Translated from the Polish

CHAPTER VII

CIVILISATION AND RELIGION

I INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

If a system of communal life is to be comprehensive, it must embrace religion.⁵⁸⁶ Life without religion cannot be complete — however many-sided, it will fall short of universality. On the other hand, anti-religious life is opposed to the development of civilisation and must have an immediately unfortunate effect on ethics as well as on the fine arts, and after a short period, on other categories of being. Because of the links between the physical and spiritual categories, any crippling of the latter brings in its train deficiencies and even abnormalities in material categories also. A civilisation which makes light of religion will begin to creak everywhere.

In the present consideration of the relationship arising between civilisation and religion it is not intended to examine civilisation from the point of view of religion, nor religion from the point of view of civilisation, but only to prepare material which will help the solution of the following problem: do the resemblances and differences between civilisations result from resemblances and differences of religion; if so is differentiation in civilisation the result of the variety of religions, and are religions therefore the creators of civilisations, i.e. of systems for the organisation of communal life?

For the sake of precision, I define what I mean by religion, which is a system embracing the relation of the natural to the supernatural world. Until recently stereotyped methods were employed for the investigation of religions in the belief that it was possible to deal with them all at once. This produced fantastic theories. Today nobody believes that religions emerged from ancestor-worship, and “astral” religion and the “Babylonian outlook” are treated as nonsense by serious scholars.⁵⁸⁷

The relation of every religion to civilisation ought to be investigated separately, so that it is the more necessary to distinguish between them. Religions are of three kinds — local, tribal and universal in membership; three also in essence — with monolatry alongside with polytheism and monotheism.

After proto-historic monotheism, religions became local and so fell into monolatry, for no monotheist religion can be local; by the logic of things monotheism is linked with universality. Monolatry is something basically different. If it had obtained among the majority of peoples, each would honour its own separate god and none of these gods would be the god of even two peoples. From the total of monolatries polytheism would then have developed — a team of tribal gods not even making up a mythology because all totally alien to each other.

In classical times, the Romans discovered one of the ways of ruling Italy permanently was to centre on Rome the cults of numerous local religions. Local and tribal religions were also associated with the expeditions of Alexander the Great, who offered sacrifice to all the gods along his route.

A local religion is attached to territory; in the event of a change of population, it is transferred from one people to another, from one race to another. The opposite is true of a tribal religion, which is attached to a people regardless of its place of abode. Tribal religions arose among nomads who, being fed up of constantly changing gods, realised that in fact they had none of their own. Not distinguishing monolatry but mistakenly reckoning it as monotheism, a whole series of scholars reached the fantastic conclusion that monotheism was the prerogative of nomads.

Evidently neither a local nor a tribal religion can be true. True monotheism proclaims only one God common to all peoples, and to each of them separately, identical for all: monotheism and universal religion go together. Brahminism, universal in principle, never lived up to itself, never went outside India, but deteriorated into a polytheistic religion, local even although the locality is a vast region. Unquestionably universal are Islam, Buddhism and Christianity.

If local and tribal are lower than universal, do adherents of universal religions automatically belong to higher civilisations? What has historical induction to teach us on the matter?

Through monotheism the Arabs and (to a point) the Jews attained a superior level of civilisation, but it is also certain that the pagan Scipios stood above them; if the Scipios had possessed belief in the One True God, they would have risen to a still higher level of civilisation. It is equally beyond doubt that monotheists would be falling to a lower level if they returned to polytheism. But such movement, whether lower or higher, takes place within the frame of the civilisation to which those concerned already belong. A monotheist Roman would never have become Jewish by civilisation, since it would have meant a lowering of his cultural level. In this matter there can be discussion only of levels, not of kinds of civilisation.

In following links with civilisations, conclusions from external resemblances between religions are to be guarded against. For example, there have always been processions, prayer-strings, etc. There were processions to Eleusis, and today flocks of pilgrims cross the Tibetan mountains, while in China a “fleet of junks” sails to the sacred island Pu-Tu, and “processional boats” are no rarity. In Constantinople rosaries are to be seen “wound round the hand of a fashionable gentleman distinguishable from the average European only by his fez, and round the hand of the hamal who carries loads in the port”. In Japan “every sect has different prayerstrings, as St. Francis Xavier noticed”.⁵⁸⁸ All this has no connection with the relationship of religions to civilisations.

In the Old Testament external resemblances can be found with the religion of old Persia, while “the later Mithraism, through the medium of the Persian religion, borrowed very many of the religious beliefs and practices of monotheism”.⁵⁸⁹ But it would be necessary to investigate separately whether influences on the organisation of communal life followed the same paths.

We face a great problem — the extent to which religion creates civilisation or civilisation religion. Buckle asserted that “religion is the consequence of the perfecting of humanity and not the cause of it”.⁵⁹⁰ On the other hand, Fustel de Coulanges argued that social always follows religious progress, and is evoked by it.⁵⁹¹ The recently deceased Durkheim held that religion is the mother of all institutions. The contemporary P. J. Andre is of opinion that “the birth of a new religion means the birth of a new civilisation”.⁵⁹² Le Bon went furthest in this direction, emphasising that even tha slightest change in religious beliefs brings a whole series of changes in the life of a people.⁵⁹³

And yet the religious changes in sixteenth century England certainly did not effect changes in the five categories of being. The Englishman who is converted to Catholicism at the present day does not change his civilisation; he belonged to Latin civilisation as an Anglican and continues to do so as a Catholic. Undoubtedly a man who passes from paganism to Christianity changes a great deal; which is also the case if he rejects it by passing over to Islam — very important changes took place on such occasions in North Africa and later in the Balkans. But against this may be set facts from the decline of the Roman Empire, when the flower of the Roman intelligentsia, in accepting baptism, remained within Roman civilisation and strove to carry it on. Thus there is no general rule; the matter must be investigated in the case of each religion separately.

Religion creates civilisation only when it draws under its sacral legislation the five categories of being, when it is the determining factor not only for morals but also in categories of health, the struggle for existence, art and learning.