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

by Roy Wood Sellars

THE LIMITS OF PERSONAL AGENCY

Religion was born from need wedded to ignorance. But needs change, and illusions fade away and are replaced by knowledge. That religion reflects these factors of which it is a function cannot be doubted. Some thinkers, who have sincerely pondered the problem, declare that religion will only be transformed. Others, as earnest, assert that it will disappear, and speak of the non-religion of the future. Is not the question in large measure one of definition? That man will continue to evolve ethically can scarcely be doubted, but it can be doubted with good right that he will continue to seek to fulfill his needs by rites designed to enlist superhuman agents in his behalf. Is there not more than a note of skepticism in that much-approved saying: "God helps those who help themselves?" Already, man is beginning to classify his needs and to believe that his material needs, at least, can best be met by industry and knowledge. He supplicates less and works more. Let us not forget what tremendous economic and social changes have occurred since the days of the little, helpless communities that lifted up praying hands to their gods lest famine and war destroy them completely. To-day, man does more harm to man than does nature. The face of things has changed more radically than we are accustomed to realize. Social habits and beliefs cannot fail to reflect this change. It may very well be that we shall be forced to conclude that what were, in a sense, the by-products of religion have become all that promises to survive when man has, indeed, eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

We have seen that primitive man read his surroundings in the light of his own consciousness. Everywhere he saw the evidence of will and anger, desire and caprice. The world was the theater of personal agents not so dissimilar to himself. Technically, we should speak of this outlook as anthropomorphic animism. Perhaps a still lower stage existed in which things are full of mana or a mysterious power for good and evil. As man felt his own powerlessness in the midst of tremendous, and often hostile agencies, which overtopped his own meager powers, he was led to feel the desire to ally himself with these agencies and propitiate them in order that all might be well with him. Man was ever more convinced that his own life was bound up with the plans of the gods. To displease them was to incur the most serious danger. The anger of Jove, or Neptune, or Asshur, or Yahweh was not easily turned aside once it was kindled. The winds which threaten shipwreck, the rains which give increase, the drouth which dries up the earth, the plague which brings death are under the control of the gods; and it behooves man to walk warily in order not to offend them. Thus was the path set in which man was to travel until he reached an ethical monotheism.

As time passed, demons and gods gave way, in theory at least, to the sovereignty of one powerful deity who gathered to himself the powers and activities of the old multiplicity of agents whom man had worshipped and placated. It is probable that this movement toward a consciously held monotheism reflected the changing political organization of society. The old chaos of superhuman agents, each doing what was right in his own eyes, gave way to a growing heavenly order in which one powerful agent exerted his suzerainty over minor principalities. Yet monotheism has always been relative, for the one god has his agents of subordinate rank—agents, powers and intercessors—just as the most absolute monarch has his ministers. Political imagination cannot go beyond its source.

Christianity is usually regarded as the best type of monotheism; yet the early Church Fathers thought of the old gods as demons working their nefarious will upon man. It is notorious that many of the saints of the calendar are only re-christened pagan deities adopted by the Church to meet popular demands. The peasantry would believe in the agency of local divinities whose reputation had been great for the healing of sickness, or the granting of children to the childless, or the causing of rain to fall in seasons of drouth; and the Church, wisely enough, controlled and adopted what it could not prevent. The old pluralism of agencies refused to give way more than formally to a single agent. The psychology of this resistance is simple enough. Just as the king is unable to give his personal attention to the requests of all his subjects but must delegate authority to officers to look after details, so the one deity cannot give ear and attention to the incessant cries of his myriads of creatures. I cannot help feeling that the pious catholic has more psychological realism in these matters than the protestant sectarian who wearies his deity with all sorts of trivial matters. Surely a million petitions at the same time would distract any conceivable kind of personal deity!

But, in the present chapter, we are not concerned so much with the problem of the number and inter-relations of the superhuman agents at work in the universe as with the idea of personal agency itself. The point I wish to call attention to is that the change from polytheism to monotheism did not involve any essential modification of the accepted notions of agency. Nature—and human life with it—was thought of as under the control of a superpersonal agent who guided the course of events in accordance with his purposes. An ethical refinement of the idea of deity had supervened which lifted it far above the crudities of the so-called nature-religions. Was this not because man and human society had evolved ethically and socially? But no marked break in the setting of the idea had arisen. And this fact presents the thinker with a problem.

In its origins, religion is innately hostile to the extension of impersonal causation to the cosmos, for the obvious reason that such a conception conflicts with the operation of special agency. Religion begins with the postulation of powerful agents whom man can placate. Up to the present, the evolution of religion has not involved a withdrawal of this primary assumption but only its ethical refinement and the reduction of the number of agents. In the Western world, at least, religion and the idea of an ethical control of the course of nature have been inseparable. This latter idea underlies prayer for material blessings, miracles, and the various conceptions of providence. Can this primary assumption be taken from religion without destroying it?

The difficulties which confront this assumption for the educated man of to-day must not blind us to its naturalness in the past. But that is the very point to grasp. The primitive view of the world is not being so much refuted as outgrown. Slowly and painfully, man has learned that events are conditioned by antecedents of an inflexible character, and that his wishes and desires must have hands and feet working for them before they can affect things. He has bettered his condition through invention and discovery and social organization. Of course, the world might have been different, and moral categories might have been the proper ones to apply to nature; but the brute fact of the case is that our particular universe is not of that sort.

Once given the notion of superhuman agents of a social character, the after-development of religion is inevitable. Man adopts toward them the attitude that he takes toward his own rulers. To pray to the gods is as natural as to pray to those who have power and who, we hope, may be moved by our prayers. Psychologically, there is no difference in the attitude involved. Providence is merely the action of an agent who is more than human. For primitive man it did not imply an intervention with nature, for the very good reason that the gods were active in nature. Nature was the sphere of the activities of the gods in the same way that it was, in a minor degree, the sphere of the activity of men. We must rid ourselves of the modern conception, nourished by science, of nature as a realm of causal relations. For ages, man had no such conception; all activities were thought of as acts. Nature, man and the gods acted together in a sort of social whole. Law, as we understand the term in science, would have had no meaning to primitive man just as it has little meaning for many at the present day.