Comparative Religion

by J. Estlin Carpenter

The part played by this doctrine in the early Church is well known. When the new faith began to attract the attention of the educated, it was impossible that the resemblances between Christian and Hellenic monotheism should be ignored. Philosophy had reached many of the same truths, and poets and sages bore the same witness to the unity and spirituality of God as the prophets and psalmists of Israel. It was easy to suggest that the Hebrew seers had been the teachers of the Greek; might not Plato, for instance, have learned of Jeremiah in Egypt? On the other hand, the pleas of chronological and literary dependence might be insufficient; there were radical differences as well as resemblances; the Apologist might deride the diversities of opinion and make merry over the contradictions of the schools. Nevertheless Christianity was often presented by its defenders as "our philosophy." The Latin writer Minucius Felix (in the second century) is so much struck by the parallels in the higher thought that he boldly declares, "One might think either that Christians are now philosophers, or that philosophers were then already Christian." The martyr Justin (about A.D. 150) incorporates such teachings into the scheme of Providence by the aid of the Logos. For Justin, as for his co-believers, the popular religion was the work of demons. But philosophy had combated them in the past like the new faith. If Socrates had striven to deliver men from them, and they had compassed his death through evil men, it was because the Logos condemned their doings among the Greeks through him, just as among the barbarians they were condemned by the Logos in the person of Christ. The great truths of God and Providence, of the unity of the moral government of the world, of the nature and destiny of man, of freedom, virtue, and retribution, which were to be found in the writings of the wisest of the past, were the product of "the seed of the Logos implanted in every race of men." Those who had lived with the Logos were Christians before Christ, though men might have called them atheists, like Heracleitus and Socrates. All noble utterances in theology or legislation arose through partial discovery or contemplation of the Logos, and consequently Justin could boldly claim "whatever things have been rightly said among all men" as "the property of us Christians."

The cultivated and mystical Clement, who became head of the catechetical school of Alexandria towards the close of the second century, enforced the same theme. An enormous reader, he loved to compare the truths enunciated by Greek poets and philosophers with the wisdom of the barbarians. Philosophy, indeed, was a special historical manifestation of thought along a peculiar line of development. It affected a particular race, it spread over a distinct area, and appeared in a definite time. In these respects it resembled the preparatory work of Israel itself. It was a discipline of Providence, so that beside the generalisation of St. Paul that the Law had been a tutor to bring the Jews to Christ, Clement could set another, that philosophy had played the same part for the Greeks. On the field of common speech Clement's contemporary, the fiery Tertullian of Carthage, appealed to the worshipper who bore the garland of Ceres on his brow, or walked in the purple cloak of Saturn, or wore the white robe of Egyptian Isis—what did he mean by exclaiming "May God repay!" or "God shall judge between us?" Here was a recognition of a supreme authority and power, the "testimony of a soul naturally Christian."

Such comparisons, however, had a very different side. Greece had long had its secret mysteries, with their sacred initiations, their rites of purity and enlightenment, their promises of welfare beyond the grave. When the new deities from Asia Minor, from Egypt, Syria, and the further East, were brought to Italy, the resemblances of their practice to that of the Christian Church excited the believer's alarm, and roused at once the charge of plagiarism. There was a congregation of Mithra at Rome as early as 67 B.C., and towards the end of the first century of our era his mysteries began to be widely spread. Here was a baptism; here was a "sacrament" as the neophyte took the oath on entering the warfare with evil; here were grades of soldiership and service; here were oblations of bread and water mingled with wine which were naturally compared with the Lord's supper; here were doctrines of deliverance from sin, of judgment after death and ascent to heaven, which brought the theology and practice of Mithraism very close to that of the Church. So Mithra bore the august titles of the holy and righteous God; or he was the Mediator, author of order in nature and of victory in life between the ultimate powers of good and evil.

For a time the rivalry was acute, as his worship was carried through the West as far as York and Chester and the Tyne. But with the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century the sounds of conflict die away. The men of learning, Eusebius of Cæsarea (about A.D. 260-340), Augustine (A.D. 354-430) bishop of Hippo, surveyed the religions and philosophies of antiquity as conquerors. The faiths of Egypt, Phœnicia, Greece, and Rome, are passed in review. With a broad sweep of learning Eusebius comments on the ancient mythologies, the oracles, the theory of demons, the practice of human sacrifice, the history of Mosaism. His treatise on the "Preparation for the Gospel" is the first great work on comparative religion which issued out of Christian theology. With generous recognition of what lay beyond the Church he taught (in the Theophania) that all higher culture was due to participation in the Logos. Idolatry might be the work of demons; the world might be filled with the babblings of philosophers and the follies of poets; but the Logos had been continuously present, sowing in the hearts of men the rudiments of the divine laws, of various orders of teaching, of doctrines of every kind. Thus ethics, art, science, and the fairest products of human thought, were genially brought within the scope of Revelation.

II

The panorama of religions unrolled before the student of the present day is far vaster than that which offered itself to the thinkers of Greece and Rome, and its meaning is far better understood. When Pausanias describes the daily sacrifice to a hero at Tronis in Phocis, where the blood of the victim was poured down through a hole in the grave to the dead man within, while the flesh was eaten on the spot, he notes, like the careful author of a guide-book, a curious local usage, but he does not know that it belongs to a group of savage practices that may be traced all round the globe. On Mount Lycæus in Arcadia, he tells us, was a spring which flowed with equal quantity in summer as in winter. In time of drought the priest of Lycæan Zeus, after due prayer and sacrifice, would dip an oak-branch into the surface of the spring, and a mist-like vapour would rise and become a cloud. In the midst of Hellenic culture it was still possible, as among the negroes of West Africa or the Indians of North America, to make rain.

From continent to continent a multitude of observers have gathered an immense range of facts, which show that amid numerous differences in detail the religions of the lower culture may all be ranked together on the basis of a common interpretation of the surrounding world. Philosophy suggests that man can only explain nature in terms of his own experience. He is encompassed by powers that are continually acting on him, as he to a much smaller extent can in his turn act on them. By various processes of observation and reflection (p. [85]), he comes to the conclusion that within his body lives something which enables it to move and feel and think and will, until at death it goes away. To this mysterious something many names are given, and for purposes of modern study they are all ranked under the term "spirits." This explanation is then applied to the behaviour of all kinds of objects within his view; though it does not at all follow that this was actually the first explanation. The animals that are stronger and more cunning than himself, the trees that move in the wind, the corn that grows so mysteriously, the bubbling spring, even the things that he himself has made, his weapons, tools, and jars, all have their "spirits," so that the entire scene of his existence is pervaded by them. To this doctrine, with its many branches of belief and practice, Sir E. B. Tylor, in his classical work on Primitive Culture (1871), gave the name of "Animism," and the religions founded upon it are called "animistic," or sometimes, from the multitude of unorganised spirits which they recognise, "polydæmonistic" religions.

Such religions belong to no specific ethnic group. They appear either in existing practice or in the shape of occasional survivals in all of the three great racial divisions of mankind—the white or Caucasic, the yellow or Mongolian, and the black or Negroid. They are to be found under the Equator and among the Arctic snows. They are sometimes associated with a peculiar form of social structure regulating inter-tribal relations known as totemism. It was at one time supposed that this designated a stage of evolution through which all peoples had passed. The totem or clan-sign, whether animal or plant, or more rarely an inanimate object like wind, sun, or star, was supposed to have become an object of worship, and various theories were invented to explain the divisions and subdivisions of the clans, and the selection of their special signs. Hence, it was argued, came the cultus of beast and bird and tree; hence the altar and the idol; hence the animal sacrifice and the sacramental meal. In clever hands it supplied a universal key. The extraordinary intricacy of the subject, and the widely scattered character of the evidence, prevent any discussion here. But the most recent researches have not sustained these attempts. Among the Central Australian tribes the totems are not worshipped, they are in no sense deities, no prayers or sacrifices are offered to them. They may be brought into the sphere of religion in some tribes as part of a social order to which a superhuman origin is ascribed (p. [171]). But totemism cannot be established as the typical form of "primitive religion" any more than any other complicated system. Its general diffusion is questionable. At the present day there are large areas over which no signs of totemic organisation are found; and many phenomena which were formerly assumed to be proofs of totemism in the higher religions of antiquity, in Egypt, Greece, and Italy, now receive other explanations.

The higher forms of animistic religion pass out into polytheisms of more or less dignity. They do not succeed in embodying themselves in permanent literary product, they create no scriptures or sacred books. They have their rude chants, their songs for weddings and funerals, their genealogies and tales of ancient heroes. Strange cosmogonies float from island to island in Polynesia. The Finnic peoples enshrined their faith in the ballads collected under the name of the Kalevala. Among the Indians of North America speculation is sometimes highly elaborated in mythologic tradition; and out of the fusion of nationalities in Mexico rose a developed polytheism in which lofty religious sentiment seems strangely blended with a hideous and sanguinary ritual. Peru, no less, presented to the Spanish conquerors bewildering and incongruous aspects. In these two cultures native American civilisation reached its highest forms. In Mexico the apparatus of religion was very minutely organised. There were immense temples, which required large numbers of priests and servitors. The capital alone is said to have contained 2000 sacred buildings, and the great temple had a staff of 5000 priests. There were religious orders and temple-schools; rites of baptism and circumcision; feasts and sacrifices and sacraments, in which the monkish chroniclers found strange parallels to their own practice. The issues of victory were disastrous. With the death of the last Aztec emperor (1520) the doom of the old gods was assured, and the Inquisition (1571) completed what the sword of Cortes had begun.