Ancients and Moderns

While ancient philosophy continues to live on, and indeed to flourish, in the modern discipline of philosophy, the religions of ancient Greece and Rome have left very little discernible trace upon the religions of the modern world. It was only because, and only to the extent that, the pagan religions of Greek and Roman antiquity were radically transformed, almost beyond recognition, into the vast, eclectic world religion of Christianity, that anything of them at all managed to survive the fall of the classical world. The result is that, while the Christian Church shrewdly adapted its practices to the traditional conditions of the mass pagan world it found itself in and while the Christian Fathers elaborated a brilliant theoretical synthesis of certain elements of pagan intellectual culture with Judaeo-Christian theology, religion in the modern world is so different from what it was in antiquity that it requires considerable effort to appreciate ancient religiosity without a feeling of bewilderment, repulsion or superiority.