Even so, another book published this year (two in fact), by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Fornari, moves in what appears to be a completely different direction. In Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Fornari argues that any benign, romantic interpretation of the god Dionysus is nonsense. Violence was not exceptional to the Greek god of wine but constituent. To prove this assertion, Fornari draws on the history of philosophy, archaeology, biblical studies, anthropology, and theology from Mesopotamia to modernity. Fornari’s two volumes, the achievement of a lifetime, are richly informed by René Girard (1923–2015). Fornari applies and updates the great French anthropologist’s theory—Christianity’s exposure of sacralized violence—with systemic and creative precision. Which is to say, if Girard commendably cited Fornari in his classic I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Fornari returns the favour here in spades.

In essence, Fornari shows that Thomas Mann’s revelatory moment in The Magic Mountain, in which the cult of Dionysus is premised on child dismemberment, is perfectly correct. He gives us all the data we need to confirm Mann’s intuition of the cult’s “terrible bloody center.” Fornari considers scholars who would hesitate to make these connections to be infected with a “customary ideological distrust of Christian sources.” Among Fornari’s most revealing discoveries is that the Eleusinian secrets, spoken of with great reverence today by those who promote psychedelics, are really not secrets at all. We should take the early Christian thinker Clement of Alexandria, probably himself a disillusioned Eleusinian initiate, at his word. Eleusis was really the cult of Dionysus in disguise, and this cult always entailed sacrifice, even if that sacrifice at a later date became more symbolic.

Fornari relies in particular on Origen to make his case for the ancient Christian sea change in morality. In his debates with the pagan Celsus, Origen—while conceding opportunistic conversions among some Christians—isolates a hitherto untapped spring of universal mercy that irrigated a parched world. Celsus, Fornari shows, was incapable of thinking past the possibility of vindictive deities. In Fornari’s work, the Christian revolution becomes, just as in Tom Holland’s Dominion, a documentary fact, one that most people take for granted today, even when they claim to be opposed to Christianity.

This brings Fornari to grapple with modernity. In an earlier and shorter translated volume, A God Torn to Pieces, English readers were already offered a teaser of Fornari’s grand thesis in this respect. Therein Fornari upends the many books that present Nietzsche as some kind of friendly intra-Christian critic. Nietzsche was not attacking Manichaean corruptions of Christian faith (as does Michael Martin). Fornari inveighs that Nietzsche was indeed attacking Christ himself, and in so doing Nietzsche got his wish: he became the god Dionysus—and, like the god Dionysus, Nietzsche was accordingly dismembered (that is, delivered to the psychic fragmentation of madness). But seeing Fornari’s insights nestled in a longer, two-volume history is much more satisfying and makes his insights more convincing. “It does no great service to the prophet of Dionysus to deny him the tragedy that is his, and is his authentic legacy, in which the entire Western world has been reflected without recognizing it.” Indeed, “nobody offers a more tragic and eloquent testimony to the significance and inevitability of Christ’s cross than Nietzsche, who comes to identify with it totally.”

Rather than criticize Christian approaches to sexuality, Fornari believes we should celebrate the elimination of the hieros gamos, which was sexuality’s deification. If Jews and Christians are less enthusiastic about sex than many today would like them to be, this is because they are resisting its ritualized intensity and its pairing with violence in the classical world. Fornari offers a moving meditation on the Virgin Mary’s fulfillment of pagan myth: “The many Pasiphaes forced to give birth to their Minotaurs find their redemption in Mary, as do the countless women condemned to be prostitutes and sacrificial victims.” Fornari can say this “not because [Mary] is herself [the] center but because she takes us to it.” Indeed, to return to Madison’s living room, just to the right of the portrait of Christ, another Dutch painting offers a classic depiction of the interior of a church with a woman modestly nursing her child on the ground (a Reformed proxy for Mary). It almost seems to be an answer to the bare-chested girl, exposed and vulnerable, in the Pan painting, and is a fitting illustration of Fornari’s point.

It is not difficult to speculate what Fornari would make of Madison’s parlour contrast between Dionysus and Christ. Only one of these paintings, Fornari would surely argue, represents the kind of America that most Americans hope for, whether Christian or not. Only the Christ painting evokes self-sacrifice, regard for the downtrodden, love for one’s enemies. The other, jolly as its surface may appear, symbolizes an America with the lesser trodden underfoot. Fornari’s proof for this, no doubt, would be slavery. Madison hated the institution of slavery, but the execution of a slave was, to speak in Girardian terms, the founding murder of his estate. Madison never freed his slaves; his debts, like Thomas Jefferson’s, precluded the realization of this ideal. And what better justification for this arrangement is there than Dionysus?

More than a few ancient mosaics show the wine god’s entourage whipping the dark-skinned foreigners that Dionysus conquered. In one such mosaic on the island of Cyprus, Pan is even given the whip himself. Christianity surely had its own justifications for slavery, but ultimately such doomed vessels would be wrecked on the sharp shoals of the New Testament itself. There was no such mitigating mercy, however, in the rites of Bacchus (Dionysus’s Roman name).

As it happens, however, we need not choose between Michael Martin’s pro-Dionysian Christian vision and Giuseppe Fornari’s justified attack on the god. The Christian tradition is wide enough for both. Some modern advocates of Bacchus, insofar as they instinctually resist sacrificial violence, unknowingly smuggle Christian contents into their arguments; but Michael Martin is different. He is too sophisticated a thinker to be unaware of the extent to which his benevolent view of Dionysus is possible only because of the Christian revolution. Moreover, as if ceding ground to Martin, Fornari argues that it was very much the case that the best of the wine god was redeemed in “propitious contaminations” of the Judaic and Christian traditions. Even the Eucharist depicted in Madison’s painting of Christ is, for Fornari, “the mystic union of Demeter’s cereals with the wine of Dionysus.”

And this is not even to mention the great tradition of the propitiously named Dionysius the Areopagite (ca. 500), the Christian Platonist with a kinder, less severe approach to the body than standard ascetic approaches, even to the point of offering an early theology of the body himself: “The many parts of the human body can provide us with images which are quite appropriate to the powers of heaven.” The late-antique poet Nonnus, moreover, happily composed both Dionysian epics and Christian ones. But such qualified Christian embraces of Dionysus were crafted in a world where Gregory of Nyssa could make a metaphysically consistent attack on slavery. Closer to our own time, there is C.S. Lewis: “I wouldn’t have felt very safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls,” explains Susan in Prince Caspian, “if we’d met them without Aslan.” In short, the Christian order offers the love of wine and sex (within the bounds of chastity) and a passionate protest of slavery and the racism that still follows in its hideous train. But what happens when the lion is no longer present and we are left with the drunken Bacchus alone?

Reading the culmination of Martin’s trilogy alongside Fornari’s doubleheader is like taking a long weekend away from the turf struggles of jostling public opinion. One returns to the digital fracas refreshed, less offended than amused that Christianity is blamed for a presumably morbid focus on sacrifice when it was in fact sacrifice and violence that the religion effectively ended, enabling us to create fables of benign, “earth-loving” paganism that did not actually require blood. To minds moulded by news algorithms that feature the failures of Christian faith with calculated intensity, Fornari’s and Martin’s uplifting of the religion’s truth may seem nonsensical. But both authors, having examined the plate tectonics beneath our shifting cultural surface, forestall any such critique. For Fornari, “there has ever thrived a persecutory Christianity in perpetual contradiction with the gospel message.”

There are many servants of Dionysus, in other words, who claim the name Christian, and many self-professed pagans who, in their repudiation of violence, secretly serve the Lamb. Martin is equally unblinking when assessing the damaged state of Christianity, which “has been haunted by a Gnostic disdain for the flesh, as much as it has tried to overcome it.” And yet his trilogy is a gold mine of sources (a great number of them Protestant) that offer the corrective. In short, Martin very much believes we need to be saved from Christianity; but only Christianity is up to the task.

Still, the further we get from participation in, or even simple memory of, Christ’s final oblation, we seem to require fresh ones. With our present divisions in mind, Fornari writes, “Quite clearly Christianity . . . can only be on the side of the losers . . . on the side of those who make history by being forgotten, while the rampant globalitarianism in which we live triumphs across the board.” On this, Martin appears to be in agreement. Despite his embrace of the Christianized god of wine, he is stone-cold sober regarding the challenges that new technologies, irresistibly enhancing our phones and our factory farms, have presented.

Even so, just as one leaves Madison’s home today, before one exits to enter the reconstructed slave quarters, there is another painting on display: the Holy Family escaping into Egypt. Bedecked in yellow and red, Joseph exhibits passions that are vibrant but controlled. Caretaker of the Christ child, he quietly represents what to some is an impossibility: Christian masculinity redeemed. In coming decades, many may look back with longing to the kind of masculinity represented by Joseph, a nostalgia triggered by unsavoury encounters with a post-Christian masculinity to come. Pagan machismo ensures an eternal return to America’s less-than-heroic pathologies with which this essay began. But in the meantime, there is still enough of the Christian order to savour.

Just behind Joseph, an idol—perhaps the child Dionysus—the same colour as the stubborn mule, is crumbing apart. And that is no matter. He was but a shadow of the child to come. We have received from Dionysus that which we needed. His grapes contributed to a vintage that no pagan mind had dreamed of: a single cup that slaves and masters, men and women, vagabonds and globalitarians would share.