Part 29 (1/2)
For a certain tribe had been set apart from the beginning to keep alive the memory of G.o.d's judgments and promises, while the rest of mankind, abandoned to its natural depravity, sank deeper and deeper into crimes and vanities. The deluge that came to punish these evils did not avail to cure them. ”The world was renewed[A] and the earth rose again above the bosom of the waters, but in this renovation there remained eternally some trace of divine vengeance. Until the deluge all nature had been exceedingly hardy and vigorous, but by that vast flood of water which G.o.d had spread out over the earth, and by its long abiding there, all saps were diluted; the air, charged with too dense and heavy a moisture, bred ranker principles of corruption. The early const.i.tution of the universe was weakened, and human life, from stretching as it had formerly done to near a thousand years, grew gradually briefer. Herbs and roots lost their primitive potency and stronger food had to be furnished to man by the flesh of other animals.... Death gained upon life and men felt themselves overtaken by a speedier chastis.e.m.e.nt. As day by day they sank deeper in their wickedness, it was but right they should daily, as it were, stick faster in their woe. The very change in nourishment made manifest their decline and degradation, since as they became feebler they became also more voracious and blood-thirsty.”
Henceforth there were two spirits, two parties, or, as Saint Augustine called them, two cities in the world. The City of Satan, whatever its artifices in art, war, or philosophy, was essentially corrupt and impious. Its joy was but a comic mask and its beauty the whitening of a sepulchre. It stood condemned before G.o.d and before man's better conscience by its vanity, cruelty, and secret misery, by its ignorance of all that it truly behoved a man to know who was destined to immortality. Lost, as it seemed, within this Babylon, or visible only in its obscure and forgotten purlieus, lived on at the same time the City of G.o.d, the society of all the souls G.o.d predestined to salvation; a city which, however humble and inconspicuous it might seem on earth, counted its myriad transfigured citizens in heaven, and had its destinies, like its foundations, in eternity. To this City of G.o.d belonged, in the first place, the patriarchs and the prophets who, throughout their plaintive and ardent lives, were faithful to what echoes still remained of a primeval revelation, and waited patiently for the greater revelation to come. To the same city belonged the magi who followed a star till it halted over the stable in Bethlehem; Simeon, who divined the present salvation of Israel; John the Baptist, who bore witness to the same and made straight its path; and Peter, to whom not flesh and blood, but the spirit of the Father in heaven, revealed the Lord's divinity. For salvation had indeed come with the fulness of time, not, as the carnal Jews had imagined it, in the form of an earthly restoration, but through the incarnation of the Son of G.o.d in the Virgin Mary, his death upon a cross, his descent into h.e.l.l, and his resurrection at the third day according to the Scriptures. To the same city belonged finally all those who, believing in the reality and efficacy of Christ's mission, relied on his merits and followed his commandment of unearthly love.
All history was henceforth essentially nothing but the conflict between these two cities; two moralities, one natural, the other supernatural; two philosophies, one rational, the other revealed; two beauties, one corporeal, the other spiritual; two glories, one temporal, the other eternal; two inst.i.tutions, one the world, the other the Church. These, whatever their momentary alliances or compromises, were radically opposed and fundamentally alien to one another. Their conflict was to fill the ages until, when wheat and tares had long flourished together and exhausted between them the earth for whose substance they struggled, the harvest should come; the terrible day of reckoning when those who had believed the things of religion to be imaginary would behold with dismay the Lord visibly coming down through the clouds of heaven, the angels blowing their alarming trumpets, all generations of the dead rising from their graves, and judgment without appeal pa.s.sed on every man, to the edification of the universal company and his own unspeakable joy or confusion. Whereupon the blessed would enter eternal bliss with G.o.d their master and the wicked everlasting torments with the devil whom they served.
The drama of history was thus to close upon a second tableau: long-robed and beatified cohorts pa.s.sing above, amid various psalmodies, into an infinite luminous s.p.a.ce, while below the d.a.m.ned, howling, writhing, and half transformed into loathsome beasts, should be engulfed in a fiery furnace. The two cities, always opposite in essence, should thus be finally divided in existence, each bearing its natural fruits and manifesting its true nature.
Let the reader fill out this outline for himself with its thousand details; let him remember the endless mysteries, arguments, martyrdoms, consecrations that carried out the sense and made vital the beauty of the whole. Let him pause before the phenomenon; he can ill afford, if he wishes to understand history or the human mind, to let the apparition float by unchallenged without delivering up its secret. What shall we say of this Christian dream?
[Sidenote: Mythology is a language and must be understood to convey something by symbols.]
Those who are still troubled by the fact that this dream is by many taken for a reality, and who are consequently obliged to defend themselves against it, as against some dangerous error in science or in philosophy, may be allowed to marshal arguments in its disproof. Such, however, is not my intention. Do we marshal arguments against the miraculous birth of Buddha, or the story of Cronos devouring his children? We seek rather to honour the piety and to understand the poetry embodied in those fables. If it be said that those fables are believed by no one, I reply that those fables are or have been believed just as unhesitatingly as the Christian theology, and by men no less reasonable or learned than the unhappy apologists of our own ancestral creeds. Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a pa.s.sion. That he harbours it is no indication of a want of sanity on his part in other matters. But while we acquiesce in his experience, and are glad he has it, we need no arguments to dissuade us from sharing it. Each man may have his own loves, but the object in each case is different. And so it is, or should be, in religion. Before the rise of those strange and fraudulent Hebraic pretensions there was no question among men about the national, personal, and poetic character of religious allegiance. It could never have been a duty to adopt a religion not one's own any more than a language, a coinage, or a costume not current in one's own country. The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea. Whoever entertains it has not come within the region of profitable philosophising on that subject.
His science is not wide enough to cover all existence. He has not discovered that there can be no moral allegiance except to the ideal.
His cert.i.tude and his arguments are no more pertinent to the religious question than would be the insults, blows, and murders to which, if he could, he would appeal in the next instance. Philosophy may describe unreason, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote A: Bossuet: Discours sur l'histoire universelle, Part II, Chap. I.]
CHAPTER VII
PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY
[Sidenote: Need of paganising Christianity.]
The western intellect, in order to accept the gospel, had to sublimate it into a neo-Platonic system of metaphysics. In like manner the western heart had to render Christianity congenial and adequate by a rich infusion of pagan custom and sentiment. This adaptation was more gentle and facile than might be supposed. We are too much inclined to impute an abstract and ideal Christianity to the polyglot souls of early Christians, and to ignore that mysterious and miraculous side of later paganism from which Christian cultus and ritual are chiefly derived. In the third century Christianity and devout paganism were, in a religious sense, closely akin; each differed much less from the other than from that religion which at other epochs had borne or should bear its own name. Had Julian the Apostate succeeded in his enterprise he would not have rescued anything which the admirers of cla.s.sic paganism could at all rejoice in; a disciple of Iamblichus could not but plunge headlong into the same sea of superst.i.tion and dialectic which had submerged Christianity. In both parties ethics were irrational and morals corrupt.
The political and humane religion of antiquity had disappeared, and the question between Christians and pagans amounted simply to a choice of fanaticisms. Reason had suffered a general eclipse, but civilisation, although decayed, still subsisted, and a certain scholastic discipline, a certain speculative habit, and many an ancient religious usage remained in the world. The people could change their G.o.ds, but not the spirit in which they wors.h.i.+pped them. Christianity had insinuated itself almost un.o.bserved into a society full of rooted traditions. The first disciples had been disinherited Jews, with religious habits which men of other races and interests could never have adopted intelligently; the Church was accordingly wise enough to perpetuate in its practice at least an indispensable minimum of popular paganism. How considerable this minimum was a glance at Catholic piety will suffice to convince us.
[Sidenote: Catholic piety more human than the liturgy.]
The Graeco-Jewish system of theology constructed by the Fathers had its liturgical counterpart in the sacraments and in a devout eloquence which may be represented to us fairly enough by the Roman missal and breviary.
This liturgy, transfused as it is with pagan philosophy and removed thereby from the Oriental directness and formlessness of the Bible, keeps for the most part its theological and patristic tone. Psalms abound, Virgin, and saints are barely mentioned, a certain universalism and concentration of thought upon the Redemption and its speculative meaning pervades the Latin ritual sung behind the altar-rails. But any one who enters a Catholic church with an intelligent interpreter will at once perceive the immense distance which separates that official and impersonal ritual from the daily prayers and practices of Catholic people. The latter refer to the real exigences of daily life and serve to express or reorganise personal pa.s.sions. While ma.s.s is being celebrated the old woman will tell her beads, lost in a vague rumination over her own troubles; while the priests chant something unintelligible about Abraham or Nebuchadnezzar, the housewife will light her wax-candles, duly blessed for the occasion, before Saint Barbara, to be protected thereby from the lightning; and while the preacher is repeating, by rote, dialectical subtleties about the union of the two natures in Christ's person, a listener's fancy may float sadly over the mystery of love and of life, and (being himself without resources in the premises) he may order a ma.s.s to be said for the repose of some departed soul.
In a Catholic country, every spot and every man has a particular patron.
These patrons are sometimes local worthies, canonised by tradition or by the Roman see, but no less often they are simply local appellations of Christ or the Virgin, appellations which are known theoretically to refer all to the same _numen_, but which practically possess diverse religious values; for the miracles and intercessions attributed to the Virgin under one t.i.tle are far from being miracles and intercessions attributable to her under another. He who has been all his life devout to Loreto will not place any special reliance on the Pillar at Saragossa. A bereaved mother will not fly to the Immaculate Conception for comfort, but of course to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. Each religious order and all the laity more or less affiliated to it will cultivate special saints and special mysteries. There are also particular places and days on which graces are granted, as not on others, and the quant.i.ty of such graces is measurable by canonic standards. So many days of remitted penance correspond to a work of a certain merit, for there is a celestial currency in which mulcts and remissions may be accurately summed and subtracted by angelic recorders.
One man's spiritual earnings may by gift be attributed and imputed to another, a belief which may seem arbitrary and superst.i.tious but which is really a natural corollary to fundamental doctrines like the atonement, the communion of saints, and intercession for the dead and living.
[Sidenote: Natural pieties.]
Another phase of the same natural religion is seen in frequent festivals, in the consecration of buildings, s.h.i.+ps, fields, labours, and seasons; in intercessions by the greater dead for the living and by the living for the lesser dead--a perfect survival of heroes and penates on the one hand and of pagan funeral rites and commemorations on the other. Add Lent with its carnival, ember-days, all saints' and all souls', Christmas with its magi or its Saint Nicholas, Saint Agnes's and Saint Valentine's days with their profane a.s.sociations, a saint for finding lost objects and another for prospering amourettes, since all great and tragic loves have their inevitable patrons in Christ and the Virgin, in Mary Magdalene, and in the mystics innumerable. This, with what more could easily be rehea.r.s.ed, makes a complete paganism within Christian tradition, a paganism for which little basis can be found in the gospel, the ma.s.s, the breviary, or the theologians.
Yet these accretions were as well authenticated as the substructure, for they rested on human nature. To feel, for instance, the special efficacy of your village Virgin or of the miraculous Christ whose hermitage is perched on the overhanging hill, is a genuine experience. The principle of it is clear and simple. Those shrines, those images, the festivals a.s.sociated with them, have entered your mind together with your earliest feelings. Your first glimpses of mortal vicissitudes have coincided with the awe and glitter of sacramental moments in which those _numina_ were invoked; and on that deeper level of experience, in those lower reaches of irrationalism in which such impressions lie, they const.i.tute a mystic resource subsisting beneath all conventions and overt knowledge. When the doctors blunder--as they commonly do--the saints may find a cure; after all, the saints' success in medicine seems to a crude empiricism almost as probable as the physicians'. Special and local patrons are the original G.o.ds, and whatever religious value speculative and cosmic deities retain they retain surrept.i.tiously, by virtue of those very bonds with human interests and pa.s.sionate desires which ancestral demons once borrowed from the hearth they guarded, the mountain they haunted, or the sacrifice they inhaled with pleasure, until their hearts softened toward their wors.h.i.+ppers. In itself, and as a minimised and retreating theology represents it, a universal power has no specific energy, no determinate interest at heart; there is nothing friendly about it nor allied to your private necessities; no links of place and time fortify and define its influence. Nor is it rational to appeal for a mitigation of evils or for a.s.sistance against them to the very being that has decreed and is inflicting them for some fixed purpose of its own.
[Sidenote: Refuge taken in the supernatural.]
Paganism or natural religion was at first, like so many crude religious notions, optimistic and material; the wors.h.i.+pper expected his piety to make his pot boil, to cure his disease, to prosper his battles, and to render harmless his ignorance of the world in which he lived. But such faith ran up immediately against the facts; it was discountenanced at every turn by experience and reflection. The whole of nature and life, when they are understood at all, have to be understood on an opposite principle, on the principle that fate, having naturally furnished us with a determinate will and a determinate endowment, gives us a free field and no favour in a natural world. Hence the retreat of religion to the supernatural, a region to which in its cruder forms it was far from belonging. Now this retreat, in the case of cla.s.sic paganism, took place with the decay of military and political life and would have produced an ascetic popular system, some compound of Oriental and Greek traditions, even if Christianity had not intervened at that juncture and opportunely pre-empted the ground.
[Sidenote: The episodes of life consecrated mystically.]
Christianity, as we have seen, had elements in it which gave it a decisive advantage; its outlook was historical, not cosmic, and consequently admitted a non-natural future for the individual and for the Church; it was anti-political and looked for progress only in that region in which progress was at that time possible, in the private soul; it was democratic, feminine, and unworldly; its Oriental deity and prophets had a primitive simplicity and pathos not found in pagan heroes or polite metaphysical ent.i.ties; its obscure Hebrew poetry opened, like music, an infinite field for brooding fancy and presumption. The consequence was a doubling of the world, so that every Christian led a dual existence, one full of trouble and vanity on earth, which it was piety in him to despise and neglect, another full of hope and consolation in a region parallel to earth and directly above it, every part of which corresponded to something in earthly life and could be reached, so to speak, by a Jacob's ladder upon which aspiration and grace ascended and descended continually. Birth had its sacramental consecration to the supernatural in baptism, growth in confirmation, self-consciousness in confession, p.u.b.erty in communion, effort in prayer, defeat in sacrifice, sin in penance, speculation in revealed wisdom, art in wors.h.i.+p, natural kindness in charity, poverty in humility, death in self-surrender and resurrection. When the mind grew tired of contemplation the lips could still echo some pious pet.i.tion, keeping the body's att.i.tude and habit expressive of humility and propitious to receiving grace; and when the knees and lips were themselves weary, a candle might be left burning before the altar, to witness that the desire momentarily forgotten was not extinguished in the heart. Through prayer and religious works the absent could be reached and the dead helped on their journey, and amid earthly estrangements and injustices there always remained the church open to all and the society of heaven.