Chesterton talks about how the truth of God and the coming Christ was reflected or foreshadowed--perhaps preflected would be better, if I may be permitted to coin a term--in the mythologies of the pagans. Or, as Lewis puts it, "He sent the human race what I call good dreams" (I think Lewis must have been drawing directly from Chesterton here). On the other hand, Chesterton points out the wide gulf between pagan mythologies and pagan religion.
"Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them."He then goes on to talk about the hideous depths to which the darker sort of paganism inevitably descends:
"But with the idea of employing the demons who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the demons. It may indeed be truly described as the idea of being worthy of the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the hidden spring that works in the mysterious machinery of the world. And there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world."So this is the state of pagan man, before Christ and outside of Israel. He is either striving blindly toward a mark which he cannot possibly hit because he has no revelation, as Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, or Marcus Aurelius, but achieving good in a purely human way. Or he is wallowing in a depravity of utter evil, like the Canaanites sacrificing their children to Molech, the Aztecs sacrificing, well, everyone they could get their hands on, to the sun, or Pharaoh giving his wife to perform fertility rites with the priests and even the idol of Osiris.
At least, this is the commonly accepted Christian view. But is it accurate? Did God really leave the entire world, except for one insignificant Mediterranean nation, in utter darkness?
Here's a question to begin the search with: Who was Balaam? And more importantly, what was his relationship with Jehovah, and how did he know him? Balaam was not an Israelite, yet he clearly had the ability to call on God--the True God--and prophecy, curse, and bless in his name.
And what about Melchizedek? He was apparently already practicing the true worship of the true God, and was somehow even superior to Abraham such that Abraham brought him his tithe.
Also, consider the Magi who visited Christ in his infancy. Why? Who were they, and what did they believe?
Then there are the extra-biblical examples of monotheism which come close to, if not fully reaching, the worship of the True God as given in revelation. Zoroaster, whose original teachings (before a later reform which reduced his religion to a crude dualism) so closely parallel the God of the Old Testament that they recognized the Jewish Messiah as their own expected savior (that's the answer to the above question: Magi are Zoroastrian priests). Hermes Trismegistus of Egypt, who taught a monotheism so similar that later scholars assumed his writings were a counterfeit of Medieval Christians, as they assume any biblical prophecy fulfilled was written after the fact. And Pharaoh Akhenaton who, (probably following the teachings of Hermes) cast down all the idols of Egypt, closed the temples, fired the priests, and instituted worship of one God. An act which so offended the priestly and ruling classes that they assassinated his son, Tutankhamen, in order to restore idolatry in the land. What about the fact that the Temple of Heaven in Beijing contains no idol, but was to an invisible God, and that the Chinese characters contain the same history as Genesis? Or the monotheism of North American Indians which has been remarked on so often? The great god Ohm of Hinduism, who exists in three aspects? The First Cause of Socrates and the temple of the Unknown God in Athens? I could go on, but you get the idea.
My hypothesis is that the true worship of God was passed down by Noah to his sons and their descendants, and continued (often in hiding) alongside the other two branches of human religion, that is, mythology and idolatry, and eventually either became merged with them (as in India or North America), was corrupted and debased (as in Persia), or was wholly supplanted by them (as in Egypt). So, when one comes across a Melchizedek or a Balaam in the Old Testament, Abraham and Moses are not really surprised: these are just men practicing the true religion as it had been revealed to their common ancestors, and they immediately recognize one another.
I'm thinking of writing a book about this, but I'd need access to a really good library, like at a university. As of now, it's just an interesting but undeveloped theory.
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