Nature Mysticism Part 13

Now let a philosopher like Heracleitus be meditating on nature as a circulatory system, and let him, by chance or otherwise, bring together in his mind the phenomena of a burning lamp and the cosmic facts for which he seeks an explanation--is it difficult to imagine his Eureka? At any rate, Heracleitus felt that in the phenomena of combustion he had gained an insight into the ultimate const.i.tution of nature. And he concluded from them that there is no such thing as substance, properly so called, but simply constant movement; the movement _is_ substance. The great solid-seeming cosmos is motion; some of it visible, some of it imperceptible; some of it rising upward to serve as fuel, some of it falling downward, after having fed the flame, to form the const.i.tuents of the present world. The motion is constant, the stream ever-flowing: no "thing" is ever at rest, and, if it were at rest, would disappear.

The marvel is that with such scanty data, Heracleitus was able to attain to views which are in truly remarkable harmony with the most advanced theories as to the const.i.tution of matter.

Nowadays the very qualities of hardness and impenetrability are being ascribed to motion--to the almost inconceivable rapidity of the whirling of electrons within the system of the atom. Le Bon, for example, in his "Evolution of Matter" and his "Evolution of Forces," contends that atoms are continually breaking down, radium presenting merely an extreme case of a general rule, and that the final product is something which is no longer matter. Robbed of motion, what we call matter disappears! It eludes detection by any methods known to us, and ceases, therefore, so far as we are concerned, to be existent.

Atoms, then, according to this modern doctrine, are complex systems of motion; and bodies, all agree, are aggregates of atoms. It seems to follow that the ground of reality, from the point of view of physics, is motion. In short, as Heracleitus taught, the world is the result of ceaseless motion. Tyndall's doctrine of "heat as a mode of motion" is being generalised until it covers the whole field of material phenomena. Or approach the theory of Heracleitus from the side of modern astronomy, the harmony between old and new is equally striking. All substances, said he, spring from fire and to fire they are bound to return. It does not require much special knowledge to realise that this statement contains the pith of the latest theories of the birth and death of worlds. From fire-mist, says the modern astronomer, they were condensed, and to fire-mist, by collisions or otherwise, they will return. What the particular stages may be, what the significance of the nebula;, what the cosmic functions of electricity, and other like problems--may be, and will be, matter for keen debate. But the grand generalisation remains--from fire-mist back again to fire-mist. How modern, also, the grand unity which such a theory gives to existence as a whole. Physics, psychology, sociology, even spiritual facts, all come under the sway of the vast generalisation, because all concerned with the same ultimate Reality. The most striking parallel is found, perhaps, in the doctrine of Energy, which is attracting so much attention at the present time, and of which Ostwald is a champion so doughty. It embodies an attempt to bring into one category the various physical forces together with the phenomena of organic evolution, of psychology, and of sociology in the largest sense. Whether the attempt is successful or not, it is a tribute to the genius of the ancient sage, though it seems to lack that definite element of consciousness, or soul-life, which was so adequately recognised by its great predecessor.

Many other points in the system of Heracleitus are worthy of the closest study. Intensely interesting, for example, is his doctrine that strife is the condition of harmony, and indeed of existence. Sch.e.l.ling reproduced this idea in his well-known theory of polarity; Hegel developed it in his dialectic triad-- Thesis, Ant.i.thesis, Synthesis; and the electrical theories of matter and force now in vogue fall easily into line with it--not to speak of the dominant theory of evolution as involving a struggle for existence, and as applied in well-nigh all departments of enquiry and research. But it is enough to have grasped the central principle of Fire-motion to prove that the phenomena of fire have had an influence in the development of man's intellectual and spiritual life--an influence which cannot easily be exaggerated. Heracleitus claims an honoured place in the line of nature-mystics.

CHAPTER XXVIII

FIRE AND THE SUN

There can be no doubt, as already stated, that, of all physical phenomena, fire had the most marked effect upon the imagination of primitive man. He saw that it was utterly unlike anything else known to him, both in its properties and in its action.

If of anything a divine nature could be predicated, it was fire--the standing miracle--at once destroying and life-giving-- material and immaterial--pre-eminently an agent with strange and vast powers, known and unknown. For many objects and inst.i.tutions a divine origin was sought; it could not fail to be the case with fire. Even the poor Tasmanian natives felt it could not be a thing of earth, and told each other how it was thrown down like a star by two black fellows who are now in the sky, the twin stars, Castor and Pollux. A great gap separates this simple tale from the elaborate Prometheus myth, and yet the same essential features appear in both: and between the two are found a varied series of stories and legends, belonging to many climes and ages, which ring the changes on the same fundamental ideas.

The whole of the ancient world believed that the origin of fire must be divine. And the various steps can be clearly traced by which the worship, originally accorded to the nature-power itself, was transferred to a spirit behind the power, and centred at last on the supreme Deity.

For primitive man, as Max Muller well points out, the phenomena of fire would present a dual aspect--on the one hand as a fatal and destructive element, on the other hand, as a beneficent and even homely agency. The lightning would be seen flashing from the one end of heaven to the other, darting down at times to set ablaze the forests and prairies, at times to maim and kill both animals and men. Thus experienced, it would strike terror into the beholders, and impress them with a vivid sense of the presence of spiritual powers. As a late product of the emotions and conceptions thus stimulated, we have the fine myth of the ancient nature G.o.ddess, Athene-- sprung from the head of Zeus, the austere virgin, who was to become the personification of prudence, self-restraint, and culture, the celestial representative of the loftiest intellectual and spiritual ideals of the Greek world at its best. Hence, too, the group of conceptions which make the lightning and thunderbolts the weapons of the sky, putting them into the hands of the supreme ruler, and making them at last the symbols of law and order. "Out of the fire" (says Ezekiel) "went forth lightning." "Out of the throne" (says the seer of the Apocalypse) "went forth lightnings."

In strong contrast is the beneficent aspect of fire, which, once known and "tamed," becomes almost a necessity for human life.

It affords new protection against the cold, makes man peculiarly the cooking animal, and above all establishes the family hearth with all that is meant by "home." Of more distinctly utilitarian import are the uses of fire in fashioning tools and instruments, and the smelting of metals. And it is significant to note that man's use of fire almost certainly owed its origin to his emotional att.i.tude towards it, culminating in worship. As many anthropologists have pointed out, the fire on the hearth had its unmistakable religious aspect, the result of the feeling of veneration for the "element" of fire before its production or use had been understood. And the kindling of the fire on the hearth was as much a sacrifice to the G.o.ds as a means to the cooking of food. Each house became a veritable temple of fire.

Wonderfully instructive, as well as fascinating it is to trace the development of the home idea as based on the emotional experiences stimulated by the mystic influences of fire. Each house, as was just stated, was regarded as a temple of the divine element; but the common house, the tribe house, was specially singled out for this honour, and became a temple properly so-called. When bands of citizens set out to found colonies in strange lands, they took with them glowing embers from the tribal or national hearth, as AEneas brought with him to Italy the sacred fire of Troy. Until lately, we are told, the German peasant just married would take to his new home a burning log from the family hearth.

The cla.s.sical instance of the development of this idea is found in the cult of the Greek Hestia, the Latin Vesta, a G.o.ddess who was the personification of fire, the guardian of the household altar and of the welfare of cities and nations. She was worshipped fairly widely in Greece and Asia Minor, but princ.i.p.ally in Rome, where a beautiful circular temple was dedicated to her service; her ministers, the Vestal virgins, were held in the greatest honour and were chosen from among the loveliest and n.o.blest of Roman maidens. In this temple was kept ever brightly burning the sacred fire supposed to have been kindled by the rays of the sun, and to have been brought by AEneas when he founded his kingdom in the new land of Italy.

The extinction of this fire would have been regarded as the gravest public calamity, foreboding disaster. Its flames were intended to represent the _purity_ of the G.o.ddess, thus emphasising the mystic aspect of another physical property of fire--its purifying power. "Our G.o.d" (said the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews) "is a consuming fire."

Greece had its common hearth at Delphi. It was also supposed that at the centre of the earth there was a hearth which answered to that. In the Apocalypse we read of the altar with its sacred fire as central in heaven. Truly these concepts are persistent!

And why? Because there is more than imagination in them; they are the products of ideas immanent in the material phenomena in which they are embodied, and through which they manifest themselves to the human soul.

There could not fail to be fire-G.o.ds many, and a study of their respective characters, especially in the earlier stages of their development, often furnishes a key to the intuitional workings of the primitive mind as prompted by the always arresting, and often terrorising phenomena of fire and flame. Max Muller's detailed study of the development of the Hindu G.o.d, Agni, was mentioned in an earlier chapter. The name originally means the Mover, and arose, doubtless, from the running, darting, leaping movement of flame. Beginning his career as a purely physical G.o.d, he advanced through various stages of spiritualisation until he became the supreme deity. Is not the problem of motion still one of the most fascinating and profound? Bergson's "L'Evolution creatrice" is one of the latest attempts to grapple with it, and those who in early India personified fire as the Mover were his legitimate predecessors.

The Greek Hephaestus personified the brightness of flame, and took shape as a G.o.d of ripe age, of muscular form, of serious countenance, but lame. Why lame? Why this physical defect as a drawback to so much physical beauty and strength? A Frenchman, Emerie, suggests--"attendu la marche inegale et vacillante de la flamme." Certainly fire, as compared with water and air, is dependent on sustenance, as Heracleitus so well realised, as also its consequent limitations in regard to free and independent movement: but the sage solved this difficulty by making the Fire-motion feed, as it were, upon itself. The G.o.d was represented as puny at birth because flame, especially as kindled artificially, so often starts from a tiny spark. His marriage to Aphrodite typifies "the a.s.sociation of fire with the life-giving forces of nature." So, remarks Max Muller, the Hindu Agni was the patron of marriage. How many lines of thought open out before us here, bringing us face to face, by pre-scientific modes of mental activity, with some of the deepest mysteries of human life!

Vulcan, the Latin parallel of Hephaestus, suggests to us the awe-inspiring phenomena of volcanoes, which, though not of frequent occurrence, are calculated by virtue of their magnitude and grandeur to stimulate emotion and intuition to an exceptional degree. Fear would naturally predominate, but, even for the primitive mind, would be one factor only in a complex whole. Matthew Arnold has attempted to portray the soul-storm raised by the sight of the molten crater of AEtna. He makes Empedocles, the poet-philosopher, climb the summit of the mountain, gaze for the last time on the realm of nature spread around, and apostrophise the stars above and the volcanic fires beneath his feet.

"And thou, fiery world, That sapp'st the vitals of this terrible mount Upon whose charred and quaking crust I stand-- Thou, too, brimmest with life."

Note here again the sense of life--of kinship, so fundamental to Nature Mysticism. And so to the close.

"And therefore, O ye elements! I know-- Ye know it too--it hath been granted me Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved.

I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free, Is it but for a moment?

--Ah, boil up, ye vapours!

Leap and roar, thou sea of fire!

My soul glows to meet you.

Ere it flag, ere the mists Of despondency and gloom Rush over it again, Receive me, save me!

[He plunges into the crater.]"

Out of the ancient beliefs and myths concerning subterranean fires grew up the enormously important beliefs in h.e.l.l and Purgatory, which attained such abnormal proportions in medieval times, and which are by no means yet extinct. The most vivid picture of h.e.l.l, founded largely on ancient material, though with a Biblical basis, is found in Milton. In language which recalls the t.i.tanomachy, the poet tells of Satan and his myrmidons hurled from heaven.

"Him the almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from th' aetherial sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire."

Confounded for a time by his fall, he lies rolling in the fiery gulf; but at length, rolling round his baleful eyes, he sees

"A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all; but torture without end Still urges, and a fiery deluge fed With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed."

What manner of intuitions are embodied here? Perchance we are beginning to treat them too lightly, as also the Hindu doctrine of Karma; for the universe, after all, is the scene of the reign of law. But however this may be, we are glad to emerge, with Dante, from the regions of punitive flames into the regions of the fires that purge--into the pure air that surrounds the Isle of Purgatory.

"Sweet hue of eastern sapphire, that was spread O'er the serene aspect of the pure air, High up as the first circle, to mine eyes Unwonted joy renewed, soon as I 'scaped Forth from the atmosphere of deadly gloom That had mine eyes and bosom filled with grief."

Shall we invest with like purgatorial powers the flaming swords that barred the way to Paradise? Is such the inner meaning of the appeal:

"do thou my tongue inspire Who touched Isaiah's hallowed lips with fire"?

The more hostile aspects of fire are most strikingly embodied in the Teutonic giant Logi (Flame) with his children, who were supposed to be the authors of every great conflagration, and who might be seen in the midst of the flames, their heads crowned with chaplets of fire. They may be taken, like the Greek giants and t.i.tans, as personifications of the wild brute forces of nature, which strive to hinder man's work and destroy what he has made. For, as Schiller says:

"the elements are hostile To the work of human hand."

For such are but some out of the many forms in which man has struggled to give expression to his intuitions that there is something wrong in nature--to his deep sense of division and conflict in the cosmic process. Heracleitus, as we saw, held that conflict is an essential condition of existence. At any rate, it is true, that order is only won by severe conflict with destructive and irregular powers. An ancient expression of this experience is found in the long contest waged between Zeus and the other children of Cronos. A modern expression is found in Huxley's ill.u.s.tration of the fenced garden that, if untended, speedily returns to its wild condition. In the framing and moulding of this experience, the hostile aspects of fire have played no insignificant part.

In this context it would be natural to treat of the Sun as the predominant manifestation of fire, of which Sh.e.l.ley, in his hymn to Apollo, has said:

"I am the eye with which the Universe Beholds itself and knows itself divine."

The various sun-G.o.ds would be pa.s.sed in review, Ra of the Egyptians, Apollo of the Greeks, and the various forms of sun-worship, from the most primitive times down through the Persian religion, that of the Peruvians, the "children of the sun,"

to that of the modern Pa.r.s.ees--and that of the unnamed mult.i.tudes who in substance have echoed the words which Moore puts into the mouths of the Hyperboreans:

"To the Sun-G.o.d all our hearts and lyres By day, by night belong; And the breath we draw from his living fires We give him back in song."

But the subject is too great and is deserving of special treatment. Certain of the more essential conceptions involved will come before us in the chapter on light. Mirabeau on his death-bed would seem to have put the whole matter in the briefest s.p.a.ce--"Si ce n'est pas la Dieu, c'est du moins son cousin-german." Turner, on his deathbed, was briefer and bolder still--"The sun is G.o.d." Knowing the man and knowing his work, we can understand what he meant. Put it the other way round, we have the same, and yet the fuller truth--"the Lord G.o.d is a Sun."

CHAPTER XXIX

LIGHT AND DARKNESS

Robert Fludd, the English Rosicrucian, who died in 1637, wrote a treatise on the universe, in which he taught that man was a microcosm of the macrocosm, and that light and darkness are the two great principles of existence, the one of animate, the other of inanimate nature. He held that soul and life are every day shed from the sun upon all objects open to his beams. For such doctrines as these he was denounced as practically an atheist! Fortunately the times have changed, though we have still much to learn in the way of rational tolerance and sympathetic receptivity.

Who shall say how old is this idea of two distinct, and generally opposing principles, the light and the dark? The Babylonian cosmology carries us a long way back, but not to the beginning of such mystical conceptions. For in that cosmology Marduk is a well-developed G.o.d of light, with Tiamat as his ant.i.thesis, the G.o.ddess of the dark, and the nature and course of the deadly contest between them has taken form in a well-defined series of myths.

One of the most obvious emotional effects of darkness is to inspire fear, and there are few who have not in some degree and on some occasions experienced a sense of discomfort in the dark--a chill, or a shrinking, which in certain cases, especially with children, may amount to terror. It is possible that we have here, as is often contended, an organic reminiscence of the experience of our remote ancestors. Certainly it is not difficult for us to sympathise with the primitive dread of darkness, nor to understand the transition to the conception of darkness as a hostile power. But there is also an element which may be regarded as simply personal and individual--a natural antic.i.p.ation of unknown dangers, and a sense of helplessness should the apprehensions be realised. There is, moreover, an element of a still more directly mystical character, that which Everett describes as a feeling that in the darkness the familiar world is swept away and that we are touching the limits of the natural. Hence the chill of the unknown and supernatural.

However this may be, the fact remains that from the earliest known times, there have been powers of darkness set over against the powers of light; and the conflict between them has suggested with exceptional vividness the conflict between good and evil. The opening verses of the Bible, with their chaos and darkness, and the sublime command--"Let there be light"--are in line with a vast body of primitive myth and speculation which represents the good G.o.d as the Creator of light, or as light itself over against the dark. The mysticism of the prologue to St.

John's Gospel both represented and fostered ideas which were current in the earliest Christian communities and have coloured the whole of the primitive Christian literature.

So in the most ancient of the cla.s.sical mythologies, Night was one of the oldest deities, daughter of Chaos, and sister of Erebus, the dark underworld. So in Persian dogmatic we have the same essential concepts. From the beginning existed uncreated light and uncreated darkness--the opposing kingdoms of Ahura and Ahriman.

Who shall say what great cosmic facts lie behind these vague and looming intuitions? The physical merges by insensible degrees into the aesthetic, the moral, the spiritual. On the one hand, the chill, the blankness, the negation, sometimes the horror, of the darkness. And on the other hand the purity and beauty, the colour and effulgence of the light--above all, its joy-giving, life-giving, though noiseless, energy.