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

by Roy Wood Sellars

All developed religions have their sacred books. Until the translation of the Sacred Books of the East was undertaken in the latter part of the nineteenth century, few people realized how many such books there were. And we Americans have been the unwilling witnesses of the appearance of two other collections of writings making the same claims, The Book of Mormon and Science and Health. Now such sacred books are regarded as revelations which could not be obtained except by a mysterious contact with divine things. And the religious faith which has been called forth and directed by a teaching founded on the scripture turns back its own warmth upon its source. Nothing is more natural than this interaction between a living faith and the writings which are felt to be its guarantee. Religion is notoriously conservative and retrospective. Especially is this true of religions which impute to themselves a complete and final source of revelation in the past. Faith and book are associated in the mind so intimately that they lose their separateness. To doubt one is like doubting the other. Thus faith forms an emotional envelope which protects the literature, while the concrete detail of the literature reacts upon the mind to strengthen the faith. It is not strange, therefore, that the cult of the book is a phenomenon which is universal in the advanced religions. The Mohammedan believes in the verbal inspiration of the Koran just as fully as does the Jew in the divine origin of the Old Testament, and the Christian in the inspiration of the accepted canon called the Bible. Nor are these the only examples. But this psychological circle is a vicious one. It involves the substitution of a subjective support to claims and theories which require the test of human experience as a whole. But just because science is this coördination of the whole range of experience, there inevitably arises that conflict between science and theology of which we have heard so much during the last few decades. It is a conflict between a part of experience, interpreted too hastily, and the rationalized whole.

Science arose at the time of the Renaissance as a consequence of man's awakened curiosity. Its first conquests were in the fields of astronomy and physics. These were of such a striking character that they gave this comparatively new movement a prestige which stood it in good stead in time of trouble. Gradually, an assured technic was developed, and inductive tests made of every hypothesis which suggested itself. For a considerable time, science was confined pretty definitely to the physical world; but it was inevitable that the mental habits encouraged would sooner or later extend themselves to other fields. While there were many tentative applications of the methods and ideals of inductive science to the field of history in the eighteenth century, it was not until the nineteenth century that the science of history was fully developed. Our conception of the past has become progressively deeper and truer. Romanticism has been replaced by a realism which calls anthropology, archeology, and modern psychology to its aid. We wish to see the men of the past as they actually were; and we are quite aware that we know more about the world than they did.

In the domain of biblical literature and comparative religions, the method of science was slow of application. There was a tremendous inertia to overcome, and a strong spirit of positive antagonism to resist. The whole system of hopes and fears, sanctions and taboos, which the ancient view of the world had fostered within the human breast cried out against the sacrilege of rational investigation. Humanity hugs illusion more fondly than it does truth because it is more familiar with it. For a while, all that orthodoxy had to contend with was a rationalism of a skeptical cast which had scarcely a better historical outlook at its command than had its opponent. It could assert that these stories and beliefs handed down from the past could not be true because they conflicted with our experience; but it could not explain why people had originated these ideas and why they had believed in them so implicitly. In other words, it could not let the past explain itself in such a natural way that it would disprove its own beliefs. It is this that modern research has done so thoroughly that there is scarce need for the appeal to the constructive sciences which skeptical rationalism makes. The battle is no longer a drawn one so far as the intellect is concerned. It is merely a question of how long it will take before the victory will be recognized and proclaimed by all educated people.

As the evolutionary point of view forced its way into recognition, scholars became aware of the real nature of myth and legend; they realized that beliefs of this sort are products of a creative group-consciousness saturated with a view of the world which we have slowly outgrown; they sensed the mental complexity of the past and became suspicious of the naïve assumption that religions were formed in a generation by the sheer authority of a single man or of a small group of men. The first clear statement of this changed point of view was the work of David Friedrich Strauss in his famous Life of Jesus. Strauss developed the idea that much of religious literature consists of myths and dogmas, not created out of whole cloth by would-be deceivers, but woven by the stimulated fancy of groups working in the atmosphere of traditions and attitudes which the most intense research, alone, can make living to the scholar. There can be little doubt that this standpoint is essentially correct. Before it could be applied satisfactorily, however, painstaking investigation of the literature and recorded customs of the people of the Mediterranean basin had to be carried through. Only by now has this task been so far achieved that the main features of the Graeco-Syrian-Palestinian-Egyptian world are open to a sympathetic inspection. No one who has not done some work in this field at first or second hand can realize the difficulties which confronted investigators. Fragments found here and there in the writings of the Church Fathers, the teachings of the Jews of Alexandria, the apocalyptic literature discovered in remote places, inscriptions unearthed here and there, all were carefully studied and compared and forced to yield their quota of information.

It is a psychological principle which must always be reckoned with that the less an untrained individual knows about the past, the more certain of the correctness of his assumed knowledge he is prone to be. For example, the American who has read one or more of the over-simplified text-books dealing with the history of his country, which are used in the schools, has a clear-cut picture of the various events, knows exactly how they occurred and who was in the right. The university teacher, on the other hand, has before him a wealth of conflicting data from which he must painfully and tentatively construct a picture of the tendencies at work at different periods. He must test the genuineness of his sources, weigh the prejudices of the writer, and decide whether he was in a position to know exactly what was happening. Consequently, he will speak in a qualified language where the average citizen will deliver himself of emphatic assertions.

Yet the investigator of American history is possessed of an abundance of material and deals with a time for which printing existed. The language in which these documents are written is his own or else a well-known one. The student of comparative religions has none of these advantages. For the ancient world, the inscriptions are archaic and condensed. In the case of the biblical literature, he may be dealing with accounts edited from older manuscripts in other languages. These narratives conflict among themselves and contain surprisingly little information on important points. Hence, the investigator is almost overwhelmed by the difficulty of his task and the fewness of his certain results. The ordinary confessing Christian, on the contrary, is blissfully unaware of these problems. He opens his English translation and reads the familiar words in the light of inherited dogmas which blind his eyes to all contradictions and discrepancies. The truth is, that he is mentally unprepared to compare passages and to see problems which stare the trained man in the face. He reads subjectively for edification. The ecclesiastical atmosphere is such that his spiritual advisors have either desired to keep modern critical work from his notice, or have been afraid to arouse the bigotry of their keepers, or have themselves lacked a modern education. The consequence is that the average Christian has the most naïve notions in regard to the authorship and authenticity of the gospels and of the real meaning of many of the verses. Palestine is conceived in terms of the color-prints which illustrate his bible, while the mental atmosphere of the Year One is that of the present day in America with, perhaps, an exotic touch here and there.

Let us glance over some of the facts which investigation is making ever clearer and which are not as generally known as they deserve to be. What is said here should be read with remembrance of the results of the previous chapters. Such a bird's eye view of the forces at work in later Hellenistic and Roman times will be the best preparation for a sane conception of the origin and trend of Christianity.

In Tarsus, a Greek city of Cilicia, Paul, or Saul, was born and educated. Now Tarsus was, after Alexandria, the chief seat of late Greek philosophy in the near-orient. Many of the more noted Stoic thinkers and teachers of the day came from Cilicia and had semitic blood in their veins. Athenodorus, the teacher of Cicero and Augustus, came from Tarsus, itself; and it is said that his grateful and admiring fellow citizens made him a hero upon his death and annually celebrated him in a memorial feast, a procedure very characteristic of the age. There is the strongest evidence in Paul's epistles that he was well acquainted with the doctrines of Stoicism. The larger intellectual world of Philo of Alexandria and Seneca of the Imperial City lies behind these epistles. The Hellenistic Jew of the Dispersion differed widely from the Jew of Palestine, no matter how desirous he might be to identify himself with the worship at the Temple.

But Greek philosophy was not the only element with which the inhabitant of Tarsus would come in contact. When Paul speaks of mysteries, he is referring to the various secret cults which permeated the Roman world. How few Christians are aware that the ancient world was, at this time, in a religious ferment almost without parallel. The Greek civilization had lost its nerve. It had shot its bolt and been overwhelmed by autocratic powers and sheer barbarism. The conditions of a progressive and broadly based civilization had not yet been achieved. "Any one who turns from the great writers of classical Athens, say Sophocles or Aristotle," writes Gilbert Murray, "to those of the Christian era must be conscious of a great difference in tone. There is a change in the whole relation of the writer to the world about him. The new quality is not specifically Christian: it is just as marked in the Gnostics and Mithra-worshipers as in the Gospels and the Apocalypse, in Julian and Plotinus as in Gregory and Jerome. It is hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism; a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state; a conversion of the soul to God. It is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man is not so much to live justly, to help the society to which he belongs and enjoy the esteem of his fellow creatures; but rather, by means of a burning faith, by contempt for the world and its standards, by ecstasy, suffering and martyrdom, to be granted pardon for his unspeakable unworthiness, his immeasurable sins. There is an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions; an increase of sensitiveness, a failure of nerve." It was in such a state of the social mind that Christianity had its birth. It was, as we have before pointed out, one of many competing for dominance.

These competing religions had much in common, though it was the advantage of Christianity to have inherited the ethical monotheism of the prophets. Upon Paul, the Hellenist and Jew of the dispersion, was focussed this august tradition along with traditions of a more mystical character. Syria had been the home of certain mysteries from an early day, for we read in the Old Testament of women mourning the death of Tammuz, the god of vegetation who dies and is born again. Now Adonis or Attis was the corresponding god of Phrygia, and all people of Syria were well acquainted with the cult which showed the mother-goddess mourning for her son. But these more primitive rites were being displaced by a more developed and ethical form called Mithraism. I well remember my surprise when, visiting one of the older churches at Rome, I was shown the earlier church beneath and told that, beneath that again, a church dedicated to Mithra had been discovered. Now Tarsus was one of the chief seats of Mithraism, and it is practically certain that Paul was acquainted with its main rituals and beliefs. Let us try to realize the importance of this fact.