Three elements of false religions: apparent 'good,' human bad, satanic ugly
Why did God tolerate the spread of paganism and false religions for so long before the Incarnation? Are all religions paths to arrive at God? Father Henry James Coleridge explains.
Why did God tolerate the spread of paganism and false religions for so long before the Incarnation? Are all religions paths to arrive at God?
Editor’s Notes
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the topic of false religions.
This section of Fr Henry James Coleridge’s Preparation of the Incarnation deals with this very topic.
For decades, people have been emphasising what is “good” in these false religions, even referring to them as “elements of sanctification.”
Some even think and say that all religions are paths to arrive at God, that religious differences are positively willed by God, and that they all have divine inspiration present amongst them.
Amazingly, many think that someone can say such things and remain a Catholic, even though Pope Pius XI made clear, in Mortalium Animos, that such an idea constituted apostasy:
“Certainly such attempts can nowise be approved by Catholics, founded as they are on that false opinion which considers all religions to be more or less good and praiseworthy, since they all in different ways manifest and signify that sense which is inborn in us all, and by which we are led to God and to the obedient acknowledgment of His rule.
“Not only are those who hold this opinion in error and deceived, but also in distorting the idea of true religion they reject it, and little by little, turn aside to naturalism and atheism, as it is called; from which it clearly follows that one who supports those who hold these theories and attempt to realize them, is altogether abandoning the divinely revealed religion.”
This is the second part of the first chapter of Fr Henry James Coleridge’s Preparation of the Incarnation, in which he talks about the progressive degradation of the world after the fall of Man, and why God waited for so many centuries to redeem mankind through the incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
In the Advent Ember Week, focused on prophecies of Christ’s coming, this is very important reading.
In this piece, Fr Henry James Coleridge discusses…
Why God tolerated the spread of paganism and false religions for so long before the Incarnation
The three distinct elements of false or pagan religions—the apparent “good,” the humanly bad or corrupt, and the satanic evil
How even that which we could call “good” in false religions is “skilfully used by the authors of evil to disguise their own work for the delusion of men.”
All this also pertains, of course, to sects of heretical and schismatic “Christians.”
The Three Elements of False Religions
The apparent 'good'; the human bad, and the satanic ugly
From
The Preparation of the Incarnation
Fr Henry James Coleridge, 1885, Ch. 1, pp 12-24
Conflict between God and Satan and God’s Providence
It must be remembered that the history of the world is described in Sacred Scripture, not simply as a struggle of the good influences and spiritual action of God with the perversity of the human race, but also as a conflict between God and Satan.
The latter is permitted, for the greater glory and for the all-wise ends of God, to vent his spite on man in the way of seduction and imposture, only however to a certain fixed limit in the exertion of his powers, and God meanwhile supporting man with His grace according to his needs and deserts.
This is certainly the most marvellous instance on record of the patience and forbearance of God, that He should have tolerated so much evil, and allowed so much of apparent triumph to His enemies.
He alone could fathom the depths of iniquity and malice which were exercised in the seduction of mankind. He alone could understand the degradation of His own image which He allowed, not here and there, but in the great mass of the human race, in the laws and customs which prevailed, in the contempt of reason and the violation of conscience, in the veiling even of the natural law, in the cruel slavery of so many millions, in the reduction of woman to the condition of a simple tool of sensuality, in the cruelties of the rulers and the utter misery of the ruled, in the savage treatment of the poor, the old, the helpless, the miserable in every kind and degree.
And yet all this triumph of evil made the need of Redemption more crying. It must have shown, both to Angels and men, what our nature is capable of in the way of debasement, and so it must have prepared the world to welcome with deeper gratitude the mighty and perfect remedy which was in store.
Meanwhile, as St. Paul says, God did not leave Himself without testimony,1 supplying the needs of His rebellious and degraded creatures by the faithful ministrations of the bountiful nature which He had made and administered for their sakes, and co-operating by His presence and help to every single action of mind and body, of which their life, so outrageously displeasing and insulting to Himself, was made up.
The Scripture tells us in one place that God even repented that He had made man on the earth.2 And yet, during all those centuries, and since the time of the Incarnation, He has never failed in the daily mercies and bounties of His Providence. Here then is another great and beautiful revelation of the character of God.
All discerned by God
But the picture becomes even more startling when we know that not one of the detestable victories of the enemies of mankind could have been achieved, but for the patience and permission of Him Who was alike the Maker of man and the Lord and Creator of the enemies of the human race.
And it must be remembered also, that God watched and encouraged and supported every effort, made by individuals or communities, to cling to the better things which they had originally received from Him. The ancient Fathers of the Church fastened eagerly on all the traces of good, the struggles of conscience, the protests of natural justice and reverence, the manly resistances to the tyranny of evil, of which there were so many examples that are known to us, and therefore certainly, thousands and thousands more of which we have never heard.
They dwelt with joy on the thought that God was always helping those who would seek His aid, and in that He cherished and fostered all the aspirations after purer truth, and higher morality, and holier worship, and unrevealed crowns for virtue, on which His all-seeing Eye rested wherever they were to be found.
Then, as now, God was ever the discerner of the thoughts and intentions of the heart, and by those He judges every one of His children.
No son of Adam, however disadvantageous and unpromising the conditions under which he is born into the world, at the time and in the place which God has chosen for him, but enters life with some light within him by which he may walk, and which, if he is faithful to it, will warn him against moral and spiritual rebellion. And it will be by his faithfulness or unfaithfulness thereto that he will stand or fall before his Judge at the last.
Silent preparation for Redemption
Alas! we know how much hypocrisy and how much secret impurity the Eye of the great Lover of souls may discern in those who walk in the full light of the privileges of the Gospel, how many flaws He can see in the service which seems so perfect, how much self-seeking He can detect in what appears so single-hearted and upright!
So it is not unreasonable to think that on the other hand, among those countless myriads that have walked the earth in those dark days of heathenism, or who walk it now in the shadow of death, because they are born in heathen countries, or in parts of the world under the blighting sway of false religions or of imperfect and separated communities bearing the Christian name, God may have seen, and may see, much on which His merciful Eye might rest with pleasure, many and many a soul that has followed the light that was in him, that has served Him faithfully by the careful custody of a good conscience, that has sought Him out in truth, even while he may have been ignorantly worshipping Him!
St. Paul gives this account of the heathen world in the famous speech which he addressed to the philosophers of Athens, that God passed over their ignorance for a time, that He had appointed to all the nations of the earth fixed times and habitations, that they might seek Him, if haply they might feel after Him, as blind men groping their way, and find Him, though as he adds, He is not far from every one of us.3
And so we may hope and believe that, if nations did not find Him, still He was found by individuals. We may hope that the abode into which so many millions of departed souls have been gathered since the creation of the world, will give up many and many, at the last day of account, who have either left this world with no stain on them but that of original sin, or who have, even outside the particular covenants which He has made from time to time, as with Abraham and others, made their peace with Him after offending Him, in some way which has been acceptable to Him, because it has been, implicitly at least, an appeal to His original promise of succour to mankind.
When the great day comes for the revelation of all this long history, we may certainly expect that it will unveil many secret triumphs of grace as well as many hideous developments of human depravity and diabolical perversion. Then alone will it be possible to understand the blended miseries and beauties of which that poor heathen world was made up.
Then alone shall we see plainly how no one has been truly deserted by God, how no one has incurred punishment, except for his own actual sin, and how it was expedient for God’s glory, as well as for the good of man, that the enemy should be allowed so great an apparent victory, only to be the more completely and signally worsted in his conflict with the human nature which God has united to Himself in Jesus Christ.
Power of Satan to be destroyed by Our Lord
For this is also an element in the explanation of the counsels of God, in the permission of so much evil. Our Lord was to find His enemy in possession, as He Himself says, like a strong man armed who keeps his court and castle in peace. He was to overpower him, and take away all his arms in which he trusted, and to distribute his goods.
The more complete the empire which Satan had established, the more overwhelming was his rout and subjugation to be. Whatever he had usurped was to be taken from him, and the kingdom of the world, which he so falsely claimed as his own and so arrogantly offered to our Lord, if He would worship him, was taken from him and made the property of his conqueror.
The weakest of the children of men, over whom he had so long lorded it, were to be enabled to laugh at him and trample under foot his power, by the virtue of the Cross. So the Psalmist sings of the ultimate triumph of man through our Lord.
“Out of the mouth of infants and sucklings thou hast perfected praise, that thou mightest destroy the enemy and the avenger.”4
There is one other principle which appears to have guided, if we may so speak, the action of Providence in dealing with the old world, and especially in bringing about its healing, of which mention should be made before we pass on. It could have cost God nothing to overthrow His enemies, and the enemies of mankind, to use the Scriptural expression, by a “single rough word.” Nothing can resist His power.
But it was not by His power alone that the world was to be redeemed, or Satan defeated. God deals with men, as one of the saints has said, rather with the wisdom of His benignity than with the power of His majesty. He never forces the human will, He woos it, and wins it by His grace. And moreover, He was not, even in dealing with His enemies, to forget that they were His creatures.
He allows them the full play and exercise of the powerful and intelligent nature which He had given them, only taking care, as in the typical case of Job, not to let them use all their powers in an unfair conflict with the inferior nature of man, but only just so far as His permission extended in each particular case and no further.
And the Fathers speak as if it had been a part of this Divine mode of action that the remedy for the evils of humanity and the defeat of the powerful foes of our race should be prepared in secret, should be carried out silently, that evil should be turned into good, and good brought out of evil, that Satan should be defeated by his own weapons turned against himself, that he should be as it were surprised in the heyday of his security, and baffled by his own inconceivable blindness, the inevitable result of his own pride.
While the Angels in their deep humility could look down on earth and see the gradual advance and growth of the world towards its own redemption, and the gradual maturing of the preparation which God had not only decreed, but promised, and prefigured in a thousand ways, the proud vain conquerors, as they thought themselves, of the despised and hated race of man, were unable to see the gathering storm which was to overthrow their reign.
They knew the prophecies and the promises as well as the Angels themselves, and yet the accomplishment of these predictions stole on them unawares, because it consisted in the main in the humiliation of God Himself and in His victory through humiliation. Thus the secrecy and silence of the Divine work of the healing of the world is an element that has continually to be kept in mind for the right intelligence of that work.
The three elements in heathenism
Thus, without going into longer details concerning this great subject, we may perhaps sum up the moral and spiritual condition of man, in words which have already seen the light.5
We may say that, in that old heathenism into which it was the will of God that the Christian religion should be introduced by the Apostles, there were three diverse and conflicting elements.
There was a good element which came from God, there was a thoroughly bad element, which came from Satan, and there was a corrupt element, which was a fruit of the workings of unregenerate human nature upon society and upon the objects of sense and intelligence with which man is placed in relation.
The good element we see embodied in great part of the laws and institutions of the ancient world, as also in much of the literature, the poetry, the philosophy, of Greece and Rome, which literature, consequently, after having been purified and as it were baptized, has always been used by the Christian Church in the education of her children. This element, we say, was originally the gift of God, the Author of nature, to man, the offspring of reason and conscience, the tradition of a society of which God Himself was the founder.
It enshrined whatever fragments of primeval truth, as to God, the world, and man himself, still lingered, in whatever shape, along the far-wandering children of Adam. St. Paul alludes to this element in the great passage at the beginning of the Epistle to the Romans, and his words altogether seem to imply that God watched over it, supported it, and fostered it, and that it might even have been expanded into a perfect system of natural religion and of reasonable virtue, had men been grateful enough to earn larger measures of grace from God, Who left not Himself without witness in His daily Providence, and “was not far” from any one of His children.
Ingratitude of man, noted by St. Paul
Here then we have the great Apostle putting his finger, as it were, on one at least of the great causes of the comparative weakness of this good element in the heathen world, a cause which probably has done as much to paralyse good, and to prevent God from adding gift upon gift to men, under every dispensation, as any other. That cause is the ingratitude of men.
St. Paul, in the passage to which we are now referring, seems to say that, but for man’s ingratitude, he would never have been abandoned as he was to the machinations of his enemies in the building up of the shameful and degrading system of idolatry, in which the lowest of God’s creatures were worshipped in His place, nor to the unutterable moral degradation of every kind in which the heathen world was steeped. Men did not choose to keep God in their minds, to adore Him and to be thankful, and on that account it was that they were given up.
Thus the heathen world is a continual lesson to the Christian world of the duty of gratitude, and of the continual service of thanksgiving which fills so large a part in the worship of the Church on earth, as it is the principal occupation of the Church in heaven. We are always inclined to ask ourselves, What might have been?
And St. Paul seems to tell us that the degradations, even of heathenism, would not have been, if men had been thankful for the gifts and the graces which they had. And here also is a sufficient answer to the complaint that men were so abandoned to their own bad passions and to their spiritual enemies.
Yes, they were abandoned, because they did not choose to be thankful. The simple discharge of this one natural duty would have saved the world from all that misery, and would have of itself gone far to defeat all the malice of Hell.
Paganism
But now we come to another element, which just now was placed the last of the three, the workings of which we may distinguish in the heathen world.
All flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth, and man had shut out the knowledge of God from his soul. He had let his passions lead him instead of his conscience. The unregenerate instincts of nature gradually overpowered the moral law in the heart of man, and their victory reflected itself in the rules of society, in the customs and maxims by which human life was guided.
In proportion as man became more and more the master of the world, as wealth and power and knowledge and experience increased, as civilization (so to call it) and the means of communication advanced, there grew up that great system of cruelty and immorality, of the godless pursuit of pleasure and worldly ends, which we call paganism.
For paganism is not properly so much a religion, as a system of human life and human society, according to the impulses and unbridled lusts of the natural man, checked only by what remained of strength in the law of right, as written in men’s hearts, in the voice of conscience, in the old traditions of better days, and also by the law of necessity which made it imperative that society should, in some way or other, be kept alive and be held together. St. Paul, in the passage to the Romans on which we have dwelt, has described what sort of men they were who were penetrated by this pagan spirit.
It is a catalogue of every vice, founded on the fertile principle of selfishness in every form. And, as if to show that this whole growth springs naturally in the unregenerate soil of man, when the same Apostle comes in another great passage to describe the sort of men those will be who will be the enemies of God in the days of the last apostasy, he repeats this description of the heathen before Christianity almost word for word.
That old state of human degradation, therefore, is not far from us at any time, it is in the soil of human nature, when it is left to itself and has forgotten its God.
Power and action of the devils
These thoughts bring us to the third element of heathenism, that which has been called the work of Satan, the enemy of God and of man. As to this also we have St. Paul’s authority to guide us, in that passage where, in a few short words, he tells us that the gods of the heathen were the devils.
We are often inclined to look upon the personages of which the heathen mythologies, especially that of Greece, was made up, as a number of poetic creations, as the powers of nature symbolised, or perhaps at the worst, as great men and famous heroes of fabulous times, raised by a sort of natural canonization to the thrones of a higher world. This is the human part of the heathen religions, skilfully used by the authors of evil to disguise their own work for the delusion of men.
But there was more behind these forms of grace and beauty than the imagination of earthly poets. Unless St. Paul is mistaken, unless thousands of Christian martyrs were mistaken, who treated the heathen idols as the forms under which the apostate Angels were adored, the gods of the heathen were Satan and his associates, permitted by the just judgment of God to draw to themselves the adoration which men had denied to Him, and taking care to deify in themselves every shape of human vice and passion, and to exact from their worshippers impure rites and filthy mysteries, that man, made in the image of God, might learn from them to degrade himself even below the level of the beasts of the field.
Or, if we wanted a still more clear proof of the Satanic agencies which underlay the pagan religion, we find it in the other kind of worship which it exacted of the ancient world, and is still found to exist — that is, the frightful tribute of human sacrifices, a custom widely spread and more nearly universal than we imagine among pagan nations.
Some of these have astonished their Christian discoverers by their mildness and gentleness, their courtesy and simplicity, and yet have been found to be penetrated to the core by moral and unnatural corruption, and to be in the habit of honouring their gods by the frightful homage of hecatombs of human victims, a homage enough in itself to proclaim as its author the hater alike of man, and of God Who created him.
Conclusion—The riddle of the ancient world
The history of the old world of which we are speaking would not be to us the riddle and the labyrinth that it is if we could trace out the conflict and the combinations of these three elements with precision and full knowledge.
But what human mind is adequate to such a task? We can only say to ourselves that these are the fundamental lines of the condition of humanity as it was when the fulness of time came for the accomplishment of the promised redemption.
We can see how it is that the history of the pagan world is so full of noble aspirations, of longings and desires for a better state of humanity, as well as of enormous crimes and colossal evils.
We can see how to account for the predominance of evil, and for the gradual darkening of the moral atmosphere.
We may also see perhaps how it was that society and civilisation did not altogether perish, but that, on the contrary, use was to be made of the prominent heathen nations themselves for the foundation of the kingdom of Christ, how the world was being prepared for its Saviour at the very time that it was sinking still deeper and deeper in ignorance of God.
A few considerations of this kind must close the remarks which can be here contributed to this great subject.
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From Fr Henry James Coleridge, The Preparation of the Incarnation
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Acts xiv. 16.
Gen. vi. 6.
Acts xvii. 27
Ps. viii. 8. See St. Luke xi. 21, 22; iv. 6.
The next three or four paragraphs are taken from the volume edited, The Return of the King, Sermon iii. “The decay of Faith,” Burns and Oates, 1883.
Pope XI Mortalium Animos - whoa. Pretty straightforward as quoted.