God Among the Idols

David Elliot

Part I originally published in Issue XIII of Vulgata,May, 2004.

Part I -- The Old Testament to the Middle Ages

The Victorian poet Charles Swinburne decried with atheistic languor the domestication of pagan antiquity’s Dionysian vitality at the hands of Christ the conqueror:

Thou hast triumphed, O pale Galilean,
The whole world is grey with thy breath.
Like Nietzche, he saw Christianity as a pallid, bloodless, anemic thing, an ascetic asphyxiation of primal instinct, tyrannical rule, and the lusty affirmation of life’s amoral naturalness and bestial beauty.  Thus the thing chiefly to be guarded against is the spreading of the Christian virus through the missionary enterprise, and the great evil to be feared is that the Church’s “sins and sons through sinless lands will disperse”.  This is a sentiment that has not died out.  We can hear it at a great many cocktail parties or interfaith dialogues where the mere suggestion of converting natives from their own religious traditions to confessional Christianity would be lambasted as unutterably imperialistic and monolithically self-righteous. Often the ghost of Spanish Conquistadors or some Jesuit phalanx looms like a nefarious cloud in the minds of those for whom the word “missionary” invariably appears in ironic quotation marks.   Here we see the dominance of the postmodern model in the religious assumptions of the secular West: one’s tradition, whether it be that of hallowing God, praying to the ancestors, conjuring the totem pole, or worshipping a crocodile, is raucously trumpeted by the cultural elite, not because it tells me anything about reality or touches the transcendent, but simply because it pleases me; is the thing I happen to prefer.  The Commandment is still “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”, but the question of whether the “me” in question refers to God or to the individual speaker must be left undecided in a culture where the monstrance held up for our adoration too seldom features a Host, too often a mirror.  This may seem a somewhat curmudgeonly and uncharitable note to sound, but it is only the necessary conclusion of the endemic notion that the preferences of the individual, and not what is objectively owed to God, should determine one’s spiritual fealty.  “And it harm me none, do what thou wilt” is repeated with jingoistic glee by postmodern purveyors eager to replace an immutable God owed unconditional obedience with One – whether He, She, or It - pieced together by the individual’s own inviolable fiat.  Cardinal Newman’s dictum that we are not simply imperfect people in need of improvement, but rebels who must lay down our arms, is quite reversed in this vision dubbed by “progressives” as broad-minded and “traditionalists” as sophistical.  In such a schema there is no room for another St. Francis Xavier – or, for that matter, St. Paul - to blanket the globe with Christian particularities at the expense of native piety’s lush traditions.  We might even without glibness go so far as to say that the great commission of postmodern religiosity is to permanently retire the former commission “Go out into all the world and make disciples of all nations” since that is a species of spiritual colonialism chafing at cultural diversity.  Thus Christians stand now at a hardly navigable crossroads: we may continue to evangelize, but with the heightened risk of ecumenical capsize and the likely relegation to academic obscurantism; or we can make obeisance to postmodernity, with the sure loss of Christian distinctiveness and the possible fate of becoming just one more voice added to the chorus of secularism.

Before capitulating to sensationalism, I think we need to understand that the problem of religious pluralism is hardly the unforeseen disaster or “Trojan Horse in the City of God” that some cantankerous critics and Tridentine nostalgiacs have dubbed it.  No indeed.  The church was born into the original era of religious diversity, when the Roman Empire, having grown tired of prosy old Jove, was willing to give ear to any crank vending a panacea and was eager to transplant all the mystery cults of Egypt, Greece, and Persia onto its own aboriginal mythology of deified lechers.  The whole Mediterranean at that time was a vast melting pot of religious syncretism, and the brotherhood of all religions was an axiomatic fact.  We don’t usually associate an Empire built on martial belligerence with one of the cherished values of modern liberal democracies, but notwithstanding its swords and siege-engines, Rome was a paragon of religious inclusivity.  At least, until there occurred the rather apocalyptic episode which scholars insist on calling “The Jesus Movement”.  Something in that company of fishermen, slaves, peasants, and women came across as so frenetically antiestablishment that the normally sanguine laws surrounding religion presently ceased to apply to the Christian provincials.  Soon Caesars eulogized for their tolerance (who even had the greatness of heart to overlook the excesses of the scandalously monotheistic Jews) were issuing decrees calling for the arrest, torture, and execution of Christians who demurred in the matter of Emperor-worship and mulishly clung to the criminal Galilean.  If anything should strike us as novel, then, it should not be the phenomenon of Christianity encountering a myriad of religions in a pluralistic world.  Despite the colourful zoology of unexpected gods brought to Western shores in the past generation or so, the “problem of many religions” was originally the first – not the twenty first – century’s pioneer territory.  What should really beguile us is the fact that in a place as religiously pluralistic and tolerant as the Roman Empire, Christians were from the earliest days persecuted with a rancour bordering on mania.  It should never be forgotten that when the first Christians were offered a place at the table of interfaith jamboree, and were invited to place a statue of Christ beside the statues of Zeus and Adonis in one great revel of reconciliation, how it was that they answered, and what were the consequences of their refusal.  This may not give us any definitive theological conclusion, but it does give us some perspective, and makes clear two particular things: i) that the encounter between Christianity and the melting pot of religions is nothing new and nothing which of itself need annex the Christian identity, and ii) that the original Christian response to a pluralistic society was not to measure the Faith by the standards of the world, but to measure the world by the standards of the Faith.  The confessors and martyrs all took the side of Plato’s Socrates against that of the Sophist Protagoras in the first and most important of all theological debates: God, and not man, is the measure of all things.

In order to avoid banal generalizations in the matter of what Christians have historically thought and how they have reacted to the pagan arabesque; I propose a short outline of the major positions and thinkers from Scripture to the present followed by a brief riposte to modern latitudinarian assumptions.  To tie up loose ends and move beyond what this or that man has opined to a surer footing, I take the ecclesiastical verdicts – and especially those of Vatican II – as my theological court of final appeal while avoiding a slavish officiousness that would only thwart licit creativity.  This, I hope, will prove somewhat useful despite admittedly impressionistic assessments calculated not to definitively exhaust, but only fruitfully probe, the multicultural West’s great theological question mark.

Old Testament

Beginning with Scripture itself, then, we must admit that the raw letter does not tend to furnish us with anything like ecumenical utopianism.  True that in the Old Testament the oriental patriarch Job is paraded as God’s superlative boast, the reluctant prophet Jonah is sent to garb heathen Nineveh in penitent’s rags, and the Gentile “queen of the South” is prophesied as eschatological judge for unfaithful Jews – all implying that God is solicitous for, and quite capable of, salvation for those without Abrahamic pedigree.  But these are all exceptions.  The general tenor of the Old Testament is iconoclastic.  We see it in the fierce red glint in all the prophets eyes at bedeviled cults and blood imbibed by idols; we hear it in the call to war upon the ancient order of the gods and their wayward pagan votaries.  The sacred groves are felled, the idols are smashed, and when Israel itself begins hankering for demonic patrons; God, we are given to understand, permits the Babylonians or Assyrians to deal out a fierce drubbing that leads in the end to tearful repentance.  It is no accident that the First Commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me”, nor was it so taken by the ancient Jews whose monotheistic zeal arced to violence with what looked to pagan eyes like the barbarous frenzy of a desert horde.  And although there is the eschatological promise that Israel will be the ultimate source of salvation and sanctification for the demonically hoodwinked nations, the idea of missionary goodwill tends to be relegated by the Israelites – quite comfortably - to the mists of futurity.  The overall impression the Old Testament leaves us with is that any encounter between Almighty God, His angels, and Chosen People on one side; and the benighted pagans in thrall to dark gods on the other, almost always takes place on black and white chequered squares, with innumerable saber scars being left behind.

 New Testament

Nor, at first reading, does the New Testament appear to be more sanguine on the subject of unbelievers.  It will be remembered that it is there - from the lips of Christ Himself - that the fierce monosyllable “Hell” first appears with threats so incendiary as to make all the thirst, grit, dust, and itch of the Old Testament underworld look like rivers of honey in comparison.  This is not to undermine the moral beauty and divine amorousness of the Christ whose clemency and goodness ravish believers and unbelievers alike, and whose admonitions about Hell are really love’s precautions against choosing final lovelessness.  But we must avoid the rosy naivete of attributing to Christ an unscriptural universalism that bowdlerizes His “hard sayings” about faith’s necessity and the narrowness of the way.

There are, for example, the sayings that seem to imply that an individual’s eternal felicity is contingent upon a professed faith and sacramental baptism.  “He who has believed and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.”  (Mark 16:16).  And:  “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (John 3:5).  When Paul is asked by his prison guard: “What must I do to be saved?” he replies “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved… and he was baptized at once, with all his family.”  (Acts 16:30-33).  Peter’s epistolary conclusion on the subject is unmistakably clear: “Baptism now saves you” (3:21).  And yet there are clear exceptions to this seeming absolute.  The Old Testament saints, for example, who knew no baptism but concerning whose salvation we can hardly be in doubt; or the penitent thief crucified beside Christ and gently assured a room in the house of many mansions.  The old formula “God has bound salvation to the sacraments, but God himself is not bound by his sacraments” therefore finds New Testament warrant.  But while noting that a few instances of extraordinary incorporation into the saving mystery of Christ are to be found, Scripture’s unrelenting stentorian summons (from the lips of Jesus Himself) to explicit faith and baptism cannot to be sandpapered away to permit a laissez-faire soteriology.  That would be like saying (in the words of St. Augustine) “Let so-and-so be wounded worse, for he is not dead yet”.  And surely Christ would not prescribe a medicine for which His patients were not in need.
Somewhat in the vein of Old Testament Yahwistic triumphalism we find assorted passages concerning Christ’s harrowing of Hell that unquestionably tell against the old gods.  Christ is “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion”, all things are put “under his feet” (Ephesians 1:21-2), “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it (Colossians 2:15)” etc.  It need hardly be said that the above royal titles (principalities, powers, dominions etc.) in Jewish and Christian parlance denote the fallen angels who lead gentile nations astray, the pagan gods whom St. Paul chillingly equates with “demons” (1 Corinthians 10:20).  Such language is most certainly meant in Scripture to reprobate the Canaanite Baals, Olympian despots, and Babylonian hierarchies; the only question is whether it could also be applied, say, to the three million gods of the Hindu pantheon, or to the oft-invoked luminaries of Mahayana Buddhism.  If so, the crusader animus and fey iconoclasm it would engender in Christianity’s view of “foreign gods” would be unilateral in scope and terminal to ecumenism.

But the evidence for this position is certainly not irresistible.  There is, for example, Paul’s exhortation to the pagan intelligentsia of Athens where he praises their altar to “an unknown God” whom he equates with the Creator; quoting in approval also, in reference to God, a text lauding Zeus from the Greek poet Aratos: “In him we live and move and have our being, for we are his offspring” (Acts 17:28).  Irenic ecumenist that he is, Paul allows the Athenians some very princely concessions: they are said to be: i) “very religious”, ii) worshipping the “Lord of heaven” (but only as an “unknown God”), and iii) as sons of Adam, they “seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him” (Acts 17:27).  So they are not simply described as cynical brutes meant to die on pikes or the deranged slaves of capricious idols.  They have piety, wisdom, wit, and a dignity borne of their descent from Adam.  However, Paul is not content - now that the torch of truth is present to burn away the cobwebs of past error – to have them go on building bronze statues of Zeus and worshipping the genius of the Emperor.  The overall impression of the Athenian détente is that the gentiles have a sense of the true God, but that their idolatry has left whatever antediluvian impression of Him remains thoroughly befogged and in need of Christian Revelation as a corrective to their errors and the consummation of their piety.  (One is reminded here of Chesterton’s saying that “What we are in need of isn’t a religion that is right where we are right, but a religion that is right where we are wrong”).

This dovetails nicely with Paul’s view in Romans that Creation testifies to its Maker (Romans 1:20) and that the heathen are therefore culpable when they decline the adoration of the invisible deity to worship the nearest crocodile.  Beyond this, he explicitly grants that those who lacked the law of God written on tablets of stone will be judged on the basis of whether they followed the moral law written on the tablets of human hearts (Romans 2:13-16).  This suggests that virtuous pagans whose ignorance of Christ is inculpable may yet be saved by their adherence to the pre-Incarnate Logos who enlightens every man coming into the world (John 1:9).  Thus, the Enlightenment picture of the Christian God as a tyrannical child who plays with some toys and pulls to pieces others is rubbished, and frantic palpitations about the fate of far-off natives and forgotten savages are allayed.  For, as St. Paul says, God wills “all to be saved, and be led to recognize the truth”; and He has provided the means for both.

Church Fathers and Doctors

The idea that the ruck of Christian theologians from the early Church Fathers past the twilight of medieval scholastics could say nothing about non-Christian religions without endlessly glutting hapless readers on venomous, reactionary, and specious bombast; is (I hope to show) merely a stock example of secular hysterics.  For example, St. Irenaeus held that the Son, from the very beginning and in every part of the world, gives a more or less obscure revelation of the Father to every creature, and that He can be the “Salvation of those who are born outside the Way.”  St. Justin Martyr held that the logos spermatikos (“seed-bearing word) was discernible by the intelligible light of reason to all peoples and that traces of Christian truth could be found fruitfully scattered in the vagaries of pagan myth and the brilliance of its philosophy.  St. Cyprian, St. Hilary, and St. Ambrose held that “the divine Sun of Justice shines on all and for all”; Origen, St. Jerome, and St. Cyril of Alexandria refused to assert “that any man is born without Christ”; and St. John Chrysostom proclaimed: “grace is diffused everywhere and there is no soul that cannot feel its attraction”.  St. Augustine, though widely regarded as the patristic canon’s severest doctrinaire, is prepared to grant that the pagans have always had their “hidden saints” and prophets, and that someone born into error is blameless before God “provided he does not with obstinate self-assurance shut out all better knowledge, but seeks the truth simply and loyally”.  And finally, we have it from the pen of St. Thomas Aquinas that God can be known in part by the heathen, but only “by a few, over much time, with many errors” (a reverent nod to the Plato’s and Aristotle’s of the world), for which reason man’s natural lights need to be augmented by divine revelation.

Such rumbustious ecumenism is not to say that the pioneering geniuses of the Christian patrimony were naive in their assessment of the myths, rites, dramas, philosophies, idolatries and debaucheries of the old-world pagan morass; or that they were chary or timorous in flogging devotion to anachronistic deities when all things had been made new in Christ.  They could overturn idols with the volcanic fury of a Moses or Elijah in their more apocalyptic moments.  But they were also penetrating masters in the art of separating the wheat from the chaff when it came to the pagan inheritance; else St. Augustine would never have come to Christianity through neo-Platonism, and St. Thomas Aquinas would never have built the cathedral of his theology on an Aristotelian foundation.  Grace builds on nature rather than abolishing it, and though the Fathers and the Doctors knew that man’s nature – and therefore pagan invention – was fallen; they also knew that the fire of God, descending upon impure altars, need not destroy those that it can purify.  I, for one, therefore see no reason to think that if the accidents of history were such that the Fathers had lived to see, say, Buddhism and Hinduism rather than Greek and Roman paganism, that their martyr’s passion combined to their towering intellects would have resulted in any less faithful, or any more perspicacious, a Christian assessment of the proverbial “other”.

[Part II]
 

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