by Beatrice Scudeler, The Critic
Are we “repaganising”? Louise Perry says yes. Tom Holland thinks we’re still a deeply Christian culture. If we are indeed shedding the last vestiges of Christian morality, is that something to celebrate or fear? Nadya Williams enters the debate with her new book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic, in which she draws convincing parallels between pre-Christian and contemporary morality. At the core of the work is her argument that “the default, history shows, has been and continues to be the embrace of death”.
This, for Williams, is most evident in the treatment of what she terms “the useless ones”: people who, being unprofitable for the economy, were often despised and neglected in pagan societies. For example, parents exposed their unwanted newborns — especially if visibly disabled — leaving them to die unless rescued and adopted. The infirm were also seen as an economic burden, “worth more dead than alive”.
Similarly, “since unmarried women could not produce legally born children who might grow to contribute to the war effort … they had no value in the pre-Christian pagan worldview”.
Williams’s scope is wide. She vividly retells stories from Homer’s epics and ancient Greek tragedy through to the martyrdom of the early Christian saints Felicity and Perpetua. If she doesn’t home in on a time or place more specific than the “ancient Mediterranean”, it’s because she doesn’t need to. Her point is precisely that across different ancient cultures, the absence of any concept of innate human dignity remains consistent.
As we lose a sense of us all being made in the image of God, Williams argues that it is unsurprising if we should become alienated from a Christian framework which seeks to protect the most vulnerable. “Human lives,” she writes, are considered “a necessary cost whenever there is no philosophical or theological framework for valuing them … it is difficult to overemphasize just how revolutionary the idea of the imago Dei was in antiquity and continues to be within all philosophical systems of world history.” It’s Christianity that is the historical anomaly.