Of threads and primates
An apolutionary gaze upon the religious apestry
Some quite profound questions in intellectual history are framed in the most disarmingly simplistic of terms. We are reminded of the child who, upon first visiting an art gallery, poses the deceptively naïve query: “But why are all the people in the paintings so very grey?” The answer, of course, involves centuries of varnish, the slow oxidation of pigments and the fall of light through dusty air, a complex history hidden beneath a simple observation. A similarly charming, if conceptually precarious, question has of late been whispered in the corridors of divinity schools and across the digital agora: “If Christianity evolved from paganism, why are there still pagans?” The formulation, a deliberate echo from the creationist’s perennial challenge to Darwinism, holds a certain charming allure. It is, however, rather like asking why the existence of the chimpanzee should be taken as an affront to the dignity of Homo sapiens. To address this requires more than a blunt refutation, it demands the adoption of a new lens, a fresh vocabulary for an ancient process. Let us propose two terms for the academic lexicon: apolution, to describe the branching, adaptive development of religious systems and apestry, to conceptualise the vast, interwoven historical product of this process.
The fundamental misstep in the initial query is categorical by nature, a confusion of linear progression for complex divergence. It implicitly champions a model of supersessionism, a neat, teleological relay race in which paganism hands its baton to Christianity before expiring gracefully at the track’s edge. Reality, as is so often the case, was considerably less tidy. The early Christian movement did not emerge ex nihilo into a spiritual vacuum, nor did it simply consume and replace its predecessors in a straightforward act of theological predation. Rather, it underwent a process of intense and rapid apolution. This term, marrying the simian with the notions of evolution and solution, aptly describes the manner in which a belief system adapts to new cultural environments, selecting and incorporating useful traits from the surrounding ideological ecosystem while modifying its own inherited structures for survival and dominance.
The initial apolutionary niche of Christianity was the unique and highly specific world of Second Temple Judaism, a milieu of eschatological expectation, covenantal nomism and a radical, aniconic monotheism. This was its genetic and doctrinal starting point. Its subsequent explosive spread across the Hellenistic and Roman world represented a dramatic migration into a new and fiercely competitive ecological zone, a veritable rainforest of spiritualities. Here, the apolutionary pressures were immense. To thrive, indeed to survive, this new faith had to adapt. It did so with a vigour that would impress any naturalist. It developed sophisticated theological structures, utilising the philosophical language of the Greek Logos and Platonic forms to articulate its core mysteries in a manner intelligible only to the educated classes of the empire. Its organisational model began to mirror the robust bureaucracy of the Roman state itself. Most strikingly, it engaged in a widespread and canny policy of ritual and calendrical syncretism.
This was not, as its detractors might claim, a simple act of borrowing but a strategic apolutionary adaptation. The human psyche, accustomed to the rhythmic, agricultural paganism of the solstices and the seasons, does not easily abandon its need for cyclical celebration. Thus, the birth of the Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, on the 25th of December, became the sanctioned celebration of the Nativity of the Sol Iustitiae, the Sun of Righteousness. The profound, visceral devotion to the Great Mother, whether as Cybele, Isis or Diana, was subtly transfigured into the burgeoning cult of the Theotokos, the God-Bearer. Local spirits of place, the genii of grove and spring, were reassigned as patron saints, their feast days and sacred sites seamlessly incorporated into the new liturgical calendar. This is apolution in its most potent form: the selection of pre-existing cultural traits that confer fitness and their incorporation into a new, more robust synthesis. The faith that emerged was not a rejection of its environment but a product of it, a triumphant organism that had successfully made the resources of its habitat its own.
The tangible result of this millenia-long process is the grand apestry of Western Christendom. This apestry is a vast and multi-panelled hanging, rich with borrowed threads and repurposed designs. When gazing upon it with an informed eye, we see a complex historical palimpsest. The very stones of a great medieval cathedral like Chartres stand as a testament to this apestry. Its architecture speaks the language of Platonic light metaphysics, a system of thought entirely foreign to the Aramaic-speaking world of Jesus, yet here employed to lift the soul towards the divine Lux Nova. The figures carved around its portals tell biblical stories but their stylised forms and hierarchical composition owe a clear debt to the traditions of Roman imperial sculpture. The apestry is woven through with these threads, each one a silent witness to an apolutionary encounter, a moment of adaptation and synthesis. Pulling on one thread, the date of Christmas, the attributes of a local saint, the symbolism of the Easter egg, we find it connected to a pattern far older and more religiously diverse than the official orthodoxy might comfortably acknowledge.
We might further consider the apolutionary pressures that led to the Great Schism of 1054 or the Protestant Reformation. These were political squabbles, speciation events, driven by geographical isolation, differing environmental pressures (the collapse of the Western Roman Empire versus the continuity of Byzantium) and distinct selective advantages. The Roman Papacy developed its claims to universal jurisdiction in the power vacuum of the West, a trait that would have been maladaptive in the intact imperial structure of the East. The Reformation, in turn, was a dramatic punctuated equilibrium in the apolution of Western Christianity, where traits like sola scriptura and individual conscience were selected for in the new environment of printing, rising nationalism and a perceived corruption in the central religious authority. Each of these branches, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and the myriad Protestant denominations, represents a distinct apolutionary pathway from a common ancestor, each weaving its own complex panel in the broader Christian apestry, using similar materials but creating strikingly different patterns of authority, liturgy and soteriology.
This apolutionary model, of course, extends far beyond the Christian story. It provides a remarkably useful framework for understanding the entire phylogenetic tree of world religions. Islam, for instance, represents another dramatic apolutionary branching from the Abrahamic root. Forced to adapt to the conquest of vast, culturally sophisticated empires, it absorbed and refined the administrative genius of the Persians and the philosophical riches of the Greeks, weaving them into its own powerful, uncompromisingly monotheistic design. Its relationship to Judaism and Christianity is an indirect descent of common ancestry followed by divergent apolution. They are sister branches on the same tree or neighbouring, albeit often contentious, panels in the same grand apestry. We might even identify a form of apolutionary convergence between, say, Islamic Sufism and Eastern Christian Hesychasm, where similar mystical yearnings led to the independent development of analogous practices like dhikr and the Jesus Prayer, despite their distinct theological starting points.
Similarly, the modern phenomenon of pagan revivalism, the rise of Wicca, Druidry and Heathenry, is the baffling persistence of an ancient lifeform as a fascinating case of what might be termed convergent apolution. From the shared, ancestral human yearning for a connection to nature and the numinous and utilising the raw materials of historical scholarship, poetic imagination and a modern desire for spiritual autonomy, these movements have evolved forms that functionally resemble the ancient patterns. They are filling an ecological niche left vacant by the perceived abstractions and institutional failings of the dominant religious organisms. They are far from the direct, unbroken lineage of classical paganism (the original Neanderthal, to labour our biological metaphor), a conscious and thoughtful reconstruction, a new, self-aware branch sprouting from an old, dormant root, adding a vibrant, new section to the ever-expanding apestry. Their very existence is a testament to the ongoing nature of the apolutionary process, demonstrating that the loom of belief is never silent.
The initial question, “Why are there still pagans?”, now dissolves into irrelevance when viewed through this apolutionary lens. Their existence is an inevitability. The apolution of human spirituality is a branching, ongoing process, not a linear race to a single finish line. The grand apestry of belief is still on the loom. New threads are constantly being spun from the raw materials of contemporary experience; old threads are rediscovered, re-dyed and woven back into the pattern. The continued vitality of paganism, the dynamism of Islam, the profound wisdom of the Dharmic traditions and the perpetual, internal reformation of Christianity itself are not so much problems to be solved but rather data points to be expected in a healthy, diversifying ecosystem of belief. Asking why there are still pagans misunderstands the fundamental nature of religious history, which is not a story of replacement but of perpetual adaptation and diversification.
We are all, in the final analysis, participants in a single, grand and gloriously unplanned apolutionary experiment. Theist and atheist, pagan and priest, we are all weavers, adding our own stitches, however clumsy or brilliant, to the immense, bewildering and ultimately beautiful apestry of the human search for meaning. It is a tapestry whose full design transcends the comprehension of any single contributor, a fact which should inspire a humble and curious awe. The true magnificence of the apestry lies in the perfection of every single panel as well as in the breathtaking, complex and endlessly fascinating whole. In contemplation, we will understand that we are all cousins in this endeavour, more than just bound by a uniform belief, we are bound by a shared participation in the grand, messy and endlessly creative process of apolution.