GOD AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION
I was once escorted over the Roman foundations of an ancient British
city by a professor, who said something that seems to me a satire on a
good many other professors. Possibly the professor saw the joke, though
he maintained an iron gravity, and may or may not have realised that it
was a joke against a great deal of what is called comparative religion.
I pointed out a sculpture of the head of the sun with the usual halo of
rays, but with the difference that the face in the disc, instead of
being boyish like Apollo, was bearded like Neptune or Jupiter. ‘Yes,’ he
said with a certain delicate exactitude, ‘that is supposed to represent
the local god Sul. The best authorities identify Sul with Minerva; but
this has been held to show that the identification is not complete.’
That is what we call a powerful understatement. The modern world is
madder than any satires on it; long ago Mr. Belloc made his burlesque
don say that a bust of Ariadne had been proved by modern research to be
a Silenus. But that is not better than the real appearance of Minerva as
the Bearded Woman of Mr. Barnum. Only both of them are very like many
identifications by ‘the best authorities’ on comparative religion; and
when Catholic creeds are identified with various wild myths, I do not
laugh or curse or misbehave myself; I confine myself decorously to
saying that the identification is not complete.
In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly
applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped
corporate mankind as a Supreme Being. Even in the days of my youth I
remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising and
dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal
contradiction; and then asking us to adore a deity who is a hundred
million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing
the substance.
But there is another entity, more or less definable and much more
imaginable than the many-headed and monstrous idol of mankind. And it
has a much better right to be called, in a reasonable sense, the
religion of humanity. Man is not indeed the idol; but man is almost
everywhere the idolator. And these multitudinous idolatries of mankind
have something about them in many ways more human and sympathetic than
modern metaphysical abstractions. If an Asiatic god has three heads and
seven arms, there is at least in it an idea of material incarnation
bringing an unknown power nearer to us and not farther away. But if our
friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson, when out for a Sunday walk, were
transformed and amalgamated into an Asiatic idol before our eyes, they
would surely seem farther away. If the arms of Brown and the legs of
Robinson waved from the same composite body, they would seem to be
waving something of a sad farewell. If the heads of all three gentlemen
appeared smiling on the same neck, we should hesitate even by what name
to address our new and somewhat abnormal friend. In the many-headed and
many-handed Oriental idol there is a certain sense of mysteries becoming
at least partly intelligible; of formless forces of nature taking some
dark but material form, but though this may be true of the multiform god
it is not so of the multiform man. The human beings become less human by
becoming less separate; we might say less human in being less lonely.
The human beings become less intelligible as they become less isolated;
we might say with strict truth that the closer they are to us the
farther they are away. An Ethical Hymn-book of this humanitarian sort of
religion was carefully selected and expurgated on the principle of
preserving anything human and eliminating anything divine. One
consequence was that a hymn appeared in the amended form of ‘Nearer
Mankind to Thee, Nearer to Thee.’ It always suggested to me the
sensations of a strap-hanger during a crush on the Tube. But it is
strange and wonderful how far away the souls of men can seem, when their
bodies are so near as all that.
The human unity with which I deal here is not to be confounded with this
modern industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a congestion
than a communion. It is a thing to which human groups left to
themselves, and even human individuals left to themselves, have
everywhere tended by an instinct that may truly be called human. Like
all healthy human things, it has varied very much within the limits of a
general character; for that is characteristic of everything belonging to
that ancient land of liberty that lies before and around the servile
industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that its products are all
of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the same seal and
drink the same bad whisky, that a man at the North Pole and another at
the South might recognise the same optimistic label on the same dubious
tinned salmon. But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with every
valley and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any
wine once reminding us of whisky; and cheeses can change from county to
county without forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese. When
I am speaking of this thing, therefore, I am speaking of something that
doubtless includes very wide differences; nevertheless I will here
maintain that it is one thing. I will maintain that most of the modern
botheration comes from not realising that it is really one thing. I will
advance the thesis that before all talk about comparative religion and
the separate religious founders of the world, the first essential is to
recognise this thing as a whole, as a thing almost native and normal to
the great fellowship that we call mankind. This thing is Paganism; and I
propose to show in these pages that it is the one real rival to the
Church of Christ.
Comparative religion is very comparative indeed. That is, it is so much
a matter of degree and distance and difference that it is only
comparatively successful when it tries to compare. When we come to look
at it closely we find it comparing things that are really quite
incomparable. We are accustomed to see a table or catalogue of the
world’s great religions in parallel columns, until we fancy they are
really parallel. We are accustomed to see the names of the great
religious founders all in a row: Christ; Mahomet; Buddha; Confucius. But
in truth this is only a trick; another of these optical illusions by
which any objects may be put into a particular relation by shifting to a
particular point of sight. Those religions and religious founders, or
rather those whom we choose to lump together as religions and religious
founders, do not really show any common character. The illusion is
partly produced by Islam coming immediately after Christianity in the
list; as Islam did come after Christianity and was largely an imitation
of Christianity. But the other eastern religions, or what we call
religions, not only do not resemble the Church but do not resemble each
other. When we come to Confucianism at the end of the list, we come to
something in a totally different world of thought. To compare the
Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an
English squire or asking whether a man is a believer in immortality or a
hundred-per-cent American. Confucianism may be a civilisation but it is
not a religion.
In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most
popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel. It
is not easy, therefore, to expose the fallacy by which a false
classification is created to swamp a unique thing, when it really is a
unique thing. As there is nowhere else exactly the same fact, so there
is nowhere else exactly the same fallacy. But I will take the nearest
thing I can find to such a solitary social phenomenon, in order to show
how it is thus swamped and assimilated. I imagine most of us would agree
that there is something unusual and unique about the position of the
Jews. There is nothing that is quite in the same sense an international
nation; an ancient culture scattered in different countries but still
distinct and indestructible. Now this business is like an attempt to
make a list of nomadic nations in order to soften the strange solitude
of the Jew. It would be easy enough to do it, by the same process of
putting a plausible approximation first, and then tailing off into
totally different things thrown in somehow to make up the list. Thus in
the new list of nomadic nations the Jews would be followed by the
Gypsies; who at least are really nomadic if they are not really
national. Then the professor of the new science of Comparative Nomadics
could pass easily on to something different; even if it was very
different. He could remark on the wandering adventure of the English who
had scattered their colonies over so many seas; and call _them_ nomads.
It is quite true that a great many Englishmen seem to be strangely
restless in England. It is quite true that not all of them have left
their country for their country’s good. The moment we mention the
wandering empire of the English, we must add the strange exiled empire
of the Irish. For it is a curious fact, to be noted in our imperial
literature, that the same ubiquity and unrest which is a proof of
English enterprise and triumph is a proof of Irish futility and failure.
Then the professor of Nomadism would look round thoughtfully and
remember that there was great talk recently of German waiters, German
barbers, German clerks, Germans naturalising themselves in England and
the United States and the South American republics. The Germans would go
down as the fifth nomadic race; the words Wanderlust and Folk-Wandering
would come in very useful here. For there really have been historians
who explained the Crusades by suggesting that the Germans were found
wandering (as the police say) in what happened to be the neighbourhood
of Palestine. Then the professor, feeling he was now near the end, would
make a last leap in desperation. He would recall the fact that the
French Army has captured nearly every capital in Europe, that it marched
across countless conquered lands under Charlemagne or Napoleon; and
_that_ would be wanderlust, and _that_ would be the note of a nomadic
race. Thus he would have his six nomadic nations all compact and
complete, and would feel that the Jew was no longer a sort of mysterious
and even mystical exception. But people with more common sense would
probably realise that he had only extended nomadism by extending the
meaning of nomadism; and that he had extended that until it really had
no meaning at all. It is quite true that the French soldier has made
some of the finest marches in all military history. But it is equally
true, and far more self-evident, that if the French peasant is not a
rooted reality there is no such thing as a rooted reality in the world;
or in other words, if he is a nomad there is nobody who is not a nomad.
Now that is the sort of trick that has been tried in the case of
comparative religion and the world’s religious founders all standing
respectably in a row. It seeks to classify Jesus as the other would
classify Jews, by inventing a new class for the purpose and filling up
the rest of it with stop-gaps and second-rate copies. I do not mean that
these other things are not often great things in their own real
character and class. Confucianism and Buddhism are great things, but it
is not true to call them Churches; just as the French and English are
great peoples, but it is nonsense to call them nomads. There are some
points of resemblance between Christendom and its imitation in Islam;
for that matter there are some points of resemblance between Jews and
Gypsies. But after that the lists are made up of anything that comes to
hand; of anything that can be put in the same catalogue without being in
the same category.
In this sketch of religious history, with all decent deference to men
much more learned than myself, I propose to cut across and disregard
this modern method of classification, which I feel sure has falsified
the facts of history. I shall here submit an alternative classification
of religion or religions, which I believe would be found to cover all
the facts and, what is quite as important here, all the fancies. Instead
of dividing religion geographically, and as it were vertically, into
Christian, Moslem, Brahmin, Buddhist, and so on, I would divide it
psychologically and in some sense horizontally; into the strata of
spiritual elements and influences that could sometimes exist in the same
country, or even in the same man. Putting the Church apart for the
moment, I should be disposed to divide the natural religion of the mass
of mankind under such headings as these: God; the Gods; the Demons; the
Philosophers. I believe some such classification will help us to sort
out the spiritual experiences of men much more successfully than the
conventional business of comparing religions; and that many famous
figures will naturally fall into their place in this way who are only
forced into their place in the other. As I shall make use of these
titles or terms more than once in narrative and allusion, it will be
well to define at this stage for what I mean them to stand. And I will
begin with the first, the simplest and the most sublime, in this
chapter.
In considering the elements of pagan humanity, we must begin by an
attempt to describe the indescribable. Many get over the difficulty of
describing it by the expedient of denying it, or at least ignoring it;
but the whole point of it is that it was something that was never quite
eliminated even when it was ignored. They are obsessed by their
evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or
something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes
from a tree, or from something larger than itself. Now there is very
good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some
detail that was forgotten because it was too small to be traced. Much
more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large
to be managed. There is very good reason to suppose that many people did
begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all;
and afterwards fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a
sort of secret dissipation. Even the test of savage beliefs, of which
the folk-lore students are so fond, is admittedly often found to support
such a view. Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense
in which anthropologists use the word, the Australian aborigines for
instance, are found to have a pure monotheism with a high moral tone. A
missionary was preaching to a very wild tribe of polytheists, who had
told him all their polytheistic tales, and telling them in return of the
existence of the one good God who is a spirit and judges men by
spiritual standards. And there was a sudden buzz of excitement among
these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was letting out a secret,
and they cried to each other, ‘Atahocan! He is speaking of Atahocan!’
Probably it was a point of politeness and even decency among those
polytheists not to speak of Atahocan. The name is not perhaps so much
adapted as some of our own to direct and solemn religious exhortation;
but many other social forces are always covering up and confusing such
simple ideas. Possibly the old god stood for an old morality found
irksome in more expansive moments; possibly intercourse with demons was
more fashionable among the best people, as in the modern fashion of
Spiritualism. Anyhow, there are any number of similar examples. They all
testify to the unmistakable psychology of a thing taken for granted, as
distinct from a thing talked about. There is a striking example in a
tale taken down word for word from a Red Indian in California, which
starts out with hearty legendary and literary relish: ‘The sun is the
father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his
wife and the stars are their children’; and so on through a most
ingenious and complicated story, in the middle of which is a sudden
parenthesis saying that sun and moon have to do something because ‘It is
ordered that way by the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.’
That is exactly the attitude of most paganism towards God. He is
something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident; a habit
possibly not peculiar to pagans. Sometimes the higher deity is
remembered in the higher moral grades and is a sort of mystery. But
always, it has been truly said, the savage is talkative about his
mythology and taciturn about his religion. The Australian savages,
indeed, exhibit a topsyturvydom such as the ancients might have thought
truly worthy of the antipodes. The savage who thinks nothing of tossing
off such a trifle as a tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a
baby chopped in two, or dropping into small-talk about a colossal cosmic
cow milked to make the rain, merely in order to be sociable, will then
retire to secret caverns sealed against women and white men, temples of
terrible initiation where to the thunder of the bull-roarer and the
dripping of sacrificial blood, the priest whispers the final secrets
known only to the initiate: that honesty is the best policy, that a
little kindness does nobody any harm, that all men are brothers and that
there is but one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible
and invisible.
In other words, we have here the curiosity of religious history that the
savage seems to be parading all the most repulsive and impossible parts
of his belief and concealing all the most sensible and creditable parts.
But the explanation is that they are not in that sense parts of his
belief; or at least not parts of the same sort of belief. The myths are
merely tall stories, though as tall as the sky, the waterspout, or the
tropic rain. The mysteries are true stories, and are taken secretly that
they may be taken seriously. Indeed it is only too easy to forget that
there is a thrill in theism. A novel in which a number of separate
characters all turned out to be the same character would certainly be a
sensational novel. It is so with the idea that sun and tree and river
are the disguises of one god and not of many. Alas, we also find it only
too easy to take Atahocan for granted. But whether he is allowed to fade
into a truism or preserved as a sensation by being preserved as a
secret, it is clear that he is always either an old truism or an old
tradition. There is nothing to show that he is an improved product of
the mere mythology and everything to show that he preceded it. He is
worshipped by the simplest tribes with no trace of ghosts or
grave-offerings, or any of the complications in which Herbert Spencer
and Grant Allen sought the origin of the simplest of all ideas. Whatever
else there was, there was never any such thing as the Evolution of the
Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten,
was even explained away; but it was never evolved. There are not a few
indications of this change in other places. It is implied, for
instance, in the fact that even polytheism seems often the combination
of several monotheisms. A god will gain only a minor seat on Mount
Olympus, when he had owned earth and heaven and all the stars while he
lived in his own little valley. Like many a small nation melting in a
great empire, he gives up local universality only to come under
universal limitation. The very name of Pan suggests that he became a god
of the wood when he had been a god of the world. The very name of
Jupiter is almost a pagan translation of the words ‘Our Father which art
in heaven.’ As with the Great Father symbolised by the sky, so with the
Great Mother whom we still call Mother Earth. Demeter and Ceres and
Cybele often seem to be almost incapable of taking over the whole
business of godhood, so that men should need no other gods. It seems
reasonably probable that a good many men did have no other gods but one
of these, worshipped as the author of all.
Over some of the most immense and populous tracts of the world, such as
China, it would seem that the simpler idea of the Great Father has never
been very much complicated with rival cults, though it may have in some
sense ceased to be a cult itself. The best authorities seem to think
that though Confucianism is in one sense agnosticism, it does not
directly contradict the old theism, precisely because it has become a
rather vague theism. It is one in which God is called Heaven, as in the
case of polite persons tempted to swear in drawing-rooms. But Heaven is
still overhead, even if it is very far overhead. We have all the
impression of a simple truth that has receded, until it was remote
without ceasing to be true. And this phrase alone would bring us back to
the same idea even in the pagan mythology of the West. There is surely
something of this very notion of the withdrawal of some higher power in
all those mysterious and very imaginative myths about the separation of
earth and sky. In a hundred forms we are told that heaven and earth were
once lovers, or were once at one, when some upstart thing, often some
undutiful child, thrust them apart; and the world was built on an abyss;
upon a division and a parting. One of its grossest versions was given by
Greek civilisation in the myth of Uranus and Saturn. One of its most
charming versions was that of some savage people, who say that a little
pepper-plant grew taller and taller and lifted the whole sky like a lid;
a beautiful barbaric vision of daybreak for some of our painters who
love that tropical twilight. Of myths, and the highly mythical
explanations which the moderns offer of myths, something will be said in
another section; for I cannot but think that most mythology is on
another and more superficial plane. But in this primeval vision of the
rending of one world into two there is surely something more of ultimate
ideas. As to what it means, a man will learn far more about it by lying
on his back in a field, and merely looking at the sky, than by reading
all the libraries even of the most learned and valuable folk-lore. He
will know what is meant by saying that the sky ought to be nearer to us
than it is, that perhaps it was once nearer than it is, that it is not a
thing merely alien and abysmal but in some fashion sundered from us and
saying farewell. There will creep across his mind the curious suggestion
that after all, perhaps, the myth-maker was not merely a moon-calf or
village idiot thinking he could cut up the clouds like a cake, but had
in him something more than it is fashionable to attribute to the
Troglodyte; that it is just possible that Thomas Hood was not talking
like a Troglodyte when he said that, as time went on, the tree-tops only
told him he was further off from heaven than when he was a boy. But
anyhow the legend of Uranus the Lord of Heaven dethroned by Saturn the
Time Spirit would mean something to the author of that poem. And it
would mean, among other things, this banishment of the first
fatherhood. There is the idea of God in the very notion that there were
gods before the gods. There is an idea of greater simplicity in all the
allusions to that more ancient order. The suggestion is supported by the
process of propagation we see in historic times. Gods and demigods and
heroes breed like herrings before our very eyes, and suggest of
themselves that the family may have had one founder; mythology grows
more and more complicated, and the very complication suggests that at
the beginning it was more simple. Even on the external evidence, of the
sort called scientific, there is therefore a very good case for the
suggestion that man began with monotheism before it developed or
degenerated into polytheism. But I am concerned rather with an internal
than an external truth; and, as I have already said, the internal truth
is almost indescribable. We have to speak of something of which it is
the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not merely to
translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.
I suspect an immense implication behind all polytheism and paganism. I
suspect we have only a hint of it here and there in these savage creeds
or Greek origins. It is not exactly what we mean by the presence of God;
in a sense it might more truly be called the absence of God. But absence
does not mean non-existence; and a man drinking the toast of absent
friends does not mean that from his life all friendship is absent. It is
a void but it is not a negation; it is something as positive as an empty
chair. It would be an exaggeration to say that the pagan saw higher than
Olympus an empty throne. It would be nearer the truth to take the
gigantic imagery of the Old Testament, in which the prophet saw God from
behind; it was as if some immeasurable presence had turned its back on
the world. Yet the meaning will again be missed if it is supposed to be
anything so conscious and vivid as the monotheism of Moses and his
people. I do not mean that the pagan peoples were in the least
overpowered by this idea merely because it is overpowering. On the
contrary, it was so large that they all carried it lightly, as we all
carry the load of the sky. Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud,
we can all ignore its awful blue background; we can neglect the sky; and
precisely because it bears down upon us with an annihilating force, it
is felt as nothing. A thing of this kind can only be an impression and a
rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made
by pagan literature and religion. I repeat that in our special
sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence of
God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of
God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt
if there was ever in all the marvellous manhood of antiquity a man who
was happy as St. Francis was happy. We feel it in the legend of a Golden
Age and again in the vague implication that the gods themselves are
ultimately related to something else, even when that Unknown God has
faded into a Fate. Above all we feel it in those immortal moments when
the pagan literature seems to return to a more innocent antiquity and
speak with a more direct voice, so that no word is worthy of it except
our own monotheistic monosyllable. We cannot say anything but ‘God’ in a
sentence like that of Socrates bidding farewell to his judges: ‘I go to
die and you remain to live; and God alone knows which of us goes the
better way.’ We can use no other word even for the best moments of
Marcus Aurelius: ‘Can they say dear city of Cecrops, and canst thou not
say dear city of God?’ We can use no other word in that mighty line in
which Virgil spoke to all who suffer with the veritable cry of a
Christian before Christ, in the untranslatable: ‘O passi graviora dabit
deus his quoque finem.’
In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher than the
gods; but because it is higher it is also further away. Not yet could
even Virgil have read the riddle and the paradox of that other divinity,
who is both higher and nearer. For them what was truly divine was very
distant, so distant that they dismissed it more and more from their
minds. It had less and less to do with the mere mythology of which I
shall write later. Yet even in this there was a sort of tacit admission
of its intangible purity, when we consider what most of the mythology is
like. As the Jews would not degrade it by images, so the Greeks did not
degrade it even by imaginations. When the gods were more and more
remembered only by pranks and profligacies, it was relatively a movement
of reverence. It was an act of piety to forget God. In other words,
there is something in the whole tone of the time suggesting that men had
accepted a lower level, and still were half conscious that it was a
lower level. It is hard to find words for these things; yet the one
really just word stands ready. These men were conscious of the Fall, if
they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of all heathen
humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they
forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at
the back of all pagan sentiment. There is such a thing as the momentary
power to remember that we forget. And the most ignorant of humanity know
by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven. But it
remains true that even for these men there were moments, like the
memories of childhood, when they heard themselves talking with a simpler
language; there were moments when the Roman, like Virgil in the line
already quoted, cut his way with a sword-stroke of song out of the
tangle of the mythologies; the motley mob of gods and goddesses sank
suddenly out of sight and the Sky-Father was alone in the sky.
This latter example is very relevant to the next step in the process. A
white light as of a lost morning still lingers on the figure of Jupiter,
of Pan, or of the elder Apollo; and it may well be, as already noted,
that each was once a divinity as solitary as Jehovah or Allah. They lost
this lonely universality by a process it is here very necessary to note;
a process of amalgamation very like what was afterwards called
syncretism. The whole pagan world set itself to build a Pantheon. They
admitted more and more gods, gods not only of the Greeks but of the
barbarians; gods not only of Europe but of Asia and Africa. The more the
merrier, though some of the Asian and African ones were not very merry.
They admitted them to equal thrones with their own; sometimes they
identified them with their own. They may have regarded it as an
enrichment of their religious life; but it meant the final loss of all
that we now call religion. It meant that ancient light of simplicity,
that had a single source like the sun, finally fades away in a dazzle of
conflicting lights and colours. God is really sacrificed to the gods; in
a very literal sense of the flippant phrase, they have been too many for
him.
Polytheism, therefore, was really a sort of pool; in the sense of the
pagans having consented to the pooling of their pagan religions. And
this point is very important in many controversies ancient and modern.
It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing to say that the god of
the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought
themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the
gods of the city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming
down from the mountains or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of
the woods. But exactly what it lost by these larger ideas is the largest
idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole
world one. And the converse is also true. Doubtless those more
antiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and
their single sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages
benighted and left behind. But these superstitious savages were
preserving something that is much more like the cosmic power as
conceived by philosophy, or even as conceived by science. This paradox
by which the rude reactionary was a sort of prophetic progressive has
one consequence very much to the point. In a purely historical sense,
and apart from any other controversies in the same connection, it throws
a light, a single and a steady light, that shines from the beginning on
a little and lonely people. In this paradox, as in some riddle of
religion of which the answer was sealed up for centuries, lies the
mission and the meaning of the Jews.
It is true in this sense, humanly speaking, that the world owes God to
the Jews. It owes that truth to much that is blamed in the Jews,
possibly to much that is blameable in the Jews. We have already noted
the nomadic position of the Jews amid the other pastoral peoples upon
the fringe of the Babylonian Empire, and something of that strange
erratic course of theirs blazed across the dark territory of extreme
antiquity, as they passed from the seat of Abraham and the shepherd
princes into Egypt and doubled back into the Palestinian hills and held
them against the Philistines from Crete and fell into captivity in
Babylon; and yet again returned to their mountain city by the Zionist
policy of the Persian conquerors; and so continued that amazing romance
of restlessness of which we have not yet seen the end. But through all
their wanderings, and especially through all their early wanderings,
they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle,
that held perhaps a featureless symbol and certainly an invisible god.
We may say that one most essential feature was that it was featureless.
Much as we may prefer that creative liberty which the Christian culture
has declared and by which it has eclipsed even the arts of antiquity, we
must not underrate the determining importance at the time of the Hebrew
inhibition of images. It is a typical example of one of those
limitations that did in fact preserve and perpetuate enlargement, like a
wall built round a wide open space. The God who could not have a statue
remained a spirit. Nor would his statue in any case have had the
disarming dignity and grace of the Greek statues then or the Christian
statues afterwards. He was living in a land of monsters. We shall have
occasion to consider more fully what those monsters were, Moloch and
Dagon and Tanit the terrible goddess. If the deity of Israel had ever
had an image, he would have had a phallic image. By merely giving him a
body they would have brought in all the worst elements of mythology; all
the polygamy of polytheism; the vision of the harem in heaven. This
point about the refusal of art is the first example of the limitations
which are often adversely criticised, only because the critics
themselves are limited. But an even stronger case can be found in the
other criticism offered by the same critics. It is often said with a
sneer that the God of Israel was only a God of Battles, ‘a mere barbaric
Lord of Hosts’ pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their
envious foe. Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles. Well
it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the
ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved
the desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend. It would have been
only too easy for them to have seen him stretching out his hands in love
and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing the painted face of
Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods; the last god to sell his
crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian pantheon or the nectar of
Olympus or the mead of Valhalla. It would have been easy enough for his
worshippers to follow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the
pooling of all the pagan traditions. It is obvious indeed that his
followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the
almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to
the divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and
ruin. The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that
contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a
real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of
Israel. As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of
confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow,
precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the
primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal.
He was as narrow as the universe.
In a word, there was a popular pagan god called Jupiter-Ammon. There was
never a god called Jehovah-Ammon. There was never a god called
Jehovah-Jupiter. If there had been, there would certainly have been
another called Jehovah-Moloch. Long before the liberal and enlightened
amalgamators had got so far afield as Jupiter, the image of the Lord of
Hosts would have been deformed out of all suggestion of a monotheistic
maker and ruler and would have become an idol far worse than any savage
fetish; for he might have been as civilised as the gods of Tyre and
Carthage. What that civilisation meant we shall consider more fully in
the chapter that follows; when we note how the power of demons nearly
destroyed Europe and even the heathen health of the world. But the
world’s destiny would have been distorted still more fatally if
monotheism had failed in the Mosaic tradition. I hope in a subsequent
section to show that I am not without sympathy with all that health in
the heathen world that made its fairy-tales and its fanciful romances
of religion. But I hope also to show that these were bound to fail in
the long run; and the world would have been lost if it had been unable
to return to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all
things. That we do preserve something of that primary simplicity, that
poets and philosophers can still indeed in some sense say an Universal
Prayer, that we live in a large and serene world under a sky that
stretches paternally over all the peoples of the earth, that philosophy
and philanthropy are truisms in a religion of reasonable men, all that
we do most truly owe, under heaven, to a secretive and restless nomadic
people; who bestowed on men the supreme and serene blessing of a jealous
God.
The unique possession was not available or accessible to the pagan
world, because it was also the possession of a jealous people. The Jews
were unpopular, partly because of this narrowness already noted in the
Roman world, partly perhaps because they had already fallen into that
habit of merely handling things for exchange instead of working to make
them with their hands. It was partly also because polytheism had become
a sort of jungle in which solitary monotheism could be lost; but it is
strange to realise how completely it really was lost. Apart from more
disputed matters, there were things in the tradition of Israel which
belong to all humanity now, and might have belonged to all humanity
then. They had one of the colossal corner-stones of the world: the Book
of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greek
tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting
of poetry and philosophy in the morning of the world. It is a solemn and
uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the
pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really
perfects the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more
monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job
avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with
riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of
a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts
can only say, ‘I do not understand,’ it is true that he who knows can
only reply or repeat, ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke
there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something
that would be worth understanding. But this mighty monotheistic poem
remained unremarked by the whole world of antiquity, which was thronged
with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way in which the Jews
stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they
should have kept a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole
intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestly
concealed the Great Pyramid. But there were other reasons for a
cross-purpose and an impasse, characteristic of the whole of the end of
paganism. After all, the tradition of Israel had only got hold of one
half of the truth, even if we use the popular paradox and call it the
bigger half. I shall try to sketch in the next chapter that love of
locality and of personality that ran through mythology; here it need
only be said that there was a truth in it that could not be left out,
though it were a lighter and less essential truth. The sorrow of Job had
to be joined with the sorrow of Hector; and while the former was the
sorrow of the universe the latter was the sorrow of the city; for Hector
could only stand pointing to heaven as the pillar of holy Troy. When God
speaks out of the whirlwind He may well speak in the wilderness. But the
monotheism of the nomad was not enough for all that varied civilisation
of fields and fences and walled cities and temples and towns; and the
turn of these things also was to come, when the two could be combined in
a more definite and domestic religion. Here and there in all that pagan
crowd could be found a philosopher whose thoughts ran on pure theism;
but he never had, or supposed that he had, the power to change the
customs of the whole populace. Nor is it easy even in such philosophies
to find a true definition of this deep business of the relation of
polytheism and theism. Perhaps the nearest we can come to striking the
note, or giving the thing a name, is in something far away from all that
civilisation and more remote from Rome than the isolation of Israel. It
is in a saying I once heard from some Hindu tradition; that gods as well
as men are only the dreams of Brahma; and will perish when Brahma wakes.
There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia which is
less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it despair, even
if they would call it peace. This note of nihilism can be considered
later in a fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. It is enough to
say here that there is more of disillusion in that idea of a divine
awakening than is implied for us in the passage from mythology to
religion. But the symbol is very subtle and exact in one respect; that
it does suggest the disproportion and even disruption between the very
ideas of mythology and religion; the chasm between the two categories.
It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no
comparison between God and the gods. There is no more comparison than
there is between a man and the men who walk about in his dreams. Under
the next heading some attempt will be made to indicate the twilight of
that dream in which the gods walk about like men. But if any one fancies
the contrast of monotheism and polytheism is only a matter of some
people having one god and others a few more, for him it will be far
nearer the truth to plunge into the elephantine extravagance of Brahmin
cosmology; that he may feel a shudder going through the veil of things,
the many-handed creators, and the throned and haloed animals and all the
network of entangled stars and rulers of the night, as the awful eyes of
Brahma open like dawn upon the death of all.