Section VIII — Comparison of Christianity with Other Forms of Religion; the Duty of Embracing Divine Revelation as Proposed by the Catholic Church

Article 1 — Comparison of Christianity with the Mosaic Religion

I. Extrinsic arguments showing the divine origin of the Mosaic Religion.

1° Christ and the Apostles repeatedly cite, as divinely inspired, the books of the Old Testament in which the primitive and Mosaic Religion is recorded. Our Lord Himself called these books “Scripture,” and affirmed that they contained the doctrine of salvation and foretold His own coming (cf. John 5:39; Matt. 22:32; 4:10; Luke 16:16; Matt. 11:13; 22:40). St. Peter states explicitly that the prophets wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost (2 Pet. 1:21), and St. Paul, similarly, speaks of Scripture as “inspired of God” (2 Tim. 3:16).

2° Christ specifically approved the principal historical facts, the Mosaic Law, and the prophecies of the Old Testament. He commemorates as certain the death of Abel, the deluge, the destruction of Sodom, the promises made to Abraham, the apparition of God to Moses, the manna in the desert, and the miracle of the brazen serpent. He abrogated only the ceremonial precepts, and only gradually: “think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matt. 5:17). By appealing to the Law (John 7:19) and confirming the principal prophecies of the Old Testament regarding the Messiah (John 5:46), He confirms in turn the promises made to Abraham and the prophecies of Moses and the prophets, above all Isaiah.

3° Miracles and prophecies of Moses and the prophets further witness to the Divine origin of the Mosaic Religion. As regards Moses, it suffices to recall the Burning Bush (Ex. 3:1–4:17), the ten plagues (Ex. 8–10), the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea (Ex. 14:16–31), the pillar of fire (Ex. 13:21–22), the manna (Num. 11:4–9), the water miraculously drawn from the rock (Deut. 8:15), and the destruction of Core, Dathan, and Abiron (Num. 16:1–33) — miracles Moses had, moreover, himself foretold in advance (cf. Ex. 8–10; 14:13; Num. 16:28ff.; Ex. 16:4). The prophets, similarly, worked miracles in confirmation of their divine mission (4 Kings 5; 3 Kings 17–18; Dan. 6), and foretold future events with striking precision — Elijah a drought of three years and six months, Isaiah the massacre of Sennacherib’s army, Jeremiah the length of the Babylonian captivity at seventy years (Jer. 25), Micah and Daniel the destruction and restoration of Jerusalem.

II. Intrinsic arguments showing the divine origin of the Mosaic Religion. The Biblical Commission, in a decree of June 27, 1906, ruled that the arguments urging a date for the Pentateuch later than the Mosaic age are not weighty enough to justify denying that Moses was, in the relevant sense, its author; it remains a tenable opinion that Moses, under divine inspiration, made use of earlier written or oral traditions, and may even have entrusted the actual writing of his divinely inspired thoughts to others, subject always to his own approval, without prejudice to the substantial authenticity and integrity of the Pentateuch as a whole.

1° The Mosaic and primitive Religion agree substantially with Christianity, and predict its coming.

(A) The Primitive Religion, revealed to our first parents and to the patriarchs, may be summarized as follows: (a) the unity of God, Creator of heaven and earth (Gen. 1:1ff.), excluding both polytheism and dualism, since all things created by God are declared good (Gen. 1:10, 12, 18, 21); God is provident Ruler, supreme Legislator, and Judge, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked (Gen. 2:16–17; 3:14ff.). (b) Man was made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27), and so endowed with a spiritual and immortal soul (cf. Gen. 2:7; Heb. 11:13–16); he was created in a state of original justice, lord of all things, capable of both good and evil, joined to Eve in indissoluble marriage — but transgressed the divine command, and lost, for himself and his descendants, this privileged state (Gen. 3:1–24), even as God held out the hope of forgiveness and redemption (Gen. 3:15). (c) The precepts given were either of the natural law or positive precepts: God must be adored, loved, feared, and thanked; sacrifices were offered from the time of Abel (Gen. 4:3–4); circumcision was later laid upon Abraham as the sign of a covenant between God and the chosen people (Gen. 17:9ff.). St. Thomas notes that even implicitly the “articles of faith” are contained here — namely, that God exists, and that He exercises providential care for the salvation of men, and that “he that cometh to God, must believe that he is: and is a rewarder to them that seek him” (Heb. 11:6).

(B) The Mosaic Religion. When the primitive Religion had become corrupted, God chose the family of Abraham and the people of Israel as the guardians of Revelation, so that the true Religion might be preserved — the Mosaic Religion thus originating as both a renewal of the primitive Religion and a preparation for Christian Revelation. God’s unity and nature are taught with striking clarity: “I am who am” (Ex. 3:14); idolatry and superstition are forbidden (Ex. 20:3); God is declared Creator, Ruler, Lord of all things, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, ubiquitous, most holy, “merciful and gracious, patient and of much compassion, and true” (Ex. 34:6), “who doth judgment for the fatherless and the widow” (Deut. 10:18). Man was created in God’s image so that, through love and fear of God and observance of His commandments, he might draw nearer to Him; Moses presupposes the soul’s immortality when he forbids “seeking the truth from the dead” (Deut. 18:11), and Christ Himself, authoritatively interpreting Ex. 3:6, drew from the words “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” a direct proof of the soul’s immortality, since God “is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matt. 22:31ff.; Mark 12:26ff.; Luke 20:37ff.).

As to precepts, love of God held first place, and next the love of one’s neighbour (Deut. 6:5; 11:1; Lev. 19:18; Matt. 22:39); from these two fundamental precepts flowed the whole Decalogue (Ex. 19–20), a compendium of the natural law, together with kindness commended toward the poor, widows, servants, the old, the deaf, the blind, strangers, enemies, and even animals (Ex. 23:10–11; Deut. 15:11–13; Ex. 23:4–5; Deut. 25:4). Sacrifices were enjoined to acknowledge God’s supremacy, to preserve the Faith, and to promote the love of God (Lev. 23, 25); priests and Levites were consecrated to His service (Lev. 8, 21); and God promised that He would send a prophet like unto Moses to His people (Deut. 18:9ff.).

2° The Mosaic Religion is, further, preparatory to, and a figure of, Christianity, and predicts its coming, as the utterances of the prophets themselves show. Before ever the later prophets had spoken, Moses had already said: “the Lord thy God will raise up to thee a prophet of thy nation and of thy brethren, like unto me: him thou shalt hear” (Deut. 18:15; cf. John 1:45; 4:25; 6:14; 7:40). St. Thomas explains that the divine law is not divided into two wholly different species, Old and New, but into the imperfect and the perfect stages of a single species (Summa, I-II, q. 107, aa. 1–3).

3° The divine origin of the Mosaic and primitive Religion is shown, further, from their own excellence. Negatively: the Mosaic dogmas, precepts, and worship cannot be characterized as in any way unworthy of God. Positively: although monotheism can, in principle, be known and demonstrated by unaided reason, Revelation remains morally necessary if the truths of natural religion are to be known quickly, with certitude, and without admixture of error — and it is the Israelites, and the Israelites alone among the ancient nations, who actually embraced monotheism and the truths of natural religion in this way. Even Plato and Aristotle never fully attained the doctrine of creation, or of a truly provident personal God. Evolutionist theories claiming that monotheism was reached only gradually, through fetishism, totemism, animism, and polytheism in turn, rest on gratuitous assertions devoid of real evidence; even Gunkel, in the course of his own controversial writing, admits that the popular religion of Israel remains a genuine wonder in the midst of the surrounding religions of the ancient East.

4° The divine origin of Israel’s Religion is shown, finally, from its own explicit announcement and prediction of the universal Kingdom of God to come through Christianity. Such prediction, made centuries in advance, exceeded the natural power of human foresight, and postulates direct divine intervention. St. Thomas observes that to order something toward an end and actually to lead it to that end are functions of one and the same governing agent, whether acting directly or through subordinates — hence the same God who, through the mediation of Christ, accomplished the salvation of men, also promulgated the Old Law that prepared the way for it (Summa, I-II, q. 98, a. 2).

III. Difficulties.

(1) Why did God permit the corruption of primitive Revelation? The permission of evil, moral and physical alike, remains a genuine mystery. St. Augustine offers this much: since God is infinitely good, He would not have permitted any evil at all to enter His work, were He not so omnipotent and so holy as to draw a still greater good even out of evil itself (Enchiridion, c. 11); St. Paul, the earliest of Christian apologists, had already suggested the same thought: “where sin abounded, grace did more abound” (Rom. 5:20).

(2) Why were the ceremonial observances of the Old Law so numerous and so minute? These observances were necessary to guard the people of Israel against the idolatrous practices prevalent among the surrounding nations, and to train them gradually toward a more purely spiritual worship. Christ announced that the worship of the New Law would be one “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23) — the whole development of worship thus ascends, across salvation history, from the sensible to the spiritual, from a multiplicity of external figures to the unity of the one Divine reality itself.

(3) Why did the Mosaic Religion not stress the immortality of the soul more explicitly? It did, in fact, stress this truth clearly enough: man was made in the image and likeness of God, who breathed into him the breath of life (Gen. 2:7); the Patriarchs speak repeatedly of “the days of their pilgrimage” (Gen. 47:9); Jacob, mourning for Joseph, says, “I will go down to my son into Sheol” (Gen. 37:35) — a word that cannot mean simple annihilation, since Jacob believed at that moment that a wild beast had devoured Joseph’s body entirely; the dead are consistently said to have “gone to their fathers” (Num. 20:26; 31:2); Jacob, dying, says, “I will look for thy salvation, O Lord” (Gen. 49:18); Moses forbids “seeking the truth from the dead” (Deut. 18:11), presupposing their continued existence; and the testimonies of Job (19:25) and of Daniel (12:2–3; cf. Is. 26:19; 2 Mach. 7:9; 12:44) are entirely explicit on the point.

(4) In what sense can the Mosaic Law be called perfect? Not absolutely, but relatively — perfect, that is, for the particular time and people to which it was given.

(5) Does not Delitzsch (in “Babel und Bibel,” 1902) maintain that the biblical narrative of Creation is simply borrowed from Babylonian and Assyrian myth? Several considerations tell against this: (a) the biblical narrative is strictly monotheistic, whereas the Gentile cosmogonies — even the Code of Hammurabi — remain thoroughly polytheistic; (b) Genesis teaches creation from nothing, with no pre-existing material whatsoever, whereas the Gentile cosmogonies everywhere presuppose pre-existent matter; (c) such likenesses as do exist between various ancient cosmogonies regarding man’s original state and his subsequent fall most plausibly derive from a shared primitive tradition, common to all — and it is precisely the marked superiority of the biblical narrative over its rivals, at every comparable point, that most strikingly points to genuine divine guidance behind it.

Article 2 — Buddhism

I. A brief history of Buddhism. Brahmanism, whose doctrines are contained in very ancient texts (the Vedas, dating to roughly 1000 B.C. and earlier), taught in an obscure way the existence of a Supreme Being, to whom sacrifices were offered in return for benefits. Brahmanism later came to be interpreted, in a pantheistic sense, to mean that God, the world, and all things are essentially one and the same underlying substance — hence the emergence of the god Brahma (masculine), Brahman (neuter), Vishnu, and Shiva, sometimes treated as three hypostases of a single divine triad. Souls were held to migrate through the bodies of animals in succession until finally reabsorbed into Brahma; suffering, mutability, and change were all to be avoided, and the ethical system taught, in theory, a rigid asceticism that in practice frequently degenerated into impure rites. In the sixth century B.C., Brahmanism was substantially reformed by Siddhartha, called Shakyamuni or the Buddha (“the sage” of the Shakya, an Aryan tribe), born about 557 B.C. He left home and family to seek wisdom through meditation and self-mortification; his teaching spread through India, Ceylon, Siam, China, and Japan, and counts, at the time of writing, some 125,000,000 adherents.

II. The dogmatic and ethical teaching of Buddhism.

(A) Dogmas. (1) Nothing certain can be known regarding the existence of God. (2) All beings are essentially equal, and in constant flux — spirituality and immortality of the soul are, accordingly, both excluded. (3) Metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls) is a fundamental dogma. (4) The moral law is immutable, so that good actions merit reward and evil actions merit punishment. (5) All evil arises from the desire to live, a desire that must be strenuously resisted. (6) Man, after many successive changes, reaches ultimately, in Nirvana, a state of total immobility and, in practice, virtual annihilation.

(B) Ethics. Man must renounce concupiscence; the means recommended are meditation, moderate mortification, and confession of faults — but of prayer and of grace properly speaking there is no mention at all, since the very existence of a Deity remains, on Buddhist principles, uncertain. Shakyamuni himself enjoined a universal sympathy toward all sentient beings.

III. A criticism of Buddhism, by way of comparison with Christianity.

(A) Resemblances are confined to certain external rites and practices, and do not touch on dogma at all. They may be summarized: (1) a shared consciousness of the sufferings of this present life; (2) mortification of the flesh and of concupiscence; (3) the institution of monastic orders; (4) voluntary poverty, continence, and benevolence; (5) confession of faults; (6) the practice of meditation; (7) a shared desire of attaining some ultimate end. But the true end of Christianity — the vision of God, attained through the Sacraments, prayer, and supernatural merit — is wholly different from the Buddhist end, which amounts, in substance, to annihilation. The resemblances, in other words, are merely external, and proceed from aspirations common to human nature generally, not from any real convergence of doctrine.

(B) Differences. The benevolence Buddhism enjoins proceeds not from the love of God but from mere natural sympathy; humility, moreover, is not cultivated as a virtue, and polygamy, divorce, and even polyandry have flourished freely in Buddhist societies. The miracles alleged in proof of Buddhist doctrine are, on examination, simply absurd. The historical propagation of Buddhism is explained by a mixture of its genuine human qualities and its evident defects — nor, in any case, was it ever the propagation of a single coherent form of religion, since Buddhists themselves have divided into agnostics, atheists, pantheists, and even polytheists, according to differing later interpretations of the founder’s original teaching.

Article 3 — Mahometanism

I. A brief history of Mahometanism. Mahometanism, or Islam (Arabic for “submission” or “resignation”), is the religion founded in Arabia by Mahomet (Mohammed) in the seventh century A.D. The Arabs, descended from Abraham, had originally accepted the ancient patriarchal religion, but later fell into polytheism and idolatry. Mahomet was born about A.D. 570, and later married a wealthy widow. He claimed that the angel Gabriel had appeared to him, choosing him to be a prophet; in A.D. 622 he fled to Medina (the Hegira), and eventually gathered a following that spread his new religion across Arabia and, in time, a considerable part of the old Christian East and North Africa, and even into part of Europe. Mahomet appears, originally, to have been broadly sincere in his own convictions, but later, on the reckoning of most Western historians, announced further “revelations” more evidently calculated to gratify his own ambition and personal desires.

II. The doctrine of Islam.

(A) Dogmas. (1) One God exists — Allah — with the Trinity expressly excluded. (2) Angels are ambassadors of God and protectors of men. (3) There has been a succession of divinely sent prophets, of whom Mahomet is held to be the greatest. (4) This revelation is contained in the sacred book, the Qur’an. (5) Human souls are immortal, and bodies will rise again; paradise is described as a place where carnal pleasure may be freely gratified. (6) Fatalism is taught in some passages of the Qur’an, while human free will is asserted elsewhere, without any clear reconciliation of the two.

(B) Precepts. (1) Wine, the flesh of swine, images, and games of chance are forbidden. (2) Prayer, five times daily, is enjoined. (3) Fasting is prescribed, above all during the month of Ramadan. (4) Pilgrimage, almsgiving, and circumcision are all obligatory. (5) Polygamy and divorce are both permitted.

III. A criticism of Islam. From Judaism and Christianity alike, Islam adopted monotheism, but rejected outright the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Incarnation. No genuinely supernatural signs — no miracles properly so called — are claimed in witness of the truth of Mahometanism. It was propagated, historically, chiefly by the sword, and its rapid spread was further assisted by the promise of sensual rewards held out in the Mahometan paradise — a stark contrast, on every point, with the evidentiary basis on which the Christian Faith itself rests.