The quest of the ages

Front matter

By : A. EUSTACE HAYDON

MCMXXIX

THE QUEST OF THE AGES Copyright, 1929, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the U.S.A.

Chapter One THE QUEST

LL life is a questing. The drive of living organisms for satisfactions is the key to understanding of our world drama. Man was a late comer on the stage. When he first emerged through the dawn shadows with wonder in his eyes, he had climbed to his high status upon the hard-earned experience of innumerable living forms. Heir of the ages, he began his ‘long march toward mastery of the planet. The record is blurred. Much has been lost in the drift of a thousand centuries but enough remains to reveal heroic wrestling with the dangers of an untamed nature, the achievement of skills, and the enlargement of desires and power through social codperation. Yet disaster, defeat and death walked the ways of that early world. Simply to live was a problem. The winning of the satisfactions of the elemental needs of life was man’s central interest. In that shared quest for the values of a satisfying life is the motif which has molded all the religions of mankind.

There is no dark mystery about religion. Mystery enough there was in the world for the man who made the religions of the past, but religion itself was never a mystery. It was a practical and prescribed way of behavior; the safe way of living. It had its roots in the rich soil of natural, human hungerings. Often the towering figures of the gods loom so large as to obscure the main action of the play. But to those who know the nature of our human quest it seems most natural that all the early religions of the race should center about the basic values of living. They are concerned with the winning of food, shelter, security and protection from danger. They deal with the strange phenomena of birth, the relation of the sexes, sickness, death and the care of the dead. All the ceremonies and practical techniques of early religions are oriented about these interests. They vary with the type of life of the group. Agricultural peoples are interested in the fertility of the soil, in the very necessary rain, in the fructifying warmth of the sun. Their ceremonies, then, are directed toward securing prosperity and abundant food supply through the control of these phases of their natural world. They deal with plowing, magical technique to stimulate the seed, fertility ceremonies in the fields, methods for making their sprouting grain grow tall, rituals for bringing rain, protective rites to ward off the danger of blight, cautious rituals at the opening of harvest. Among all peoples the coming of new life in the springtime is marked by festivals of joy and gladness symbolized sometimes by a battle of the life powers over the powers of death.

In the autumn when the sun seems to be losing its strength and death 2 lays its chill hand upon all living things, there are ceremonies to give new life to the sun, and new energy to the dying earth. All these forms of the cult are born in emotion. They are charged with the desperate necessity of winning in some manner the means of sustaining life. All of it is a blind, groping effort of people bound to the soil, bravely battling for security on a planet that is none too friendly to man. Pastoral groups, hunting groups each have their own peculiar differentia in religious practice. For those who live by the sea the animals and dangers of the deep are important. Peoples in the dark, fear-haunted jungles have all their customs colored by the necessity of coming to terms with the prowling dangers of the forest deeps. While no religion ever had its origin in fear, early man knew the necessity of caution. His technique of protection makes up a manifold armory of amulet, spell, charm, incantation, words and rites of power. Man early learned the values of mutual aid. The social control of the group over the individual gave sanctity to the relation of the sexes, to loyalty, and to the virtues necessary for the maintenance of group life. On this shrine the fire of spiritual values was first kindled. The tangled system of social custom and ceremonial magic with which the life of early man is enwrapt constitutes an established working relationship with the natural and social environment. The one permanent and controlling thing which runs through and shapes every religion is the restless questing of the 3 life of man, of hungering, groping, hoping, human life, trying to make a home in the world.

Man found helpers in his struggle. They were the gods. In the morning of our human story gods were not vague figures dwelling in the unseen, but real. They were the actual powers of the environing natureworld, with welcome kindly presence, codperating with man in the realization of his desired values. It would be a mistake to think of early man as a theologian, or to represent him as having clear-cut, intellectual concepts of the gods. As is natural in relation to a benefactor, his reaction was largely emotional. The gods owe their existence to the fact that at a time of need, or anxiety, or emotional strain, their activity brought the much-desired relief. To say that “‘gods are not so much believed in as used”’ is true; but it is also true that the gods came into being because they were useful. It is natural therefore to find the sun, the fertile earth, the dawn-light, the rain, and especially the storm-rain playing the rdle of gods. The stress is variable, but human interest always dictates that stress.

For nomadic peoples the heavenly sky-power, giver of light, warmth, and rain was all-important. Settled agricultural people were more closely bound to the earth-mother, giver of the goods of life. Some of these emotional attitudes we may still feel—the joy of spring, the witchery of a quiet night under a full moon, the fresh beauty of early dawn. We may share the emotional release of nomad watchers of the flocks, when, after the cold and dangers of the night, the lovely dawn-maiden threw back the curtains of darkness and poured over the world the warm light of a new day, driving the wild animals to their lairs and calling man to labor and to enjoy. The dawn was always a goddess,

The storm-power wielding the lightning-bolt and terrible thunder was naturally a warrior, but because such storms released the rains after periods of drought, the god was always beneficent. When the Vedic Aryans moved from the northern highlands into the Punjab they came to a land where intense heat and drought threatened the values of life. After weary rainless months all nature, animal and human, seemed to plead for relief but rain did not come. Men anxiously scanned the heavens for the coming of the “cows of the clouds.’”’ Then one day there appeared moving from the Himalayas the dark rolling herds of the rain, and round about them the black, writhing, twisting, sinuous body of the dragon Vritra. By this evil power the clouds were herded back to the hills. Another day and again the promise of rain melted back into the high mountains, leaving the earth parched and dying. When still once more the demon of drought threatened to drive away the clouds, suddenly there flashed the terrific lightning-bolt, the world shook with the roar of the thunder and the waters came pouring in torrents over the grateful lands. Indra, giver of rain, conqueror of the demon, was the best beloved of all the gods, dearest to the farmer and herdsman. In some such way the gods of the early world played their useful part. In some such way too, they were the objects of gratitude and very real to the consciousness of man. In times of the greatest need and frustration he learned more and more to depend upon these strong helpers of the outer world.

All religions are complex, but since they are functions of the life process of a human group, all the elements that enter into any religion have some bearing upon the values central to the group ideal of living. It is possible to speak of three phases of the religious complex: the ideal of the satisfying life; the technique, practical and: ceremonial, through which the values are won; and the extra~human powers which help or hinder in the quest. That is to say, a religion has an ideal, a cult or ceremonial and a theology. And the history of any religion might be written by following any one of these threads. The driving force always is in the life hunger of earth-oriented men and women.

One thing of great importance should be noted: that always side by side with and yet inseparable from the technique of magic and ceremonial, early man had a practical method of winning his desired goods. The agriculturalists planted their fields with elaborate ritual, but they always planted them. The hunter and warrior could never neglect the ceremonial of dance and spell, but neither did they neglect their weapons and the arts of fighting. The South Sea Islanders built their fishing craft with careful rituals, but also with knowledge of the exact adaptation of means to ends. This blending of the practical and matter-of-fact use of knowledge and the magical-social ceremonial into a single unit was characteristic of early religions. The two were inseparable phases of a single complex. It was the rapid enlargement of the effective, practical means of achieving desired goals that created in later centuries the gulf between the world of everyday and the realm of the unseen. A dualism of sacred and secular appeared. The effective technique was divorced from the social magic of cult and prayer. It was the dismal failure of man to find the good life on earth, which in centuries long past gave primary importance to the compensatory unseen world of wish and ideal. A dualism was established in most religions long before man had won anywhere an adequate mastery of his world.

With the religions of culture came disillusion. Primitive man was satisfied to win the simple material satisfactions of life, but culture man, with his larger knowledge and better tools, made demands upon his world for much more subtle satisfactions..He had discovered the realm of spiritual values, the values of happy, human relationships. He wanted not only to live, but to live joyously. Now justice, love, friendship, loyalty, _ the pleasures and beauties of social life, were goods to 7 be preferred above all material rewards or the brute fulfillment of physical needs. The ideal was exalted. The religious quest turned toward the realization of a social order in which these values of the higher life might be embodied. The pathos of the failure of that hope has left its mark upon all the religions of the world.

There were many early promises of success. Earth yielded her resources to the new tools of culture. Agriculture furnished a solid basis of material wealth. Firmly compacted racial groups built the ancient empires. With them came the kings, the nobility, the priestly potentates—an aristocracy which gathered into its own hands and appropriated to its own service the fruits of the common toil. Glorious promise was here presented of the possibility of human achievement when given unified direction, if only it could once be captured by the ideal of a shared life. On the somber background of the ages are flung these flaming torches of splendor—the massive grandeur of Egypt, Persian glory, Grecian magnificence. India and China also knew the same chapter of aristocratic brilliance and ptide of mastery. Failure waited for them all. Empire followed empire into oblivion. To all succeeding generations these ancient glories appear as momentary gleams of unequaled beauty, passing glimpses of human capacity, glimmerings of an ideal sunk and lost again in the dismal wastes where the suffering children of men wander, still seeking joy and peace. In every age was the fatal defect, a lack of knowledge to clarify and give embodiment to the human quest. Man had no adequate understanding of human nature, no method of human control, no science with which to master himself, his social organization, or the world of nature. Prophet and seer stood amid the wreckage age after age and proclaimed again the ideal of a world ruled by righteousness, love, and peace; but neither they nor their hearers knew how the ideal social order might be actualized. The dream remained as a splendid beacon awakening in the spirits of men the hope of a joyous home in the world; but repeated failure bit into the heart like acid. The lament is in the sacred literatures of all lands.

Religions are always tempered and molded under the hammer of human experience. Through the maze of human problems, life is ever questing for the good and the better. Even in the ruins of defeat religion rebuilds the shattered hopes and points the way toward the ideal; for the hunger of life will not be denied. Yet with the shadow of defeat darkening the highways of civilization a change came over the religions of the world. Gone now was the naive attitude toward the world of nature. Though his eyes were lifted to the far horizon, it is to the eternal glory of the heroic spirit of man that in spite of the failure of civilizations and the heart-sickness of age-long discouragement he refused to abandon his vision of the good life. Crushed by the bludgeoning of sinister forces of uncontrolled evil, mocked by time, he still dared to believe that somehow, sometime, somewhere the good life in a good world might be realized. He kept his dream, but postponed its fulfillment. Not in this world and not by feeble human power might the goal be won. It was projected, either into some future age or into the realm beyond the gates of death. Sometimes there was the expectation of the coming of a Messianic figure to usher in the kingdom of righteousness, justice, and peace on earth; sometimes there was the hope of a divinely ordained prophet who would bring to an end the world of sin and evil and herald the coming of a new heaven and a new earth; sometimes the goal was beyond this world in an immortal heaven-realm; sometimes the flight was farther still, not only beyond this earth, but also beyond heaven to an ineffable existence of eternal bliss.

Whether we describe this radical transformation in religions as an heroic loyalty to ideals or as “a failure of nerve,’ we must face the fact that the great religions with but one or two exceptions have for sometimes thousands of years been cast in this mold. The background was the reality of failure. Human hopes and hungerings outran human powers. Religion, embodying the quest for the satisfying life, turned its back upon this world. It is impossible now to know what emotions moved in the breasts of the vast unknown multitudes who age after age bore the burden of real life—marched, builded, toiled, and died. Perhaps to

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them the actualities of the everyday life were always more important than any far-off ideal. Only a few sensitive souls became vocal. The ever-recurring refrain of their message was the transiency of all earthly things, the tragedy of human effort beaten down by the overwhelming forces of evil, the weakness of man’s best strength. Only because we have become accustomed to the lament and are familiar with the building of a compensatory world of hope on the ruins of the actual are we not startled to find in almost all lands, down all the centuries, the same pathos—a sense of sin, of failure, of helplessness, of the worthlessness of the world and the futility of life. Yet it was always the joy of beautiful living for which man sought. There are no visions of millennium eras, no future paradises, no realms of immortal life that are not ideal projections of an existence where human life may find perfection and bliss. In some such way over all the world man clung to his dream even at the risk of losing the world.

With the postponement of the hope of realizing the good life the most important phases of the religious technique came to be those which guaranteed to man a share in the future kingdom. The old established folk-ways of family and community life remained. The seasonal ceremonies tended to take on new meaning in the light of the new ideal. Even the group sanction of the moral life, so important as an element in religions of frank this-worldliness, became a sec-

II ondary thing when the gaze was on the far future or the other world. Asceticism, world-denial, and world-flight seemed natural as aids to escape. It is true that a few brave spirits, such as the Epicureans of classic Greece, the Charvakas of ancient India, men like Yang Chu of China, continued to say “‘yes’”’ to life and threw a laughing challenge to the world. Most men sought guaranties of eternal salvation.

Each religion had its own peculiar emphasis determined by the attitude and thought patterns of long-past centuries, but all of them gave secure leading to the questing soul. Salvation by works, salvation by knowledge, salvation by faith, many methods adapted to the capacity of individuals, opened the gates to the land of promised bliss. It may not be without significance that salvation was mediated in this stage to the individual rather than the group. The new stress on immortality was the cause. In the early centuries of their history the religions of Israel, of Greece, of China, had no place for interest in the continuity of the individual. It was enough that a man lived his life fully and that continuity of existence should belong to clan or family or nation. But with the fading of the vision of a happy human society and the quest for life in an after-world or an after-age, each man must walk the pathway alone. The most important function of religion then seemed to be its special technique of revealed wisdom or magical rite, through which salvation might be won.

The change in the goal of the good life affected the gods also. Long before the religious quest was touched with world-flight the old, near-at-hand gods of early religion had withdrawn as spiritual beings into the invisible. With the increasing helplessness of man these unseen friends grew ever more powerful. Since the gods were good and were helpers of man, they were soon loaded with the unfulfilled wishes of mankind. The divine supernatural realm became the home of truth, of beauty, of goodness, of the ideal. On this background we must read not only the meaning of salvation programs, but the interpretation of life given to us in the theologies and world-denying metaphysics. All the typical theologies and philosophies of the great culture religions reflect this dualism—on the one hand, the concrete plane of human living, and on the other the deeper, perfect reality above, behind or within it.

Sometimes, as in the Sankhya system and the religion of the Jains, the old gods were neglected or denied, but only because they were helpless to save man from the weary wheel of samsara, and blissful reality was beyond the wheel. In the same way, early Buddhism ignored the gods in quest of the peace of Nirvana which neither the joys of this world nor the heaven of the gods could give. In theistic religions, one great god bore the whole burden of the world. He was the first and final cause. Evil did not threaten belief in his goodness only because in some inscrutable way his will guaranteed eternal perfection and happiness at the last. When, as often happened, thought pushed beyond all personal gods to an impersonal or super-personal absolute it was only to find there the final perfection, the eternal harmony. Everywhere religious philosophy abandoned the task of mastering the world, to seek beyond this apparently futile and useless span of time an eternal reality, an ultimate destiny, a firm and stable cosmic will, a supreme One guaranteeing the everlasting security and ultimate triumph of the values precious to the human heart.

Seen in the perspective of thousands of years of the history of religions, this seems at first glance to be a strange and pathetic refusal to face life. To the eye of understanding, watching the shifting scenes of the historic process, it is not strange. The desire-driven spirit of man refused to be denied; but evil and frustration were facts of this world. The unseen world then must needs be the realm of truth and joy, the home of the heart’s desire. And Kant’s islanders knew that a ‘“‘must be’’ is stronger than an “‘is.’’ For centuries wise philosophers and mystic saints have been willing to believe and to defend the belief that the transcendent and spiritual world is more real than the world of sense and time. So the weary search of man for a homeland, the long labor in which the sons of earth have been engaged throughout the ages in the effort to wrest a good and worthful life from a reluctant planet, came at last to be read in terms of theology, of ideas of the supernatural, of beliefs regarding another world. The earthly and human significance of religion as a shared quest for the values of the good life was obscured.

Viewed over too brief a span of time, it would be easy to confuse the creative, driving power of religion with one of its local or temporal embodiments. ‘There have been thousands of varying forms of theology, of cult, of institution through which the living current of restless human questing has flowed during the centuries. Not in church or temple, mosque or pagoda, is enshrined the heart of religion. Not in sacrament or ceremony, philosophy or creed, is the singing soul of it. All these things were vestments, magnificent, memorymellowed vestments, embodying for a time the deep aspirations of religion, and then, in the change and drift of life, outgrown and discarded.

The creative religious forces of every age are where the masses of common folk are toiling together with aching shoulders at the problems of life; where stouthearted men and anxious women, sheltering wideeyed little children, seek still the ancient goal—the joy of living—despite all the discouragement and tragedy of an inhospitable, uncontrolled environment. Where humanity, baffled and broken, yet with hope ever renewed, battles still for fulfillment, there is living religion. For life refuses to be conquered. Surely it is not without profound meaning that almost all the great prophets, reformers, and seers of the religions of the world have taken their places close to the earth as champions of the cause of the lowly, of the struggling, suffering, neglected, multitude. With their feet firmly planted in the midst of the folk, they proclaimed the gospel of delivery for the captives, the opening of prisons for them that are bound. They preached glad tidings to the poor, to the diseased, to the outcast and oppressed, an opportunity for new life to the discouraged, a surcease from pain for the weary and heavy laden. Religion is there, where burns the eternal fire of an irrepressible human hope; where man wrestles with the world and seeks unceasingly for life in happy perfection. The débris of dead cults and institutions litters the highways of the past. Creative change is in the social life of man, demanding ever more satisfying embodiment. Civilizations come and pass; religion, driven by life hunger, quests ever for complete fulfillment.

It would be wildly optimistic to say that our age has climbed to the mountain-top of self-consciousness and is now capable of viewing religions in perspective as a human venture on a cosmic scale. Few, perhaps, are sufficiently detached to see the devious paths of the historic religions, winding through the centuries with their complexities of creed and cult, all converging toward the same goal—the achievement of a good life in a good world. If this were realized there would be hope that modern knowledge and skill might be harnessed by intelligence to actualize the vision. But in the complexity of modern life even the wisest leaders are bewildered.

‘There are many reasons for the hesitancy of the religious quest of today. Of these not least is the narrow meaning given by the Western World to the term “religion” itself. For multitudes it undoubtedly is synonymous with denomination or church. For many it means simply Christianity. Some would define it as divinely revealed truth, guaranteed by authority, leading safely to salvation. The inertia of centuries is here. The historic view, that all religions are products of social living and that all truth is hammered out on the anvil of human experience, is difficult doctrine for such as these.

Still more disconcerting is the fact that scientist and philosopher so often agree with the narrow sectarian in the naive identification of religion with the theology of supernaturalism. The long stress upon religion as “truth” and “‘belief’’ has obscured the longer vision of religion as a way of living. It is discouraging, but the reason is clear. It is thus that Christianity as a living religion pays the penalty for its crystallization into a rigid orthodoxy of creed and institution. Not since the thirteenth century has there been in Christendom a synthesis of life under the guidance of religious idealism. With the dawn of the modern world, one after another of the great domains of human activity and interest consciously won emancipation from a Church which refused any longer to change. Science, philosophy, politics, business, education, art one by one plunged into the current of the new life until men everywhere came to be conscious of a separation between these phases of life and religion. Yet in the patterns of these social activities the weal or woe of men living in this world ‘was woven. Religion was felt to be something apart, an affair largely of the other world. It is small consolation now to understand the process. The consequences are disastrous. Religion failed to give orientation to the life process. here was no guide to formulate the ideal of social values, to synthesize knowledge and power in the service of a social ideal. Science, politics, and business created our modern civilization, but without any unifying control of social idealism or loyalty to the values of the higher life. Man has been marvelously enriched in goods, but the good life for the children of men still remains a dream.

The endless complexity of modern civilization adds to our perplexity. [he new science has transformed the whole significance of earthly life for man. It has given him power over the material world beyond even the most fabulous dreams of the past. Steam, electricity, means of swift communication, have so conquered space and time that the problems of every little nation become world problems. Sleeping cultures of Oriental lands awaken, startled to find themselves in the steel grip of machines thousands of miles away. A power-driven civilization has settled itself down over all the world, changing the old conditions of life, altering the habits and hopes and needs of men, multiplying and intensifying problems. Like a fairy godmother, science has put into the hands of man the magic wand—a marvelous technique of control over nature. The powers of earth and air and ocean bow obediently to the human will. But the gift avails nothing until all this power and knowledge is moralized, humanized, and made safe for culture.

Mere material mastery may mean only tragedy. The science which harnesses physical nature may also create engines capable, under the direction of a selfish will, of destroying the life of a people. The multiplication and perfection of machines may save men from the drudgery of labor and at the same time crush human hope. In the midst of a plethora of production the more perfect machines may crowd the displaced worker out of any share in the goods of life. Sciences which have learned to quiet pain and minister kindly healing to the body of man have created also the dark threat of poison gas. Knowledge, serving technology, which develops the resources of the earth, may put into the hands of a ruthless few control over the lives of millions of their fellows, hurl nation against nation in a bloody turmoil, devastate the earth with war. ‘There is a cruel irony in the fact that an age most able to satisfy the wishes of man should lack the synthesis of the religious vision; that the civilization which has so swiftly developed the modern instruments of practical control should also have allowed economic and political organizations to escape responsibility to the human ideal.

Through the ages man’s greatest problem has been the lack of tools, the inadequacy of his power of mastery over the world. Out of this helplessness came his flight to compensatory other-worlds. All that is changed. The contrast between the old and new technique is startling. It is a very long way from a charm, a spoken exorcism, a few words pronounced with passion and hurled against invisible powers of sickness, to medical science diagnosing and prescribing a cure. There is a vast difference in mastery between the method of an Arval Brotherhood moving with dignity around a Roman field, or of Russian peasants bearing icons and chanting prayers in procession around the standing grain to secure safety for the crops, and that of modern agricultural scientists who study the soil, feed it, and plan scientifically for a harvest. So completely has the primitive technique of spell and rite and prayer been superseded by effective scientific methods that those who are accustomed to think of religion in terms of the pre-scientific ceremonies and ideas are convinced that religion may be dismissed as ‘‘superstition,’” an interesting relic of a dying past. There could be no clearer evidence of the lamentable fact that our religious quest has failed to harness the new technique of science to the winning of shared values in a common life. Material mastery and scientific knowledge we do not lack. Every year heaps up new resources of mechanical efficiency and technological complexity. Our difficulty lies elsewhere and it is plain enough. It is the necessity of understanding and directing the wishes of man in society, of orienting our powers toward a worth-while goal. Our problem is to summon sufficient intelligence and good will to develop a social order in which the creative energies of men will find their glory in the achievement of spiritual values, of an ever more richly satisfying life for the race. This is to take up the time-hallowed task of man, the religious quest of the ages.