“to cozen
The gods that constrain us and curse.”
The motives which underlie these simplest as well as the most elaborate rituals, and impress upon them their distinctively religious character can be reduced to two, the idea of sacrifice and the idea of specific performance.
The simplest notion involved in a sacrifice is that of giving. The value of the gift is not, however, the intrinsic worth of the thing given, nor even the pleasure or advantage the recipient derives therefrom, but, singularly enough, the amount of pain the giver experiences in depriving himself of it! This is also often seen in ordinary transactions. A rich man who subscribes a hundred dollars to a charity, is thought to merit less commendation than the widow who gives her mite. Measured by motive, this reasoning is correct. There is a justice which can be vindicated in holding self-denial to be a standard of motive. All developed religions have demanded the renunciation of what is dearest. The Ynglyngasaga tells us that in a time of famine, the first sacrifice offered to the gods was of beasts only; if this failed, men were slain to appease them; and if this did not mitigate their anger, the king himself was obliged to die that they might send plenty. The Latin writers have handed it down that among the Germans and Gauls a human sacrifice was deemed the more efficacious the more distinguished the victim, and the nearer his relationship to him who offered the rite.151 The slaughter of children and wives to please the gods was common in many religions, and the self-emasculation of the priests of Cybele, with other such painful rites, indicates that the measure of the sacrifice was very usually not what the god needed, but the willingness of the worshipper to give.
The second idea, that of specific performance, has been well expressed and humorously commented upon by Hume in his Natural History of Religions. He says: “Here I cannot forbear observing a fact which may be worth the attention of those who make human nature the object of their inquiry. It is certain that in every religion, many of the votaries, perhaps the greatest number, will seek the divine favor, not by virtue and good morals, but either by frivolous observances, by intemperate zeal, by rapturous ecstasies, or by the belief of mysterious and absurd opinions.
* * * In all this [i. e., in virtue and good morals], a superstitious man finds nothing, which he has properly performed for the sake of his deity, or which can peculiarly recommend him to divine favor and protection. * * * * But if he fast or give himself a sound whipping, this has a direct reference, in his opinion, to the service of God. No other motive could engage him to such austerities.”
The philosopher here sets forth in his inimitable style a marked characteristic of religious acts. But he touches upon it with his usual superficiality. It is true that no religion has ever been content with promoting the happiness of man, and that the vast majority of votaries are always seeking to do something specifically religious, and are not satisfied with the moral only. The simple explanation of it is that the religious sentiment has a purpose entirely distinct from ethics, a purpose constantly felt as something peculiar to itself, though obscurely seen and often wholly misconceived. It is only when an action is utterly dissevered from other ends, and is purely and solely religious, that it can satisfy this sentiment. “La religion,” most truly observes Madame Necker de Saussure, “ne doit point avoir d’autre bût qu’elle même.”
The uniform prevalence of these ideas in rites may be illustrated from the simplest or the most elaborate. Father Brebeuf, missionary to the Hurons in 1636, has a chapter on their superstitions. He there tells us that this nation had two sorts of ceremonies, the one to induce the gods to grant good fortune, the other to appease them when some ill-luck had occurred. Before running a dangerous rapid in their frail canoes they would lay tobacco on a certain rock where the deity of the rapid was supposed to reside, and ask for safety in their voyage. They took tobacco and cast it in the fire, saying: “O Heaven (Aronhiaté), see, I give you something; aid me; cure this sickness of mine.” When one was drowned or died of cold, a feast was called, and the soft parts of the corpse were cut from the bones and burned to conciliate the personal god, while the women danced and chanted a melancholy strain. Here one sacrifice was to curry favor with the gods, another to soothe their anger, and the third was a rite, not a sacrifice, but done for a religious end, whose merit was specific performance.
As the gift was valued at what it cost the giver, and was supposed to be efficacious in this same ratio, self-denial soon passed into self-torture, prolonged fasts, scourging and lacerations, thus becoming legitimate exhibitions of religious fervor. As mental pain is as keen as bodily pain, the suffering of Jephthah was quite as severe as that of the Flagellants, and was expected to find favor in the eyes of the gods.
A significant corrollary from such a theory follows: that which is the efficacious part of the sacrifice is the suffering; given a certain degree of this, the desired effect will follow. As to what or who suffers, or in what manner he or it suffers, these are secondary considerations, even unimportant ones, so far as the end to be obtained is concerned. This is the germ of vicarious sacrifice, a plan frequently observed in even immature religions. What seems the diabolical cruelty of some superstitious rites, those of the Carthaginians and Celts, for example, is thoroughly consistent with the abstract theory of sacrifice, and did not spring from capricious malice. The Death of Christ, regarded as a general vicarious atonement, has had its efficiency explained directly by the theory that the pain he suffered partook of the infinity of his divine nature; as thus it was excruciating beyond measure, so it was infinitely effectual toward appeasing divinity.
It is well known that this doctrine was no innovation on the religious sentiment of the age when it was preached by the Greek fathers. For centuries the Egyptian priests had taught the incarnation and sufferings of Osiris, and his death for the salvation of his people. Similar myths were common throughout the Orient, all drawn from the reasoning I have mentioned.152
They have been variously criticized. Apart from the equivocal traits this theory of atonement attributes to the supernatural powers – a feature counterbalanced, in modern religion, by subduing its harshest features – it is rooted essentially in the material view of religion. The religious value of an act is to be appraised by the extent to which it follows recognition of duty. To acknowledge an error is unpleasant; to renounce it still more so, for it breaks a habit; to see our own errors in their magnitude, sullying our whole nature and reaching far ahead to generations yet unborn, is consummately bitter, and in proportion as it is bitter, will keep us from erring.153 This is the “sacrifice of a contrite heart,” which alone is not despicable; and this no one can do for us. We may be sure that neither the physical pain of victims burning in a slow fire, nor the mental pain of yielding up whatever we hold dearest upon earth, will make our views of duty a particle clearer or our notion of divinity a jot nobler; and whatever does neither of these is not of true religion.
The theory of sacrifice is intimately related with the idea of sin. In the quotation I have made from Father Brebeuf we see that the Hurons recognized a distinct form of rite as appropriate to appease a god when angered. It is a matter of national temperament which of these forms takes the lead. Joutel tells of a tribe in Texas who paid attention only to the gods who worked them harm, saying that the good gods were good anyhow. By parity of reasoning, one sect of Mohammedans worship the devil only. It is well to make friends with your enemy, and then he will not hurt you; and if a man is shielded from his enemies, he is safe enough.
But where, as in most Semitic, Celtic and various other religions, the chief gods frowned or smiled as they were propitiated or neglected, and when a certain amount of pain was the propitiation they demanded, the necessity of rendering this threw a dark shadow on life. What is the condition of man, that only through sorrow he can reach joy? He must be under a curse.
Physical and mental processes aided by analogy this gloomy deduction. It is only through pain that we are stimulated to the pursuit of pleasure, and the latter is a phantom we never catch. The laws of correct reasoning are those which alone should guide us; but the natural laws of the association of ideas do not at all correspond with the one association which reason accepts. Truth is what we are born for, error is what is given us.
Instead of viewing this state of things as one inseparable to the relative as another than the universal, and, instead of seeing the means of correcting it in the mental element of attention, continuance or volition, guided by experience and the growing clearness of the purposes of the laws of thought, the problem was given up as hopeless, and man was placed under a ban from which a god alone could set him free; he was sunk in original sin, chained to death.
To reach this result it is evident that a considerable effort at reasoning, a peculiar view of the nature of the gods, and a temperament not the most common, must be combined. Hence it was adopted as a religious dogma by but a few nations. The Chinese know nothing of the “sense of sin,” nor did the Greeks and Romans. The Parsees do not acknowledge it, nor do the American tribes. “To sin,” in their languages, does not mean to offend the deity, but to make a mistake, to miss the mark, to loose one’s way as in a wood, and the missionaries have exceeding difficulty in making them understand the theological signification of the word.
The second class of rites are memorial in character. As the former were addressed to the gods, so these are chiefly for the benefit of the people. They are didactic, to preserve the myth, or institutionary, to keep alive the discipline and forms of the church.
Of this class of rites it may broadly be said they are the myth dramatized. Indeed, the drama owes its origin to the mimicry by worshippers of the supposed doings of the gods. The most ancient festivals have reference to the recurrence of the seasons, and the ceremonies which mark them represent the mythical transactions which are supposed to govern the yearly changes. The god himself was often represented by the high priest, and masked figures took the parts of attendant deities.
Institutionary rites are those avowedly designed to commemorate a myth or event, and to strengthen thereby the religious organization. Christian baptism is by some denominations looked upon as a commemorative or institutionary rite only; and the same is the case with the Lord’s Supper. These seem to have been the only rites recommended, though the former was not practiced by Christ. In any ordinary meaning of his words, he regarded them both as institutionary.
The tendency of memorial to become propitiatory rites is visible in all materialistic religions. The procedure, from a simple commemorative act, acquires a mystic efficacy, a supernatural or spiritual power, often supposed to extend to the deity as well as the votary. Thus the Indian “rain-maker” will rattle his gourd, beat his drum, and blow through his pipe, to represent the thunder, lightning, and wind of the storm; and he believes that by this mimicry of the rain-god’s proceedings he can force him to send the wished-for showers. The charms, spells and incantations of sorcery have the same foundation. Equally visible is it in the reception of the Christian rites above mentioned, baptism and the Eucharist, as “sacraments,” as observances of divine efficacy in themselves. All such views arise from the material character of the religious wants.
The conclusion is that, while emblems and memorial rites have nothing in them which can mar, they also have nothing which can aid the growth and purity of the religious sentiment, beyond advancing its social relations; while symbols, in the proper sense of the term, and propitiatory rites, as necessarily false and without foundation, always degrade and obscure religious thought. Their prominence in a cult declines, as it rises in quality; and in a perfected scheme of worship they would have no place whatever.
THE MOMENTA OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
SUMMARY
National impulses and aims as historic ideas. Their recurrence and its explanation. Their permanence in relation to their truth and consciousness. The historic ideas in religious progress are chiefly three.
I. The Idea of the Perfected Individual.
First placed in physical strength. This gave way in Southern Europe to the idea of physical symmetry, a religion of beauty and art. Later days have produced the idea of mental symmetry, the religion of culture. All have failed, and why? The momenta of true religion in each.
II. The Idea of the Perfected Commonwealth.
Certain national temperaments predispose to individualism, others to communism. The social relations governed at first by divine law. Later, morality represents this law. The religion of conduct. The religion of sentiment and of humanity. Advantages and disadvantages in this idea.
Comparisons of these two ideas as completed respectively by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Auguste Comte.
III. The Idea of Personal Survival.
The doctrine of immortality the main moment in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Unfamiliar to old and simple faiths. Its energy and speculative relations. It is decreasing as a religious moment owing to, (1) a better understanding of ethics, (2) more accurate cosmical conceptions, (3) the clearer defining of life, (4) the increasing immateriality of religions.
The future and final moments of religious thought.
CHAPTER VII
THE MOMENTA OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
The records of the past can be studied variously. Events can be arranged in the order of their occurrence: this is chronology or annals; in addition to this, their connections and mutual relations as cause and effect may be shown: this is historical science; or, thirdly, from a general view of trains of related events some abstract aim as their final cause may be theoretically deduced and confirmed by experience: this is the philosophy of history. The doctrine of final causes, in its old form as the argumentum de appetitu, has been superseded. Function is not purpose; desire comes from the experience of pleasure, and realizes its dreams, if at all, by the slow development of capacity. The wish carries no warrant of gratification with it. No “argument from design” can be adduced from the region where the laws of physical necessity prevail. Those laws are not designed for an end.
When, however, in the unfolding of mind we reach the stage of notions, we observe a growing power to accomplish desire, not only by altering the individual or race organism, but also by bringing external objects into unison with the desire, reversing the process common in the life of sensation. This spectacle, however, is confined to man alone, and man as guided by prospective volition, that is, by an object ahead.
When some such object is common to a nation or race, it exercises a wide influence on its destiny, and is the key to much that otherwise would be inexplicable in its actions. What we call national hopes, ambitions and ideals are such objects. Sometimes they are distinctly recognized by the nation, sometimes they are pursued almost unconsciously. They do not correspond to things as they are, but as they are wished to be. Hence there is nothing in them to insure their realization. They are like an appetite, which may and may not develope the function which can gratify it. They have been called “historic ideas,” and their consideration is a leading topic in modern historical science.
Reason claims the power of criticizing such ideas, and of distinguishing in them between what is true and therefore obtainable, and what is false and therefore chimerical or even destructive. This is the province of the philosophy of history. It guides itself by those general principles for the pursuit of truth which have been noticed in brief in the earlier pages of this book. Looking before as well as after, it aspires in the united light of experience and the laws of mind, to construct for the race an ideal within the reach of its capacities, yet which will develope them to the fullest extent, a pole-star to which it can trust in this night teeming with will-o’-the wisps.
The opinion that the history of mind is a progress whose end will be worth more than was its beginning, may not prove true in fact – the concrete expression never wholly covers the abstract requirements – but it is undoubtedly true in theory. The progress, so far, has been by no means a lineal one – each son a better man than his father – nor even, as some would have it, a spiral one – periodical recurrences to the same historical ideas, but each recurrence a nearer approach to the philosophical idea – but it has been far more complex and irregular than any geometrical figure will illustrate. These facile generalizations do not express it.
Following the natural laws of thought man has erred infinitely, and his errors have worked their sure result – they have destroyed him. There is no “relish of salvation” in an error; otherwise than that it is sure to kill him who obstructs the light by harboring it. There is no sort of convertability of the false into the true, as shallow thinkers of the day teach.
Man has only escaped death when at first by a lucky chance, and then by personal and inherited experience, his thoughts drifted or were forced into conformity with the logical laws of thought.
A historic idea is a complex product formed of numerous conceptions, some true and others false. Its permanency and efficacy are in direct proportion to the number and clearness of the former it embraces. When it is purging itself of the latter, the nation is progressive; when the false are retained, their poison spreads and the nation decays.
The periodical recurrence of historic ideas is one of their most striking features. The explanations offered for it have been various. The ancient doctrines of an exact repetition of events in the cycles of nature, and of the transmigration of souls, drew much support from it; and the modern modification of the latter theory as set forth by Wordsworth and Lessing, are distinctly derived from the same source. Rightly elucidated, the philosophical historian will find in it an invaluable clue to the unravelment of the tangled skein of human endeavor.
Historic periodicity is on the one side an organic law of memory, dependent upon the revival of transmitted ancestral impressions. A prevailing idea though over-cultivation exhausts its organic correlate, and leads to defective nutrition of that part in the offspring. Hence they do not pursue the same idea as their fathers, but revert to a remoter ancestral historic idea, the organic correlate of which has lain fallow, thus gained strength. It is brought forth as new, receives additions by contiguity and similarity, is ardently pursued, over-cultivated, and in time supplanted by another revival.
But this material side corresponds to an all-important mental one. As an organic process only, the history of periodic ideas is thus satisfactorily explained, but he who holds this explanation to be exhaustive sees but half the problem.
The permanence of a historic idea, I have stated, is in direct proportion to the number of true ideas in its composition; the impression it makes on the organic substrata of memory is in turn in proportion to its permanence. The element of decay is the destructive effects of natural trains of thought out of accord with the logically true trains. These cause defective cerebral nutrition, which is thus seen to arise, so far as influenced by the operations of the memory, from relations of truth and error. There is a physiological tendency in the former to preserve and maintain in activity; in the latter to disappear. The percentage of true concepts which makes up the complexity of a historic idea gives the principal factor towards calculating its probable recurrence. Of course, a second factor is the physiological one of nutrition itself.
The next important distinction in discussing historic ideas is between those which are held consciously, and those which operate unconsciously. The former are always found to be more active, and more amenable to correction. An unconscious idea is a product of the natural, not the logical laws of mind, and is therefore very apt to be largely false. It is always displaced with advantage by a conscious aim.
One of the superficial fallacies of the day, which pass under the name of philosophy, is to maintain that any such historic idea is the best possible one for the time and place in which it is found. I am led to refer to this by the false light it has thrown on religious history. Herbert Spencer remarks in one of his essays:154 “All religious creeds, during the eras in which they are severally held, are the best that could be held.” “All are good for their times and places.” So far from this being the case, there never has been a religion but that an improvement in it would have straightway exerted a beneficent effect. Man, no matter what his condition, can always derive immediate good from higher conceptions of Deity than he himself has elaborated. Nor is the highest conception possible an idealization of self, as I have sufficiently shown in a previous chapter, but is one drawn wholly from the realm of the abstract. Moreover, as a matter of history, we know that in abundant instances, the decay of nations can be traced largely to the base teachings of their religious instructors. To maintain that such religions were “the best possible ones” for the time and place is the absurdest optimism. In what a religion shares of the abstractly true it is beneficent; in what it partakes of the untrue it is deleterious. This, and no other canon, must be our guide.
The ideas of religious history obey the same laws as other historic ideas. They grow, decay, are supplanted and revive again in varying guises, in accordance with the processes of organic nutrition as influenced by the truth or falsity of their component ideas. Their tendency to personification is stronger, because of the much greater nearness they have to the individual desire. The one aspiration of a high-spirited people when subjugated will be freedom; and in the lower stages of culture they will be very certain to fabricate a myth of a deliverer to come.
In like manner, every member of a community shares with his fellow members some wish, hope or ambition dependent on unknown control and therefore religious in character, which will become the “formative idea” of the national religious development.
Of the various ideas in religious history there are three which, through their permanence and frequent revival, we may justly suppose in accordance with the above-mentioned canons to contain a large measure of truth, and yet to be far from wholly true. They may be considered as leading moments in religious growth, yet withal lacking something or other essential to the satisfaction of the religious sentiment. The first of these is the idea of the perfected individual; the second the idea of the perfected commonwealth; the third, that of personal survival. These have been the formative ideas (Ideen der Gestaltung) in the prayers, myths, rites and religious institutions of many nations at widely separated times.
Of the two first mentioned it may be said that every extended faith has accepted them to some degree. They are the secret of the alliances of religion with art, with government, with ethics, with science, education and sentiment.
These alliances have often been taken by historians to contain the vital elements of religion itself, and many explanations based on one or another assumption of the kind have been proffered. Religion, while it may embrace any of them, is independent of them all. Its relations to them have been transitory, and the more so as their aims have been local and material. The brief duration of the subjection of religion to such incongenial ties was well compared by Lord Herbert of Cherbury to the early maturity of brutes, who attain their full growth in a year or two, while man needs a quarter of a century.155 The inferior aims of the religious sentiment were discarded one after another to make way for higher ones, which were slowly dawning upon it. In this progress it was guided largely by the three ideas I have mentioned, which have been in many forms leading stimuli of the religious thought of the race.
First, of the idea of the perfected individual.
Many writers have supposed that the contemplation of Power in nature first stirred religious thought in man. Though this is not the view taken in this book, no one will question that the leading trait in the gods of barbarism is physical strength. The naive anthropomorphism of the savage makes his a god of a mighty arm, a giant in stature, puissant and terrible. He hurls the thunderbolt, and piles up the mountains in sport. His name is often The Strong One, as in the Allah, Eloah of the Semitic tongues. Hercules, Chon, Melkarth, Dorsanes, Thor and others were of the most ancient divinities in Greece, Egypt, Phœnicia, India, and Scandinavia, and were all embodiments of physical force. Such, too, was largely the character of the Algonkin Messou, who scooped out the great lakes with his hands and tore up the largest trees by the roots. The huge boulders from the glacial epoch which are scattered over their country are the pebbles he tossed in play or in anger. The cleft in the Andes, through which flows the river Funha, was opened by a single blow of Nemqueteba, chief god of the Muyscas. In all such and a hundred similar legends, easy to quote, we see the notion of strength, brute force, muscular power, was that deemed most appropriate to divinity, and that which he who would be godlike must most sedulously seek. When filled with the god, the votary felt a surpassing vigor. The Berserker fury was found in the wilds of America and Africa, as well as among the Fiords. Sickness and weakness, on the contrary, were signs that the gods were against him. Therefore, in all early stages of culture, the office of priest and physician was one. Conciliation of the gods was the catholicon.
Such deities were fearful to behold. They are represented as mighty of stature and terrible of mien, calculated to appal, not attract, to inspire fear, not to kindle love. In tropical America, in Egypt, in Thibet, almost where you will, there is little to please the eye in the pictures and statues of deities.
In Greece alone, a national temperament, marvellously sensitive to symmetry, developed the combination of maximum strength with perfect form in the sun-god, Apollo, and of grace with beauty in Aphrodite. The Greeks were the apostles of the religion of beauty. Their philosophic thought saw the permanent in the Form, which outlives strength, and is that alone in which the race has being. In its transmission love is the agent, and Aphrodite, unmatched in beauty and mother of love, was a creation worthy of their devotion. Thus with them the religious sentiment still sought its satisfaction in the individual, not indeed in the muscle, but in the feature and expression.
When the old gods fell, the Christian fathers taught their flocks to abhor the beautiful as one with the sensual. St. Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian describe Christ as ugly of visage and undersized, a sort of Socrates in appearance.156 Christian art was long in getting recognition. The heathens were the first to represent in picture and statues Christ and the apostles, and for long the fathers of the church opposed the multiplication of such images, saying that the inward beauty was alone desirable. Christian art reached its highest inspiration under the influence of Greek culture after the fall of Constantinople. In the very year, however, that Rafaello Sanzio met his premature death, Luther burned the decretals of the pope in the market-place of Wittenberg, and preached a doctrine as hostile to art as was that of Eusebius and Chrysostom. There was no longer any hope for the religion of beauty.
Nevertheless, under the influence of the revival of ancient art which arose with Winckelmann towards the close of the last century, a gospel of esthetics was preached. Its apostles were chiefly Germans, and among them Schiller and Goethe are not inconspicuous names. The latter, before his long life was closed, began to see the emptiness of such teachings, and the violence perpetrated on the mind by forcing on the religious sentiment the food fit only for the esthetic emotions.
The highest conception of individual perfection is reached in a character whose physical and mental powers are symmetrically trained, and always directed by conscious reason to their appropriate ends. Self-government, founded on self-knowledge, wards off the pangs of disappointment by limiting ambition to the attainable. The affections and emotions, and the pleasures of sensation as well, are indulged in or abstained from, but never to the darkening of the intellect. All the talents are placed at usury; every power exercised systematically and fruitfully with a consecration to a noble purpose.
This is the religion of culture. None other ranks among its adherents so many great minds; men, as Carlyle expresses it, of much religiosity, if of little religion. The ideal is a taking one. Such utter self-reliance, not from ignorance, but from the perfection of knowledge, was that which Buddha held up to his followers: “Self is the God of self; who else should be the God?” In this century Goethe, Wordsworth, beyond all others Wilhelm von Humboldt, have set forth this ideal. Less strongly intellectual natures, as Maine de Biran, De Senancourt, and Matthew Arnold, listen with admiration, but feel how unknown to the mass of human kind must remain the tongue these masters speak.