Pantheism, Its Story and Significance Part 2

[Sidenote: Not Properly a Pantheist]

Having given so much s.p.a.ce to an ancient who seems to me specially interesting as a prophet of the ultimate apotheosis of earthly religions, I must be content to indicate, in a very few lines, the course of the Pantheistic tradition among the Greeks after his day. The arithmetical mysticism of Pythagoras has no bearing upon our subject.

Empedocles of Agrigentum, living about the middle of the fifth century B.C., and thus, perhaps, in the second generation after Xenophanes, was, in many respects, a much more imposing figure--clothed in purple, wielding political power, possessing medical skill, and even working miraculous cures, such as are apparently easy to men of personal impressiveness, sympathy, and "magnetism." But he does not appear to have so nearly antic.i.p.ated modern Pantheism as did his humbler predecessor. For though the fragments of Empedocles, much larger in volume than those of Xenophanes, certainly hint at some kind of everlasting oneness in things, and expressly tell us that there is no creation nor annihilation, but only perpetual changes of arrangement, yet they present other phases of thought, apparently irreconcileable with the doctrine that there is nothing other than G.o.d. Thus he teaches that there are four elements--earth, air, water and fire--out of which all things are generated. He also antic.i.p.ates Lucretius in his pessimistic view of humanity's lot; and insists on the apparently independent existence of a principle of discord or strife in the Universe. It would be a forced interpretation to suppose him to have set forth precociously the Darwinian theory of the struggle for life. For his notion seems much more akin to the Zoroastrian imagination of Ahriman. Again, he sings melodiously, but most unphilosophically, of a former golden age, in which the lion and the lamb would seem to have lain down together in peace; and trees yielded fruit all the year round.

At that time the only deity was Venus, who was worshipped with bloodless offerings alone. Still, it must be remembered that, whether consistently or not, Empedocles produced an elaborate work on the Nature of Things, to which Lucretius makes eloquent and earnest acknowledgments. But that very approval of Lucretius forbids us to regard the older poet as a Pantheist in our sense of the term. For certainly to him the Universe cannot have been a living G.o.d.

[Sidenote: Genesis of Modern Religious Pantheism.]

Between this philosophical idea of a Oneness, not thought of as G.o.d, and the spiritual contemplation of a universal Life of which all things are modes, the highest thoughts of men hovered during the process by which, in some measure under extraneous influences, Greek speculation finally produced Neo-platonism--or, as we might say in the current phraseology of our time--a restatement of Plato's teaching. Of this school, arising in the early Christian centuries, some leaders were undoubtedly Pantheists. But we cannot say this of Plato himself, nor of his master Socrates. For though these great men were more profoundly interested in the moral order of the world than in any questions of physical nature, or even of metaphysical subtleties, they were never given to the kind of contemplation suggested above in extracts from the Cla.s.sical Books of the East, the contemplation which educes the moral ideal from unreserved subordination of self to the Universe as of the part to the Whole. Doubtless the inspiration imparted by Socrates to a disciple in mere intellect his superior, and the resulting moral and religious suggestions abounding in the Dialogues, did much to impel the current of religious evolution toward that spiritual aspect of the Infinite All which fascinated some of the Neo-Platonists, and received its most splendid exposition from Spinoza. But the conditions imposed by necessary brevity compel me to pa.s.s by those cla.s.sic names with this acknowledgment, and to hasten toward the fuller revelation of Pantheism as a religion.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: Some scholars think they can trace Christian, influences in the exceptionally late Bhagavad Gita, hereafter quoted. But it is a disputed point; and certainly in the case of the Vedas and pre-Christian literature arising out of them even Jewish influence was impossible.]

[Footnote 3: As imperious brevity excludes full explanation, I must content myself with a reference to _The Religion of the Universe_, pp.

152-5. London: Macmillan & Co.]

[Footnote 4: According to the late Max Muller, with whom Prof. T.W. Rhys Davids agrees, the word Upanishad is equivalent to our word "sitting" or "session"; only that it is usually confined to a sitting of master and pupil.]

[Footnote 5: _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. i. p. 92. The immediately following quotations are from the same Upanishad.]

[Footnote 6: "The G.o.ds of ocean, air and fire, and the judge of the lower regions respectively" (Rev. John Davies).]

[Footnote 7: The "Bhagavad Gita," translated by the Rev. J. Davies, M.A.]

[Footnote 8: The Karma was _not_ a soul. What it was is, according to our authorities, very difficult for the Western mind to conceive. But its practical effect was, that on the death of the imperfect man, another finite existence of some sort necessarily took his place. But this new finite existence was not the former man. It is only on the death of him who has attained Nirvana that Karma ceases to act, and no new finite existence takes his place.]

[Footnote 9: See Prof. W. Max Muller, on "Egypt," in the _Encyc.

Biblica._]

[Footnote 10: "Capability of walking home without help," is the limit quaintly fixed by the poet. To our modern feeling it seems rather wide.

Yet, practically, it is the limit professedly observed by our publicans in serving their customers.]

[Footnote 11: Karsten, _Xenophanis Reliquiae_, p. 68 (Amsterdam, 1830).

Both the paraphrase and occasional translations which I give are of course free; but I think the spirit and meaning are preserved.]

CHAPTER II

POST-CHRISTIAN PANTHEISM.

In speaking of Neo-Platonism I incidentally mentioned its apparent subjection to "extraneous influences," These, of course, included the rising power of Christianity and its Jewish traditions.

[Sidenote: The Hebrew Tradition.]

Even before the advent of the new revelation, the Jewish settlements existing in all great cities of the Graeco-Roman world excited interest at any rate among sentimentalists touched by the fascination at that time beginning to be exerted by oriental religions. And this influence of Jewish traditions was much facilitated by the existence of a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures.

[Sidenote: Its Influence on Greek Philosophy.]

[Sidenote: To Inspire Devotion, Not Solve Problems.]

Now, what the Hebrew tradition did for Greek philosophy was, of course, not to favour its Pantheistic trend, where that existed, but much more to convert such semi-Pantheism from a mere intellectual speculation to contemplative devotion. For Hebraism itself had become almost as intensely monotheistic as the later Islam. And, though monotheism may be a stage in the progress of religion from Animism to Pantheism, it may, also, by the peculiar intensity of the personal devotion it sometimes inspires, cause the very idea of any farther expansion of faith to be counted a sin.

[Sidenote: Philo, the Jew of Alexandria.]

Perhaps the influence of Hebraism on h.e.l.lenism may be ill.u.s.trated by the Alexandrian Philo's pathetic endeavour not only to trace the wisdom of the Greeks to Moses, but to show that this derived lore is much mightier for good when re-invested with the spiritual power and ardent devotion of the Jewish faith.

"If any one will speak plainly," he writes,[12] "he might say that the intelligible world is nothing other than the word (se. [Greek: logos], reason) of the world-making G.o.d. For neither is the intelligible city anything other than the thought [Greek: logismos] of the architect already intending to build the city. This is the teaching of Moses, not mine. At any rate in what follows, when he records the origin of man, he declares outright that man was made in the image of G.o.d. But if a part (of creation) reflects the type, so also must the entire manifestation, this intelligible ordered world, which is a reproduction of the divine image on a larger scale than that of man."[13]

[Sidenote: Motives Underlying his Distortion of Hebraism.]

[Sidenote: Not Pantheistic.]

How Philo managed to extort this out of the Pentateuch is a question of interest, but one on which I cannot delay. Suffice it, that while he thus showed his reverence for the traditions of his race, his whole aim is to fire philosophy with religious devotion. But he was not, in any strict sense of the word, a Pantheist, though he regarded the Logos as an emanation from the Eternal, and the kosmos, the ordered world, as in some way emanating from the Logos. Perhaps, indeed, if we could exclude from emanation the idea of time, as Christians are supposed to do when they speak of the "eternal generation" of the Divine Son or the "procession" of the Holy Ghost, we might regard Philo, with the succeeding Neo-Platonists and some of the Gnostics, as approximately Pantheistic. But his vagueness and uncertainty about matter forbid such a conclusion. For whether he regarded matter as eternally existing apart from the divine substance, or whether he looked upon it as the opposite of Being, as a sort of positive nothing, in either case, it cannot be said that for him the whole Universe was G.o.d, and nothing but G.o.d.

[Sidenote: Neo-Platonism.]

[Sidenote: Resultant of Contact between East and West.]

If I have given more s.p.a.ce to the great Alexandrian Jew than my narrow limits ought to afford, it is because I think I may thus avoid the necessity of saying much about the philosophic schemes of the Neo-Platonists, the phantasies of the Gnostics, or the occasionally daring speculations of the Christian Fathers. For whether the works of Philo were much studied by the Greeks or not, they certainly described the spiritual resultant--so to speak--emerging from the mutual impact of Western and Oriental, especially Jewish, ideas. Which resultant was "in the air" from the first century of the Christian age; and the later epistles ascribed to St. Paul, as well as the Fourth Gospel, show clear traces of it.[14]

[Sidenote: Its Religious Inspiration.]

[Sidenote: Suggestive of Pantheism, but not such in Spinoza's Sense.]

But the inspiration of the time-spirit was not confined to the Christian Church. For the city of Alexandria, where that spirit seems to have been peculiarly potent as shown in the transfigured Judaism of Philo, was the birthplace of the Neo-Platonic school already mentioned above. And among its greatest members, such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, the religious influence of the East was distinctly apparent. True, they followed Socrates and Plato in reverence for knowledge as the unfailing begetter of virtue. But their speculations about the divine Being were touched by Oriental emotion. And we may with some confidence believe that their development of the Platonic Trinity owed a good deal to the rapid spread of Christianity. Thus the sentiment, the fervour, the yearning for "salvation," the worship and devotion taught by the best of the Neo-Platonists were not so much, from Athens as from Sinai and Galilee.

Yet, though there were in their world-conception many antic.i.p.ations of the gospel of the "G.o.d-intoxicated man," whom the counsels of the Eternal reserved for the fulness of times, it would scarcely be accurate to describe the system of any of them as strictly Pantheistic. For they were always troubled about "matter" as an anomalous thing in a divine universe, and in treating of it they hesitated between the notion of an eternal nuisance which the Demiurgus, or acting G.o.d, could only modify, not destroy, and, on the other hand, a strained theory of an evil nothing, which is yet something. Again, so far from realising Spinoza's faith in G.o.d as so literally All in All that there is nothing else but He, they would not tolerate the contact of the Infinite with the finite, of G.o.d with the world. Consistently with such prepossessions, they held obstinately to the notion of some beginning, and therefore some ending of the ordered world. And this beginning was effected by emanations such as the Logos, or, as others had it, the world-soul and other divine energies, between the Eternal and creation; a phantasy which, however poetically wrought out, is not really consistent with Pantheism.

[Sidenote: The Gnostics.]

Such ideas of a hierarchy of subordinate emanations to fill the supposed abyss between the Infinite and the Finite were eagerly adopted and developed by the pseudo-philosophers called Gnostics, on both sides of the boundary between the Church and the World. Suffice it that, like most, though by no means all of their predecessors, they regarded the world of earth, sun, planet, stars, and animated nature with man at its head, as the whole Universe; and, a.s.suming that it must have had a beginning, they vexed their souls with futile attempts to frame some gradual transition from the uncreated to the created, from the eternal to the mortal. The grotesque chimaeras engendered thus are remembered now only as ill.u.s.trations of the facile transition from the sublime to the ridiculous and from philosophy to folly.

[Sidenote: The Church Fathers.]

[Sidenote: Augustine.]

The orthodox Christian fathers were not less conscious than the Neo-Platonists or Gnostics of the perennial problem of the Many and the One. But they were restrained, perhaps, by the "faith that comes of self-control," perhaps by mere common sense, from indulging in attempts to connect the Infinite with the Finite by "vain genealogies." Indeed, for the most part they confessed that whatever light the Gospel might shed on moral issues, it left untouched the ultimate question of the relation of the Infinite to the Finite. And the only aspect of their most venturesome speculations which I need recall is their insistence, even when apparently verging toward Pantheism, on a transcendent as well as an immanent G.o.d, that is on a Creator existing, so to speak, outside the Universe and apart from it as well as permeating every part. Thus, for example, Augustine would seem to deny to the world any separate creature existence when he says, that but for the divinity everywhere in it, creation would cease to be. But in his insistence on the creation of the world from nothing, he directly contradicts Pantheism, because he must necessarily be taken to mean that there is now something other than G.o.d.

That there have been devout Christians whose mystic speculations on the relations of the soul to the Eternal logically involved Pantheism--if logic in such a case had any function--there can be no doubt. But for most of them "G.o.d's word written" seemed to confirm G.o.d's word in heaven and earth as known to them, proclaiming that there had been a beginning and there must be an end. Therefore, whatever might be the immanence of the Creator in His works, G.o.d could not, in their minds, be identified with "the fashion of this world" which "pa.s.seth away."

Yet the time was coming when the Divine word both in Scripture and in Nature was to be otherwise read. For men began to learn that the Bible was other than they had supposed and the Universe immeasurably greater than they had conceived.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: _De Mundi Opificio_, p. 5B. I take him to mean by [Greek: kosmos noetos]--the world as apperceived--realised in our consciousness.]

[Footnote 13: It should be noted that Philo, who was contemporary with Jesus, often uses the t.i.tle "the Father" [Greek: ho Pataer] as a sufficient designation of the Eternal. It was not very usual, and is suggestive of certain spiritual sympathies amidst enormous intellectual divergencies between the Alexandrian philosopher and the Galilean prophet.]