American Academy of Religion

CommunicationAuthor(s): Kenneth HamiltonSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Mar., 1967), pp. 65-66Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1461048 .

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C OMMUNICATION

EDITOR, JAAR

SIR: On opening the October, 1966 number and seeing that my "Homo Religiosus and Historical Faith" published in the Journal in July, 1965 had prompted the reply "Homo Religiosus and the Death of God," I began to read David L. Miller's article with considerable interest. My interest dwindled rapidly, however, as I read on and met preachment rather than argument. Dr. Miller's parade of the theories of Joseph Campbell and Stanley R. Hopper proves that it is easy to write a short article and lose the point in some two-hundred-odd lines of footnotes. It proves nothing else.

The point I raised in my article was whether we are to opt for one side or the other of Eliade's dichotomy of the sacred and the profane, i. e., whether we wish to return to the outlook of homo religiosus. Miller claims to meet the point, but in fact elaborately avoids it: to begin with, by calling in Campbell's theory of four (or more) stages in the religious

consciousness. What Miller calls a "complicating factor" is actually a red herring. For either all stages in Campbell's evolutionary pattern fall within Eliade's explanation of the "nature of religion" or they do not. If they do, they are irrelevant to the discussion. If they do not, it becomes pointless to con- tinue to use the term homo religiosus. We shall have to start again to find a new defini- tion of "religion."

Precision of thought - or, more simply, coming to the point - is strangely absent from Miller's use of his authorities. There is a superabundance of quotation, but no consideration whatever of the vital issue of the religious presuppositions of these writers. He does not raise the question of what criteria Campbell has chosen in order to trace the history of "the religious con- sciousness" (whatever that may be) or how Hopper has reached the conclusion that true prophets make known "the deep no- tions of the collective unconscious." Yet,

after all, the article under discussion is supposed to be about the validity of religion today; and so the one overriding concern must be how the "circle" of religion is to be drawn and where its limits are.

However, if Miller avoids the obvious and tries to squeeze multiple choices out of a straight either/or, he finds simple answers on the plane of history, which to most people seems rather complex. There exists, if we are to believe him, a homogeneous "modern man" who can be positively cor- related with "pre-sacral man." This is post-Christian man, and our religious needs are to be predicated upon his experiences. Modern literature, meanwhile, witnesses prophetically to these experiences being ex- periences of the death of God.

Speaking as one whose academic training has been in literature as well as in theology, I find this kind of reasoning comical. Since the break-up of the unitary Aristotelian- Thomistic vision of the universe, we have had no commonly accepted vision to replace it. (Some of the literary evidence for this view I have gathered in an essay, In Search of Contemporary Man, shortly to be pub- lished.) But to use the term "post-Christian" in any more specific sense than "post- Medieval" is almost always to claim too much, too loosely. This is especially ob- vious when the term is put forward, together with "the death of God," as typifying our own century. It might well be argued, for instance, that T. S. Eliot is less post-Chris- tian than Whitman or even Tennyson. And a case could be made for regarding talk about "the death of God in our generation" to spring from a desire to regress into the security of the nineteenth century. Then Nietzsche really could believe that men, having killed God, were becoming gods; whereas now we must face the possibility of humanity committing suicide.

Of course, some modern men are saying that God has died in their experience, and, if they speak only for themselves, we must respect their sincerity. (It is noteworthy,

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66 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF RELIGION

all the same, that this group contains few scientists, historians, or philosophers other than disciples of Heidegger.) But to attrib- ute the experience, as Miller does, to lack of nourishment in the traditional Christian diet is to go a long way beyond the evi- dence. Did Auden suffer malnutrition when he left the "religions" of Marxism and Freudianism for historic Christianity? The question is probably as futile as to ask whether Joyce would have fared better had he stayed with his Jesuit instructors. Our age is not unique in discovering that Chris- tianity satisfies some people and does not satisfy others.

What Miller signally fails to make clear is that the so-called experience of the death of God is not a supporting reason for choos-

ing to resurrect homo religiosus. It is an ex- pression of that choice. "Homo religiosus and the Death of God" is, in fact, a tautology. Similarly, phrases such as "the age of the Paraclete" and "Christ, in his final trans- formation, man's Spirit" are not independ- ently deduced truths but theological dogmas proper to an immanentist faith. I have no objection to Miller preaching the faith he happens to believe in. Sermons have their value. But, when he tells me that his theo- logical stance is the one which provides a "meaning for our day," I want to see some evidence for his assertion before I am pre- pared to consider being converted.

KENNETH HAMILTON

United College, Winnipeg

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