salvation

Nature and significance

It could be argued reasonably that the primary purpose of all religions is to provide salvation for their adherents, and the existence of many different religions indicates that there is a great variety of opinion about what constitutes salvation and the means of achieving it. That the term salvation can be meaningfully used in connection with so many religions, however, shows that it distinguishes a notion common to men and women of a wide range of cultural traditions.

The fundamental idea contained in the English word salvation, and the Latin salvatio and Greek sōtēria from which it derives, is that of saving or delivering from some dire situation. The term soteriology denotes beliefs and doctrines concerning salvation in any specific religion, as well as the study of the subject. The idea of saving or delivering from some dire situation logically implies that humankind, as a whole or in part, is in such a situation. This premise, in turn, involves a series of related assumptions about human nature and destiny.

Objects and goals

The creation myths of many religions express the beliefs that have been held concerning the original state of humankind in the divine ordering of the universe. Many of these myths envisage a kind of golden age at the beginning of the world, when the first human beings lived, serene and happy, untouched by disease, aging, or death and in harmony with a divine Creator. Myths of this kind usually involve the shattering of the ideal state by some mischance, with wickedness, disease, and death entering into the world as the result. The Adam and Eve myth is particularly notable for tracing the origin of death, the pain of childbirth, and the hard toil of agriculture to humanity’s disobedience of its maker. It expresses the belief that sin is the cause of evil in the world and implies that salvation must come through humanity’s repentance and God’s forgiveness and restoration.

In ancient Iran a different cosmic situation was contemplated, one in which the world was seen as a battleground of two opposing forces: good and evil, light and darkness, life and death. In this cosmic struggle, humanity was inevitably involved, and the quality of human life was conditioned by this involvement. Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism, called upon human beings to align themselves with the good, personified in the god Ahura Mazdā, because their ultimate salvation lay in the triumph of the cosmic principle of good over evil, personified in Ahriman. This salvation involved the restoration of all that had been corrupted or injured by Ahriman at the time of his final defeat and destruction. Thus, the Zoroastrian concept of salvation was really a return to a golden age of the primordial perfection of all things, including humans. Some ancient Christian theologians (e.g., Origen) also conceived of a final “restoration” in which even devils, as well as humans, would be saved; this idea, called universalism, was condemned by the church as heresy.

In those religions that regard humans as essentially psychophysical organisms (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Islam), salvation involves the restoration of both the body and soul. Such religions therefore teach doctrines of a resurrection of the dead body and its reunion with the soul, preparatory to ultimate salvation or damnation. In contrast, some religions have taught that the body is a corrupting substance in which the soul is imprisoned (e.g., Orphism, an ancient Greek mystical movement; Hinduism; and Manichaeism, an ancient dualistic religion of Iranian origin). In this dualistic view of human nature, salvation has meant essentially the emancipation of the soul from its physical prison or tomb and its return to its ethereal home. Such religions generally explain the incarceration of the soul in the body in terms that imply the intrinsic evil of physical matter. Where such views of human nature were held, salvation therefore meant the eternal beatitude of the disembodied soul.

Christian soteriology contains a very complex eschatological (regarding a doctrine of last things) program, which includes the fate of both individual persons and the existing cosmic order. The return of Christ will be heralded by the destruction of heaven and earth and the resurrection of the dead. The Last Judgment, which will then take place, will result in the eternal beatitude of the just, whose souls have been purified in purgatory, and the everlasting damnation of the wicked. The saved, reconstituted by the reunion of soul and body, will forever enjoy the beatific vision; the damned, similarly reconstituted, will suffer forever in hell, together with the Devil and the fallen angels. Some schemes of eschatological imagery used by both Christians and Jews envisage the creation of a new heaven and earth, with a New Jerusalem at its centre.

Means

The hope of salvation has naturally involved ideas about how it might be achieved. These ideas have varied according to the form of salvation envisaged, but the means employed can be divided into three significant categories: (1) the most primitive is based on belief in the efficacy of ritual magic; initiation ceremonies, such as those of the ancient mystery religions, afford notable examples; (2) salvation by self-effort, usually through the acquisition of esoteric knowledge, ascetic discipline, or heroic death, has been variously promised in certain religions, such as Orphism, Hinduism, and Islam; and (3) salvation by divine aid usually entails the concept of a divine saviour who achieves what humans cannot do for themselves, as in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Basic context

The cosmic situation

Time

Study of the relevant evidence shows the menace of death as the basic cause of soteriological concern and action. Salvation from disease or misfortune, which also figures in religion, is of comparatively lesser significance, though it is often expressive of more immediate concerns. But the menace of death is of another order to humans because of their profound personal awareness of the temporal categories of past, present, and future. This time-consciousness is possessed by no other species with such insistent clarity. It enables humans to draw upon past experience in the present and to plan for future contingencies. This faculty, however, has another effect: it causes humans to be aware that they are subject to a process that brings change, aging, decay, and ultimately death to all living things. Humans thus know what no other animals apparently know about themselves—namely, that they are mortal. They can project themselves mentally into the future and anticipate their own decease. Human burial customs grimly attest to a preoccupation with death from the very dawn of human culture in the Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age). Significantly, the burial of the dead is practiced by no other species.

The menace of death is thus inextricably bound up with the human consciousness of time. In seeking salvation from death, humanity has been led on to a deeper analysis of its situation: a person’s subjection to time is the true cause of the evil that besets him. The quest for salvation from death, accordingly, becomes transformed into one for deliverance from subjugation to the destructive flux of time. How such deliverance might be effected has been conceived in varying ways, corresponding to the terms in which the temporal process is imagined. The earliest known examples occur in ancient Egyptian religious texts. In the so-called Pyramid Texts (c. 2400 bce), the dead pharaoh seeks to fly up to heaven and join the sun-god Re on his unceasing journey across the sky, incorporated, thus, in a mode of existence beyond change and decay. A passage in the later Book of the Dead (1200 bce) represents the deceased, who has been ritually identified with Osiris, declaring that he comprehends the whole range of time in himself, thus asserting his superiority to it.

The recognition that humankind is subject to the inexorable law of decay and death has produced other later attempts to explain its domination by time and to offer release from it. Such attempts are generally based on the idea that the temporal process is cyclical, not linear, in its movement. Into this concept a belief in metempsychosis (transmigration of souls) can be conveniently fitted, for the idea that souls pass through a series of incarnations becomes more intelligible if the process is seen as being cyclical and in accordance with the pattern of time that apparently governs all the forms of being in this world. The conception has been elaborated in various ways in many religions. In Hinduism and Buddhism, elegantly imaginative chronological systems have been worked out, comprising mahayugas, or periods of 12,000 years, each year of which represents 360 human years. In turn, 1,000 mahayugas make up one kalpa, or one day in the life of the creator deity Brahma, and span the duration of a world from its creation to its destruction. After a period of quiescence, the world would be re-created by Brahma for another kalpa. The purpose of this immense chronological scheme was to emphasize how the unenlightened soul was doomed to suffer an infinite series of incarnations, with all of their attendant pain of successive births and deaths. In the Orphic texts of ancient Greece, the human destiny to endure successive incarnations is significantly described as “the sorrowful weary Wheel,” from which the Orphic initiate hoped to escape through the secret knowledge imparted to him.