Religiō as a Universal Human Quality:

On the Harmony of Faith Traditions

JESSE HAKE

Christians today slip easily into thinking that our faith is in competition with other religions. In fact, however, for most of Christian and pre-Christian history, there was a widespread understanding that everyone shared a basic religious impulse—and that this was a crucial human virtue, a capacity required for the exercise of our humanity across all aspects of human society. In the first millennium or more of the Christian faith, the various “religions” did not primarily vie with one another—as we tend to do—over dogmatic truth claims or try to earn the right to meet whatever “religious needs” they might have alongside more basic secular or public needs. 

Premoderns generally agreed that all humans were religious beings who each needed to cultivate the virtue or skill of religiō (as it was called in Latin) equally within every zone of endeavor so as to lead a fully connected and harmonious human life. Given these common goals, different wisdom traditions and folklores were able to share various aspects of life and to learn from each other. Christians, with their universal claims that Jesus Christ is the revelation of the Godhead and of all truth, were actually in the best possible position to gain insights into the meaning of Christ’s incarnation from the metaphysical and moral insights in other traditions. This is not to say that all traditions are actually in agreement, or that they are all equivalent paths to God, but it does provide a basis for Christians to seek the flourishing of every city and to bring all truth, insight, and beauty into conversation and relationship with the revelation of God in Christ’s incarnation.

What was in competition for ancient faiths was not the various ideas or concepts (competing “beliefs” as we tend to think today) so much as the practices, habits, and material culture including the canons of sacred texts themselves and the stories surrounding the ancient teachers. All of these sacred practices from varying schools and sects, however, would have been understood as aiming to cultivate the same human virtue of religiō (along with other virtues such as wisdom). As with everything else in our modern world, religions have been commodified. They are largely reduced to sets of goods and services offered on the free market and regulated as neutrally as possible by the sovereign secular state. Christians must now lobby beside other faiths on behalf of our “religious rights” and consider what options will best care for any “religious needs” that we might have. Many or most religions have been reduced to just one more means of personal self-care.

Most of the modern categories of “world religions” were developed by scholars from European colonial powers who were influenced by ideas endemic to Christendom as well as by issues related to the end of Christendom and the rise of modernity, the secular nation state, and the autonomous individual. All religions came to be identified over against the realm of the secular, and many religions were invented as categories imposed rather artificially from the outside. Hinduism is one of the more obvious examples. When India was occupied by Great Britain, the wide range of philosophies and local folk religions that existed in the subcontinent did not consider themselves to be part of one faith community, but Hinduism was given as a catch-all name by the British colonial scholars. Ironically, despite these European origins, in more recent years, Hinduism has become a focal point for some modern forms of Indian nationalism. Similar trends have deeply reshaped our thinking about all world faiths including Christianity itself.

Previous to these modern developments, what was notable about the pre-modern understanding of religiō was that various philosophical schools and traditions of cultic practice could all aim at the cultivation of this same human virtue. Certainly, the teachers and sacred texts were in real competition—but the fact that they shared recognized common goals made it reasonable to also see that one school or cult could learn and benefit from others in various ways.

This was easily recognized by many early Christian writers. Justin Martyr's First Apology (written 155 to 157) says that Christ “is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers.” Church fathers widely agreed that Jesus Christ reveals the meaning of all history, all creation, and the entirety of God’s divine life. As Paul says in Colossians 2:9-10: “For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power.” Paul talks in the previous chapter about the ordering of all formerly hostile powers under the headship of Christ. This putting into order is the best way to understand the subjugation of all cosmic principalities under Christ that Paul speaks about in several other letters as well. Finally, Paul’s injunction in Philippians 4:8 brings all of us into this task of recognizing and ordering the goodness and truth of Christ that is dispersed throughout creation and across all of history: “Whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.” 

Every human culture must call upon all of creation to participate in the exposition of what Jesus Christ has revealed. Whether it is Justin Martyr’s logos spermatikos or the logoi of all creatures that Maximus the Confessor wrote about five centuries later, Christians have received the most comprehensive revelation possible. Gregory of Nyssa points out in The Life of Moses that Christ is the manifestation of an infinite God and that union with God is therefore synonymous with an endless stretching out of our capacity to receive. In a related point, Dionysius the Areopagite expounds how it is that every theophany of God must always be both a concealment and a manifestation at one and the same time (similarly to how one Greek word for truth, aletheia, describes the manifestation of a hidden reality). The more complete the divine revelation claimed by any school or sect, the more this sect or school must learn from other traditions of sacred wisdom about the profound revelation they themselves have received. It is counterintuitive to us, but the prevailing pre-modern view was that the deeper and the more universal the revelation, the more that everyone must participate in the full reception and unfolding of it.

Dionysius the Areopagite

This approach has not been entirely lost to modern Christians. One beautiful exploration of such a Christian vision is by the Orthodox Christian scholar Jaroslav Pelikan with his book Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture. Keith Harper noted of Pelikan’s book in a 2020 review: “As amazing as it might seem, the historical Jesus forges a common link for a host of unlikely fellows ranging from the Apostle Peter and Tertullian to David Hume and Thomas Jefferson.” Christians claim that the man Jesus Christ is the most perfect and most beautiful revelation of God the Father, and we should therefore consider if such a profound revelation of all truth should require generations of human wisdom from every culture, time, and place to fully comprehend and articulate it. Such a vision was once easily comprehensible but has faded from prominence among modern Christians and is in need of resuscitation.

We can look back at Christian history and see concrete examples of how Christianity came to better see and understand the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ with help from pagan schools of thought. Arguably, several New Testament authors had recourse to concepts from a popular Stoicism as they articulated what had been revealed in Jesus Christ. However, probably the most obvious example of this in later centuries is with the most prestigious school of pagan wisdom: neoplatonism. This school claimed that the world of our five senses is an icon of an even more substantial world and that our contemplative mind can participate in this more substantial world only when it is received in wonder as a gratuitous gift. A variety of thinkers have made the case that Christianity did not replace neoplatonism but instead learned from it and engulfed or engrafted it.

All of this also shows up in David Bentley Hart’s book Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief from February 2022. Hart makes an appeal to Christians of today to recognize how our shared humanity as religious creatures should open us all up to the shared objective of learning to see the reality that is revealed to us by Jesus Christ from the kingdom of God (from a realm of truth that is more than history). Hart argues that other traditions of faith and wisdom can help Christians to more fully grasp the infinitely deep and transcendent meaning of Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension. 

This is not to say that all traditions are equivalent, or to make the glib claim that they all lead to God. It is to say, however, that Christians can learn things about the revelation of Jesus Christ from the metaphysical and moral insights in other traditions of piety, faith, and wisdom. It should seem obvious, as well, that recognizing this is by far the most meaningful way in which to invite other faiths into conversation and relationship with us as Christians—recognizing our real differences of revelation, doctrine, and practice while also respecting, partnering, and learning from one another at the same time.

Several prominent examples in the New Testament suggest that such an idea is not at all alien to the methods of Christ or his apostles. Jesus uses a Samaritan as a model of righteousness (Luke 10) and commends a Roman centurion as having faith greater than any in Israel (Luke 7:9). In other passages, Christ is clearly focused on his immediate calling to the people of Israel, but he draws upon everything around him when teaching about God’s Kingdom and what faithfulness to this kingdom means. 

In a similar vein, the Apostle Paul famously quotes pagan poets and philosophers when engaging with the learned crowd gathered at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17). According to this model, Christians recognize the revelation of Jesus Christ as the most supremely beautiful, clarifying, and perfect manifestation of God at the center of our fallen history, and this comes with a real burden of both good news and confrontation. However, the way we learn to receive this revelation of Jesus Christ should not happen in isolation from the many strands of human experience—and certainly not in separation from all that is good, true, and beautiful within any realm of human experience.

While the fathers and mothers of the church expressed many concerns with regard to pagan wisdom, there is also a tradition of interaction and borrowing that extends clearly back to the New Testament and even earlier into the Jewish faith from its earlier origins and up through the birth of Jesus Christ. Saint Jerome speaks of these many pathways in his Homilies on the Psalms (homily 42 on Ps 127 or 128):

What are the marks of the man who fears the Lord? The stamp of those “Who walk in his ways.” There are many ways, and the many ways lead to the one Way, wherefore it says in Jeremiah: “Stand beside the ways of the Lord, and ask for the eternal pathways; find the one way, and walk it.” Through many ways, we find the one Way. This same thought occurs in the Gospel under another form and figure in the parable of the merchant who had many pearls and sold them and bought a single pearl of great price.

In more recent times, we can look to missionary examples, such as the work of Saint Herman and his compatriots who settled in Alaska. These missionaries clearly followed in the example of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who “sought to give every people-group access to the Scriptures and liturgy in their own language so that they may become part of ‘a privileged and chosen society within which every nation has its own peculiar gifts and every people its legitimate calling.’” The stories recounted in books such as The Transition from Shamanism to Russian Orthodoxy in Alaska by S. A. Mousalimas or Alaskan Missionary Spirituality by Michael J. Oleska show clear appreciation by the missionaries for what native Alaskans already understood about the goodness of creation and how this enabled the Aleuts and other peoples to see the reality of God incarnate in Jesus Christ and his body the church.

Mousalimas describes the ministries of two shamans who were blessed by Orthodox churchmen: the Aleut elder of Akun, Ivan Smirennikov, as well as an Alutiiq healer named Kangatyuq. In the case of the healer Kangatyuq, we have an account of Saint Herman recognizing Alutiiq’s gifts as a shaman and inviting Alutiiq to heal the daughter of a priest who was deathly ill. In the second case, Smirennikov, a baptized Orthodox Christian, was being referred to as a “shaman” by the Akun Aleuts during a period of over three decades. Upon looking personally into Smirennikov’s ministry, Bishop Innokentii (Veniaminov) differentiated Smirennikov’s ministry of healing and prophecy from shamanism but still gave his blessing to Smirennikov’s regular interactions with visiting spirits who provided healing and counsel to the people. The bishop encouraged the elder of Akun not only to continue practicing but to practice among the baptized Aleuts of his own parish. 

Mousalimas also describes festivities known as Selaviq (or “Starring”) that are clearly a synthesis of “both the ancient Yup'ik and the Christian elements” so that: “These mid-winter Yup'ik Orthodox Christian ceremonial festivities ...contain unique characteristics that have been retained and transformed in continuity from Yup'ik antiquity. A creative synthesis has taken place.” This is all possible because the Russian Orthodox missionaries recognized the goodness of the “sacralized cosmos” already understood by the ancient Yup'ik cultures and that “the dynamics of divine participation” were also seen in the ancient Aleut and Alutiiq cultures who already “had the ability to comprehend the dynamics of ‘panentheistic divine participation in the cosmos’” before the arrival of Christian missionaries.

As Mousalimas and others studying Orthodox missionary history have also pointed out, such an understanding was widespread among the church fathers. Origen defends the pagan recognition of all nature as filled with living spirits:

We indeed also maintain with regard not only to the fruits of the earth, but to every flowing stream and every breath of air that the ground brings forth those things which are said to grow up naturally — that the water springs in fountains, and refreshes the earth with running streams — that the air is kept pure, and supports the life of those who breathe it, only in consequence of the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen and guardians; but we deny that those invisible agents are demons.

Many Christian churches contained various pagan figures (such as sibyls) in the outer courts as the worshipers approached incrementally, through pagan and Old Testament wisdom, toward Christ himself at the altar. Paganism was not understood as simply an evil or a falsehood to be rejected but as a gift containing essential help to Christians in their comprehension of God’s plentitude as revealed by Jesus Christ. Early Cumbrian Christians in the first half of the 10th century carved the stone Gosforth Cross and depicted the Norse goddess Sigyn symbolically alongside of Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross. Sigyn is shown on this cross saving the life of her husband Loki (the trickster son of Oden) by holding a bowl over Loki’s head to catch the poison dripping toward him from the fangs of a snake that the other gods had sent to kill Loki. 

Clearly, these Christians understood that their older pagan stories had meaning that could help them to grasp the beauty revealed on the cross. To consider one more example, Orthodox Christians should not be embarrassed (or simply ignorant or amused) by the fact that an account of Buddha’s youth and enlightenment made its way into Christian tradition as the beloved story of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat who were entered into the Greek Orthodox liturgical calendar on August 26.

Our increasingly secularized global civilization presents both a challenge and an opportunity when it comes to relating with people of other beliefs and practices. However, Orthodox Christianity should have the vision and the resources to provide local and global leadership in relation to religiō as a universal human capacity that we still possess despite our blindness to it. Whether reading about ancient folk practices in Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village by Juliet du Boulay or exploring the “sad joyfulness” of Black spirituals in Jubilation: Cultures of Sacred Music by Nun Katherine Weston, Orthodox Christians have every reason to recognize that human experience is always fundamentally religious and that all of creation should enable us to more fully perceive and receive the revelation of Jesus Christ. As Maximus the Confessor writes: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things” (Ambigua 7.22).

Orthodox Christians should be the first to hear and understand the voices among us such as Jaroslav Pelikan and David Bentley Hart (with books like Jesus Through the Centuries or Tradition and Apocalypse) as such Orthodox writers call us to see that “Christ plays in ten thousand places” (in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins). We should be the warmest champions of our local communities and of their endless capacity for festival and celebration. We should see that our Christian liturgical life is intended to spill over into the habits, rhythms, and frolics in all realms of life where they might still exist and be ready for attendance and encouragement. We should seek the flourishing of all our religious neighbors and cultivate hearts that are ready to learn from them how to better see the humanity that we have received in Jesus Christ. 

If Orthodox Christians succumb to the commodification of religion and its modern colonial categorizations, then we miss out on countless opportunities to share Jesus Christ with the world while also, even more sadly, blinding ourselves to many of the ways in which other faiths might help us to see the reality and goodness revealed by Christ’s incarnation within human history. Our modern and commercialized way of seeing religion not only hollows out the richness of religion but puts us more and more into conflict with one another by seeing competing camps rather than the common duty of every human being and of all society to be religious and to cultivate that virtue.