Books of the Day
An Anthropological Ramble
Religion in Science and Civilization. By Sir Richard Gregory, Bart., F.R.S. (Macmillan. 123. 6d.) THE somewhat enigmatic title of Sir Richard Gregory's book might leave any one who only saw the back of it in doubt as
to what he would find inside. In fact, what the book contains is a discursive presentation of a large number of the results reached by anthropological inquiry regarding the part played by religion in the different phases of human culture. Some of it, however, is concerned less with religion than with rudimentary attempts at science—in Babylonian and Greek star-lore, for instance—or with the allusions to contemporary scientific theories in an arbi- trarily selected number of poets—Omar Khayyam, Dante, Tenny- son, Chaucer, Milton, Donne, Goethe ; Leonardo da Vinci, although not a poet, is thrust into the series, presumably because he is famous for his achievements in another of the arts. The chapters skip about from one subject to another without any obvious plan. Since Sir Richard has a large acquaintance with the results of anthropological inquiry in the various parts of the field over which he ranges, any reader less versed in that field will no doubt gain from such a book a good deal of knowledge which he had not before. Nowhere indeed does Sir Richard claim to contribute anything fresh of his own to what the specialist researchers have put forward: the book is one of popularisation, but to spread the results of research among the general public is, after all, a good work.
So far as my own limited knowledge qualifies me to judge, the account which Sir Richard gives of the different religious and cultural phenomena surveyed is generally sound, though it seems to me unfortunate that he should set forth the fantastic imaginations of Professor Freud about Moses as if they were accepted by any competent body of opinion. I have noticed only one or two definite mistakes. The worst perhaps is that which makes Thales possibly a pupil of Berosus: Thales belongs to the first half of the sixth century ac., and Berosus flourished under the Seleucid king, Antiochus I (281- 262 a.c.). On page 154 it is said that Greek men of science went to Persia " after the destruction of the Alexandrian Museum in415.7 I can find no evidence for a destruction of the Alexandrian Museum in 415: Sir Richard is probably thinking of the Greek philosophers who went to Persia when the schools of Athens were shut down by Justinian in A.D. 529. Sir Richard says (p. 213) that " Joseph is often referred to as the father of Jesus, especially by St. Mark." There is no allusion to Joseph in St. Mark nor to the Nativity. Aristarchos of Samos was not " the only astronomer and philosopher who taught that the earth moves round the sun " (p. 121): the heliocentric hypothesis was maintained as the true view by Seleucus of Seleucia (second century B.C.) ; Aristarchos had only indicated it as a possibility. On page rot it is implied that the 14th of Nisan, the date of the Crucifixion, coincided with a new moon: this is plainly merely an inadvertence in expression, since Sir Richard states correctly a page or two further on that the Passover had to be on the fourteenth day after a new moon. Some other surprising state- ments are, I think, to be considered rather cases of carelessness in expression than as definite mistakes. I really do not know what Sir Richard has in mind when he says that " we are told " (by whom?) that the tradition of the Divine origin and inerrancy of the Scriptures began with Moses's bringing down the Tables of the Law from Sinai (p. 67). On page 125 it is said that " to early Christians pagan thought and intellectual development were anathema." This, of course, is quite untrue of an important part of the early Church—of Clement of Alexandria and Origen, of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, of Ambrose and Augustine. Nor do I know what Sir Richard means when he makes the statement, obviously untrue as it stands, that " the Christian Church never actually said that Jesus was God " (p. 213).
Sir Richard is, of course, right in saying that some of the beliefs held generally in the Christian Church regarding the Bible and human origins have now been given up by most educated Christians, and that such a document as the recent Report on Doctrine in the Church of England, to which he refers, shows a shifting of opinion. He is, however, hardly at home when he talks about the present state of belief in the Christian Churches. He seems to suppose that there is a minority of "enlightened
leaders " who " ask for nothing more than belief in a Supreme Being, Who created the universe, established laws which rule is. and watches the evolution of man upon the earth " (p. 212). M such " leaders " exist, they must be a very small minority indeed, and by describing them as " enlightened" Sir Richard obtrudes a value-judgement of his own which would seem, I think, to those leaders who have an acknowledged standing as philosophers— Professor A. E. Taylor, for instance, or the present Dean of St. Paul's—to be marked by a certain naiveté.
Sir Richard's grasp of the real problems of religion seems to me fumbling and vague. That the various conceptions and beliefs about the universe which he puts before us have existed, as matters of psychological fact, among primitive men, in the ancient civilisations, in the Christian Church, may be acknowledged equally by a Christian or an atheist. The problem comes with the question what relation this series of beliefs bears to Reality. They may be regarded as simply a sequence of delusions to be explained by the working of the human mind : they may be regarded as more or less successful attempts to apprehend a super- human spiritual Reality ; and then it makes a great difference what the character of that Reality is. It is as if someone were looking at a face through shifting mists and seeing the truth more or less clearly. By merely pointing to the sequence as one of psychological facts you cannot prove which explanation of it is the right one. Sir Richard's view is apparently the first one ; the beliefs are to be understood simply as a sequence of delusions. Yet he wants, in spite of that, to attribute some value to religion, to mark degrees of value between different phases. This, of course, is impossible to do unless you make up your mind what you are going to hold about the Reality outside the series : only so can you form any value-judgement about the series as a whole,
or about differences of " higher " and " lower " within it. Sir Richard seems to think that it would be an advance if we could conceive of Divinity " as a universal and infinite ocean of spirituality " (p. 322), though to Christians this would seem an attempt to get over a difficulty by a meaningless phrase.
EDWYN BEVAN.
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