The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

"From chaos were generated Erebos and black Night,
And from Night again were generated Ether and Day,
Whom she brought forth, having conceived from the embrace of Erebos."

Here we have the same sexual motive at work as among the Egyptians; a motive which, as we should expect, is well-nigh universal. During the sixth century there was an efflorescence of creation myths among the Greeks. These are associated with the name of Orpheus, and are commonly classed together as Orphic cosmogonies. Soon after, philosophic speculation began to come into its own and the Greeks "left off telling tales." Burnet, a famous student of Greek culture, asserts that "history teaches that science has never existed except among those peoples which the Greeks have influenced." But we shall leave the Greeks for the present; it may be that we shall meet them, and their influence again.

The Hindoos passed from crude views to more abstract and refined concepts just as the Egyptians and Greeks did. In the Vedic period, there are many contradictory statements about the creation of the world and of the gods. Heaven and earth are spoken of as the parents of the gods, and at the same time the gods are said to have built, or woven, the whole world. When we remember that there was little distinction at first between nature and the gods, we are not surprised at this contradiction. Moreover, as one writer suggests, this contradiction seems only to have enhanced the mystery of the conception. When religion enters, logic is not always desired.

Another conception which we find in Hindoo thought is that of a world-egg. This analogy is so natural that we are not surprised to discover it. Let us glance at one of the accounts given in the Satapatha Brahmana: "In the beginning this universe was water, nothing but water. The waters desired, 'How can we be reproduced?' So saying, they toiled, they performed austerity. While they were performing austerity, a golden egg came into existence. Being produced, it then became a year. Wherefore this golden egg floated about for the period of a year. From it in a year a male came into existence, who was Prajapati.... He divided this golden egg.... In a year he desired to speak. He uttered 'bhur,' which became this earth; 'bhuvah,' which became this firmament; and 'svar,' which became that sky.... Desiring progeny, he went on worshiping and toiling. He conceived progeny in himself; with his mouth he created the gods...."

This account of the creation is characteristic of Hindoo thought as it passes from the frank admiration of nature, which distinguishes the Vedic period, to what more nearly approaches theosophic speculation. Yet there is no genuine break with the animism of primitive times. The waters are thought of as desiring, that is, they are held to be alive and vaguely conscious. The belief that words are inseparable from things should again be noted. "Bhur" becomes the earth, and "svar" becomes the sky.

In the course of time, Hindoo thought became more abstract and sophisticated without having achieved any method which would lead to tested knowledge. An analogy may make clearer to the reader the vicious intellectual situation. Imagine the subtle minds of the Mediæval scholastics, without the material furnished them by the Greek philosophy, and obliged to exercise themselves upon magic, myth and legend. The very energy and subtlety of their intellects would lead them into all sorts of phantasmagoria. Theosophy—and a large share of what is called theology—is simply a refining and subtilizing of mythology. The more difficult and abstract the thought, the more significance it is assumed to possess. The penetrative and exploring power of mere untested speculation is taken for granted. Words throw a spell over the mind because nothing of a more positive character is before it to counteract their charm. Even to-day we all know of people who like to employ such terms as force, and unity, and spirit, and will. The very vagueness of the words exercises a fascination which smothers the slight demand for explanation. Just as the Jews of the Dispersion spoke of Wisdom as the first-born creature of God and gave this abstraction an objective existence, so the Hindoo poets and theosophists explained the world in terms which seem to the scientifically trained mind subjective and irrelevant. For all its apparent profundity, such an outlook represents a lower stage than that which science has reached. Subtlety is not enough; it must be a servant to the right methods of investigation. Dialectic and imaginative vividness cannot give truth to ideas not adapted to explain the sort of a world we live in.

Those creation stories developed by the Hebrews with the aid of the Babylonians have had most influence on Western thought and, therefore, deserve considerable attention. The motives and mental processes at work are, however, essentially those which we have already examined. Unfortunately, we have only hints here and there in the Old Testament of the more primitive traditions which were worked over and built upon by the priests and prophets. Moreover, the Yahweh religion seems to have been adopted quite late and to have made easy a break with the older tales. Probably few readers of the Bible, who have not made a systematic study of Semitic literature, are aware that ancient strands of folk-lore are scattered through it. In Psalm 74, for instance, there is a good instance of primitive views: "Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength; Thou breakest the head of Leviathan in pieces.... Thou didst cleave fountain and flood." In Job, likewise, there are references to these deeds of Yahweh in the far past. Very few casual readers ask themselves who Rahab and the Flying Serpent and Leviathan were. Now investigation has shown that we have, in these references to the deeds of Yahweh, fragments of the Babylonian myth of creation. These creatures are monsters whom Yahweh makes captive before he orders the original chaos into a cosmos. In doing this, he is a counterpart of Marduk, the Babylonian creator. These monsters, like the gods who conquer them, are only personified forms of phenomena in the heavens above and the earth beneath. Let us now consider the stories of creation given in Genesis. It is not widely enough known that there are two distinct accounts which, although they are externally combined, can easily be separated even in the English translation. The oldest version begins with chapter two, verse five. This version is called the prophetic account. It assumes that the world already exists and concerns itself only with man's appearance, the institution of marriage, and the general features of man's life. God forms man out of the dust of the ground, as a potter molds his clay, and breathes into him the breath of life. He places him in a garden to dress and keep it. But the incidents which follow are so familiar to every one that there is no need to repeat them. Scholars have pointed out that this account is very similar to that current in Babylonia. The motives are like those found in the Gilgamish and Adapa myths. The differences in general tone and in geographical details can readily be explained by the later date—about the eighth century—and the character of the Palestinian landscape. Those who read Hebrew will note the difference in vocabulary between the second chapter in Genesis and the first, while those who are confined to the English translation should especially note that the two words, Lord and God, are combined in the prophetic account. There are many naïve, and obviously primitive, touches in this creation story which give it a quaint charm. Only those, however, who are themselves naïve in their outlook upon the world can dream of taking it as other than folk-lore. I must confess that it is a mystery to me that so many fairly educated men can take it as anything but what it so obviously is, a creation myth.

The creation story, told in the first chapter, is called by scholars the priestly account. It is post-exilic and, so, relatively late. The foundation consists of mythical ideas which go back to the mists of antiquity. From these were derived certain terms which are scarcely translatable into English. The reader has been further confused by a poetic and inexact rendering of many Hebrew phrases. The "spirit of God" is literally the "wind of God," an idea which probably is historically connected with the Babylonian tale of how Marduk uses the wind as his instrument in his fight against Tiamat, the monster of the deep. Tiamat has become Tehom, translated as the "deep."

In spite of the lapse in verse 26, into the language of polytheism, the priestly account represents a late theological level in which creation is conceived as the passage of will and word into existence. The effect is majestic and intensely dramatic in its simplicity. Yet how else can critical thought portray creation? An omnipotent, personal God is necessarily conceived as one who has the power to call things into being. To ask how he does this is meaningless, for it ignores the stark power which is assumed. In accordance with the genius of the Semite, then, God was pictured as a monarch whose very will brought forth without effort. But a little reflection must convince us that this conception neither makes creation thinkable in any genuine sense nor proves its occurrence. We have merely attained the idealization of the creation myth, its most perfect form.

The Christian conception of the creation rests largely upon the Hebrew account. The uncritical way in which this was studied and accepted, previous to the rise of modern science and the higher criticism, remains a marvel to those who are not acquainted with the psychology of religion. Sanctioned by religion, idealized myth naturally held its own until something positive arose to dispute it. The Church Fathers, the scholastics, and the leaders of the Reformation accepted the stories in Genesis as revelations. They believed that there was a God and that he had revealed to man what he had done and what his plan of salvation was. These myths fitted into their view of the world as an essential and harmonious ingredient of it. What motive would there be for skepticism? Luther states that "Moses is writing history and reporting things that actually happened." "God was pleased," says Calvin, "that a history of the creation should exist." Of course, no really educated man of to-day can accept this attitude unless he wishes to sin against his reason. It is unfortunate that there has not been sufficient openness of mind to make possible a wider extension of the knowledge which scholars have been accumulating. The only candid thing to do is to class these Hebrew stories of the creation with the myths which grew up in other parts of the world. All represent attempts to picture a beginning of things as they are, by appeal to a magnified and magical personal agency. Those early thinkers did the best they could do with the ideas they had at hand. They were innocent of our modern understanding of nature as a scene of impersonal, causal processes. To try to find science in mythology is like looking upon Dante's Divine Comedy as a tale of real adventure.