Book Report: A Cosmic View of Religion

We see the world in slow-motion. A bubbling surfeit of living things have come and gone in an instant and subtly marked this planet. Plants came into existence and withered like butter. Storms circled the globe and blew down meek little shelters. Wriggling pink living things slithered out of the mud and sprouted legs. Dirty savages somehow found themselves driving automobiles and starting businesses. Are there patterns to this epic symphony to which few of us even contribute a note? It is in our nature to hope so.

William Riley Halstead certainly thought so. I picked up his 1913 book A Cosmic View of Religion in Portland at Powell's. Whenever someone in the humanities finds a strange book that we've never heard of, I think we all have the same thought: "What if this is really something?" I've looked in rare book collections everywhere I can think of, and I can't find anyone whose heard of it. So, the question is whether or not the book should be forgotten as it is now.

Well, first off, the title is a bit misleading; the book isn't as new-agey as it sounds and, thankfully, we're not dealing with someone who believes that aliens control us, or that the planet is communicating with him. More importantly, there's not much here that seems implausible. He seems to have been fairly conversant with the science of the age and has a good grasp of physics, zoology, history, sociology and evolution. At one point, he makes a referrence to the notorious Jukes family that I would disagree strongly with, but he's not a pisher.

Secondly, the prose is quite good. When the guy gets going he reads like a watered-down Henry Miller; all lights and flashes and special effects. Unfortunately, he also tends to ramble as much as Miller, and then to fade into a duller encyclopedia tone. So, it's not the great unread poem of the twentieth century, but a second-tier poem at least. And better than expected.

So, what is he saying? First, there is a God. Or, more specifically, "God is", which is different really. He disagrees with Spinoza that mind and body are separate. He sees mind, or "spirit" as the underlying order of the universe and marshals quite a bit of evidence to support this idea, from the psychic abilities of bees to the laws of heredity. He quotes Anaxagoras as saying that mind is the cause of order in the universe, and essentially he seems to agree. He seems to believe that science will eventually reveal that the ultimate knowable nature of being is spirit and that spirit corresponds to the order of the universe.

For the historian, it's an interesting book because Halstead is arguing that the gains of the industrial and scientific revolutions have removed man from both the natural world and the spiritual world, which he conflates. He is talking about what historians have referred to as the disenchantment of the world. This is perhaps a common argument of the romantic 19th century. But, what's most interesting is the fact that Halstead believes that only an understanding of science can lead us to God. It's like all roads lead to reason, which is both destroyer and saviour here. By this time, science is so respected that it is used to prove the "unprovable".

So, when Halstead finally gets to the Scriptures towards the end of the book, we start to understand that he wants to reconcile them with nature. To argue that Christ's life was not a break with the natural order, but an event of "cosmic" significance. In other words, he wants to finally reconcile Appollo and Dionysius.

He believes that the natural world shows the "unity" of God, and that this knowledge is innate in all people, which is why they all seem to have some idea of God. This is also interesting because it appeals to another 19th century Romantic idea- that our true self is inborn, and that society is at odds with that true self. Halstead wants more religion in the schools, but in a sort of idealized Rousseaunian sense in which the child is "allowed" to find their inborn religion. With a Romanticism that might have made Schlegel proud, he believes that society can be righted by limiting reason enough to allow our instinctual spiritualism to develop.

Again, he does tend to ramble quite a bit, and I'm not even sure that this summary has captured half of what he's getting at. In fact, it can be confusing in many spots to tell what exactly he's getting at. I think his work is interesting enough to use as a footnote, or to support other thinkers' ideas in a historical work, but I'm not sure who exactly would want to read it today. Still, it's a lot more interesting and developed and wide-ranging than most contemporary books, although Halstead might have benefitted from an editor.