The Return of the East Upon the West : Part 1

Modern Religious Cults and Movements
by Gaius Glenn Atkins

(Page 10 of 20)

Theosophy and Kindred Cults

Historic Forces Carried Early Christianity West and Not East. The Far-Reaching Results of This Process

Christianity in its beginning belonged neither to the East nor the West; it was born where they met and its subsequent development was greatly governed by the direction of the dominant tides of historical development. But from the beginning of the Christian era the main currents of human action flowed West and they carried Christianity with them. It is, therefore, outstandingly an occidental development. This is not to minimize the influence of the East in the earlier phases of Christianity.

There was doubtless a measure of give and take, some blowing of the winds of the spirit in changing directions across vast regions and a confused time, which carried the germinal forces from one religion to another. But in the main, Christianity, to use Gardner's fine phrase, was baptized into the forms and forces of the West. I say in the main, for Asia Minor was in the time of St. Paul the meeting place of manifold religions and his first Gentile converts brought with them into their new faith a very great deal of what their old faiths had made them.

There was, generally, in the Apostolic world a very great longing for a spiritual deliverance and a mystic temper which easily took over and transformed those elements in Christianity which lent themselves to mystic interpretations. Something of this we discover in the Pauline Epistles themselves; Paul's use of the word "mystery" shows how he adapted his teaching to the understanding of those to whom he addressed himself. To quote Gardner: "In the growth and spread of popular superstition, if we may call them by so harsh a name, we may well discern a gradual preparation for Christianity....

These religions stand toward Christianity, to continue my biological comparison, as the wings of a penguin stand toward those of an eagle, and it is surely no slight on Christianity to say that it met the blind longings of a pagan nation and showed them a path toward which they had, for long generations, been trying to find their way. The religious needs which were very imperfectly met by the initiations and ceremonies and prayers of the cults of the pagan saving deities found a complete and perfect satisfaction from faith in an exalted Christ."

Christianity could not do this really very great thing without at the same time being affected by that which it, in a measure, took over and completed. The influence of Asia upon Christianity is, therefore, a very real influence. One can only wonder what would have happened had the course of empire been East instead of West. Christianity might then have been carried into India and China and through long centuries been given so distinctly an oriental content as to have taken on a character radically different from its Western form. But this did not happen.

To follow Gardner's figure still farther, it was baptized into Greek philosophy and Roman imperialism and the power of the nascent nations of western Europe, and into the medieval spirit, and so we have become its heirs. More than that, the East took its own way, uninfluenced by the West, until two entirely different types of culture, civilization, religion and approach to reality had been developed, as far apart as the East is from the West, and each, until almost our own time, substantially uninfluenced by the other.

The West Rediscovers the East; the East Returns Upon the West

Given the contacts of the modern world this massive isolation of cultures could not continue. The East and the West were bound to meet and religion was bound to be affected by their meeting. Western Christianity has for more than a hundred years now been sending its missionaries to the Orient and oriental religions are beginning to send their missionaries to the West. More justly the return of the East upon the West is not so much in a missionary propaganda, though there is a measure of that, as in a more subtle indoctrination of Western speculation by the fascination and mystery of the Eastern cults. It is not possible to follow this process in detail but it has gone on long enough now for us to begin to see the outcome of it and to appraise its force.

It began with New Thought. One discovers oriental names on the programs of New Thought conventions; the Vedanta Philosophy was expounded by East Indian speakers at the Greenacre conference in Maine in the late nineties; B.F. Mills was lecturing on Oriental Scriptures in 1907; and a lecture on the Vedanta Philosophy appears on the program of the second convention of the International Metaphysical League held in New York City in the year 1900. The New Thought movement in England naturally reflected the same tendency to look for light to Eastern speculation even more markedly than the American movement.

All this was natural enough because New Thought, once divorced from inherited Christianity and committed to pure speculation about the sources and meanings of life, was sure to find out that the Orient had been doing just this for a thousand years. Two things happened. First, New Thought welcomed Eastern teachers to its conventions in the hope of receiving thereby some measure of enlightenment, and second, many of these seekers, finding that the East had a wealth of speculation compared with which the West is poor indeed, took over the Eastern cults bodily, gave themselves up to their study and became their ardent devotees and missionaries.

Generalizations are always dangerous and though the East has, until the West began to exploit it, remained practically unchanged, the West has changed so often that whatever one may say about it must immediately be qualified. But, on the whole, Eastern and Western life are organized around utterly different centers. The West in its present phase is predominantly scientific. Our laboratories are perhaps the distinguishing hall-mark of our civilization. We are always asking questions of the outside world; we are hungry for facts; we are always seeking to discover the law and direction of physical force; we have taken small account, comparatively, of our own inner states, but we have taken immense account of the universe of which we are a part and the forces which play around us. Our realities are what we touch and see.

Copyright 1923 by Fleming H. Revell Company