How true is the notion that saints (especially Roman Catholic) are pagan Roman gods in disguise?

iori

iori

There are a very small amount of early ones based on them, but the large, large majority of Saints were actual people who were sanctified.
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

Trailboss49 said:
Not Catholic but I'm curious about this after reading the link.
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It's pretty clear that, say, the Martyrs of Japan have no connection at all to pagan Roman deities, so it's obviously false in general (though it may be true in certain specific cases, as noted in the linked discussion). To the extent that there is any substantial similarity between Roman Catholic and pagan Roman practices, it probably has more to do with the fact that non-elite religious practices often involve a greater focus on more local and approachable divine elements than the abstract and overarching gods favored by the elites over anything else. It's remarkable how frequently this sort of thing pops up.
 
Karolus Rex

Karolus Rex

Church Saints tend to be people who were actually Sanctified, but when we talk about local saints, meaning saints only recognised by the local population of a village/region and not recognised by the Church officials, its not unusual for them to draw their basis from an old pagan regional god/deity/spirit that had been popular in the region during the pre-Christian period.

In one of the books I had to read for the Late Antiquity period the historian mentioned that these local saints and their origins were a thing from very early on and that the church officials absolutely disliked what was happening - he gave an example of a small coastal city in Asia Minor (I think it was in Asia Minor) that after the Christianisation had adopted a local saint whose miracles were associated with the sea and that was suspiciously similar to an old sea god that had been worshiped in said city in the past and that the priests did their best to fight this kind of things.

So it really depends on what we are talking about, Church Recognised Saints or Local Saints.
 
theg*ddam*hoi2fan

theg*ddam*hoi2fan

I know that it’s been argued that Norman reverence for Saint Michael was because he filled Thor’s niche from their Viking ancestors (warrior deity, lightning, killed a serpent...)
 

Arcavia

There are still at least some saints who are quite possibly an adoption of pagan gods under Christian guise. A good example is St. Brigid of Kildare, who shares a name, holy place, iconography, and feast day with the pagan goddess Brigid. Whilst some scholars argue that there probably was a historical woman named Brigid, it seems quite clear that many of the pagan goddess' attributes were grafted onto this historical personage.
 

twovultures

Donor
I think one thing to keep in mind with the 'pagan' religious practices is that they valued "right practice" over "right belief". So even though the average saint is not likely to be derived from a specific pagan deity, practices around that saint may very well have continuity from pagan practices. For example, in Peru the celebration of Corpus Christi involves taking statues of saints from churches and parading them around town. This practice is suspiciously similar to the pre-Christian Inca practice of taking the mummies of the Inca elite from their tombs and parading them around.
 
Dante

Dante

twovultures said:
I think one thing to keep in mind with the 'pagan' religious practices is that they valued "right practice" over "right belief". So even though the average saint is not likely to be derived from a specific pagan deity, practices around that saint may very well have continuity from pagan practices. For example, in Peru the celebration of Corpus Christi involves taking statues of saints from churches and parading them around town. This practice is suspiciously similar to the pre-Christian Inca practice of taking the mummies of the Inca elite from their tombs and parading them around.
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In the same vein in Mexico there is a yearly festival where melting snow is taken from the mountains to the church, or some such thing. This practice began with the Aztecs to honor their rain goddess, when the region became christianized they kept the festival and just changed it to venerating the Virgin Mary.
 

mjwebb76

As some people have alluded to all ready I think a key question is whether you would count a saint taking on the attributes particularly associated with a Pagan God/Goddess or do you literally mean some church father scratched out the name Demeter and wrote in Saint Retemed. If its the later, I think there are few examples (except perhaps St. Brigid replacing the Goddess Brigid). On the other hand associating the attributes of a god/goddess with a saint is quite common. The most obvious is the rule of the Blessed Virgin Mary for the Mother Goddess (or Aztec goddesses). Note that in most cases these saints likely correspond to actual people (e.g. Jesus almost certainly had an actual mother and it is plausible her name was Miriam and she was venerated from very early times in the church). As a mass going catholic, I do not find this problematic in the least. Just as St. Patrick supposedly used the shamrock to explain the concept of the trinity associating saints with attributes previously associated with gods can make it easier for people to explore a broader truth.
 
Mr_Fanboy

Mr_Fanboy

mjwebb76 said:
As some people have alluded to all ready I think a key question is whether you would count a saint taking on the attributes particularly associated with a Pagan God/Goddess or do you literally mean some church father scratched out the name Demeter and wrote in Saint Retemed. If its the later, I think there are few examples (except perhaps St. Brigid replacing the Goddess Brigid). On the other hand associating the attributes of a god/goddess with a saint is quite common. The most obvious is the rule of the Blessed Virgin Mary for the Mother Goddess (or Aztec goddesses). Note that in most cases these saints likely correspond to actual people (e.g. Jesus almost certainly had an actual mother and it is plausible her name was Miriam and she was venerated from very early times in the church). As a mass going catholic, I do not find this problematic in the least. Just as St. Patrick supposedly used the shamrock to explain the concept of the trinity associating saints with attributes previously associated with gods can make it easier for people to explore a broader truth.
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I think that this is probably a good explanation for why the Marian tradition is so popular in much of Latin America.

As full disclosure, I am a lapsed Catholic, so I get how other Catholics can be sensitive to this sort of suggestion. For a long time, fundamentalist Protestants have argued that the Catholic Church does not espouse true Christianity, but crypto-paganism.

That does not mean the topic should not be discussed in an objective fashion, of course.
 

Thanksforallthefish

It's not that saints are 1-1 copies of pagan gods, it's that Catholicism and Christianism has adopted pagan practices in many places has adopted pagan imagery and ritual. Even the popular image of God like depicted on the Sistine Chapel stems from Zeus/Jupiter, early images of Jesus were similar to Apollo, and so on.

In the cases of "classical" religions, there hasn't been much more than aesthetics and ritual though. While surely there are some interesting connections, pagan beliefs, theology and worldviews were much different from the Christian ones. The representation of God might be similar to Zeus, but the conception and role of God is entirely different. I dare say there wasn't a relevant syncretism between Christianity and Hellenic religion, rather Christianity replaced it with only some aesthetic and cultural remnants

But there are more interesting cases, in Latin America in particular. To add to what other people said, I've seen some rituals to the Pachamama as well as other Latin American folk saints, and often they have very little in common to the European concept of Catholicism except for names and feast days. For the Andean peoples, celebrating the Pachamama and the Virgin Mary is the same thing and they see no contradiction on it. I think the particularities of those beliefs go beyond simply aesthetics into actual syncretism, and are worthy of study.
 

Tapirus Augustus

Umbral said:
I kind of assumed that the Archangel Michael was an absorption of Mithras.
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I'm pretty sure Michael was a preexisting figure in Jewish tradition.

Overall, some saints would come to encompass certain aspects of preexisting cults, and others would organically develop traditions around themselves that would come to appear similar to pagan cults, but the actual number of saints that are renamed pagan deities is extremely tiny. A lot of rhetoric around the "true pagan nature" of Catholic religious traditions is just Protestant propaganda or lazy new atheist badhistory.
 
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mjwebb76

Mr_Fanboy said:
I think that this is probably a good explanation for why the Marian tradition is so popular in much of Latin America.

As full disclosure, I am a lapsed Catholic, so I get how other Catholics can be sensitive to this sort of suggestion. For a long time, fundamentalist Protestants have argued that the Catholic Church does not espouse true Christianity, but crypto-paganism.

That does not mean the topic should not be discussed in an objective fashion, of course.
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Oh I agree with your point that many Catholics can be sensitive to this issue and I understand why. I am saying it does not bother me since I take the concept of catholic (i.e. universal seriously). I don't have a particular devotion to the saints but if others do and it helps them come closer to the divine who am I to say they are wrong.
 

baldipaul

oreocruncher said:
There's a saint who's based on the Buddha...no really...
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My Catholic priest told me that following Lord Buddha was another way to heaven. He also recommended the Harry Potter series as a Christian allegory. This was at my first meeting to convert from CofE to Catholicism. Mind you seeing as a fair few CofE priests are atheists it's probably a step up.
 
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