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Comparative Study of Religions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2024

Norbert Drewitt O.P.
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Let us follow the sun in its perpetual rising, as it passes over the earth's scarred surface, crossing illimitable oceans, continents, deserts, and towering mountain ranges, and the eternal snows—silent, glistening, old.

It lights up, with its dawn, the dawn of the world—the superposed strata of archaic cultures, one upon another in an unfolding phantasy, of prolific confusion, yet a crumbling order, proclaiming an ordered growth in the buried millennia of the world’s childhood. It tells us things we had never grasped as a whole, till we came to this preparatory contemplative vision (preparatory to all real thought), or, perhaps, which we never knew at all. Giant human forms, of enigmatic origin in the abyss of time, emergent, yet now in retreat, from crumbling stone, among the old decay of Easter Island. The stone lamps, the lavers of holy water, and 200,000 shrines, each with its frail conscious beings, who reason and pray within, in the red dawn of Shinto Japan. The convents of Tibet, and Burma, and Siam, where thousands upon thousands of devoted religious pray, and work, and sacrifice—the daily priestly offering of incense, fruit, and flowers, to the lord Buddha’s golden image, and his relics, in their precious shrine. The earth’s-dawn mysteries of Ur, and Agade, and Babylon: crumbled, earth-sprawled temples, where vultures call and jackals prowl, and all is distant, and dim, and past, the crumbling symbols of a mighty religious conception—the ziggurats, or ‘‘step- temples,” of Babylon and Ur, each a consciously planned microcosm, in form and detail, organically symbolizing all creation: the steps or degrees of created being.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 17 , Issue 196 , July 1936 , pp. 504 - 512
Copyright
Copyright © 1936 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Footnotes

1

Religions of Mankind. By Otto Karrer. Translated by E. I. Watkin. (Sheed & Ward; 10/6.) For our emphasis on the apologetic rôle of comparative religion, cf. R. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., De Revelatione, 3rd. Ed., p. 402, and pp. 585–592.

References

2 (i) “The logical reasoning of the so-called proofs of God's existence” (p. 120), is hard to reconcile with the excellent analysis of the Vatican Council doctrine (on p. 236). (ii) It is not clear how far the early part of Ch. V is a reflection on the mytho-analytical theory of Dacqué, and how far the author's attitude. Hence our confusion on reading of an “intuitive” faculty almost literally identical with the Aristotelian intellectus, and posited in contradistinction to it, because the inadequacy of the latter, as a true facultas entis, is assumed! This is caricaturing and question-begging. (iii) No rapport whatever is established with the Freudian psychology. We mean, especially, Jung's now classical work. No thesis in Comparative Religion, however transcendentally valid, has universal probative strength for its recipients, to-day, if it ignores Jung. It is not a question so much of theories and difficulties, but of overlapping data and of light thrown on the entire held by an inspection of Jung.

3 The metaphysical essence—human nature. Cf. pp. 1,2.

4 Cf. St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, IIa IIæ, q. 2, a. 7, corpus.

5 Cf. Asistotle, De Anima, A. 5.

6 “Ad idem corpus Ecclesia ad quod nos perlinemus.” St. Thomas Summa Theologica, IIIa, q. 3, a. 3, ad 3. Dr. Karrer, as we understand him, would extend this integrally to pagan religions, in virtue of that universality of the world's great “myths,” in so far as these prefigure Christ. With this assumption, the principle's applicability is obvious. But the non-Catholic wants vindication of that assumption. We even suggest that he might require discriminating treatment of Ch. V of Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious—both for a solution of implicit ambiguities and for a suggestive source of confirmatory evidence.

7 Cf. Denzinger, 1647.