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

by Roy Wood Sellars

And here I shall venture a prophecy. The new battle will be waged around psychology and philosophy. Already the lines are being drawn between the defenders of an extra-organic soul and the experimental sappers in the laboratories of biology and psychology who are seeking to show that mind and body are inseparable, that, indeed, mind is just a term for certain capacities of control exercised by the brain. The crucial character of this growing conflict, which is yet not much beyond the status of a skirmish, leaps to the eyes, as the French say. Is not even the soul to be spared the siege before which the human body fell? Is it to be placed on the dissection-table and teased apart into its component strands? Even so. The process has already begun, and far more has been accomplished than is generally known. The solution of the mind-body problem is already in the air. And, with it, will come theoretical consequences by no means secondary to those associated with the theory of evolution. With some of these consequences we shall be concerned in a later chapter.

Christianity has been bound up with the letter and even with the spirit of a sacred book. Naturally, this book reflects the view of the world held by people about two thousand years ago. It contains primitive notions of the origin of things, a naïve conception of the relation of the sun to the earth, a belief that demons are the cause of sickness, a conviction that souls merely inhabit bodies temporarily, and an apocalyptic idea of the end of the world in a last judgment. As we have seen, no part of this outlook was particularly unique, but it was accepted by the Christian Church as inspired because it was found in the canonical writings accredited to prophets and apostles. During the Middle Ages, this biblical view of the world was united with the astronomical and physical teaching of Aristotle and hardened into a system. So intimate was this union between these cosmological elements and Christianity felt to be that an attack upon one was taken as an attack upon the whole. To doubt the primitive notions of the world and man's place therein, was to doubt the bible; and to doubt the bible as an inspired compendium of information was to doubt Christianity.

For the sake of perspective, it will repay us to note the order in which these primitive ideas were attacked and replaced by more adequate ones. It will be noticed that the general cosmological setting was first reconstructed and that the growing point passed thence to the center, the nature and destiny of man. As we indicated above, the replacement of older by newer and better-founded views is proceeding most rapidly at this crucial point. Having obtained a different and vaster heaven and earth, man has turned the microscope upon himself. The suspicion is growing ever more insistent that he, also, is a natural part of this procession of things.

When, at the time of the Renaissance, modern science was born, the first field invaded with success was that of astronomy. Copernicus became convinced that the current theory, called the Ptolemaic, was untenable because it led to insuperable complexities in the interpretation of the observed paths of the heavenly bodies. He was led to suggest that the sun was the actual center of the system and that the earth revolved around it in the course of a year. One can easily imagine the furore such a daring hypothesis aroused. The Copernican theory was scoffed at by learned and ignorant alike, for it upset the whole picture of the world which had been tranquilly accepted from early times, except by such a radical non-conformist as Aristarchus of Samos. To appreciate the intellectual revolution threatened, one has only to read Dante's "Divine Comedy," for Dante journeys from planet to planet and thinks of them as arranged within crystalline spheres revolving slowly about the earth. In the second canto of Paradise, he speaks of the blessed motors who make the holy spheres revolve. These motors are angels of various orders resident in the spheres and transmitting to them the efficacy of the Divine Intelligence. Thus infant science had to challenge the appearance of things to the eye, and a system bound up with the religious view of the world.

It is obvious that the old geocentric view of the world, which thought of the earth as the center of the universe, was nothing more than a statement of the apparent relations of the visible heavens to the broad earth which stretches out on either hand as far as eye can see. That this natural view of things was taken up into the religious picture of the universe was the occurrence to be expected. Had it not been and had the priests and prophets enunciated the Copernican theory, there would be reason to suspect a hidden source of revelation. Needless to say such a reversal of the natural sequence never occurs.

It is only when we grasp the naïve outlook of early days that we can realize the full significance of many Christian doctrines. Let us take the articles of the creed. We are taught to believe that Jesus descended into Hell and then ascended into Heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God. What is this Hell into which Jesus is supposed to have descended? It is the Sheol of the old Hebrews, a misty region below the surface of the earth; it is the Hades of the Greeks, the place of the departed shades; it is the Avernus of the Romans, the lower regions where ghosts flit and gibber. This place of the dead is at first the grave and sinks deeper into the earth as time passes and the myth-making fancy has been directed upon it. But it is thought of literally as in the bowels of the earth. All through the Middle ages this naïve view was held. There was an absolute down and a subterranean Hell, and every country told of some cavern which was one of its many mouths. With the advent of the Copernican view what becomes of these age-old ideas? To save them they must be transformed and given another location or a merely symbolic meaning. But why save them? They are as pure myths as any others to be found in olden days. They are brother to Tartarus and the Battle of the Titans and the Slaying of Rahab. The early Christians believed in a literal Hell beneath the surface of the earth. Their belief was wrong beyond the shadow of a doubt. We cannot make it true by modifying it out of all recognition.

The ascent into Heaven was thought of as a literal ascension of the resurrected body by the majority of early Christians. We have seen, however, that Paul did not teach any such doctrine. But even for Paul, Jesus, as the Messiah, was literally in the heavens directly above the earth. Into this region Paul is caught up in ecstasy—even to the third heaven. It is from this region, not very far above us, that the last trump will sound and the day of judgment dawn. The account, given by the so-called "Revelation of St. John the Divine," which has led to so much foolish controversy among certain protestant sects, is typical of the apocalyptic literature of the time. No scholar to-day believes that it was written by an apostle or by any one in direct relation to an apostle. It is simply an example of the current religious phantasies of the age just before and after the Fall of Jerusalem. What factual basis could there be for such myths of the end of the world? To take this old picture of the days to come as having anything but historical interest is to live in a mist. Only the scholar can understand the allusions made and connect the ideas with the beliefs of this vanished world. It is poetry, a creation of generations of dreamers steeped in the tremendous idea of a coming destruction preceded by portents and disasters. We can understand how it arose in the motley and chaotic press of the Roman Empire in the East with its memories of oppressions and conquests and changing kingdoms; but to regard it gravely as a revelation, to be taken seriously, of the destruction of the world is impossible. The universe was a small affair for the men of that time and the little planet we call the earth and live upon was the center of all things. We who think in terms of light-years, and nebulae in which our solar system could be lost, and huge constellations far off in the pathless void, realize that we have outgrown even the imagery of this apocalyptic poem.

Religion was loth to give up the simpler and more child-like ideas of the universe and to displace the earth from its proud preëminence as the one foot-stool of deity. Man feels lonelier in the tremendous spaces and stellar systems which astronomy has revealed to his eye and mind. But the facts piled up by science in its patient work of investigation were too strong to be ignored, and religion had to modify its teaching by at least a passive acceptance of the new world outlook which would have been so strange to Jesus and Paul. It is evident that this involves the quiet giving up of the truth of the story of creation, as well as the doctrine of a day of judgment. When we once realize that the earth is a pin-point in the physical universe, these stories, woven in days when it was regarded as the stable center of things, are seen to be outgrown myths.

But astronomy was followed by biology with its hypothesis of evolution. No sooner had religion resigned itself to a larger world than its peace was again broken by the teaching that man was the end-term of an evolution of animal life going far back into the dim past. Instead of the neat little tale which Hebrew literature had passed on to the Church, men were asked to believe that ages of slow change had elapsed while one form of life changed to a more complex form adapted to new conditions. Soon facts rained in from all sides to make this new position impregnable. Geology studied the various strata of rock and found fossil remains which could only be dated back millions of years. Strange creatures unlike those to be found now upon the earth were brought to light. Reptiles of monstrous size, fishes of strange shapes, huge trees resembling our ferns, botanically weeds, yet towering into the heavens, were unearthed until the imagination caught glimpses of past ages teeming with life. The teaching of geology was reënforced by comparative anatomy, which showed the similarity of different animals which had been thought of as quite distinct. Man, himself, was examined and was found to contain traces of an older mode of life. Only in this way could certain atrophied organs, like the appendix, be understood. Before long, comparative embryology arose and it was seen that the embryo passes through certain stages of development which roughly indicate the past life of the organism. On all lines, investigation taught the same conclusion. That there was evolution in nature, so that new forms of life developed while old forms passed away, no one who knew the facts doubted. What factors were at work to produce these changes was not entirely known. The new outlook was set in the place of the old myths; but the details of the evolutionary process required careful working out by patient experiments and observations.

The mythical background of Christianity was thus again attacked. The struggle was violent and bitter. Christians were so accustomed to the primitive myth of man's creation in a Garden of Eden, as narrated in the Old Testament, that they refused for a long time to consider any other view. Bishops and laymen denounced Huxley and Darwin and their supporters, and often resorted to parodies of their position in order to awaken the prejudices of the mass of the people. It was affirmed that they believed that man was descended from an ape or monkey. But the clergy were waging a losing fight, as is always the case when the facts are overwhelmingly against an old dogma. The educated people of to-day accept some form of the theory of evolution as naturally as they accept the automobile and electric street-car. They see no reason to believe that primitive people who made no study of animal life knew more about its origin than those who have devoted their time to careful and earnest investigation. Facts speak for themselves and conquer what opposes them no matter what traditions bolster it up.