Progress in religion to the Christian era

Contents

PAGE

I Introduction 9

II Early Man and His Environment . . 29

II

To understand a man, an epoch, or a period, some familiarity with antecedents is always inevitable. Our present task will be impossible without some general view of man's progress in religious thought in the long period of his history, which in the West ends with the poems of Homer and the beginning of what we can definitely call Greek literature. A general view of man's progress — not a history of human thought — in a score of pages is an undertaking formidable enough. It will be something like a resume of a fifteen-hour journey in a half column of Bradshaw, with this drawback that, while Kettering, Leeds and Carlisle do convey very definite ideas to the mind, our stages will be more like the stations in the Delta of the Ganges, halting-places in the open with only this to recommend them, that for the moment they are out of the water. A progress is discernible; its history, especially its earliest history, is too often conjectural. The main thing is plain enough — it is the story of long and steady application of intelligence, observation and reason to Religion, and its slow but remarkable transformation in the process.

Here and there there must be allusions to "primitive man," of whom I have this to say at once. The fact that some descendants of primitive men have achieved civilisation and clear thinking while others have remained savage or become savage, and are content with the minimum of thought, suggests that primitive man was not a fixed type, and that the name should perhaps not be used, without caution, as a constant term. We cannot put all the differences down to Geography; the Turk has lived for centuries among the same scenes that Homer and his heroes knew, and among civilised neighbours, and is still a barbarian ; and it is not all due to his religion, for the Persian also is Moslem. Why race differs from race is a secret not yet wrung from Nature. Primitive races do some things very much in the same way ; and the evolution of tools and weapons can, down to a certain point, be made out by laying together the remains of different peoples who may be very widely removed from each other; they fill one another's gaps, till at last a common progression in parallel can be made out.1 Parallels, in like manner, with limitations already considered, are to be traced in the religious ideas of men; and perhaps their development followed similar courses. Perhaps; but some things are done in very different ways by different races; and in this sphere — perhaps even for ages before the dawn of history — the individual counts more than we are apt to allow. How early did man begin to notice his environment and to explain it? How soon did he begin to be subject to trance, to hysterics, to low spirits ? "Blessings on the man who invented sleep!" says Sancho Panza; and who invented the strange habits of the mind that follow hunger and disease, or result from the use of fruits and fluids that have fermented?

We shall have to look at some of those strange things in Nature, in which man is apt to surmise that there are feelings and a mind like his own — strange things which surprise him with their ordered ways and their apparent preference for law — strange things which appear to refuse the very notion of law. We shall then have to consider, in outline only, man's habit of explaining to himself what he has observed, of interpreting it, of getting

l Cf. Pitt Rivers, Evolution of Culture, pp. 102, 142, and plate xii.

it intelligible and orderly. We shall have to leave a number of ragged edges; "primitive man" had the same difficulty; but, as we study him and his ways, we find a confirmation of Carlyle's sayings : "Is not all work of man in this world a making of Order'? . . . We are all born enemies of Disorder." An unwritten chapter of Heroes and Hero Worship would be about these primitive men who "got acquainted with realities" and were "sons of Order." We shall not be able to write it, but we shall come on the tracks of some very genuine heroes. In the third place, we shall have to glance at man's ways of arranging his relations with the strange things he finds alive about him and credits with powers beyond his own. This will bring us to the factors making for progress and to those which tell against it; and then we must try to sum up what results we have reached. If Aristotle pled guilty to treating Ethics "in outline and not with precise detail," another may ask forgiveness, if under greater limitations he leaves some things unwritten, and credits his fellow-students with memory and imagination.

No one can tell where man's first observation began of what we roughly call the superhuman. Nature is full of strange and terrible things; quite apart from tempests and earthquakes, her common ways are mysterious enough. The breeze, the cloud, the rain are unaccountably wayward. Summer and Winter are more orderly in their habits — not that mere orderliness makes a thing intelligible. Leaf and fruit come about their business but make little noise as to their methods and minds. The moon's four weeks come round, and round again, with some sameness; the sun's proceedings take longer to make out, but are not quite beyond understanding, though why these great lights behave as they do, and what their relations to each other, and what (if any) to the stars, who can guess? Who could guess the explanation of eclipses? Turning to earth again, there are rivers for a man to puzzle over, and the sea. There are the birds and the animals — very like people, with languages of their own and tribal habits and rules, clever, cunning creatures ; and there was no one to say dogmatically that they had no connection with men, or were a different order. And here I may be told that I am going too fast; are not the very stones and rocks and trees living things, too, with feelings and fancies and perhaps uncanny ways of their own?

Man lived in an untracked jungle of life and mystery. And even where he was surest of himself, surprises were thickest. Was he sure of himself? What was he? Body, soul and spirit, we have been taught to say. But that is the teaching of civilisation. Which was he ? "The wrath of Achilles/' says Homer, "sent many goodly souls of heroes to Hades, and gave themselves as a prey to the dogs and to all the birds.' ' And Homer comes very late in man's story — early enough in History, but far down the ages. Is a man's soul himself? Is it? Can he be quite certain of its doings? When he sleeps? or faints? or is wounded and the blood flows ? Is the blood the life ? The soul and the life, are they two, or one, or several things? There are many such questions. And when a child comes into the world, how has that come about? There are tribes who reckon the child's life to begin with the quickening and cast about for some spirit-cause, that fluttered into the mother when she felt the first stirring. The many rituals for "purification" of women after childbirth point back to notions more primitive than we sometimes guess. After all, we are not so far ahead; there are many things about life which we have not guessed; and with all our cleverness we have not quite succeeded in manufacturing it. We can destroy it and transmit it, but not make it or explain it.

But, waiving all these pro founder questions, how was one to explain dreams ? Are the things you see in dreams real? When you dream of a living friend, does he come to your side, in reality? He? Which he comes? one asks again ; and I have perhaps modernised too much by dragging in our abstract phrase, "in reality/ 9 When you dream of the dead? "Ah me!" cries Achilles, waking from his dream of the dead Patroclus, "then there is, even in the halls of Hades, soul and form, yet not . . (Iliad, xxiii. 103). Here my knowledge of Greek breaks down, though I thought I knew the words.2 How terribly modern our language is! how elusive in truth are Homer's terms, ipvxtf, eiSco\ovf cppevesl and how far he is from anything we could conceivably call "primitive man" !

Then there is loss of consciousness to explain. What has gone, to leave the body thus dead and not dead ? Has the soul played a trick on you and slipped away? And trance is stranger still. Stranger those changes of personality— the modern phrase again, with its semi-scientific air, cloaking sheer ignorance still, and confusing the primitive record; let us be done with it and start again. What was a man to make of it when his wife or brother fell in trance and a strange voice spoke from the familiar lips — spoke, I almost said, with a strange spirit — was a spirit the explanation? — spoke (to be plain) with an unfamiliar tone of anger or lustfulness, with a hint of frenzy and madness — chanted rhythmically of things unseen by those who stood by, of presences and influences? Modern words again, these, undisguisedly abstract nouns; but what were the things, those things, which spoke through the lips of the unconscious figure, the changed nature? What did hysteria mean? or mad-

2 "Semblance and life though thought is theirs no more" (Conington) ; "A spirit and an image, without life" (Purves) ; "Second self, an image of the body, no intelligence, nous or emotions" (T. D. Seymour); "A spirit and phantom of the dead, albeit the life be not any wise therein" (Lang, Leaf aid Myers).

ness? or any of the states we now call psychopathic? And when the mood, the affection, or whatever we moderns call it, leapt from the one possessed to another and another, and swept over a community, what did it mean ? The modern psychologist, when he sees such things, calls them "primitive traits";3 he speaks in a jargon that we call "scientific" — not altogether wrongly, for it at least sets us on a new track and so far makes for knowledge. He speaks of nervous instability as a fundamental trait of the primitive man; of his remarkable imitativeness, his lack of inhibition, and the extreme plasticity that results. But the primitive man himself — certainly some of his descendants, who are not yet scientific — had a quicker way of explaining it. A spirit, a god, a daemon, something like that, did it all. For primitive man, as the same psychologist tells us, is strong in perception, but weak in the logical interpretation of what he perceives. He has no large amount of accurate tradition by which to check his perceptions, and he fills in his gaps by imagination; and what he imagines, he sees, and he believes what he sees — as any common-sense person does; and the chain of evidence is complete — and wrong; but it holds with terrible strength, holds for centuries. Now add mesmerism and all the varieties of suggestion that work on the "suggestible," particularly when reason checks things so slowly; and grasp, if you can, how much in every initiation, in every mystery, in every sacrament, is "suggested," and we shall realise that primitive man had a good many things to explain; and here again the quick way was to imagine the intervention of a spirit. And then add prophecy and second-sight and mind-reading and thought-transference, remembering the cases in which prophecies do come true, and the cases in which the very making of them gets them fulfilled; and again you

3 Davenport, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, p. 18.

touch a world of wonder and things promptly classed as superhuman.

In modern times we have a good deal of evidence of the association of these strange activities and passivities of the mind with religion, particularly with new movements— with revivals in the United States, with the development of pilgrimage centres in France. The Greek poets made much of the strange experiences of the Bacchanals,4 which I used not to believe, but which I now see to be confirmed or confirmable by modern observation, to be not out of the way but normal for the region of experience concerned. The Hebrews recorded of their Nebiim acts and states, which the traveller to-day can see in the Dervishes of the modern Semites in a religion descended from that of the Hebrews.5 It is not an extravagant use of hypothesis to suppose that primitive man saw and did the same sort of thing as his descendant, white, black and brown.

A great step forward was taken when man really began to systematise his ideas of his ultrahuman or spiritual environment. (Once again the adjectives are too modern or not modern enough.) It appears that to the earliest thinkers of our race all things were isolated particulars; they had so little notion of order or connection, of a regular course of nature, that miraculous and nonmiraculous was not one of their distinctions.6 Superhuman and supernatural are therefore not words that we can well apply when we are dealing with their thoughts. But however apt they were to entangle beast and human and what we are driven to call divine or spiritual, the mind of man makes for order and coherence; and we can trace stages in the progress of men's ideas.

4 More upon this in Chap. IV.

5 Cf. Chap. V. p. i2S, and the reference there given to D. B. Macdonald, Aspects of Islam.

« E. Caird, Evolution of Religion, i. 306, 307.

For fifty years the term Animism has been used to describe the earliest of these stages, but Mr. Marrett has of late suggested that there was one still earlier, which he calls (not very gracefully) Animatism — a stage when a rock, a boulder, a meteorite, any oddly-shaped stone, might be credited with vague but dreadful attributes of power; 7 before the spiritual was, in homely phrase, sorted out, and the rock or meteorite from being animate became merely the home of something animate. Then follows the animistic stage, when all things, or nearly all, are credited with soul or something like it, something vague but potent, and divisible; for the hair of the animal, the nail of the man, the rag a man has worn, the water he has washed in, the remnant of his dinner,8 even his shadow,9 carry something of his soul with them. In many parts, even of Europe, there survive superstitions which derive directly and not so distantly from such beliefs. The whole world is infested with spirits, erratic, incalculable and terrible; and among them are the souls of the dead. A man's soul may, as we have seen, play tricks upon him even while he lives; how much more upon his kin when he is gone ? And the mystery of death takes away the familiarity and the friendship. He* was a friend ; but what guarantee is there in that, that his soul will be a friend?

Animism is by no means dead yet; there are tribes and races the whole of whose outlook on the unseen — soul, god, nature — is best classed under this convenient name. But progress can be seen in the movement of men's minds in several directions; though this is not to

7R. R. Marrett, Threshold, p. 18; cf. Sir Bampfylde Fuller, Studies of

Indian life and Sentiment, p. 99, on the ammonite fossil as a god in India.

8 Cf. F. E. Maning, Old New Zealand, p. 96.

9 Cf. J. C. Lawson, Ancient Greek Religion and Modern Greek Folklore, p. 265. Mr. Lawson's life was saved by the rough benevolence of a stranger, who dragged him back and adjured him to go to the other side of a trench, that his shadow might not fall across the foundations and be built in among them.

deny that the paths of thought cross one another a good deal and sometimes run together for long distances.

We can recognise the development of great spirits or daemons, who acquire or have assigned to them control over great departments of life — itself a step towards order. Who or what these spirits are, and the degree to which they assume personality, are questions the answers to which depend on many different factors. There are daemons in charge of vegetation — or associated with it — many of them ; and their stories vary. And now we have struck a great factor in our survey of Progress in Religion— the myth; but it must wait a little. For the moment, we must note that behind the great Demeter of Eleusis so human and so full of sorrow and graciousness — behind the less attractive Cybele in Phrygia — behind Isis — and all the differentiated gods and goddesses of fertility — lie daemons, mere spirits, of whom, to begin, little can be predicated. When my motor-bus crossed the frontier into Travancore, a little way beyond the custom-house, it pulled up at a temple of some sort, and a priest begged of us. "The temple,,, said an old Brahmin who had been befriending me, "is being restored by public subscription.,, "And what," said I, "is the name of the goddess?" "She has no name; she is known as the goddess at Mukandal.,, She belongs to a very large family, none of whom have names, but many of whom fill a large sphere without a name. Those scholars who hold by "collective emotion" are apt to find in it the origin of some of these vague powers and (one is tempted to say) to look on them as the real old aristocracy of all our pantheons. Palestine in early days knew many of them, and called them vaguely Baals, lords. They lack character and personality, and when they begin to acquire myths, it is a sign that they are passing out of this class.

They have not — it is hard to see how they could have — • any very clear relation to morality.

If the paths were not so interlaced, one might say that from here the road divides. In some lands these old vague great powers remain predominant; in others they are dimly felt to be in the background behind younger and brighter figures. But from here the paths seem to divide. Some of these powers are associated with animals— are animals, in some queer way, and never quite lose traces of their origins. Sometimes, as with the Greeks, according to some scholars, the god emerges splendid and human, and the beast or bird sinks into a creature merely sacred to him, and remains so in popular belief. Sometimes it looks as if the god started to become human, changed his mind, and halted halfway, and Anubis keeps the jackal's head and Ganesh, or Ganpati, his elephant head and trunk, while the rest of them is human— dreadfully human, as one sees in every picture of Ganesh in his heaven. The Greeks, as a rule, had a very characteristic distaste for this sort of mixed god, though traces of it are found in Arcadia.10 Where the type became established, the one escape, when the worshippers reached a higher, a more moral and more reflective stage of culture, lay in some form of mysticism.11 The mystic theosophy that pervaded the later paganism of the Roman Empire is constantly looking to Egypt. Only by allegory, and that sometimes desperate, could this sort of religion be brought into effective connection with morality. Of totems, like Herodotus, "I do not speak," though not for his reason; for I do not know.

The other path was followed by those who, more or less confidently and completely, humanised their gods — • or found them grow human as they thought about them.

10 Farnell, Greece and Babylon, 79.

11 Farnell, Inaugural, 16.

Whether the daemon definitely became anthropomorphic, or whether the god proper came some other way, I do not know. Professor Toy says categorically that "it cannot be said that a daemon has ever developed into a god.12 Plutarch was quite as definite to the contrary; but it is possible that they are using words in different senses and not contradicting each other. Wundt explains the emergence of the anthropomorphic god as the result of the fusion of the "hero" and the daemon, the "hero" being a new creation of the mental life of a later age, when human personality enters into the very forefront of mythological thought and the value set on personal characteristics is enhanced.13 The "hero" is associated, he says, with the ancestor, who now recedes. There is some suggestion of evidence for this in Mediterranean lands. Homer's brilliant Anthropomorphism belongs to the next chapter, but while we think of his great Zeus, cloud-compeller, lord of gods and men, we should not forget that there was another story. The Cretans were always liars, another poet tells us, and he finds their champion lie in their statement that Zeus was burned in their island. Tertullian, in his turn, made a great use of this in supporting the thesis he borrowed from Euhemeros, that all the pagan gods had been men once — and what a pity, he adds, they chose such bad men to deify! 14 But we must not digress to Tertullian and his theories about the Olympian gods, which are not Miss Harrison's, though we may note that he stands in the great succession of revolt against them in honour of morality.

To return to the "hero" for a moment before we quite leave him. It is interesting to ask when the theory began to reign that he was of mixed origin, the son of a god by a mortal woman. We know it in Homer; but how

12 C. H. Toy, Introduction to History of Religions, § 694.

13 Wundt, Folk Psychology, p. 282.

14 Tertullian, Apol, 1 1 : Quot tamen potiores viros apud inferos reliquistist much older is it ? The early Semites believed there were marriages of human and daemon, and, Plutarch tells us, so did the Egyptians.15 Indeed, the curiously common explanation of twins as one the child of a man and other of a spirit 16 — taken with all the legends of snakes, in dream and otherwise, in the pedigrees of special heroes, and with the peculiarly naive notions of some surviving savages as to conception — points to the primitive idea of the daemonic origin of all life. But here perhaps we are digressing again, a little way. My defence must be that excessive relevance is no key to the primitive mind.

Gods, however, do not all arise in the same way. "The higher gods of the Rig Veda,,, says Professor Macdonnell,17 are almost entirely personifications of natural phenomena, such as Sun, Dawn, Fire, Wind. Excepting a few deities surviving from an older period, the gods are, for the most part, more or less clearly connected with their physical foundations. The personifications, being there but slightly developed, lack definiteness of outline and individuality of character." These are gods, I understand, and not the daemons of Miss Harrison and Mukandal. We may note in passing that scholars who speak with authority are very unanimous in holding that no influence from the Vedas can be traced in the growth of the Greek pantheon.18

With the arrival of gods with names we reach the outskirts of the higher cultures. The forward steps are now clearer — they are not always easy; perhaps they never have been easy. Miss Harrison is against us here; she will not have us "assume ofifhand that the shift from nature-god to human-nature-god is necessarily an advance." Yet all the progressive peoples either make it,

15 Life of Numa, 4.

16 Ct. Rendel Harris, The Cult of the Heavenly Twins, chap. i.

17 Sanskrit Literature, p. 69.

18 Cf. C. H. Toy, Intr. Hist. Relig., §539; "When the true gods appear, the totemic and individual half-gods disappear."

or, if conditions are too hard for them, they try to make up for it, by borrowing, by allegory, by interpretation; and the old nature-gods have to change their character to keep pace with growing intelligence. Unless we are prepared to say that thought is an evil, we shall not "assume offhand' ' that even so charming a writer is necessarily right on this point.

When men begin to deal with gods instead of vague, impersonal, intangible and really unthinkable daemons, thought has a chance to assert its right to control the whole of man's life. Blind fear is, in the last resort, the attitude of man toward the daemons; the shift to gods means a shift to thought. With all man's avowed and surmised ignorance about gods, there is the feeling that a god can be known. Modern men feel that a law of nature can be known, but the old daemon was not a law of nature, and his control of nature was uncertain and incalculable. But, with all the surprises of personality, personal gods had something in common with man, and they were intelligible so far. And intelligible things all belong to the same order. So the gods, with all their differences, can be grouped and co-ordinated and related in some rational way with the world; and this process gave rise to a good deal of Mythology.

Mythology in itself is a triumph of the human mind. Myths have been divided into three main classes — those which explain traditional practices and rituals and the holiness of certain places; and here we must remember that in every case the myth comes from the usage and not the usage from the myth; secondly, those which attempt to reduce the vast congeries of local and tribal cults, beliefs and myths, to order; thirdly, myths that embody the beginnings of larger religious speculation.19 This grouping is frankly logical rather than historical.

19 Robertson Smith, Early Religion of Semitics, p. 18.

If it is our object to reach the earliest knowable stage of religion it will appear that the ritual or practice (if we can recover it) will be our best evidence; but for the study of Progress in Religion, mythology is incomparably more important — particularly if we can trace its growth. In ancient religions myth took something like the central place that dogma has in the religions we know. It was less thought out, less related to man's general experience, and less authoritative; sometimes alternative myths would be offered to explain the same ritual ; and the worshipper might accept any of them, or none, or all, provided the ritual was duly performed. The primitive god required the rite; he was not interested in his worshipper's speculations. To the modern student the myth is of value, for it will generally be a sincere attempt to explain something, and it will contain implicitly a faithful picture of the god as man conceived him, and sometimes of the first-beginnings of scientific thought. For there were all kinds of myths in time — myths to explain the origin of the world, of sun and stars, of man, of differing races and their social customs and their genealogies. When once we reach civilised man, we find no new myths of cosmogony; the task of explanation passes over to the philosophers. Myth has the advantages of being more or less fixed 20 and yet subject to development — and the disadvantages.21 With time the myths are told better and better ; there is more literary skill and appeal about them ; crudities and what offended the feelings and morals of a later day were toned down; and as men gained a clearer understanding of the laws of nature and higher and more intellectual conceptions of deity, these gains were reflected in the tone of the myths. None the less, for those who

20 Cinderella sticks to glass slippers; Orestes goes barefoot and his footprint is recognised from its likeness to the family footprint; see Verrall, Choephoroi, p. lv. Similarly with stories of the gods.

21 See C. H. Toy, Intr. Hist. Relig., chap. viii. §§ 819 ff.

did not share these deeper views, who preferred a tale as it was told to them, the rude features of the old tale remain, and are inherited long after they have ceased to be anything but a drawback to thought and progress — an heirloom of reaction and even of pollution. One class of myth we must not forget — the myths of the world beyond; for, while perhaps not the oldest of myths, they were eventually associated in men's thoughts with speculations upon sin and righteousness and judgment, of the utmost consequence to human progress.

With order as an instinct, and myth as a convenient tool, man began to group and arrange his gods, a process a good deal easier than his next task — as we shall see when we reach Homer, perhaps sooner. For his methods were simple; story is added to story, for many stories may be told in many places of the same god ; in them god is equated with god, and there emerges a god with a number of names, some to fall into the background and to be of only local interest, some to coalesce into a single expression. Phoebus Apollo is one person and one name — not two; but Smintheus is a little out of the way, though still Apollo.