Pagan and Christian creeds Part 13

A monstrous Eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth; For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran.

And this may have been all very well and appropriate in the carboniferous Epoch, but WE in the end of Time have no desire to fall under any such preposterous domination, or to return to the primal swamps from which organic nature has so slowly and painfully emerged.

I say it was the entry of self-consciousness into the sphere of s.e.x, and the consequent use of the latter for private ends, which poisoned this great race-power at its root. For above all, s.e.x, as representing through Childbirth the life of the Race (or of the Tribe, or, if you like, of Humanity at large) should be sacred and guarded from merely selfish aims, and therefore to use it only for such aims is indeed a desecration. And even if--as some maintain and I think rightly (1)--s.e.x is not MERELY for child-birth and physical procreation, but for mutual vitalizing and invigoration, it still subserves union and not egotism; and to use it egotistically is to commit the sin of Separation indeed.

It is to cast away and corrupt the very bond of life and fellowship. The ancient peoples at any rate threw an illumination of religious (that is, of communal and public) value over s.e.x-acts, and to a great extent made them into matters either of Temple-ritual and the worship of the G.o.ds, or of communal and pandemic celebration, as in the Saturnalia and other similar festivals. We have certainly no right to regard these celebrations--of either kind--as insincere. They were, at any rate in their inception, genuinely religious or genuinely social and festal; and from either point of view they were far better than the secrecy of private indulgence which characterizes our modern world in these matters. The thorough and shameless commercialism of s.e.x has alas!

been reserved for what is called "Christian civilization," and with it (perhaps as a necessary consequence) Prost.i.tution and Syphilis have grown into appalling evils, accompanied by a gigantic degradation of social standards, and upgrowth of petty Philistinism and niaiserie.

Love, in fact, having in this modern world-movement been denied, and its natural manifestations affected with a sense of guilt and of sin, has really languished and ceased to play its natural part in life; and a vast number of people--both men and women, finding themselves barred or derailed from the main object of existence, have turned their energies to 'business' or 'money-making' or 'social advancement' or something equally futile, as the only poor subst.i.tute and pis aller open to them.

(1) See Havelock Ellis, The Objects of Marriage, a pamphlet published by the "British Society for the Study of s.e.x-psychology."

Why (again we ask) did Christianity make this apparently great mistake?

And again we must reply: Perhaps the mistake was not so great as it appears to be. Perhaps this was another case of the necessity of learning by loss. Love had to be denied, in the form of s.e.x, in order that it might thus the better learn its own true values and needs. s.e.x had to be rejected, or defiled with the sense of guilt and self-seeking, in order that having cast out its defilement it might return one day, transformed in the embrace of love. The whole process has had a deep and strange world-significance. It has led to an immensely long period of suppression--suppression of two great instincts--the physical instinct of s.e.x and the emotional instinct of love. Two things which should naturally be conjoined have been separated; and both have suffered.

And we know from the Freudian teachings what suppressions in the root-instincts necessarily mean. We know that they inevitably terminate in diseases and distortions of proper action, either in the body or in the mind, or in both; and that these evils can only be cured by the liberation of the said instincts again to their proper expression and harmonious functioning in the whole organism. No wonder then that, with this agelong suppression (necessary in a sense though it may have been) which marks the Christian dispensation, there should have been a.s.sociated endless Sickness and Crime and sordid Poverty, the Crucifixion of animals in the name of Science and of human workers in the name of Wealth, and wars and horrors innumerable! Hercules writhing in the Nessus-shirt or Prometheus nailed to the rocks are only as figures of a toy miniature compared with this vision of the great and divine Spirit of Man caught in the clutches of those dread Diseases which through the centuries have been eating into his very heart and vitals.

It would not be fair to pile on the Christian Church the blame for all this. It had, no doubt, its part to play in the whole great scheme, namely, to accentuate the self-motive; and it played the part very thoroughly and successfully. For it must be remembered (what I have again and again insisted on) that in the pagan cults it was always the salvation of the CLAN, the TRIBE, the people that was the main consideration; the advantage of the individual took only a very secondary part. But in Christendom--after the communal enthusiasms of apostolic days and of the medieval and monastic brotherhoods and sisterhoods had died down--religion occupied itself more and more with each man or woman's INDIVIDUAL salvation, regardless of what might happen to the community; till, with the rise of Protestantism and Puritanism, this tendency reached such an extreme that, as some one has said, each man was absorbed in polishing up his own little soul in a corner to himself, in entire disregard to the d.a.m.nation which might come to his neighbor. Religion, and Morality too, under the commercial regime became, as was natural, perfectly selfish. It was always: "Am _I_ saved?

Am _I_ doing the right thing? Am _I_ winning the favor of G.o.d and man?

Will my claims to salvation be allowed? Did _I_ make a good bargain in allowing Jesus to be crucified for me?" The poison of a diseased self-consciousness entered into the whole human system.

As I say, one must not blame the Christians too much for all this--partly because, AFTER the communal periods which I have just mentioned, Christianity was evidently deeply influenced by the rise of COMMERCIALISM, to which during the last two centuries it has so carefully and piously adapted itself; and partly because--if our view is anywhere near right--this microbial injection of self-consciousness was just the necessary work which (in conjunction with commercialism) it HAD to perform. But though one does not blame Christianity one cannot blind oneself to its defects--the defects necessarily arising from the part it had to play. When one compares a healthy Pagan ritual--say of Apollo or Dionysus--including its rude and crude sacrifices if you like, but also including its whole-hearted spontaneity and dedication to the common life and welfare--with the morbid self-introspection of the Christian and the eternally recurring question "What shall I do to be saved?"--the comparison is not favorable to the latter. There is (at any rate in modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness about the Christian att.i.tude, and also a painful self-consciousness, which is not pleasant; and though Nietzsche's blonde beast is a sufficiently disagreeable animal, one almost thinks that it were better to be THAT than to go about with one's head meekly hanging on one side, and talking always of altruism and self-sacrifice, while in reality one's heart was entirely occupied with the question of one's own salvation. There is besides a lamentable want of grit and substance about the Christian doctrines and ceremonials.

Somehow under the s.e.x-taboo they became spiritualized and etherealized out of all human use. Study the initiation-rites of any savage tribe--with their strict discipline of the young braves in fort.i.tude, and the overcoming of pain and fear; with their very detailed lessons in the arts of war and life and the duties of the grown man to his tribe; and with their quite practical instruction in matters of s.e.x; and then read our little Baptismal and Confirmation services, which ought to correspond thereto. How thin and attenuated and weak the latter appear! Or compare the Holy Communion, as celebrated in the sentimental atmosphere of a Protestant Church, with an ancient Eucharistic feast of real jollity and community of life under the acknowledged presence of the G.o.d; or the Roman Catholic service of the Ma.s.s, including its genuflexions and mock oblations and droning ritual sing-song, with the actual sacrifice in early days of an animal-G.o.d-victim on a blazing altar; and I think my meaning will be clear. We do not want, of course, to return to all the crudities and barbarities of the past; but also we do not want to become attenuated and spiritualized out of all mundane sense and recognition, and to live in an otherworld Paradise void of application to earthly affairs.

The s.e.x-taboo in Christianity was apparently, as I have said, an effort of the human soul to wrest itself free from the entanglement of physical l.u.s.t--which l.u.s.t, though normal and appropriate and in a way gracious among the animals, had through the domination of self-consciousness become diseased and morbid or monstrous in Man. The work thus done has probably been of the greatest value to the human race; but, just as in other cases it has sometimes happened that the effort to do a certain work has resulted in the end in an unbalanced exaggeration so here. We are beginning to see now the harmful side of the repression of s.e.x, and are tentatively finding our way back again to a more pagan att.i.tude.

And as this return-movement is taking place at a time when, from many obvious signs, the self-conscious, grasping, commercial conception of life is preparing to go on the wane, and the sense of solidarity to re-establish itself, there is really good hope that our return-journey may prove in some degree successful.

Man progresses generally, not both legs at once like a sparrow, but by putting one leg forward first, and then the other. There was this advantage in the Christian taboo of s.e.x that by discouraging the physical and sensual side of love it did for the time being allow the spiritual side to come forward. But, as I have just now indicated, there is a limit to that process. We cannot always keep one leg first in walking, and we do not want, in life, always to put the spiritual first, nor always the material and sensual. The two sides in the long run have to keep pace with each other.

And it may be that a great number of the very curious and seemingly senseless taboos that we find among the primitive peoples can be partly explained in this way: that is, that by ruling out certain directions of activity they enabled people to concentrate more effectually, for the time being, on other directions. To primitive folk the great world, whose ways are puzzling enough in all conscience to us, must have been simply bewildering in its dangers and complications. It was an amazement of Fear and Ignorance. Thunderbolts might come at any moment out of the blue sky, or a demon out of an old tree trunk, or a devastating plague out of a bad smell--or apparently even out of nothing at all! Under those circ.u.mstances it was perhaps wise, wherever there was the smallest SUSPICION of danger or ill-luck, to create a hard and fast TABOO--just as we tell our children ON NO ACCOUNT to walk under a ladder (thereby creating a superst.i.tion in their minds), partly because it would take too long to explain all about the real dangers of paint-pots and other things, and partly because for the children themselves it seems simpler to have a fixed and inviolable law than to argue over every case that occurs. The priests and elders among early folk no doubt took the line of FORBIDDAL of activities, as safer and simpler, even if carried sometimes too far, than the opposite, of easy permission and encouragement. Taboos multiplied--many of them quite senseless--but perhaps in this perilous maze of the world, of which I have spoken, it really WAS simpler to cut out a large part of the labyrinth, as forbidden ground, thus rendering it easier for the people to find their way in those portions of the labyrinth which remained. If you read in Deuteronomy (ch. xiv) the list of birds and beasts and fishes permitted for food among the Israelites, or tabooed, you will find the list on the whole reasonable, but you will be struck by some curious exceptions (according to our ideas), which are probably to be explained by the necessity of making the rules simple enough to be comprehended by everybody--even if they included the forbiddal of some quite eatable animals.

At some early period, in Babylonia or a.s.syria, a very stringent taboo on the Sabbath arose, which, taken up in turn by the Jewish and Christian Churches, has ruled the Western World for three thousand years or more, and still survives in a quite senseless form among some of our rural populations, who will see their corn rot in the fields rather than save it on a Sunday. (1) It is quite likely that this taboo in its first beginning was due not to any need of a weekly rest-day (a need which could never be felt among nomad savages, but would only occur in some kind of industrial and stationary civilization), but to some superst.i.tious fear, connected with such things as the changes of the Moon, and the probable ILL-LUCK of any enterprise undertaken on the seventh day, or any day of Moon-change. It is probable, however, that as time went on and Society became more complex, the advantages of a weekly REST-DAY (or market-day) became more obvious and that the priests and legislators deliberately turned the taboo to a social use. (2) The learned modern Ethnologists, however, will generally have none of this latter idea. As a rule they delight in representing early peoples as totally dest.i.tute of common sense (which is supposed to be a monopoly of us moderns!); and if the Sabbath-arrangement has had any value or use they insist on ascribing this to pure accident, and not to the application of any sane argument or reason.

(1) For other absurd Sunday taboos see Westermarck on The Moral Ideas, vol. ii, p. 289.

(2) For a tracing of this taboo from useless superst.i.tion to practical utility see Hastings's Encycl. Religion and Ethics, art. "The Sabbath."

It is true indeed that a taboo--in order to be a proper taboo--must not rest in the general mind on argument or reason. It may have had good sense in the past or even an underlying good sense in the present, but its foundation must rest on something beyond. It must be an absolute fiat--something of the nature of a Mystery (1) or of Religion or Magic-and not to be disputed. This gives it its blood-curdling quality.

The rustic does not know what would happen to him if he garnered his corn on Sunday, nor does the diner-out in polite society know what would happen if he spooned up his food with his knife--but they both are stricken with a sort of paralysis at the very suggestion of infringing these taboos.

(1) See Westermarck, Ibid., ii. 586.

Marriage-customs have always been a fertile field for the generation of taboos. It seems doubtful whether anything like absolute promiscuity ever prevailed among the human race, but there is much to show that wide choice and intercourse were common among primitive folk and that the tendency of later marriage custom has been on the whole to LIMIT this range of choice. At some early period the forbiddal of marriage between those who bore the same totem-name took place. Thus in Australia "no man of the Emu stock might marry an Emu woman; no Blacksnake might marry a Blacksnake woman, and so forth." (1) Among the Kamilaroi and the Arunta of S. Australia the tribe was divided into cla.s.ses or clans, sometimes four, sometimes eight, and a man of one particular clan was only marriageable with a woman of another particular clan--say (1) with (3) or (2) with (4), and so on. (2) Customs with a similar tendency, but different in detail, seem to have prevailed among native tribes in Central Africa and N. America. And the regulations in all this matter have been so (apparently) entirely arbitrary in the various cases that it would almost appear as if the bar of kinship through the Totem had been the EXCUSE, originating perhaps in some superst.i.tion, but that the real and more abiding object was simply limitation. And this perhaps was a wise line to take. A taboo on promiscuity had to be created, and for this purpose any current prejudice could be made use of. (3)

(1) Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, p. 66.

(2) See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Australia.

(3) The author of The Mystic Rose seems to take this view. See p. 214 of that book.

With us moderns the whole matter has taken a different complexion. When we consider the enormous amount of suffering and disease, both of mind and body, arising from the s.e.x-suppression of which I have just spoken, especially among women, we see that mere unreasoning taboos--which possibly had their place and use in the past--can be tolerated no longer. We are bound to turn the searchlight of reason and science on a number of superst.i.tions which still linger in the dark and musty places of the Churches and the Law courts. Modern inquiry has shown conclusively not only the foundational importance of s.e.x in the evolution of each human being, but also the very great VARIETY of spontaneous manifestations in different individuals and the vital necessity that these should be recognized, if society is ever to expand into a rational human form. It is not my object here to sketch the future of marriage and s.e.x-relations generally--a subject which is now being dealt with very effectively from many sides; but only to insist on our using our good sense in the whole matter, and refusing any longer to be bound by senseless pre-judgments.

Something of the same kind may be said with regard to Nakedness, which in modern Civilization has become the object of a very serious and indeed harmful taboo; both of speech and act. As someone has said, it became in the end of the nineteenth century almost a crime to mention by name any portion of the human body within a radius of about twenty inches from its centre (!) and as a matter of fact a few dress-reformers of that period were actually brought into court and treated as criminals for going about with legs bare up to the knees, and shoulders and chest uncovered! Public follies such as these have been responsible for much of the bodily and mental disease and suppression just mentioned, and the sooner they are sent to limbo the better. No sensible person would advocate promiscuous nakedness any more than promiscuous s.e.x-relationship; nor is it likely that aged and deformed people would at any time wish to expose themselves. But surely there is enough good sense and appreciation of grace and fitness in the average human mind for it to be able to liberate the body from senseless concealment, and give it its due expression. The Greeks of old, having on the whole clean bodies, treated them with respect and distinction. The young men appeared quite naked in the palaestra, and even the girls of Sparta ran races publicly in the same condition; (1) and some day when our bodies (and minds too) have become clean we shall return to similar inst.i.tutions. But that will not be just yet. As long as the defilement of this commercial civilization is on us we shall prefer our dirt and concealment. The powers that be will protest against change. Heinrich Scham, in his charming little pamphlet Nackende Menschen, (2) describes the consternation of the commercial people at such ideas:

"'What will become of us,' cried the tailors, 'if you go naked?'

"And all the lot of them, hat, cravat, shirt, and shoemakers joined in the chorus.

"'AND WHERE SHALL I CARRY MY MONEY?' cried one who had just been made a director."

(1) See Theocritus, Idyll xviii.

(2) Published at Leipzig about 1893.

XIII. THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY

Referring back to the existence of something resembling a great World-religion which has come down the centuries, continually expanding and branching in the process, we have now to consider the genesis of that special brand or branch of it which we call Christianity. Each religion or cult, pagan or Christian, has had, as we have seen, a vast amount in common with the general World-religion; yet each has had its own special characteristics. What have been the main characteristics of the Christian branch, as differentiating it from the other branches?

We saw in the last chapter that a certain ascetic att.i.tude towards s.e.x was one of the most salient marks of the Christian Church; and that whereas most of the pagan cults (though occasionally favoring frightful austerities and cruel sacrifices) did on the whole rejoice in pleasure and the world of the senses, Christianity--following largely on Judaism--displayed a tendency towards renunciation of the world and the flesh, and a withdrawal into the inner and more spiritual regions of the mind. The same tendency may be traced in the Egyptian and Phrygian cults of that period. It will be remembered how Juvenal (Sat. VI, 510-40) chaffs the priests of Cybele at Rome for making themselves "eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake," or the rich Roman lady for plunging in the wintry Tiber for a propitiation to Isis. No doubt among the later pagans "the long intolerable tyranny of the senses over the soul" had become a very serious matter. But Christianity represented perhaps the most powerful reaction against this; and this reaction had, as indicated in the last chapter, the enormously valuable result that (for the time) it disentangled love from s.e.x and established Love, pure and undefiled, as ruler of the world. "G.o.d is Love." But, as also indicated, the divorce between the two elements of human nature, carried to an extreme, led in time to a crippling of both elements and the development of a certain morbidity and self-consciousness which, it cannot be denied, is painfully marked among some sections of Christians--especially those of the altruistic and 'philanthropic' type.

Another characteristic of Christianity which is also very fine in its way but has its limits of utility, has been its insistence on "morality." Some modern writers indeed have gone so far--forgetting, I suppose, the Stoics--as to claim that Christianity's chief mark is its high morality, and that the pagans generally were quite wanting in the moral sense! This, of course, is a profound mistake. I should say that, in the true sense of the word, the early and tribal peoples have been much more 'moral' as a rule--that is, ready as individuals to pay respect to the needs of the community--than the later and more civilized societies. But the mistake arises from the different interpretations of the word; for whereas all the pagan religions insisted very strongly on the just-mentioned kind of morality, which we should call CIVIC DUTY TO ONE'S NEIGHBOR, the Christian made morality to consist more especially in a mans DUTY TO G.o.d. It became with them a private affair between a mans self and-G.o.d, rather than a public affair; and thus led in the end to a very obnoxious and quite pharisaic kind of morality, whose chief inspiration was not the helping of one's fellow-man but the saving of one's own soul.

There may perhaps be other salient points of differentiation between Christianity and the preceding pagan religions; but for the present we may recognize these two--(a) the tendency towards a renunciation of the world, and the consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love and (b) the insistence on a morality whose inspiration was a private sense of duty to G.o.d rather than a public sense of duty to one's neighbor and to society generally. It may be interesting to trace the causes which led to this differentiation.

Three centuries before our era the conquests of Alexander had had the effect of spreading the Greek thought and culture over most of the known world. A vast number of small bodies of worshipers of local deities, with their various rituals and religious customs, had thus been broken up, or at least brought into contact with each other and partially modified and h.e.l.lenized. The orbit of a more general conception of life and religion was already being traced. By the time of the founding of the first Christian Church the immense conquests of Rome had greatly extended and established the process. The Mediterranean had become a great Roman lake. Merchant ships and routes of traffic crossed it in all directions; tourists visited its sh.o.r.es. The known world had become one.

The numberless peoples, tribes, nations, societies within the girdle of the Empire, with their various languages, creeds, customs, religions, philosophies, were profoundly influencing each other. (1) A great fusion was taking place; and it was becoming inevitable that the next great religious movement would have a world-wide character.

(1) For an enlargement on this theme see Glover's Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire; also S. J. Case, Evolution of Early Christianity (University of Chicago, 1914). The Adonis worship, for instance (a resurrection-cult), "was still thriving in Syria and Cyprus when Paul preached there," and the worship of Isis and Serapis had already reached then, Rome and Naples.

It was probable that this new religion would combine many elements from the preceding rituals in one cult. In connection with the fine temples and elaborate services of Isis and Cybele and Mithra there was growing up a powerful priesthood; Franz c.u.mont (1) speaks of "the learned priests of the Asiatic cults" as building up, on the foundations of old fetichism and superst.i.tion, a complete religious philosophy--just as the Brahmins had built the monism of the Vedanta on the "monstrous idolatries of Hinduism." And it was likely that a similar process would evolve the new religion expected. Toutain again calls attention to the patronage accorded to all these cults by the Roman Emperors, as favoring a new combination and synthesis:--"Hadrien, Commode, Septime Severe, Julia Domna, Elagabal, Alexandre Severe, en particulier ont contribue personnellement a la popularite et au succes des cultes qui se celebraient en l'honneur de Serapis et d'Isis, des divinites syriennes et de Mithra." (2)

(1) See c.u.mont, Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain (Paris, 1906), p. 253.

(2) Cultes paiens dans l'Empire Romain (2 vols., 1911), vol. ii, p. 263.

It was also probable that this new Religion would show (as indicated in the last chapter) a reaction against mere s.e.x-indulgence; and, as regards its standard of Morality generally, that, among so many conflicting peoples with their various civic and local customs, it could not well identify itself with any ONE of these but would evolve an inner inspiration of its own which in its best form would be love of the neighbor, regardless of the race, creed or customs of the neighbor, and whose sanction would not reside in any of the external authorities thus conflicting with each other, but in the sense of the soul's direct responsibility to G.o.d.

So much for what we might expect a priori as to the influence of the surroundings on the general form of the new Religion. And what about the kind of creed or creeds which that religion would favor? Here again we must see that the influence of the surroundings compelled a certain result. Those doctrines which we have described in the preceding chapters--doctrines of Sin and Sacrifice, a Savior, the Eucharist, the Trinity, the Virgin-birth, and so forth--were in their various forms seething, so to speak, all around. It was impossible for any new religious synthesis to escape them; all it could do would be to appropriate them, and to give them perhaps a color of its own. Thus it is into the midst of this germinating ma.s.s that we must imagine the various pagan cults, like fertilizing streams, descending. To trace all these streams would of course be an impossible task; but it may be of use, as an example of the process, to take the case of some particular belief. Let us take the belief in the coming of a Savior-G.o.d; and this will be the more suitable as it is a belief which has in the past been commonly held to be distinctive of Christianity. Of course we know now that it is not in any sense distinctive, but that the long tradition of the Savior comes down from the remotest times, and perhaps from every country of the world. (1) The Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah emptied themselves into the Christian teachings, and infected them to some degree with a Judaic tinge. The "Messiah" means of course the Anointed One. The Hebrew word occurs some 40 times in the Old Testament; and each time in the Septuagint or Greek translation (made mainly in the third century BEFORE our era) the word is translated [gr cristos], or Christos, which again means Anointed.

Thus we see that the idea or the word "The Christ" was in vogue in Alexandria as far back certainly as 280 B.C., or nearly three centuries before Jesus. And what the word "The Anointed" strictly speaking means, and from what the expression is probably derived, will appear later. In The Book of Enoch, written not later than B.C. 170, (2) the Christ is spoken of as already existing in heaven, and about to come as judge of all men, and is definitely called "the Son of Man." The Book of Revelations is FULL of pa.s.sages from Enoch; so are the Epistles of Paul; so too the Gospels. The Book of Enoch believes in a Golden Age that is to come; it has Dantesque visions of Heaven and h.e.l.l, and of Angels good and evil, and it speaks of a "garden of Righteousness" with the "Tree of Wisdom" in its midst. Everywhere, says Prof. Drews, in the first century B.C., there was the longing for a coming Savior.

(1) Even to-day, the Arabian lands are always vibrating with prophecies of a coming Mahdi.