Part 15 (1/2)
There may have been a historic Jesus--and if so, to get a reliable outline of his life would indeed be a treasure; but at present it would seem there is no sign of that. If the historicity of Jesus, in any degree, could be proved, it would give us reason for supposing--what I have personally always been inclined to believe--that there was also a historical nucleus for such personages as Osiris, Mithra, Krishna, Hercules, Apollo and the rest. The question, in fact, narrows itself down to this, Have there been in the course of human evolution certain, so to speak, NODAL points or periods at which the psychologic currents ran together and condensed themselves for a new start; and has each such node or point of condensation been marked by the appearance of an actual and heroic man (or woman) who supplied a necessary impetus for the new departure, and gave his name to the resulting movement? OR is it sufficient to suppose the automatic formation of such nodes or starting-points without the intervention of any special hero or genius, and to imagine that in each case the myth-making tendency of mankind CREATED a legendary and inspiring figure and wors.h.i.+ped the same for a long period afterwards as a G.o.d?
As I have said before, this is a question which, interesting as it is, is not really very important. The main thing being that the prophetic and creative spirit of mankind HAS from time to time evolved those figures as idealizations of its ”heart's desire” and placed a halo round their heads. The long procession of them becomes a REAL piece of History--the history of the evolution of the human heart, and of human consciousness. But with the psychology of the whole subject I shall deal in the next chapter.
I may here, however, dwell for a moment on two other points which belong properly to this chapter. I have already mentioned the great reliance placed by the advocates of a unique 'revelation' on the high morality taught in the Gospels and the New Testament generally. There is no need of course to challenge that morality or to depreciate it unduly; but the argument a.s.sumes that it is so greatly superior to anything of the kind that had been taught before that we are compelled to suppose something like a revelation to explain its appearance--whereas of course anyone familiar with the writings of antiquity, among the Greeks or Romans or Egyptians or Hindus or later Jews, knows perfectly well that the reported sayings of Jesus and the Apostles may be paralleled abundantly from these sources. I have ill.u.s.trated this already from the Sermon on the Mount. If anyone will glance at the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs--a Jewish book composed about 120 B. C.--he will see that it is full of moral precepts, and especially precepts of love and forgiveness, so ardent and so n.o.ble that it hardly suffers in any way when compared with the New Testament teaching, and that consequently no special miracle is required to explain the appearance of the latter.
The twelve Patriarchs in question are the twelve sons of Jacob, and the book consists of their supposed deathbed scenes, in which each patriarch in turn recites his own (more or less imaginary) life and deeds and gives pious counsel to his children and successors. It is composed in a fine and poetic style, and is full of lofty thought, remindful in scores of pa.s.sages of the Gospels--words and all--the coincidences being too striking to be accidental. It evidently had a deep influence on the authors of the Gospels, as well as on St. Paul. It affirms a belief in the coming of a Messiah, and in salvation for the Gentiles. The following are some quotations from it: (1) Testament of Zebulun (p.
116): ”My children, I bid you keep the commands of the Lord, and show mercy to your neighbours, and have compa.s.sion towards all, not towards men only, but also towards beasts.” Dan (p. 127): ”Love the Lord through all your life, and one another with a true heart.” Joseph (p. 173): ”I was sick, and the Lord visited me; in prison, and my G.o.d showed favor unto me.” Benjamin (p. 209): ”For as the sun is not defiled by s.h.i.+ning on dung and mire, but rather drieth up both and driveth away the evil smell, so also the pure mind, encompa.s.sed by the defilements of earth, rather cleanseth them and is not itself defiled.”
(1) The references being to the Edition by R. H. Charles (1907).
I think these quotations are sufficient to prove the high standard of this book, which was written in the Second Century B. C., and FROM which the New Testament authors copiously borrowed.
The other point has to do with my statement at the beginning of this chapter that two of the main 'characteristics' of Christianity were its insistence on (a) a tendency towards renunciation of the world, and a consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love, and (b) on a morality whose inspiration was a private sense of duty to G.o.d rather than a public sense of duty to one's neighbor and to society generally. I think, however, that the last-mentioned characteristic ought to be viewed in relation to a third, namely, (c) the extraordinarily DEMOCRATIC tendency of the new Religion. (1) Celsus (A.D. 200) jeered at the early Christians for their extreme democracy: ”It is only the simpletons, the ign.o.ble, the senseless--slaves and womenfolk and children--whom they wish to persuade (to join their churches) or CAN persuade”--”wool-dressers and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and vulgar persons,” and ”whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent or a fool, in a word, whoever is G.o.d-forsaken ([gr kakodaimwn]), him the Kingdom of G.o.d will receive.” (2) Thus Celsus, the accomplished, clever, philosophic and withal humorous critic, laughed at the new religionists, and prophesied their speedy extinction. Nevertheless he was mistaken.
There is little doubt that just the inclusion of women and weaklings and outcasts did contribute LARGELY to the spread of Christianity (and Mithraism). It brought hope and a sense of human dignity to the despised and rejected of the earth. Of the immense numbers of lesser officials who carried on the vast organization of the Roman Empire, most perhaps, were taken from the ranks of the freedmen and quondam slaves, drawn from a great variety of races and already familiar with pagan cults of all kinds--Egyptian, Syrian, Chaldean, Iranian, and so forth. (3) This fact helped to give to Christianity--under the fine tolerance of the Empire--its democratic character and also its willingness to accept all.
The rude and menial ma.s.ses, who had hitherto been almost beneath the notice of Greek and Roman culture, flocked in; and though this was doubtless, as time went on, a source of weakness to the Church, and a cause of dissension and superst.i.tion, yet it was in the inevitable line of human evolution, and had a psychological basis which I must now endeavor to explain.
(1) It is important to note, however, that this same democratic tendency was very marked in Mithraism. ”Il est certain,” says c.u.mont, ”qu'il a fait ses premieres conquetes dans les cla.s.ses inferieures de la societe et c'est l'a un fait considerable; le mithracisme est reste longtemps la religion des humbles.” Mysteres de Mithra, p. 68.
(2) See Glover's Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire, ch. viii.
(3) See Toutain, Cultes paiens, vol. ii, conclusion.
XIV. THE MEANING OF IT ALL
The general drift and meaning of the present book must now, I think, from many hints scattered in the course of it, be growing clear. But it will be well perhaps in this chapter, at the risk of some repet.i.tion, to bring the whole argument together. And the argument is that since the dawn of humanity on the earth--many hundreds of thousands or perhaps a million years ago--there has been a slow psychologic evolution, a gradual development or refinement of Consciousness, which at a certain stage has spontaneously given birth in the human race to the phenomena of religious belief and religious ritual--these phenomena (whether in the race at large or in any branch of it) always following, step by step, a certain order depending on the degrees of psychologic evolution concerned; and that it is this general fact which accounts for the strange similarities of belief and ritual which have been observed all over the world and in places far remote from each other, and which have been briefly noted in the preceding chapters.
And the main stages of this psychologic evolution--those at any rate with which we are here concerned--are Three: the stage of Simple Consciousness, the stage of Self-consciousness, and a third Stage which for want of a better word we may term the stage of Universal Consciousness. Of course these three stages may at some future time be a.n.a.lyzed into lesser degrees, with useful result--but at present I only desire to draw attention to them in the rough, so to speak, to show that it is from them and from their pa.s.sage one into another that there has flowed by a perfectly natural logic and concatenation the strange panorama of humanity's religious evolution--its superst.i.tions and magic and sacrifices and dancings and ritual generally, and later its incantations and prophecies, and services of speech and verse, and paintings and forms of art and figures of the G.o.ds. A wonderful Panorama indeed, or poem of the Centuries, or, if you like, World-symphony with three great leading motives!
And first we have the stage of Simple Consciousness. For hundreds of centuries (we cannot doubt) Man possessed a degree of consciousness not radically different from that of the higher Animals, though probably more quick and varied. He saw, he heard, he felt, he noted. He acted or reacted, quickly or slowly, in response to these impressions. But the consciousness of himSELF, as a being separate from his impressions, as separate from his surroundings, had not yet arisen or taken hold on him.
He was an instinctive part, of Nature. And in this respect he was very near to the Animals. Self-consciousness in the animals, in a germinal form is there, no doubt, but EMBEDDED, so to speak, in the general world consciousness. It is on this account that the animals have such a marvellously acute perception and instinct, being embedded in Nature.
And primitive Man had the same. Also we must, as I have said before, allow that man in that stage must have had the same sort of grace and perfection of form and movement as we admire in the (wild) animals now.
It would be quite unreasonable to suppose that he, the crown in the same sense of creation, was from the beginning a lame and ill-made abortion.
For a long period the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher animals, must have been (on the whole, and allowing for occasional privations and sufferings and conflicts) well adapted to their surroundings and harmonious with the earth and with each other. There must have been a period resembling a Golden Age--some condition at any rate which, compared with subsequent miseries, merited the epithet 'golden.'
It was during this period apparently that the system of Totems arose.
The tribes felt their relations.h.i.+p to their winged and fourfooted mates (including also other objects of nature) so deeply and intensely that they adopted the latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man fairly wors.h.i.+pped, the animals and was proud to be called after them.
Of course we moderns find this strange. We, whose conceptions of these beautiful creatures are mostly derived from a broken-down cab-horse, or a melancholy milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen or loved them and have only wondered with our true commercial instinct what profit we could extract from them. But they, the primitives, loved and admired the animals; they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural friends.h.i.+p, (1) and accorded them a kind of divinity. This was the age of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of solidarity with Nature.
And the point of it all is (with regard to the subject we have in hand) that this was also the age from which by a natural evolution the sense of Religion came to mankind. If Religion in man is the sense of ties binding his inner self to the powers of the universe around him, then it is evident I think that primitive man as I have described him possessed the REALITY of this sense--though so far buried and subconscious that he was hardly aware of it. It was only later, and with the coming of the Second Stage, that this sense began to rise distinctly into consciousness.
(1) See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460, edn. 1903) says: ”The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among the lower races.”
Let us pa.s.s then to the Second Stage. There is a moment in the evolution of a child--somewhere perhaps about the age of three (1)--when the simple almost animal-like consciousness of the babe is troubled by a new element--SELF-consciousness. The change is so marked, so definite, that (in the depth of the infant's eyes) you can almost SEE it take place. So in the evolution of the human race there has been a period--also marked and definite, though extending intermittent over a vast interval of time--when on men in general there dawned the consciousness of THEMSELVES, of their own thoughts and actions. The old simple acceptance of sensations and experiences gave place to REFLECTION. The question arose: ”How do these sensations and experiences affect ME? What can _I_ do to modify them, to encourage the pleasurable, to avoid or inhibit the painful, and so on?” From that moment a new motive was added to life.