Human Traits and their Social Significance

by Irwin Edman

But theology has public as well as purely private importance. It must not be forgotten that religion is a social habit as well as a personal activity. From primitive life down to our own day, religion has been intimately associated with the other social activities of a people, and has indeed been one of the chief institutions of moral and social control. Ethical standards have been until very recent times in the history of Christian Europe almost exclusively derived from religion. Where the religious experience is of such crucial importance, it has been necessary to give it a fixed form and content which might be used to initiate the young and the outsider.

Theology, though essentially a product of reflection upon the religious experience itself, tends to incorporate extra-religious material into its system. In its demonstration of the divine order and of man's relationship to the divine, it incorporates both science and history. Science becomes for it the manifestation of the divine arrangements of the universe; history becomes a revelation of the divine purpose and its realization. In primitive belief science and religion are practically indistinguishable from each other. The way of the gods is the way of the universe. The attribution of personal motives to the gods was primitive man's literal and serious way of conceiving the government of the cosmos. He believed himself actually to be living in a world governed by living and personal powers, an animistic world. The myths which describe the birth and life of the gods, the creation of man, the bestowing of the gift of fire are conceived as the literal and natural history of creation.

Christianity affords a striking example of how theology incorporates science and natural history into its world view. For the early Christian Fathers, natural science was interesting and useful in so far as it illustrated, which it did, the ways of God upon earth.

"The sole interest [of the Fathers] in natural fact," writes Henry Osborn Taylor, "lay in its confirmatory evidence of Scriptural truth. They were constantly impelled to understand facts in conformity with their understanding of Scripture, and to accept or deny accordingly. Thus Augustine denies the existence of Antipodes, men on the opposite side of the earth, who walk with their feet opposite to our own. That did not harmonize with his general conception of spiritual cosmogony."[1]

[Footnote 1: H. O. Taylor: The Mediœval Mind, vol. I, pp. 75-76.]

All the natural science current, as represented, for example, in the compilation called the Physailogus, is used as symbolical of the ways of the Lord to man.

The Pelican is distinguished by its love for its young. As these begin to grow they strike at their parents' faces, and the parents strike back and kill them. Then the parents take pity, and on the third day the mother comes and opens her side and lets the blood flow on the dead young ones, and they become alive again. Thus God cast off mankind after the Fall, and delivered them over to death; but he took pity on us, as a mother, for by the Crucifixion He awoke us with His blood to eternal life.[2]

[Footnote 2: Thilly: loc. cit., p. 76.]

History is treated in the same way. Nearly all the histories written by the early Christian Fathers were written in deliberate advocacy of the Faith. It was to silence the heresies of those who attributed to the Church the entrance of Alaric into Rome that Augustine wrote his famous City of God. The whole of history is a revelation of the divine purpose which is eventually to be fulfilled. Orosius, again, a disciple of Augustine, wrote his Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans to prove the abundance of calamities which had afflicted mankind before the birth of Christ. He gathers together all the evidence he can to exhibit at once the patience and the power of God. "Straitened and anxious minds" might not be able to see the purpose always, but all was ordained for one end. Thus he writes at the beginning of his seventh book:

The human race from the beginning was so created and appointed that living under religion with peace without labor, by the fruit of obedience it might merit eternity; but it abused the Creator's goodness, turned liberty into wilful license, and through disdain fell into forgetfulness; now the patience of God is just and doubly just, operating that this disdain might not wholly ruin those whom He wished to spare ... and also so that He might always hold out guidance although to an ignorant creature, to whom if penitent He would mercifully restore the means to grace.[1]