Pagan and Christian creeds Part 15

There may have been a historic Jesus--and if so, to get a reliable outline of his life would indeed be a treasure; but at present it would seem there is no sign of that. If the historicity of Jesus, in any degree, could be proved, it would give us reason for supposing--what I have personally always been inclined to believe--that there was also a historical nucleus for such personages as Osiris, Mithra, Krishna, Hercules, Apollo and the rest. The question, in fact, narrows itself down to this, Have there been in the course of human evolution certain, so to speak, NODAL points or periods at which the psychologic currents ran together and condensed themselves for a new start; and has each such node or point of condensation been marked by the appearance of an actual and heroic man (or woman) who supplied a necessary impetus for the new departure, and gave his name to the resulting movement? OR is it sufficient to suppose the automatic formation of such nodes or starting-points without the intervention of any special hero or genius, and to imagine that in each case the myth-making tendency of mankind CREATED a legendary and inspiring figure and worshiped the same for a long period afterwards as a G.o.d?

As I have said before, this is a question which, interesting as it is, is not really very important. The main thing being that the prophetic and creative spirit of mankind HAS from time to time evolved those figures as idealizations of its "heart's desire" and placed a halo round their heads. The long procession of them becomes a REAL piece of History--the history of the evolution of the human heart, and of human consciousness. But with the psychology of the whole subject I shall deal in the next chapter.

I may here, however, dwell for a moment on two other points which belong properly to this chapter. I have already mentioned the great reliance placed by the advocates of a unique 'revelation' on the high morality taught in the Gospels and the New Testament generally. There is no need of course to challenge that morality or to depreciate it unduly; but the argument a.s.sumes that it is so greatly superior to anything of the kind that had been taught before that we are compelled to suppose something like a revelation to explain its appearance--whereas of course anyone familiar with the writings of antiquity, among the Greeks or Romans or Egyptians or Hindus or later Jews, knows perfectly well that the reported sayings of Jesus and the Apostles may be paralleled abundantly from these sources. I have ill.u.s.trated this already from the Sermon on the Mount. If anyone will glance at the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs--a Jewish book composed about 120 B. C.--he will see that it is full of moral precepts, and especially precepts of love and forgiveness, so ardent and so n.o.ble that it hardly suffers in any way when compared with the New Testament teaching, and that consequently no special miracle is required to explain the appearance of the latter.

The twelve Patriarchs in question are the twelve sons of Jacob, and the book consists of their supposed deathbed scenes, in which each patriarch in turn recites his own (more or less imaginary) life and deeds and gives pious counsel to his children and successors. It is composed in a fine and poetic style, and is full of lofty thought, remindful in scores of pa.s.sages of the Gospels--words and all--the coincidences being too striking to be accidental. It evidently had a deep influence on the authors of the Gospels, as well as on St. Paul. It affirms a belief in the coming of a Messiah, and in salvation for the Gentiles. The following are some quotations from it: (1) Testament of Zebulun (p.

116): "My children, I bid you keep the commands of the Lord, and show mercy to your neighbours, and have compa.s.sion towards all, not towards men only, but also towards beasts." Dan (p. 127): "Love the Lord through all your life, and one another with a true heart." Joseph (p. 173): "I was sick, and the Lord visited me; in prison, and my G.o.d showed favor unto me." Benjamin (p. 209): "For as the sun is not defiled by shining on dung and mire, but rather drieth up both and driveth away the evil smell, so also the pure mind, encompa.s.sed by the defilements of earth, rather cleanseth them and is not itself defiled."

(1) The references being to the Edition by R. H. Charles (1907).

I think these quotations are sufficient to prove the high standard of this book, which was written in the Second Century B. C., and FROM which the New Testament authors copiously borrowed.

The other point has to do with my statement at the beginning of this chapter that two of the main 'characteristics' of Christianity were its insistence on (a) a tendency towards renunciation of the world, and a consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love, and (b) 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. I think, however, that the last-mentioned characteristic ought to be viewed in relation to a third, namely, (c) the extraordinarily DEMOCRATIC tendency of the new Religion. (1) Celsus (A.D. 200) jeered at the early Christians for their extreme democracy: "It is only the simpletons, the ign.o.ble, the senseless--slaves and womenfolk and children--whom they wish to persuade (to join their churches) or CAN persuade"--"wool-dressers and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and vulgar persons," and "whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent or a fool, in a word, whoever is G.o.d-forsaken ([gr kakodaimwn]), him the Kingdom of G.o.d will receive." (2) Thus Celsus, the accomplished, clever, philosophic and withal humorous critic, laughed at the new religionists, and prophesied their speedy extinction. Nevertheless he was mistaken.

There is little doubt that just the inclusion of women and weaklings and outcasts did contribute LARGELY to the spread of Christianity (and Mithraism). It brought hope and a sense of human dignity to the despised and rejected of the earth. Of the immense numbers of lesser officials who carried on the vast organization of the Roman Empire, most perhaps, were taken from the ranks of the freedmen and quondam slaves, drawn from a great variety of races and already familiar with pagan cults of all kinds--Egyptian, Syrian, Chaldean, Iranian, and so forth. (3) This fact helped to give to Christianity--under the fine tolerance of the Empire--its democratic character and also its willingness to accept all.

The rude and menial ma.s.ses, who had hitherto been almost beneath the notice of Greek and Roman culture, flocked in; and though this was doubtless, as time went on, a source of weakness to the Church, and a cause of dissension and superst.i.tion, yet it was in the inevitable line of human evolution, and had a psychological basis which I must now endeavor to explain.

(1) It is important to note, however, that this same democratic tendency was very marked in Mithraism. "Il est certain," says c.u.mont, "qu'il a fait ses premieres conquetes dans les cla.s.ses inferieures de la societe et c'est l'a un fait considerable; le mithracisme est reste longtemps la religion des humbles." Mysteres de Mithra, p. 68.

(2) See Glover's Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire, ch. viii.

(3) See Toutain, Cultes paiens, vol. ii, conclusion.

XIV. THE MEANING OF IT ALL

The general drift and meaning of the present book must now, I think, from many hints scattered in the course of it, be growing clear. But it will be well perhaps in this chapter, at the risk of some repet.i.tion, to bring the whole argument together. And the argument is that since the dawn of humanity on the earth--many hundreds of thousands or perhaps a million years ago--there has been a slow psychologic evolution, a gradual development or refinement of Consciousness, which at a certain stage has spontaneously given birth in the human race to the phenomena of religious belief and religious ritual--these phenomena (whether in the race at large or in any branch of it) always following, step by step, a certain order depending on the degrees of psychologic evolution concerned; and that it is this general fact which accounts for the strange similarities of belief and ritual which have been observed all over the world and in places far remote from each other, and which have been briefly noted in the preceding chapters.

And the main stages of this psychologic evolution--those at any rate with which we are here concerned--are Three: the stage of Simple Consciousness, the stage of Self-consciousness, and a third Stage which for want of a better word we may term the stage of Universal Consciousness. Of course these three stages may at some future time be a.n.a.lyzed into lesser degrees, with useful result--but at present I only desire to draw attention to them in the rough, so to speak, to show that it is from them and from their pa.s.sage one into another that there has flowed by a perfectly natural logic and concatenation the strange panorama of humanity's religious evolution--its superst.i.tions and magic and sacrifices and dancings and ritual generally, and later its incantations and prophecies, and services of speech and verse, and paintings and forms of art and figures of the G.o.ds. A wonderful Panorama indeed, or poem of the Centuries, or, if you like, World-symphony with three great leading motives!

And first we have the stage of Simple Consciousness. For hundreds of centuries (we cannot doubt) Man possessed a degree of consciousness not radically different from that of the higher Animals, though probably more quick and varied. He saw, he heard, he felt, he noted. He acted or reacted, quickly or slowly, in response to these impressions. But the consciousness of himSELF, as a being separate from his impressions, as separate from his surroundings, had not yet arisen or taken hold on him.

He was an instinctive part, of Nature. And in this respect he was very near to the Animals. Self-consciousness in the animals, in a germinal form is there, no doubt, but EMBEDDED, so to speak, in the general world consciousness. It is on this account that the animals have such a marvellously acute perception and instinct, being embedded in Nature.

And primitive Man had the same. Also we must, as I have said before, allow that man in that stage must have had the same sort of grace and perfection of form and movement as we admire in the (wild) animals now.

It would be quite unreasonable to suppose that he, the crown in the same sense of creation, was from the beginning a lame and ill-made abortion.

For a long period the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher animals, must have been (on the whole, and allowing for occasional privations and sufferings and conflicts) well adapted to their surroundings and harmonious with the earth and with each other. There must have been a period resembling a Golden Age--some condition at any rate which, compared with subsequent miseries, merited the epithet 'golden.'

It was during this period apparently that the system of Totems arose.

The tribes felt their relationship to their winged and fourfooted mates (including also other objects of nature) so deeply and intensely that they adopted the latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man fairly worshipped, the animals and was proud to be called after them.

Of course we moderns find this strange. We, whose conceptions of these beautiful creatures are mostly derived from a broken-down cab-horse, or a melancholy milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen or loved them and have only wondered with our true commercial instinct what profit we could extract from them. But they, the primitives, loved and admired the animals; they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural friendship, (1) and accorded them a kind of divinity. This was the age of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of solidarity with Nature.

And the point of it all is (with regard to the subject we have in hand) that this was also the age from which by a natural evolution the sense of Religion came to mankind. If Religion in man is the sense of ties binding his inner self to the powers of the universe around him, then it is evident I think that primitive man as I have described him possessed the REALITY of this sense--though so far buried and subconscious that he was hardly aware of it. It was only later, and with the coming of the Second Stage, that this sense began to rise distinctly into consciousness.

(1) See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460, edn. 1903) says: "The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among the lower races."

Let us pa.s.s then to the Second Stage. There is a moment in the evolution of a child--somewhere perhaps about the age of three (1)--when the simple almost animal-like consciousness of the babe is troubled by a new element--SELF-consciousness. The change is so marked, so definite, that (in the depth of the infant's eyes) you can almost SEE it take place. So in the evolution of the human race there has been a period--also marked and definite, though extending intermittent over a vast interval of time--when on men in general there dawned the consciousness of THEMSELVES, of their own thoughts and actions. The old simple acceptance of sensations and experiences gave place to REFLECTION. The question arose: "How do these sensations and experiences affect ME? What can _I_ do to modify them, to encourage the pleasurable, to avoid or inhibit the painful, and so on?" From that moment a new motive was added to life.

The mind revolved round a new centre. It began to spin like a little eddy round its own axis. It studied ITSELF first and became deeply concerned about its own pleasures and pains, losing touch the while with the larger life which once dominated it--the life of Nature, the life of the Tribe. The old unity of the spirit, the old solidarity, were broken up.

(1) See Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness (Philadelphia, 1901), pp. 1 and 39; also W. McDougall's Social Psychology (1908), p. 146--where the same age is tentatively suggested.

I have touched on this subject before, but it is so important that the reader must excuse repet.i.tion. There came an inevitable severance, an inevitable period of strife. The magic mirror of the soul, reflecting nature as heretofore in calm and simple grace, was suddenly cracked across. The new self-conscious man (not all at once but gradually) became alienated from his tribe. He lapsed into strife with his fellows.

Ambition, vanity, greed, the love of domination, the desire for property and possessions, set in. The influences of fellowship and solidarity grew feebler. He became alienated from his great Mother. His instincts were less and less sure--and that in proportion as brain-activity and self-regarding calculation took their place. Love and mutual help were less compelling in proportion as the demands of self-interest grew louder and more insistent. Ultimately the crisis came. Cain murdered his brother and became an outcast. The Garden of Eden and the Golden Age closed their gates behind him. He entered upon a period of suffering--a period of labor and toil and sorrow such as he had never before known, and such as the animals certainly have never known. And in that distressful state, in that doleful valley of his long pilgrimage, he still remains to-day.

Thus has the canker of self-consciousness done its work. It would be foolish and useless to rail against the process, or to blame any one for it. It had to be. Through this dismal vale of self-seeking mankind had to pa.s.s--if only in order at last to find the True Self which was (and still remains) its goal. The pilgrimage will not last for ever. Indeed there are signs that the recent Great War and the following Events mark the lowest point of descent and the beginning of the human soul's return to sanity and ascent towards the heavenly Kingdom. No doubt Man will arrive again SOME day at the grace, composure and leisurely beauty of life which the animals realized long ago, though he seems a precious long time about it; and when all this nightmare of Greed and Vanity and Self-conceit and Cruelty and l.u.s.t of oppression and domination, which marks the present period, is past--and it WILL pa.s.s--then Humanity will come again to its Golden Age and to that Paradise of redemption and peace which has for so long been prophesied.

But we are dealing with the origins of Religion; and what I want the reader to see is that it was just this breaking up of the old psychologic unity and continuity of man with his surroundings which led to the whole panorama of the rituals and creeds. Man, centering round himself, necessarily became an exile from the great Whole. He committed the sin (if it was a sin) of Separation. Anyhow Nemesis was swift. The sense of loneliness and the sense of guilt came on him. The realization of himself as a separate conscious being necessarily led to his attributing a similar consciousness of some kind to the great Life around him. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Whatever he may have felt before, it became clear to him now that beings more or less like himself--though doubtless vaster and more powerful--moved behind the veil of the visible world. From that moment the belief in Magic and Demons and G.o.ds arose or slowly developed itself; and in the midst of this turmoil of perilous and conflicting powers, he perceived himself an alien and an exile, stricken with Fear, stricken with the sense of Sin.

If before, he had experienced fear--in the kind of automatic way of self-preservation in which the animals feel it--he now, with fevered self-regard and excited imagination, experienced it in double or treble degree. And if, before, he had been aware that fortune and chance were not always friendly and propitious to his designs, he now perceived or thought he perceived in every adverse happening the deliberate persecution of the powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them. Hence by a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose the belief in other-world or supernatural powers, whether purely fortuitous and magical or more distinctly rational and personal; there arose the sense of Sin, or of offence against these powers; there arose a complex ritual of Expiation--whether by personal sacrifice and suffering or by the sacrifice of victims. There arose too a whole catalogue of ceremonies--ceremonies of Initiation, by which the novice should learn to keep within the good grace of the Powers, and under the blessing of his Tribe and the protection of its Totem; ceremonies of Eucharistic meals which should restore the lost sanct.i.ty of the common life and remove the sense of guilt and isolation; ceremonies of Marriage and rules and rites of s.e.x-connection, fitted to curb the terrific and demonic violence of pa.s.sions which else indeed might easily rend the community asunder. And so on. It is easy to see that granted an early stage of simple unreflecting nature-consciousness, and granting this broken into and, after a time, shattered by the arrival of SELF-consciousness there would necessarily follow in spontaneous yet logical order a whole series of religious inst.i.tutions and beliefs, which phantasmal and unreal as they may appear to us, were by no means unreal to our ancestors. It is easy also to see that as the psychological process was necessarily of similar general character in every branch of the human race and all over the world, so the religious evolutions--the creeds and rituals--took on much the same complexion everywhere; and, though they differed in details according to climate and other influences, ran on such remarkably parallel lines as we have noted.

Finally, to make the whole matter clear, let me repeat that this event, the inbreak of Self-consciousness, took place, or BEGAN to take place, an enormous time ago, perhaps in the beginning of the Neolithic Age.

I dwell on the word "began" because I think it is probable that in its beginnings, and for a long period after, this newborn consciousness had an infantile and very innocent character, quite different from its later and more aggressive forms--just as we see self-consciousness in a little child has a charm and a grace which it loses later in a boastful or grasping boyhood and manhood. So we may understand that though self-consciousness may have begun to appear in the human race at this very early time (and more or less contemporaneously with the invention of very rude tools and unformed language), there probably did elapse a very long period--perhaps the whole of the Neolithic Age--before the evils of this second stage of human evolution came to a head. Max Muller has pointed out that among the words which are common to the various branches of Aryan language, and which therefore belong to the very early period before the separation of these branches, there are not found the words denoting war and conflict and the weapons and instruments of strife--a fact which suggests a long continuance of peaceful habit among mankind AFTER the first formation and use of language.

That the birth of language and the birth of self-consciousness were APPROXIMATELY simultaneous is a probable theory, and one favored by many thinkers; (1) but the slow beginnings of both must have been so very protracted that it is perhaps useless to attempt any very exact determination. Late researches seem to show that language began in what might be called TRIBAL expressions of mood and feeling (holophrases like "go-hunting-kill-bear") without reference to individual personalities and relationships; and that it was only at a later stage that words like "I" and "Thou" came into use, and the holophrases broke up into "parts of speech" and took on a definite grammatical structure. (2) If true, these facts point clearly to a long foreground of rude communal language, something like though greatly superior to that of the animals, preceding or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in the forms of "I" and "Thou" and the grammar of personal actions and relations. "They show that the plural and all other forms of number in grammar arise not by multiplication of an original 'I,' but by selection and gradual EXCLUSION from an original collective 'we.'" (3) According to this view the birth of self-consciousness in the human family, or in any particular race or section of the human family, must have been equally slow and hesitating; and it would be easy to imagine, as just said, that there may have been a very long and 'golden' period at its beginning, before the new consciousness took on its maturer and harsher forms.

(1) Dr. Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness) insists on their simultaneity, but places both events excessively far back, as we should think, i.e. 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. Possibly he does not differentiate sufficiently between the rude language of the holophrase and the much later growth of formed and grammatical speech.

(2) See A. E. Crawley's Idea of the Soul, ch. ii; Jane Harrison's Themis, pp. 473-5; and E. J. Payne's History of the New World called America, vol. ii, pp. 115 sq., where the beginning of self-consciousness is a.s.sociated with the break-up of the holophrase.

(3) Themis, p. 471.

All estimates of the Time involved in these evolutions of early man are notoriously most divergent and most difficult to be sure of; but if we take 500,000 years ago for the first appearance of veritable Man (h.o.m.o primigenius), (2) and (following Professor W. J. Sollas) (3) 30,000 or 40,000 years ago for the first tool-using men (h.o.m.o sapiens) of the Ch.e.l.lean Age (palaeolithic), 15,000 for the rock-paintings and inscriptions of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian peoples, and 5,000 years ago for the first actual historical records that have come down to us, we may perhaps get something like a proportion between the different periods. That is to say, half a million years for the purely animal man in his different forms and grades of evolution. Then somewhere towards the end of palaeolithic or commencement of neolithic times Self-consciousness dimly beginning and, after some 10,000 years of slow germination and pre-historic culture, culminating in the actual historic period and the dawn of civilization 40 or 50 centuries ago, and to-day (we hope), reaching the climax which precedes or foretells its abatement and transformation.

(2) Though Dr. Arthur Keith, Ancient Types of Man (1911), pp. 93 and 102, puts the figure at more like a million.

(3) See Ancient Hunters (1915); also Hastings's Encycl. art.

"Ethnology"; and Havelock Ellis, "The Origin of War," in The Philosophy of Conflict and other Essays.

No doubt many geologists and anthropologists would favor periods greatly LONGER than those here mentioned; but possibly there would be some agreement as to the RATIO to each other of the times concerned: that is, the said authorities would probably allow for a VERY long animal-man (1)-period corresponding to the first stage; for a much shorter aggressively 'self conscious' period, corresponding to the Second Stage--perhaps lasting only one thirtieth or fiftieth of the time of the first period; and then--if they looked forward at all to a third stage--would be inclined for obvious reasons to attribute to that again a very extended duration.

(1) I use the phrase 'animal-man' here, not with any flavor of contempt or reprobation, as the dear Victorians would have used it, but with a sense of genuine respect and admiration such as one feels towards the animals themselves.

However, all this is very speculative. To return to the difficulty about Language and the consideration of those early times when words adequate to the expression of religious or magical ideas simply did not exist, it is clear that the only available, or at any rate the CHIEF means of expression, in those times, must have consisted in gestures, in att.i.tudes, in ceremonial ACTIONS--in a more or less elaborate ritual, in fact. (1) Such ideas as Adoration, Thanksgiving, confession of Guilt, placation of Wrath, Expiation, Sacrifice, Celebration of Community, sacramental Atonement, and a score of others could at that time be expressed by appropriate rites--and as a matter of fact are often so expressed even now--MORE readily and directly than by language.

'Dancing'--when that word came to be invented--did not mean a mere flinging about of the limbs in recreation, but any expressive movements of the body which might be used to convey the feelings of the dancer or of the audience whom he represented. And so the 'religious dance' became a most important part of ritual.

(1) See ch. ix and xi.

So much for the second stage of Consciousness. Let us now pa.s.s on to the Third Stage. It is evident that the process of disruption and dissolution--disruption both of the human mind, and of society round about it, due to the action of the Second Stage--could not go on indefinitely. There are hundreds of thousands of people at the present moment who are dying of mental or bodily disease--their nervous systems broken down by troubles connected with excessive self-consciousness--selfish fears and worries and restlessness. Society at large is perishing both in industry and in warfare through the domination in its organism of the self-motives of greed and vanity and ambition. This cannot go on for ever. Things must either continue in the same strain, in which case it is evident that we are approaching a crisis of utter dissolution, OR a new element must enter in, a new inspiration of life, and we (as individuals) and the society of which we form a part, must make a fresh start. What is that new and necessary element of regeneration?

It is evident that it must be a new birth--the entry into a further stage of consciousness which must supersede the present one. Through some such crisis as we have spoken of, through the extreme of suffering, the mind of Man, AS AT PRESENT CONSt.i.tUTED, has to die. (1) Self-consciousness has to die, and be buried, and rise again in a new form. Probably nothing but the extreme of suffering can bring this about. (2) And what is this new form in which consciousness has to rearise? Obviously, since the miseries of the world during countless centuries have dated from that fatal attempt to make the little personal SELF the centre of effort and activity, and since that attempt has inevitably led to disunity and discord and death, both within the mind itself and within the body of society, there is nothing left but the return to a Consciousness which shall have Unity as its foundation-principle, and which shall proceed from the direct SENSE AND PERCEPTION of such an unity throughout creation. The simple mind of Early Man and the Animals was of that character--a consciousness, so to speak, continuous through nature, and though running to points of illumination and foci of special activity in individuals, yet at no point essentially broken or imprisoned in separate compartments. (And it is this CONTINUITY of the primitive mind which enables us, as I have already explained, to understand the mysterious workings of instinct and intuition.) To some such unity-consciousness we have to return; but clearly it will be--it is not--of the simple inchoate character of the First Stage, for it has been enriched, deepened, and greatly extended by the experience of the Second Stage. It is in fact, a new order of mentality--the consciousness of the Third Stage.

(1) "The mind must be restrained in the heart till it comes to an end," says the Maitrayana-Brahmana-Upanishad.