The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers

THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO THEOLOGY.

The Development of Religion—Its Relation to Theology, as the Reflective Form of the Religious Consciousness—Increasing Influence of Reflexion in the Highest Religions, especially in Judaism and Christianity—How a Religion grows into a Theology—How Theology and Religion, Reason and Faith, become opposed to each other—Importance of the Interests on both sides—The Danger of sacrificing either of them to the other—The Idea of Evolution as an Hirentcon—The unity of man’s life in its different phases—Carlyle’s view of the Alternation of Action and Refiexion—Objections to the Law of Evolution, /1) from those who separate Philosophy from Life, (2) from those who separate Life from Philosophy—In what sense Theology begins in Greece

A GREAT part of the scientific and philosophical work of this century has been the application of the idea of evolution to the organic world and to the various departments and interests of human life. And, as religion is the most comprehensive of all these interests—that which goes highest and lowest in man, and, as it were, sums up in itself all other interests—it was inevitable that the attempt should be made to throw new light on it by means of this idea. I need not dwell upon the importance and extent of the researches into the whole history of man’s religious life which have been prompted and guided by this conception, nor upon the variety of interpretations which have been given to it. In a set of lectures delivered in another University, I endeavoured to deal with certain aspects of the subject. I there tried to show, in the first place, what is the principle that underlies and finds expression in the religious life of man, or, in other words, what it is that makes him a religious being, a being who in all ages has been conscious of himself as standing in vital relation to a supreme object of reverence and worship whom he calls God. In the second place, I tried to show that, while this consciousness of God finds an adequate expression only in the highest forms of religious thought and experience, we can detect the beginnings of it, under very crude and elementary forms, even in the superstitions of savages. And, though our knowledge does not yet enable us, if it ever will enable us, to solve many of the problems connected with the transmission and filiation of the religious movements of different times and nations, yet we can trace out a fairly distinct and continuous series of stages through which the religious life of man has passed.