Part 60 (2/2)
”If there is a _personal_ G.o.d, _separate from_ the material Universe, that created all things, Himself uncreated, is He corporeal or incorporeal, material or spiritual, the soul of the Universe or wholly apart from it? and if He be Spirit, what then is spirit?
”Was that Supreme Deity active or quiescent before the creation; and if quiescent during a previous eternity, what necessity of His nature moved Him at last to create a world; or was it a mere whim that had no motive?
”Was matter co-existent with Him, or absolutely created by him out of nothing? Did He _create_ it, or only _mould_ and _shape_ and _fas.h.i.+on_ a chaos already existing, co-existent with Himself?
”Did the Deity _directly_ create matter, or was creation the work of inferior deities, emanations from Himself?
”If He be good and just, whence comes it that, foreknowing everything, He has allowed sorrow and evil to exist; and how to reconcile with His benevolence and wisdom the prosperity of vice and the misfortunes of virtue in this world?” And then, as to man himself, recurred these other questions, as they continue to recur to all of us:
”What is it in us that thinks? Is Thought the mere result of material organization; or is there in us a _soul_ that thinks, separate from and resident in the body? If the latter, is it eternal and uncreated; and if not, how created? Is it distinct from G.o.d, or an emanation from Him? Is it _inherently_ immortal, or only so by destination, because G.o.d has willed it? Is it to return to and be merged in Him, or ever to exist, separately from Him, with its present ident.i.ty?
”If G.o.d has fore-seen and fore-arranged all that occurs, how has man any real free-will, or the least control over circ.u.mstances? How can anything be done _against_ the will of Infinite Omnipotence; and if all is done _according_ to that will, how is there any wrong or evil, in what Infinite Wisdom and Infinite Power does not choose to prevent?
”What is the foundation of the moral law? Did G.o.d enact it of His own mere pleasure; and if so, can He not, when He pleases, repeal it? Who shall a.s.sure us He will not repeal it, and make right wrong, and virtue vice? Or is the moral law a necessity of His nature; and if so, who enacted it; and does not that a.s.sert a power, like the old Necessity, superior to Deity?”
And, close-following after these, came the great question of HEREAFTER, of another Life, of the soul's Destiny; and the thousand other collateral and subordinate questions, as to matter, spirit, futurity, and G.o.d, that have produced all the systems of philosophy, all metaphysics, and all theology, since the world began.
What the old philosophic mind thought upon these great questions, we have already, to some extent, developed. With the Emanation-doctrine of the Gnostics and the Orient, we have endeavored to make you familiar. We have brought you face to face with the Kabalists, the Essenes, and Philo the Jew. We have shown that, and how, much of the old mythology was derived from the daily and yearly recurring phenomena of the heavens. We have exhibited to you the ancient notions by which they endeavored to explain to themselves the existence and prevalence of evil; and we have in some degree made known to you their metaphysical ideas as to the nature of the Deity. Much more remains to be done than it is within our power to do. We stand upon the sounding sh.o.r.e of the great ocean of Time. In front of us stretches out the heaving waste of the illimitable Past; and its waves, as they roll up to our feet along the sparkling slope of the yellow sands, bring to us, now and then, from the depths of that boundless ocean, a sh.e.l.l, a few specimens of algae torn rudely from their stems, a rounded pebble; and that is all; of all the vast treasures of ancient thought that lie buried there, with the mighty anthem of the boundless ocean thundering over them forever and forever.
Let us once more, and for the last time, along the sh.o.r.e of that great ocean, gather a few more relics of the Past, and listen to its mighty voices, as they come, in fragmentary music, in broken and interrupted rhythm, whispering to us from the great bosom of the Past.
Rites, creeds, and legends express, directly or symbolically, some leading idea, according to which the Mysteries of Being are supposed to be, explained in Deity. The intricacies of mythical genealogies are a practical acknowledgment of the mysterious nature of the Omnipotent Deity; displaying in their beautiful but ineffectual imagery the first efforts of the mind to communicate with nature: the flowers which fancy strewed before the youthful steps of Psyche, when she first set out in pursuit of the immortal object of her love. Theories and notions, in all their varieties of truth and falsehood, are a machinery more or less efficacious, directed to the same end. Every religion was, in its origin, an embryo philosophy, or an attempt to interpret the unknown by mind; and it was only when philosophy, which is essentially progress, outgrew its first acquisitions, that religion became a thing apart, cheris.h.i.+ng as unalterable dogmas the notions which philosophy had abandoned. Separated from philosophy, it became arrogant and fantastical, professing to have already attained what its more authentic representative was ever pursuing in vain; and discovering, through its initiations and Mysteries, all that to its contracted view seemed wanting to restore the well-being of mankind, the means of purification and expiation, remedies for disease, expedients to cure the disorders of the soul, and to propitiate the G.o.ds.
Why should we attempt to confine the idea of the Supreme Mind within an arbitrary barrier, or exclude from the limits of veracity any conception of the Deity, which, if imperfect and inadequate, may be only a little more so than our own? ”The name of G.o.d,” says Hobbes, ”is used not to make us _conceive_ Him, for He is inconceivable, but that we may _honor_ Him.” ”Believe in G.o.d, and adore Him,” said the Greek Poet, ”but investigate Him not; the inquiry is fruitless, seek not to discover who G.o.d is; for, by the desire to know, you offend Him who chooses to remain unknown.” ”When we attempt,” says Philo, ”to investigate the essence of the Absolute Being, we fall into an abyss of perplexity; and the only benefit to be derived from such researches is the conviction of their absurdity.”
Yet man, though ignorant of the const.i.tution of the dust on which he treads, has ventured, and still ventures, to speculate on the nature of G.o.d, and to define dogmatically in creeds the subject least within the compa.s.s of his faculties; and even to hate and persecute those who will not accept his views as true.
But though a knowledge of the Divine Essence is impossible, the conceptions formed respecting it are interesting, as indications of intellectual development. The history of religion is the history of the human mind; and the conception formed by it of Deity is always in exact relation to its moral and intellectual attainments. The one is the index and the measure of the other.
The _negative_ notion of G.o.d, which consists in abstracting the inferior and finite, is, according to Philo, the only way in which it is possible for man worthily to apprehend the nature of G.o.d. After exhausting the varieties of symbolism, we contrast the Divine Greatness with human littleness, and employ expressions apparently affirmative, such as ”Infinite,” ”Almighty,” ”All-wise,” ”Omnipotent,” ”Eternal,” and the like; which in reality amount only to denying, in regard to G.o.d, those limits which confine the faculties of man; and thus we remain content with a name which is a mere conventional sign and confession of our ignorance.
The Hebrew ???? and the Greek _To ON_ expressed abstract existence, without outward manifestation or development. Of the same nature are the definitions, ”G.o.d is a sphere whose centre is everywhere, and whose circ.u.mference nowhere;” ”G.o.d is He who sees all, Himself unseen:” and finally, that of Proclus and Hegel--”the _To_ ? ??--that which has no outward and positive existence.” Most of the so-called ideas or definitions of the ”Absolute” are only a collection of negations; from which, as they affirm nothing, nothing is learned.
G.o.d was first recognized in the heavenly bodies and in the elements.
When man's consciousness of his own intellectuality was matured, and he became convinced that the internal faculty of thought was something more subtle than even the most subtle elements, he transferred that new conception to the object of his wors.h.i.+p, and deified a mental principle instead of a physical one. He in every case makes G.o.d after his own image; for do what we will, the highest efforts of human thought can conceive nothing higher than the supremacy of intellect; and so he ever comes back to some familiar type of exalted humanity. He at first deifies nature, and afterward himself.
The eternal aspiration of the religious sentiment in man is to become united with G.o.d. In his earliest development, the wish and its fulfillment were simultaneous, through unquestioning belief. In proportion as the conception of Deity was exalted, the notion of His terrestrial presence or proximity was abandoned; and the difficulty of comprehending the Divine Government, together with the glaring superst.i.tious evils arising out of its misinterpretation, endangered the belief in it altogether.
Even the lights of Heaven, which, as ”bright potentates of the sky,”
were formerly the vigilant directors of the economy of earth, now s.h.i.+ne dim and distant, and Uriel no more descends upon a sunbeam. But the real change has been in the progressive ascent of man's own faculties, and not in the Divine Nature; as the Stars are no more distant now than when they were supposed to rest on the shoulders of Atlas. And yet a little sense of disappointment and humiliation attended the first awakening of the soul, when reason, looking upward toward the Deity, was impressed with a dizzy sense of having fallen.
But hope revives in despondency; and every nation that ever advanced beyond the most elementary conceptions, felt the necessity of an attempt to fill the chasm, real or imaginary, separating man from G.o.d. To do this was the great task of poetry, philosophy, and religion. Hence the personifications of G.o.d's attributes, developments, and manifestations, as ”Powers,” ”Intelligences,” ”Angels,” ”Emanations;” through which and the oracular faculty in himself, man could place himself in communion with G.o.d.
The various ranks and orders of mythical beings imagined by Persians, Indians, Egyptians, or Etrurians, to preside over the various departments of nature, had each his share in a scheme to bring man into closer approximation to the Deity; they eventually gave way only before an a.n.a.logous though less picturesque symbolism; and the Deities and Daemons of Greece and Rome were perpetuated with only a change of names, when their offices were transferred to Saints and Martyrs. The attempts by which reason had sometimes endeavored to span the unknown by a bridge of metaphysics, such as the idealistic systems of Zoroaster, Pythagoras, or Plato, were only a more refined form of the poetical illusions which satisfied the vulgar; and man still looked back with longing to the lost golden age, when his ancestors communed face to face with the G.o.ds; and hoped that, by propitiating Heaven, he might accelerate the renewal of it in the islands of the Far West, under the sceptre of Kronos, or in a centralization of political power at Jerusalem. His eager hope overcame even the terrors of the grave; for the Divine power was as infinite as human expectation, and the Egyptian, duly ensepulchred in the Lybian Catacombs, was supposed to be already on his way to the Fortunate Abodes under the guidance of Hermes, there to obtain a perfect a.s.sociation and reunion with his G.o.d.
Remembering what we have already said elsewhere in regard to the old ideas concerning the Deity, and repeating it as little as possible, let us once more put ourselves in communion with the Ancient poetic and philosophic mind, and endeavor to learn of it what it thought, and how it solved the great problems that have ever tortured the human intellect.
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