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

by Roy Wood Sellars

Early religion was largely a state affair, for it concerned itself with the safety of the social group; but it was rapidly becoming an engrossing concern for the individual. The religious imagination was busily painting another world and connecting it with the relations of the individual to divine powers. Given the religious view of the world, what an instrument of appeal and of dread this conception of immortality was! The shadow and sunshine of another world lay athwart this one. Endless vistas of pain and pleasure stretched into the future. No wonder that the true means of salvation became the burning question! From the beginning, Christianity emphasized the fact of another world and its terrific meaning for the soul of man, adopting as an inheritance the current views with regard to a Messianic kingdom and a place of torment. Paul even goes so far as to proclaim the cynical alternative: "If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."

The ideas of immortality and salvation were the central features of the great religious revival which swept over the Roman Empire about the time of the rise of Christianity. The desire for personal safety in this world and the next moved men. Fear and hope worked together; fear of the terrors awaiting the soul after death, hope of a happy existence in some paradise. That early Christianity owed much of its success to its doctrines of final things cannot be denied. It was a period of astrology, theosophy, mysticism, cults of saviors, eschatologies. Few were able to keep their heads above this tide of oracular mythology and superstition. What moorings did they have? None of that tested knowledge of the physical world which we possess, and which keeps numbers of people fairly sane to-day in spite of themselves. When we recall the terror at Salem a few centuries ago, we must admit that these Greeks, and Romans, and Jews, and Syrians did not conduct themselves so badly in the demon-ridden world in which they lived. Yet, while it would be unfair to blame those who embraced the various cults, it would be equally unfair not to give praise to those few enlightened souls who would approve none of these things.

Up to the present, the doctrine of immortality has been an essential part of Christianity. The creeds which have come down to us proclaim the faith that Christ Jesus will appear again to judge the quick and the dead. To the average man, religion is absolutely committed to such a belief. It has gone hand in hand with the idea of retribution and reward until the two have grown together. It is not strange, then, that the suspicion that immortality is not justified by physiological and psychological facts is felt to have a grave bearing upon religion. To the vast majority, religion without immortality is like Hamlet with Hamlet left out. Remove the faith in a special providence, likewise, and the edifice around which many religious emotions and values have entwined themselves is no more than a ruin.

But the idea of a soul always accompanies the belief in immortality. The experiences which led to the one notion naturally encouraged the other. If the soul can leave the body, it is obviously independent, in large measure, of the latter's fate. Let us glance at some of the experiences whose false interpretation is at the foundation of a belief in an immortal soul inhabiting the body for a little space.

It is surprising what an influence was exercised by dreams. We have so completely outgrown this uncritical attitude toward them that it takes some effort to realize how natural it was. For the educated man of to-day, dreams are subjective experiences, that is, experiences which do not contain information about what is happening in the external world. In the jargon of psychology, they are centrally aroused ideas playing about some organic stimulus or some repressed wish. But the savage knew nothing about such distinctions. The dead appeared to the living and talked with them. Patroclus stands before Achilles and chides him. Do not the dead, then, have some sort of life? Many psychological motives combined to convince primitive man of at least a shadowy existence after death. But there was another side to the dream-life. The living went on long journeys, doing strange things, while their bodies rested in the tent. Added to these suggestions, so naturally lending themselves to a spiritistic interpretation, were still others. Certain kinds of sickness are explained by means of the idea of possession. Invisible agents are at work in the world. What can a trance be if not the temporary absence of just such an agent? "Among the Kayans of Borneo, for example, it is the custom for an elderly person learned in such matters to sit beside the corpse, where the soul is supposed to hover for some days after death, and to impart to the latter minute directions for its journey to the land of the dead." We are in the presence, here, of natural illusions, of hypotheses which inevitably arose. Man's first guesses were mistakes. The whole history of science drives this fact home.

The various opinions men have built up around the idea of a soul are instructive. How gravely men have written about such hidden things! Only very slowly have they learned to separate an experience from its interpretation, and to seek a wide range of facts before erecting even an hypothesis. To explain by means of agents, visible and invisible, is the plausible method to which man always resorts first. It is only when he becomes more sophisticated that he thinks in terms of processes. The following examples of divergent opinion upon the soul, gathered by an able French author, show the vagueness of the idea:

Origen, the Alexandrian theologian: "The soul is material and has a definite shape."

St. Augustine: "The soul is incorporeal and immortal."

A Polynesian: "The soul is a breath, and when I saw that I was on the point of expiring, I pinched my nose in order to retain my soul in my body. But I did not grasp it tightly enough—and I am dead."

Albertus Magnus: "There are thirty arguments against the immortality of the soul and thirty-six for, which is a majority of six arguments in favor of the affirmative."