The Pagan Who Paved the Way to Christianity

Virgil is a pivotal figure in Western Civilization. He stands as a bridge between the pagan and the Christian worlds.

If you’re a Christian, you’re probably familiar with the story of redemption that unfolds throughout both the Old and New Testaments. The law of the Old Testament prepared the Jew for Christ. But the gentile Romans and Greeks had no law. Who prepared the way for them? Looking back, it’s undeniable that Virgil served that purpose. Although the pagans lacked God’s law, he upheld pietas as a way of life, leading Theodore Haecker to call Virgil the proponent of an “Adventist paganism”.

Advent is the penitential season of the Christian calendar when the Church prepares for the coming of Christ. Every year at this time my mind returns to Virgil, because he did for me what he also did for the Roman world: he prepared me for Christianity. My conversion follows directly from the experience of first reading the Aeneid.

Even though St. Augustine famously attributed his love of Virgil to young and sinful desires, there was still the admiration of Virgil that preceded his Christianity. And in the great history of Western literature, Augustine finds himself in the minority. Virgil’s influence is inescapable, and thankfully, many of our greatest minds have known this.

Dante: “O light and honor of all other poets,
May my long study and the intense love
That made me search your volume serve me now.
You are my master and my author, you –
The only one from whom my writing drew
The noble style for which I have been honored.
You see the beast that made me turn aside;
Help me, o famous sage, to stand against her.”

G.K. Chesterton: “The themes of Virgil were specially and notably the normal themes and nowhere more than in morals; piety and patriotism and the honor of the countryside. And we may well pause upon the name of the poet as we pass into the autumn of antiquity, upon his name who was in so supreme a sense the very voice of autumn, of its maturity and its melancholy; of its fruits of fulfillment and its prospect of decay. Nobody who reads even a few lines of Virgil can doubt that he understood what moral sanity means to mankind.”

Roger Scruton: “Social obligations arose not from contracts only but from solemn vows, and a kind of eternal jurisdiction was implied in this—as in the fate of “pious Aeneas,” as he departed forever from the flames of Troy. Virgil’s hero had vowed to perpetuate his race and culture by founding the city of Rome; and his piety consists in an inability to forget this vow, which follows him on his travels, canceling every wish that wars with it.”

Victor Hugo: “In god-like Virgil, sometimes lines are crowned
By a foreign and peculiar glow.
For he, then dreaming that which we now know,
Sang nearly at the hour Christ first came down.
His soul, though unaware, took color
From weak and far-off oriental fires.
His heart, already born into the world entire,
Shone on the birth day of the Christ-child wonder.
For God willed Bethlehem’s first light
First of all to make the eternal city bright.”

J.R.R. Tolkien: “It has been thought that the influence of Latin epic, especially of the Aeneid, is perceptible in Beowulf, and a necessary explanation, if only in the exciting of emulation, of the development of the long and studied poem in early England. There is, of course, a likeness in places between these greater and lesser things, the Aeneid and Beowulf, if they are read in conjunction. But the smaller points in which imitation or reminiscence might be perceived are inconclusive, while the real likeness is deeper and due to certain qualities in the authors independent of the question whether the Anglo-Saxon had read Virgil or not. It is this deeper likeness which makes things, that are either the inevitabilities of human poetry or the accidental congruences of all tales, ring alike. We have the great pagan on the threshold of the change of the world; and the great (if lesser) Christian just over the threshold of the great change in his time and place: the backward view…”

C.S. Lewis: “All through the poem we are turning that corner. It is this which gives the reader of the Aeneid the sense of having lived through so much. No man who has once read it with full perception remains an adolescent… Virgil, with no intention of allegory, has described once and for all the very quality of most human life as it is experienced by any one who has not yet risen to holiness or sunk to animality. It is not thanks to the fourth Eclogue alone that he has become almost a great Christian poet.”

T.S. Eliot: “Aeneas’ end is only a new beginning; and the whole point of the pilgrimage is something which will come to pass for future generations. His nearest likeness is Job, but his reward is not what Job’s was, but is only in the accomplishment of his destiny. He suffers for himself, he acts only in obedience. He is, in fact, the prototype of a Christian hero. For he is, humbly, a man with a mission; and the mission is everything.”