk awaited the age of the
>barbarian invasions when that group linked up with the officially accepted
>religion of the rest of the indigenous population partly out of solidarity
>and partly to avoid a worse fate, notably indiscriminate enslavement at
>the hands of the invaders.
this is more complex: not only do the motivations of indigenous populations
vary, but one must also ask why the ruling invaders adopted xnty. the
really interesting resistance, to my mind, are those of the still "tribal"
societies of the northeastern regions (saxons, frisians, etc.) who resisted
xnty because it meant the advent of roman hierarchical./stratified social
structures.
>Is any of this truthful?
>John Mundy
to which i'd also add that despite the "formal" conversion of the early
medieval period, we have no evidence of widespread popular interest in and
commitment to xnty until the turn of the millennium. anyone want to
contest that one?
richard
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