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

by Roy Wood Sellars

It is interesting to study the speculations which Christian thinkers have evolved upon the question of creation. Usually, the idea of a creation of the physical world out of nothing by a fiat has been favored. "I am the Lord, that maketh all things; that stretches forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth." Such is the natural goal of the idea of a creation. Yet a moment's reflection makes us realize that the position is entirely deductive and without a shred of evidence. To assign to a hypothetical agent called God powers sufficient to produce what experience tells us exists explains nothing. The primary assumption, of course, is that there must have been a creation. But the conception of evolution has attacked that assumption at its very foundation.

Of late, there have been attempted compromises with the idea of evolution. May not God guide the course of natural change? But this outlook meets with certain difficulties. In the first place, was the physical world created? If so, it must have been the best of all possible physical worlds, or else God is either not omnipotent or not omniscient or not ideally good. And when these questions are raised, we pass immediately into a field of mere speculation. The centuries have been witnesses of disputes between advocates of different dogmas. At present, there seems to be a revival of interest in the idea of a limited and youthful deity struggling against odds to make the world livable. But God becomes a part of the universe in every sense, and so we are led to the idea that the physical world was not created but is, rather, co-existent with deity. Of course, there are many possible variations on the theme, and human ingenuity will exhaust itself in combining these possibilities in various ways.

The truth is, that these theological speculations carry us nowhere. Myth and dialectical acuteness, however skillfully blended, cannot add to our genuine knowledge of the world. Instead, they create new problems of their own which cannot be settled, because there is no way of testing and verifying the various solutions. In short, the premises are at fault and must be outgrown and left behind. Our experience no longer suggests to us the idea of a supernatural agency at work, nor are we so prone to think of an act of creation some few thousands of years in the past. We have largely outgrown the mythological setting out of which theology arose, and it is tradition and the lack of a more positive view which enable it to retain for us any semblance of plausibility. There is nothing inherently irrational in the idea of creation; it simply bears witness to a looser, more personal world in which annihilation and origination were familiar events, because man saw only the surface of things and was not able to follow the continuities which bind things together underneath. The principle of conservation, which is one of the grand achievements of science, is like a two-edged sword: it destroys not only the belief in an absolute annihilation but, likewise, the belief in an absolute beginning. Slowly, but surely, this new view of nature will have its effect and undermine the more naïve hypothesis of a creation. The emotional reverberation of the accustomed forms of speech, reënforced by the mental habits encouraged by religion, will die out only gradually. Man is instinctively romantic and tends to dramatize the world. His favorite categories are personal, and he has a profound distaste for the impersonalism of science. Only the slow pressure of actual knowledge will lift him to a truer view of the world in which he finds himself.

CHAPTER IV

MAGIC AND RITUAL

Early man had not the conception of natural law that we now possess. In order even partially to understand his attitude toward things, the man of to-day must abstract from the idea of law and regularity which he has shot through nature, and ignore the knowledge about the antecedents of events which close observation and careful experiment have furnished him with. In the case of magic, just as in the case of mythology, he who wishes to see eye to eye with those who lived long ago must rid himself for the time being both of the knowledge which science has accumulated and of the mental habits of enquiry and causal explanation which have been fostered by it. These habits and this knowledge have become such a part of us that we are not fully conscious of them and of their importance. They are like the clothes we wear or the forms of politeness which we go through with automatically. It is only after the twentieth-century man delves into folklore or reads accounts of the beliefs and practices of the past, that he realizes that he stands on the shoulders of innumerable generations as the inheritor of a long process of mental evolution. Nothing, perhaps, can make him realize this fact more vividly than a study of magic.

What is magic? The best answer is to give examples of magic. "In the Malay Peninsula the magician makes an image like a corpse, a footstep long. If you want to cause sickness, you pierce the eye and blindness results; or you pierce the waist and the stomach gets sick. If you want to cause death, you transfix the head with a palm twig; then you enshroud the image as you would a corpse and pray over it as if you were praying over the dead; then you bury it in the middle of the path which leads to the place of the person whom you wish to charm, so that he may step over it." Ancient agriculture is full of magic rites designed to ward off evils. "To this day a Transylvanian sower thinks he can keep birds from the corn by carrying a lock in the seedbag." To this day, again, in Roumania, Serbia and parts of Germany, the peasants try to bring on a rain by sprinkling water on a young girl. It is supposed that nature will follow suit, and send a beneficent shower upon the thirsty earth. Magic is, then, an ingenious way of making or leading nature to do what you want it to do. As Professor Murray writes: "Agriculture used to be entirely a question of religion; now it is almost entirely a question of science. In antiquity, if a field was barren, the owner of it would probably assume that the barrenness was due to pollution, or offense somewhere. He would run through all his own possible offenses, or at any rate those of his neighbors and ancestors, and when he eventually decided the cause of the trouble, the steps that he would take would all be of a kind calculated not to affect the chemical constitution of the soil, but to satisfy his own emotions of guilt and terror, or the imaginary being he had offended. A modern man in the same predicament would probably not think of religion at all, at any rate in the earlier stages; he would say it was a case for deeper plowing or for basic slag."

Magic is a way of controlling things. Imitate the act desired, in a certain way, and it will come to pass. Talismans and amulets, again, possess a secret power for good and evil. Ancient societies built up a lore of this kind, adding to material objects the agency of demons under the control of magicians. This lore is practically a feature of the past. Even white magic is no longer good form, no longer accredited by the dominant social mind. It slinks into out-of-the-way places beyond the public eye. Yet research is showing that these seemingly discredited beliefs and points of view seldom completely disappear. They smolder beneath the surface and flame up now and then in a startling way to remind us that society in its evolution does not carry all its members along at the same rate. The historian is surprised to find that rites which are given an exalted place in various religions are magical at heart, and go back to beliefs which have long been discredited in other settings.