Just Finished Reading: Full Circle – How the Classical World came back to us by Ferdinand Mount

I remember seeing this ages ago in hardback and thinking that it looked vaguely interesting. So when I recently had some money – actually some vouchers from work – to spend I treated myself to the paperback. The author had an remarkable premise – that we are returning to a world that our ancient Greek and Roman ancestors would understand. In many ways, at least according to the author, we are coming full circle, after a 2000 year detour, back to a pagan world. Why you may ask: Simply because of the decline of Christianity especially in Western Europe. Where Christianity declines, he proposes, the natural pagan virtues return as if the intervening millennia had not existed. We are, he seems to be saying, deeply pagan at heart.

It’s an interesting idea – even if not wholly convincing. He starts, rather oddly I thought, by discussing public baths. Big in the classical world they declined heavily after Christianity became the empire-wide religion of choice. Because, he maintains, the new Christians either denigrated the body or thought physical pleasure of any kind unseemly or irrelevant. But the baths never really went away (surviving in the Eastern Empire as Turkish baths) and where reintroduced by, of all people, the Victorians. Their numbers have been steadily growing ever since. Likewise Gym culture which was hugely popular in pre-Christian times. Today even the smallest of towns has at least one gym if not more. This re-engagement with the body beautiful (something again seen as almost unthinkable until fairly recently) has become pervasive as our culture surrounds itself with sexual imagery and is reflected in the belief that virtually ‘anything goes’ between consenting adults. Again these are, the author contends, pagan attitudes rather than Christian ones. Another part of the sensual spectrum is reflected in our obsession with the food we cook, eat and talk about. Foodies are no longer viewed with suspicion but given their own TV shows and best selling books (and the ear of governments).

But I’m not going to attempt to précis the entire book. The arguments the author makes and the evidence he uses to back them up has an impressive range although some links back to antiquity are a bit of a stretch. He is, for instance, too liberal with his interpretation of Greco-Roman science in comparison to today. The Greek idea of atoms, for example, was as far as I understand it not exactly analogous to our own ideas and hardly widely accepted at the time. They might have been groping towards an idea we might recognise but, like their ideas on Evolution, it was a speculation amongst many without any real evidence to back it up.

Overall though this was an interesting argument well presented which made me look at things I consider to be very modern with different eyes. It seems that we are not as forward looking as it first appears. It also underlies, at least theoretically, that our default mind-set (once Christianity has withdrawn enough) is a deeply pagan one. Maybe the Christianity out culture lived through was nothing more than a thin coat of paint applied to a pagan statue. As the paint flaked off over the centuries the pagan statue begins to emerge in all its sensual glory. It’s most certainly an entertaining thought. Recommended.