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

by Roy Wood Sellars

The forces which are so strongly working against the acceptance of miracles are just those forces which are antagonistic to the primitive view of the world. If nature is a self-contained spatial system, the complete mechanism of change should be open to study. Even human wills must be connected with human bodies, and shown to act in accordance with psychological and physiological laws. In the place of such vague terms as mana, we have chemical and electrical properties, bacterial infection, hypnosis. Magic and miracle are closely connected; and the replacement of magic by science put miracles on the defensive. Nature became a realm of recurrent processes. The exceptional, alone, could be assigned to the old type of agency. Thus the contrast came out more clearly, as the religious view of the world found itself opposed to an orderly conception of natural process. Divine agency, on the one hand; uniform processes, on the other.

Etymologically, a miracle is something which awakens wonder because of its strangeness. In former days, all events out of the ordinary were naturally classed as miracles, that is, as events to be wondered at. There was, of course, a routine aspect to nature. People expected the sun to rise in the morning and pass unwaveringly over the sky; they looked for the return of the seasons and had festivals to celebrate them; they anticipated normal young from their animals. Thus the routine aspect of things was fairly conspicuous, and they guided themselves by reference to it. But, in those days, things were less settled than they are in our well-organized society. People were more nervous, as it were, more surrounded by rumor, more credulous. Both the psychological and the social situation favored tales of marvelous events. I cannot help feeling that the religious customs, the constant appeal to the gods for favors and portents, were both effects and causes of this sense for the miraculous which we find so widespread in the past. Sometimes monsters were born; sometimes the wind blew from one direction for an extraordinary length of time; sometimes the sun was darkened at midday. Stories were constantly afloat about wonderful cures imputed to gods or magicians. Credulity awoke at the least encouragement. Priests, prophets, magicians, kings, gods, all were regarded as the authors of cures. Only the common man was unable to do these wonderful things. The idea that the king's touch had wonderful curative power lingered on into the nineteenth century.

We have pointed out, more than once, that the best way to explain an idea away is to explain how it arose. Add to this a clear statement of how the older view conflicts with the new outlook which has been born of tested knowledge, and the disproof is as complete as may be. Let us apply this method to the stories told of Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus was reputed to have the gifts of an exorcist. That Jesus, if he did actually live, believed in demons cannot be doubted. In Mark, the crowd exclaims: "With authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him." Again, the scribes from Jerusalem say: "He hath Beelzebub. By the prince of the devils he casteth out the devils." Wherever Jesus went, crowds of sick people flocked to him to be healed of their various complaints. But they undoubtedly did the same to every prophet or medicine-man who came along. A man could not be a prophet if he did not have a special mana, or power, either in his own right or as the representative of his deity. And we must not think of these healers as charlatans or impostors. Everybody believed that disease was a matter for religion. Why? Because they did not know anything about toxins and bacteria and amoebic infection. The demon-theory of disease was everywhere dominant outside, perhaps, certain circles in Greece. "It is beyond a doubt," writes F. C. Conybeare, "that Jesus regarded fever, epilepsy, madness, deafness, blindness, rheumatism, and all the other weaknesses to which flesh is heir, as the distinct work of evil spirits. The storm-wind which churned the sea or inland lake into fury is equally an evil spirit in the Gospel story. In the Vedic poems it is the same; and, indeed, we have here a commonplace of all folklore."

The stories told about Jesus in the synoptic gospels can be paralleled in the literature of the time throughout the Roman world. The use of spittle as a sovereign remedy was universal. In his essay upon miracles, Hume called attention to the story told about the Emperor Vespasian by Tacitus. Vespasian was a little more careful than Jesus, for he had physicians examine the eyes of the blind suppliant before he exerted his touch and spittle as healing agents. But, then, Jesus could not be so careful about such things as an emperor.

When we once clearly realize the emotional atmosphere of the times and the complete lack of the sort of intellectual background we possess, we are not surprised either at the recorded acts of Jesus or at the myths which grew up around his figure. The absence of miracles from the New Testament would be far more surprising than is their presence.

The miracles attributed to Jesus are of two main kinds, the expulsion of demons as a means of curing ills and allegorical fulfillments of supposed Old Testament prophecies. The first kind has been sufficiently examined. The second can be touched upon only briefly. It has been one of the main contributions of the higher criticism to point out how much of the life of Jesus is built up around passages in the Septuagint or Greek version of the Old Testament.

I do not think that I am going too far when I assert that the presence of these tales in the sacred literature of Christianity has done an incalculable amount of harm. They have given a sanction to all sorts of superstitious beliefs and have helped to carry over into our day an outlook which would otherwise have been more quickly cast off. Had it not been for the miracles related in the gospels, there would have been no problem of miracles to discuss. The idea, itself, would have been outgrown and have died a natural death. And, in the long run, that is what must take place. As a saner view of Jesus is taken and a better knowledge of the outlook of the time in which he lived is gained, the recorded miracles will be explained, not as actual events, but as actual beliefs.

Another period deserves study in this connection. When one examines the literature of the Middle Ages, one gains the conviction that miracles formed the staple emotional diet of the people. They played the part that novels and detective stories do now. Man is naturally dramatic in his interpretation of life, and what can be more thrilling than a miracle? Constance, the heroine of the Man of Law's Tale in Chaucer, is rescued from death when in most perilous plight by that Unseen Hand which frustrates the plots of the wicked. Skepticism and realism are slowly acquired habits of mind. The primary impulse is to believe. And, when religious motives and traditions enter to strengthen the sway of this impulse, it is hard to counteract. When learned theologians enunciate the principle, "I believe because it is absurd," it is not to be wondered at that the mass of the people believe because they do not see that it is absurd. For ages, the world was a sort of quicksand, and it has taken far more courage and sheer intellectual capacity and moral daring than the mass of the people will ever conceive to build dykes out into the unknown and rescue it for the empire of unswerving law.

But we must pass from the historical study of miracles to the systematic, or philosophical, aspect of the matter. The philosophy of miracles breaks up into two parts, the laws of evidence and proof, and the nature of cause. The first part may be called logical; the second, metaphysical.

Theological miracles involve two elements, the fact and the theory. It is only after the fact has been sufficiently proven that its cause can come into question. It is absurd to explain facts either by natural processes or by the will of God until you are certain that these events were actual occurrences. If a child took Alice in Wonderland too seriously and asked me to explain "Why the sea is boiling hot," I would be compelled to disappoint its craving for explanation. Now I am certain that the situation in regard to miracles is not much otherwise. Were the alleged facts to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, the need for a genuine explanation would press upon us. But the history of the subject points in the other direction.