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

by Roy Wood Sellars

There are many other sources of myths. Around all striking events, such as the first punishment of homicide, legends arise. Bellerophon and Ixion are compelled to flee into exile. Again, the facts and ritual of death are a fruitful center for the working of the imagination. The sheol of the Hebrews is first the grave; and only later does it become even the shadowy underworld which is pictured in Isaiah.

But our purpose is not to present an exhaustive analysis of the types of myth which early man wove about the world in which he found himself. What it is important to grasp is the slow growth from an almost animal state of ignorance to a more enlightened, moral, and socially ordered life. This evolution took time, and such progress as was made was always in danger of being overthrown by the hardening of myth and cult into a strait-jacket of superstition and hysterical fear. This danger was always great just because reason could secure no firm foothold upon reality. Man's life was one of constant fear. He felt himself assailed by evil spirits and surrounded by taboos and laws, to violate which meant disaster. When we glance over history, we find only two things which have shown promise of power to raise man out of this slough of fear,—ethical monotheism and reason. How far is this a genuine antithesis? May it not be that the real strength and freeing power of ethical monotheism is due to the reason which created it and speaks through it?

Upon one set of myths of extreme importance for religion we have, however, scarcely touched. Yet the study of this group and its explanation has been a signal triumph for the science of comparative religion. It is a great pity that the general public knows, as yet, so little about the researches made by scholars into the wide-spread ritual of communion and purification, by means of which the participant becomes one with his deity and is even assured of salvation and immortality. The interesting fact is, that, here again, we find ideas which are essentially primitive and magical given a new setting. What was once social, and largely a ritual concerned with the re-birth of vegetation in the Spring, becomes personal, and a symbol of the resurrection of a believer in another world. In its first form and motivation, this set of ideas turns around the tribe's material needs. Only with the growth of self-consciousness is it applied to the individual.

Why did this type of ritual arise? And why was it celebrated with such fervor? These questions lead us into the very heart of early religion. Religion was the expression of man's very real need, in the light of his view of the world as the seat of spiritual agencies. "The extraordinary security of our modern life in times of peace makes it hard for us to realize, except by a definite effort of the imagination, the constant precariousness, the frightful proximity of death, that was usual in these weak ancient communities. They were in fear of wild beasts; they were helpless against floods, helpless against pestilences. Their food depended on the crops of one tiny plot of ground; and if the Savior was not reborn with the spring, they slowly and miserably died. And all the while they knew almost nothing of the real causes that made crops succeed or fail. They only felt sure it was somehow a matter of pollution, of unexpiated defilement. It is this state of things that explains the curious cruelty of early agricultural works, the human sacrifices, the scapegoats, the tearing in pieces of living animals, and perhaps of living men, the steeping of the fields in blood." To men at this stage, religion is the most natural of attitudes. It is the child of animism, of magic, of ignorance and of need. But to explain the origin of an attitude is not to explain it away. May it not be that these sentiments can be given another setting and other objects?

While all races have passed through this myth-making stage, certain races have been more gifted, or else more favored by the circumstances of their development. A vivid imagination, a relatively complex society with different traditions, a diversified landscape, an inviting climate, and a leisurely, yet vigorous life were necessary to the highest efflorescence of this poetic power to weave human motives into nature and into the conduct of supernatural powers conceived after the manner of men. These conditions were fulfilled to a remarkable degree among the Greeks, whose mythology constantly surprises us by its richness, variety and delicacy. As the years rolled by, every striking aspect of nature or of traditional ritual was interpreted in terms of the passion, plan or caprice of some being, different from, yet by no means alien to, man. The daring and beauty of the legends woven by this race and the immensity of their range have made them the admiration and wonder of other times more given to reflection than to phantasy. The childhood of the race was productive in a memorable fashion which has made art and literature forever its debtors.

In our admiration for Greek mythology, we must not forget that other races and nations wove stories to account for human life and to interpret those features of nature which aroused their fear, love or wonder. Our own Northern mythology had its beauties and wild reaches of imagination which made it, in certain regards, a fit rival of that of the Mediterranean. The story of Balder, the joyous and kindly god whom all things loved, is evidently the mythical form of the passing of summer sunshine and the coming of winter with its darkness and gloom. We must always remember that our remote ancestors interpreted their world concretely, and mainly in terms of human life, because they had no abstract ideas at their command. Psychical and physical concepts were interfused in their minds: prose and poetry, fact and figure combined together without that feeling of disharmony which is so distinctive of the modern mind. Nature welcomed personification, and to read the conflict of light and darkness, warmth and cold, in terms of human struggles and hates was the inevitable course for human thought to take. The simple grandeur of many of these tales of the gods comes from the poignancy of life itself. Those events in nature which affected man intensely received an intense meaning. We, who have conquered nature in large measure, or can so predict her convulsions as to escape the first shock of her rude forces; we, who think of her processes as ruled by impersonal laws, cannot appreciate the directness and unveiled immediacy of those ancient dramas which man saw around him. Darkness is for us the absence of light, not a mysterious and threatening presence which fills the sky while the kindly god of day sleeps. Light consists of vibrations in ether emitted from a tremendously hot, material substance instead of being a beneficent force under the control of a radiant being.

But other races than the Aryan were less inclined to embellish and humanize nature. The imagination worked less freely to add to the visible aspect of things. The consequence of this thinness of reaction was, that the mind rested in things as they appeared, although it could not desist from assigning to them capacities and powers which were superhuman. Nature was at least instinct with will, even while this vaguely stirring will did not clothe itself in definite forms. Man believed himself surrounded by forces which affected him for good and evil; he felt himself immersed in an ocean of life, yet he could not discern any forms back of that which he saw with his bodily eyes. Perhaps these other races had less of the dramatic in their composition, less of that genial delight in far-fetched analogies and the free play of ideas.

As time passed, the first stage of mythology with its simple naturalism and its relative lack of imaginative elements gave way to a more human stage. Myths of the next world came to the front, and man became more and more concerned with his salvation in an afterlife. Comparative religion has proven how widespread was the belief in some sort of immortality. The Orphic cults in Greece, the Osiris and Isis cult in Egypt, the worship of Attis and Adonis in Syria, the purification and communion ceremonies of Mithraism, all turned about the idea of a secret means of salvation. A common set of ideas developed in the Mediterranean basin and found expression in liturgies and phrases of a striking similarity. The god dies and is resurrected; the virgin goddess gives birth to a son; the members of a religious community eat of their god and gain strength from the sacred meal. The Church Fathers were aware of these similarities and sought to explain away their resemblances with the Christian ritual by means of the theory that the Devil had blasphemously imitated Christian rites and doctrines. Research has shown that this theory of parody is entirely unhistorical. The fact is, that Christianity borrowed its ritual from the cults among which it grew up. For instance, the belief in the death and resurrection of a savior-god was very prevalent in Tarsus, Paul's own city. The Attis mysteries were celebrated at a season which corresponded to the end of our Lenten period and the beginning of Easter. They were preceded by fasting and began with lamentations, "the votaries gathering in sorrow around the bier of the dead divinity; then followed the resurrection, and the risen god gave hope of salvation to the mystic brotherhood, and the whole service closed with the feast of rejoicing, the Hilaria." There can be little doubt that this whole cycle of ideas represents a development of the primitive ritual of eating the sacred animal or plant in spring in order to foster the re-birth of man's necessities. From this germ sprang reflective ideas of atonement and communion and immortality.

Along with the growth of the mysteries went the introduction of more ethical standards of conduct. Ritual purity suggested the idea of spiritual purity. This ethicizing of myth is very apparent in Greece. By the time of the dramatists, moral judgments had become more severe, and the gods were looked upon as guardians of the moral law; and yet this view was tragically thwarted by much of the old tradition. The savage inheritance and the later moral idealism found themselves in conflict. The consequence was the gradual weakening of the older myths and the welcoming of new cults.

Ethical growth is usually in large measure unconscious. Man reads ideas into the world around him before he becomes conscious that they are his own. His own development is thus reflected in the pantheon with which he has peopled nature. Zeus is at first the thunderer and the cloud-gatherer; finally he represents justice and those kingly qualities which social growth stresses. Poets and philosophers refine away the grosser myths which shock the taste of a more advanced social level. When we compare the conceptions of Euripides, of Plato, of Cleanthes, of Marcus Aurelius, with the conduct of the Homeric gods, we realize the distance traveled by the mind of man along ethical lines. Man is now a builder of ideals. Yet the cosmic setting for these ideals is virtually unchanged; the framework of man's universe has remained much the same. It is at heart a realm of personal agents with which man is in communication.