Because Christian history has distinct stages hinging on the Incarnation, the term “pagan” drafts non-Christians into particular temporal relationships with Christianity. This essay explores the ways that pagans are historically solicited for their virtue, beauty, rhetorical skill, knowledge, and capacity for engendering Christian self-reflection. It launches from the idea that pagan-ness in medieval writing performs a politics of historical othering, but it argues that many narratives that engage in such confessional border-keeping are tormented by contradictory responses of mourning and loss. As a result, in a variety of historical writings, pagans are overtly damned in order to be underhandedly “saved.”