PAGANISM. - From pagus, village, that is, a grouping of farms whose association constitutes a vicus. The Paganalia (v.) were the agricultural festivals that took place in the pagi, and the paganus was the peasant or rustic inhabitant of the pagus.
In its current sense, p. designates not a precise religious system but the whole body of the polytheistic currents and animistic practices of antiquity, in antithesis to Christianity. In Rome, paganus, an inhabitant of the plain, is opposed to montanus, an inhabitant of the hills; and it also has the sense of civilian, townsman, as opposed to miles (Suetonius, Oct., 27; Tacitus, Hist., I, 53; Juvenal, XVI, 33; Tertullian, De corona, 11). After the victory of Christianity, p. came to mean the whole body of beliefs and practices of the ancient religion, by then vanquished and left to survive in the small rural centers: «Deorum falsorum multorumque cultores paganos vocamus» (Augustine, Retr., II, 43; cf. Cod. Theodosianus, XVI, 10; Isidore, VIII, 10). To this meaning, which refers above all to cultic practices, must be added that relating to belief in the power of the elements (στονάς): «Paganos elementis esse subiectos, nulli dubium est. Solent pagani ad elementa confugere dicentes haec se colere, quibus gubernaculis regitur vita humana» (Pseudo-Aug., Quaest., 27: PL 35, 2275).
The "elements" that the ancient world venerated at its twilight were not only the four fundamental ones: water, air, earth, fire, whose various combinations produce the phenomena of the sensible world, but also the elements of the astral world: sun, moon, stars, whose action is understood as a real force, which is directed or appeased through the practices of the cult. This heritage of the old p. is prolonged in the practices and in the superstitious astrological, animistic and spiritualistic beliefs of present-day popular p.
In Latin liturgical usage, p. is equivalent to non-Christian; in the litanic prayer of Good Friday the Church invites prayer for the pagans, that, having abandoned idolatrous worship, they may turn to that of the true God. In its current sense the term refers especially to the so-called peoples of nature. In Hebrew terminology, non-Israelites are called ethnic, gentiles (τὰ ἔθνε), inasmuch as they do not belong to the chosen people but to foreign nations; in the Greek Byzantine Church the pagans are called Hellenes, understanding by Hellenism the whole body of non-Christian beliefs and practices.
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Nicola Turchi