Part 25 (2/2)
The helplessness of primitive man set down in the midst of a universe of which he knew not the laws, may perhaps be brought home to the mind of modern man, if we compare the universe to a vast workshop full of the most various and highly-complicated machinery working at full speed. The machinery, if properly handled, is capable of producing everything that the heart of primitive man can wish for, but also, if he sets hand to the wrong part of the machinery, is capable of whirling him off between its wheels, and crus.h.i.+ng and killing him in its inexorable and ruthless movement. Further, primitive man cannot decline to submit himself to the perilous test: he must make his experiments or perish, and even so his survival is conditional on his selecting the right part of the machine to handle.
Nor can he take his own time and study the dangerous mechanism long and carefully before setting his hand to it: his needs are pressing and his action must be immediate.[1]
[Footnote 1: Jevons: _An Introduction to the History of Religion_, p. 17.]
The very food of primitive man was to him as precarious as it was essential. His life was practically at the mercy of wind and rain and sun. His food and shelter were desperately lucky chances. Not having attained as yet to a conception of the impersonality of Nature, he regarded these forces which helped and hindered him as friendly and alien powers which it was in the imperative interests of his own welfare to placate and propitiate. It was in this urgent sense of helplessness and need that there were developed the two outstanding modes of communication with the supernatural, _sacrifice_ and _prayer_.
Primitive man conceived his universe to be governed by essentially human powers; powers, of course, on a grand scale, but human none the less, with the same weaknesses, moods, and humors as human beings themselves. They could be flattered and cajoled; they could be bribed and paid; they could be moved to tenderness, generosity, and pity. ”Holiness,”
says Socrates in one of Plato's dialogues, ”is an art in which G.o.ds and men do business with each other, ... Sacrifice is giving to the G.o.ds, prayer is asking of them.”[2] In Frazer's _Golden Bough_ one finds the remarkably diverse sacrificial rites by which men have sought to win the favor of the divine. Primitive man believed literally that the universe was governed by superhuman personal powers; he believed literally that these are human in their motives. He believed in consequence that sacrifices to the G.o.ds would help him to control the controlling powers of Nature for his own good, just as modern man believes that an application of the laws of electricity and mechanics will help him to control the natural world for his own purposes. The sacrifices of primitive man were immensely practical in character; they were made at the crucial moments and pivotal crises of life, at sowing and at harvest time, at the initiation of the young into the responsibilities of maturity, at times of pestilence, famine, or danger.
The G.o.ds were given the choice part of a meal; the prize calf; in some cases, human sacrifices; the sacrifice, moreover, of the beautiful and best. The chief sacrificial rites of almost all primitive peoples are connected with food, the sustainer, and procreation or birth, the perpetuator, of life.
[Footnote 2: See Plato's _Euthyphro_.]
As Jane Harrison puts it:
If man the individual is to live, he must have food; if his race is to persist, he must have children. To live and to cause to live, to eat food and beget children, these were the primary wants of man in the past, and they will be the primary wants of man in the future, so long as the world lasts. Other things may be added to enrich and beautify life, but unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons.... What he realizes first and foremost is that at certain times the animals, and still more the plants, which form his food, appear, at certain others they disappear. It is these times that become the central points, the focusses of his interest, and the dates of his religious festivals.[1]
[Footnote 1: Jane Harrison: _Ancient Art and Ritual_, p. 31.]
Sacrifice is only one way primitive man contrives of winning the favor of the G.o.ds toward the satisfaction of his desires.
Another common method is prayer. In its crudest form prayer is a direct pet.i.tion from the individual to divinity for the grant of a specific favor. The individual seeks a kindness from a supernatural power whose motives are human, and who may, therefore, be moved by human appeals; whose power is superhuman and can therefore fulfill requests.
Prayer may become profoundly spiritualized, but in its primitive form it is, like sacrifice, a certain way of getting things done. They are both to primitive man largely what our science is to us.
Both prayer and sacrifice arise in primitive man's need and helplessness and terror before mysterious supernatural powers, but they may rise, in the higher form of religion, to genuine n.o.bility, from this cra.s.s commerce with divinity, this religion of bargaining and _quid pro quo_. Sacrifice may change from a desperate reluctant offering made to please a jealous G.o.d, to a thanksgiving and a jubilation, an overflowing of happiness, grat.i.tude, and good-will.
Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of an att.i.tude toward religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joy and confidence, a friendly fellows.h.i.+p with the G.o.ds, whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer, sacrifice is but, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, cleansing, and atonement. This we might explain as part of the general splendid unreality of the Greek saga, but sober historians of the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit.
Thucydides is by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him, in the main, a rest from toil. He makes Pericles say of the Athenians: Moreover we have provided for our spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout the year.[1]
[Footnote 1: Jane Harrison: _Prolegomena to Greek Religion_, p. 1.]
Sacrifice may become spiritualized, as it is in Christianity, ”instead of he-goats and she-goats, there are subst.i.tuted offerings of the heart for all these vain oblations.” The sacrificial heart has at all times been accounted germane to n.o.bility.
There is something akin to religion in the laying down of a life for a cause or a country or a friend, in surrendering one's self for others. It is this power and beauty of renunciation that is the spiritual value behind all the rituals of sacrifice that still persist, as in the sacraments of Christianity. It is the tragic necessity of self-negation that haloes, even in secular life, the sacrificial att.i.tude:
But there is in resignation a further good element. Even real goods when they are attainable ought not to be fretfully desired.
To every man comes sooner or later the great renunciation. For the young there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a pa.s.sionate will, and yet unattainable, is to them not credible. Yet by death, by illness, by poverty, or, by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to power is not only just and right; it is the very gate of wisdom.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, p. 65.]
The spiritual meaning and value of sacrifice is thus seen to lie in self-surrender. The human being, born into a world where choices must be made, must make continual abnegation.
And when the temporary good is surrendered in the maintenance of an ideal, sacrifice becomes genuinely spiritual in character.
Prayer, also, becomes genuinely spiritual in its values when one ceases to believe in its practical efficacy and comes to think it shameful to traffic with the divine. Prayer beautifully ill.u.s.trates a point previously noted, how speech oscillates between the expression of feeling and the conveyance of ideas.
Beginning in primitive religion as a crude and cheap pet.i.tion for favors, it becomes in more spiritual religious experience, a lyric cry of emotion, a tranquil and serene expression of the soul's desire. Prayer is, moreover, ”religion in act.” That deep sense of an awed relations.h.i.+p to divine power which was, in the beginning of this discussion, noted as const.i.tuting certainly one of the outstanding characteristics of the religious experience, finds its most adequate emotional expression in prayer.
Religion is nothing [writes Auguste Sabatier] if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws life. This act is prayer, by which I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repet.i.tion of certain sacred formulas, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence--it may be even before it has a name by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or doctrines, we have religion.[1]
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