Propaganda Art

“Yet now the Enlightenment too, like ancient thought before, finds its enduring legacy threatened by a fundamentalist competitor.”

When a totalizing ideology begins to emerge in a broken culture—a kind of mid-decline Explainer of Everything, if you will—it cannot become dominant until it disparages and renders untouchable other ideologies that were present before it. It is not content to be one idea among many. It is The Way. Old narratives, stories, and histories, if they cannot be erased or forgotten, must be revised and co-opted to lend credibility.

When Christianity won its first emperor in 313 A.D., and from there, gradually asserted itself as The One Truth destined to defeat competing theisms, the Christians used their newfound influence to shape Roman and post-Roman Europe by aggressively attacking, distorting, and erasing pagan myth, architecture, and practice. In the late 4th century, for instance, the archbishop of Constantinople St. John Chrysostom led a mob to loot and destroy the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Toward the end of his life—as paganism was outlawed throughout the Byzantine Empire—this same John Chrysostom, in a celebratory tone, would repeatedly shout to his subordinate monks, “Where now is Plato? Nowhere! Where now is Paul? In the mouths of all!” Greco Roman gods and goddesses were recast as “long-forgotten saints” (with Mars becoming St. Martin, Venus becoming St. Venera, Demeter becoming St. Demetrios, etc.), and the statues of these dethroned deities were smashed with hammers and rocks. Later, Dante would appropriate Virgil for his purposes, and Aquinas would appropriate Aristotle for his. In the 14th century, Chaucer would even have “visions” of beloved pagan heroes in various states of duress admitting fealty to the one true God, who was punishing them for eternity.

For 1,700 years after the near-disappearance of paganism, Christianity—in its Catholic and Protestant forms—would dominate intellectual and artistic expression from Russia to the United Kingdom (and sporadically in Turkey and in Spain), until challenged by the Enlightenment, a movement which championed rationality over revelation and representative government over arbitrary hierarchies. The arrival of the Enlightenment in the 18th century—and the industrialization that resulted two centuries after—brought revolutions in technology, architecture, medicine, transportation, agriculture, and communication, albeit not without severe side effects. On the back of such progress came two world wars, the invention of the atom bomb, climate change, and globalization as a cultural and economic disruptor. But there is no contesting that even with these concerning events, the philosophers, inventors, and freethinkers of Europe and the American colonies ushered in vast improvements on what human life was like before them.