THE DEMONS AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
I have dwelt at some little length on this imaginative sort of paganism,
which has crowded the world with temples and is everywhere the parent of
popular festivity. For the central history of civilisation, as I see it,
consists of two further stages before the final stage of Christendom.
The first was the struggle between this paganism and something less
worthy than itself, and the second the process by which it grew in
itself less worthy. In this very varied and often very vague polytheism
there was a weakness of original sin. Pagan gods were depicted as
tossing men like dice; and indeed they are loaded dice. About sex
especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born
mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity. This
disproportion dragged down the winged fancies; and filled the end of
paganism with a mere filth and litter of spawning gods. But the first
point to realise is that this sort of paganism had an early collision
with another sort of paganism; and that the issue of that essentially
spiritual struggle really determined the history of the world. In order
to understand it we must pass to a review of the other kind of paganism.
It can be considered much more briefly; indeed, there is a very real
sense in which the less that is said about it the better. If we have
called the first sort of mythology the day-dream, we might very well
call the second sort of mythology the nightmare.
Superstition recurs in all ages, and especially in rationalistic ages. I
remember defending the religious tradition against a whole
luncheon-table of distinguished agnostics; and before the end of our
conversation every one of them had procured from his pocket, or
exhibited on his watch-chain, some charm or talisman from which he
admitted that he was never separated. I was the only person present who
had neglected to provide himself with a fetish. Superstition recurs in a
rationalist age because it rests on something which, if not identical
with rationalism, is not unconnected with scepticism. It is at least
very closely connected with agnosticism. It rests on something that is
really a very human and intelligible sentiment, like the local
invocations of the _numen_ in popular paganism. But it is an agnostic
sentiment, for it rests on two feelings: first that we do not really
know the laws of the universe; and second that they may be very
different from all that we call reason. Such men realise the real truth
that enormous things do often turn upon tiny things. When a whisper
comes, from tradition or what not, that one particular tiny thing is the
key or clue, something deep and not altogether senseless in human nature
tells them that it is not unlikely. This feeling exists in both the
forms of paganism here under consideration. But when we come to the
second form of it, we find it transformed and filled with another and
more terrible spirit.
In dealing with the lighter thing called mythology, I have said little
about the most disputable aspect of it; the extent to which such
invocation of the spirits of the sea or the elements can indeed call
spirits from the vasty deep; or rather (as the Shakespearean scoffer put
it) whether the spirits come when they are called. I believe that I am
right in thinking that this problem, practical as it sounds, did not
play a dominant part in the poetical business of mythology. But I think
it even more obvious, on the evidence, that things of that sort have
sometimes appeared, even if they were only appearances. But when we
come to the world of superstition, in a more subtle sense, there is a
shade of difference; a deepening and a darkening shade. Doubtless most
popular superstition is as frivolous as any popular mythology. Men do
not believe as a dogma that God would throw a thunderbolt at them for
walking under a ladder; more often they amuse themselves with the not
very laborious exercise of walking round it. There is no more in it than
what I have already adumbrated; a sort of airy agnosticism about the
possibilities of so strange a world. But there is another sort of
superstition that does definitely look for results; what might be called
a realistic superstition. And with that the question of whether spirits
do answer or do appear becomes much more serious. As I have said, it
seems to me pretty certain that they sometimes do; but about that there
is a distinction that has been the beginning of much evil in the world.
Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less
desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely
that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I
believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical
and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the
garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland
of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than
the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate
impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical
problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the
darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about
them. And indeed that popular phrase exactly expresses the point. The
gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had
a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious
sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where
the Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man
has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective: that
it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not
exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope
of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But
the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his
promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that
he had broken them.
In the accounts given us of many rude or savage races we gather that the
cult of demons often came after the cult of deities, and even after the
cult of one single and supreme deity. It may be suspected that in almost
all such places the higher deity is felt to be too far off for appeal in
certain petty matters, and men invoke the spirits because they are in a
more literal sense familiar spirits. But with the idea of employing the
demons who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the
demons. It may indeed be truly described as the idea of being worthy of
the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting
society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some
trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the
hidden spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And
there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But
with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the
gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a
monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man
deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think
of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention
or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world. This is
the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world. For most
cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is
artificial and even artistic; a sort of art for art’s sake. Men do not
do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary,
because they do think it horrible. They wish, in the most literal sense,
to sup on horrors. That is why it is often found that rude races like
the Australian natives are not cannibals; while much more refined and
intelligent races, like the New Zealand Maories, occasionally are. They
are refined and intelligent enough to indulge sometimes in a
self-conscious diabolism. But if we could understand their minds, or
even really understand their language, we should probably find that they
were not acting as ignorant, that is as innocent cannibals. They are not
doing it because they do not think it wrong, but precisely because they
do think it wrong. They are acting like a Parisian decadent at a Black
Mass. But the Black Mass has to hide underground from the presence of
the real Mass. In other words, the demons have really been in hiding
since the coming of Christ on earth. The cannibalism of the higher
barbarians is in hiding from the civilisation of the white man. But
before Christendom, and especially outside Europe, this was not always
so. In the ancient world the demons often wandered abroad like dragons.
They could be positively and publicly enthroned as gods. Their enormous
images could be set up in public temples in the centre of populous
cities. And all over the world the traces can be found of this striking
and solid fact, so curiously overlooked by the moderns who speak of all
such evil as primitive and early in evolution, that as a matter of fact
some of the very highest civilisations of the world were the very places
where the horns of Satan were exalted, not only to the stars but in the
face of the sun.
Take for example the Aztecs and American Indians of the ancient empires
of Mexico and Peru. They were at least as elaborate as Egypt or China
and only less lively than that central civilisation which is our own.
But those who criticise that central civilisation (which is always their
own civilisation) have a curious habit of not merely doing their
legitimate duty in condemning its crimes, but of going out of their way
to idealise its victims. They always assume that before the advent of
Europe there was nothing anywhere but Eden. And Swinburne, in that
spirited chorus of the nations in ‘Songs before Sunrise,’ used an
expression about Spain in her South American conquests which always
struck me as very strange. He said something about ‘her sins and sons
through sinless lands dispersed,’ and how they ‘made accursed the name
of man and thrice accursed the name of God.’ It may be reasonable enough
that he should say the Spaniards were sinful, but why in the world
should he say that the South Americans were sinless? Why should he have
supposed that continent to be exclusively populated by archangels or
saints perfect in heaven? It would be a strong thing to say of the most
respectable neighbourhood; but when we come to think of what we really
do know of that society the remark is rather funny. We know that the
sinless priests of this sinless people worshipped sinless gods, who
accepted as the nectar and ambrosia of their sunny paradise nothing but
incessant human sacrifice accompanied by horrible torments. We may note
also in the mythology of this American civilisation that element of
reversal or violence against instinct of which Dante wrote; which runs
backwards everywhere through the unnatural religion of the demons. It is
notable not only in ethics but in aesthetics. A South American idol was
made as ugly as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as
possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by working backwards
against their own nature and the nature of things. There was always a
sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark red
timber of the forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a
cracked mirror.
In any case it is clear enough that the painted and gilded civilisation
of tropical America systematically indulged in human sacrifice. It is by
no means clear, so far as I know, that the Eskimos ever indulged in
human sacrifice. They were not civilised enough. They were too closely
imprisoned by the white winter and the endless dark. Chill penury
repressed their noble rage and froze the genial current of the soul. It
was in brighter days and broader daylight that the noble rage is found
unmistakably raging. It was in richer and more instructed lands that the
genial current flowed on the altars, to be drunk by great gods wearing
goggling and grinning masks and called on in terror or torment by long
cacophonous names that sound like laughter in hell. A warmer climate and
a more scientific cultivation were needed to bring forth these blooms;
to draw up towards the sun the large leaves and flamboyant blossoms that
gave their gold and crimson and purple to that garden, which Swinburne
compares to the Hesperides. There was at least no doubt about the
dragon.
I do not raise in this connection the special controversy about Spain
and Mexico; but I may remark in passing that it resembles exactly the
question that must in some sense be raised afterwards about Rome and
Carthage. In both cases there has been a queer habit among the English
of always siding against the Europeans, and representing the rival
civilisation, in Swinburne’s phrase, as sinless; when its sins were
obviously crying or rather screaming to heaven. For Carthage also was a
high civilisation, indeed a much more highly civilised civilisation. And
Carthage also founded that civilisation on a religion of fear, sending
up everywhere the smoke of human sacrifice. Now it is very right to
rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards
and ideals. But it is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the
other races and religions that professed the very opposite standards and
ideals. There is a very real sense in which the Christian is worse than
the heathen, the Spaniard worse than the Red Indian, or even the Roman
potentially worse than the Carthaginian. But there is only one sense in
which he is worse; and that is not in being positively worse. The
Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better.
This inverted imagination produces things of which it is better not to
speak. Some of them indeed might almost be named without being known;
for they are of that extreme evil which seems innocent to the innocent.
They are too inhuman even to be indecent. But without dwelling much
longer in these dark corners, it may be noted as not irrelevant here
that certain anti-human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of
black magic. There may be suspected as running through it everywhere,
for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would
understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they
remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was
preventing the birth of children. The Hebrew prophets were perpetually
protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that
involved such a war upon children; and it is probable enough that this
abominable apostasy from the God of Israel has occasionally appeared in
Israel since, in the form of what is called ritual murder; not of course
by any representative of the religion of Judaism, but by individual and
irresponsible diabolists who did happen to be Jews. This sense that the
forces of evil especially threaten childhood is found again in the
enormous popularity of the Child Martyr of the Middle Ages. Chaucer did
but give another version of a very national English legend, when he
conceived the wickedest of all possible witches as the dark alien woman
watching behind her high lattice and hearing, like the babble of a brook
down the stony street, the singing of little St. Hugh.
Anyhow the part of such speculations that concerns this story centred
especially round that eastern end of the Mediterranean where the nomads
had turned gradually into traders and had begun to trade with the whole
world. Indeed in the sense of trade and travel and colonial extension,
it already had something like an empire of the whole world. Its purple
dye, the emblem of its rich pomp and luxury, had steeped the wares which
were sold far away amid the last crags of Cornwall and the sails that
entered the silence of tropic seas amid all the mystery of Africa. It
might be said truly to have painted the map purple. It was already a
world-wide success, when the princes of Tyre would hardly have troubled
to notice that one of their princesses had condescended to marry the
chief of some tribe called Judah; when the merchants of its African
outpost would only have curled their bearded and Semitic lips with a
slight smile at the mention of a village called Rome. And indeed no two
things could have seemed more distant from each other, not only in space
but in spirit, than the monotheism of the Palestinian tribe and the very
virtues of the small Italian republic. There was but one thing between
them; and the thing which divided them has united them. Very various and
incompatible were the things that could be loved by the consuls of Rome
and the prophets of Israel; but they were at one in what they hated. It
is very easy in both cases to represent that hatred as something merely
hateful. It is easy enough to make a merely harsh and inhuman figure
either of Elijah raving above the slaughter of Carmel or Cato thundering
against the amnesty of Africa. These men had their limitations and their
local passions; but this criticism of them is unimaginative and
therefore unreal. It leaves out something, something immense and
intermediate, facing east and west and calling up this passion in its
eastern and western enemies; and that something is the first subject of
this chapter.
The civilisation that centred in Tyre and Sidon was above all things
practical. It has left little in the way of art and nothing in the way
of poetry. But it prided itself upon being very efficient; and it
followed in its philosophy and religion that strange and sometimes
secret train of thought which we have already noted in those who look
for immediate effects. There is always in such a mentality an idea that
there is a short cut to the secret of all success; something that would
shock the world by this sort of shameless thoroughness. They believed,
in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who delivered the goods. In
their dealings with their god Moloch, they themselves were always
careful to deliver the goods. It was an interesting transaction, upon
which we shall have to touch more than once in the rest of the
narrative; it is enough to say here that it involved the theory I have
suggested about a certain attitude towards children. This was what
called up against it in simultaneous fury the servant of one God in
Palestine and the guardians of all the household gods in Rome. This is
what challenged two things naturally so much divided by every sort of
distance and disunion, whose union was to save the world.
I have called the fourth and final division of the spiritual elements
into which I should divide heathen humanity by the name of The
Philosophers. I confess that it covers in my mind much that would
generally be classified otherwise; and that what are here called
philosophies are very often called religions. I believe however that my
own description will be found to be much the more realistic and not the
less respectful. But we must first take philosophy in its purest and
clearest form that we may trace its normal outline; and that is to be
found in the world of the purest and clearest outlines, that culture of
the Mediterranean of which we have been considering the mythologies and
idolatries in the last two chapters.
Polytheism, or that aspect of paganism, was never to the pagan what
Catholicism is to the Catholic. It was never a view of the universe
satisfying all sides of life; a complete and complex truth with
something to say about everything. It was only a satisfaction of one
side of the soul of man, even if we call it the religious side; and I
think it is truer to call it the imaginative side. But this it did
satisfy; in the end it satisfied it to satiety. All that world was a
tissue of interwoven tales and cults, and there ran in and out of it, as
we have already seen, that black thread among its more blameless
colours: the darker paganism that was really diabolism. But we all know
that this did not mean that all pagan men thought of nothing but pagan
gods. Precisely because mythology only satisfied one mood, they turned
in other moods to something totally different. But it is very important
to realise that it was totally different. It was too different to be
inconsistent. It was so alien that it did not clash. While a mob of
people were pouring on a public holiday to the feast of Adonis or the
games in honour of Apollo, this or that man would prefer to stop at home
and think out a little theory about the nature of things. Sometimes his
hobby would even take the form of thinking about the nature of God; or
even in that sense about the nature of the gods. But he very seldom
thought of pitting his nature of the gods against the gods of nature.
It is necessary to insist on this abstraction in the first student of
abstractions. He was not so much antagonistic as absent-minded. His
hobby might be the universe; but at first the hobby was as private as if
it had been numismatics or playing draughts. And even when his wisdom
came to be a public possession, and almost a political institution, it
was very seldom on the same plane as the popular and religious
institutions. Aristotle, with his colossal common sense, was perhaps the
greatest of all philosophers; certainly the most practical of all
philosophers. But Aristotle would no more have set up the Absolute side
by side with the Apollo of Delphi, as a similar or rival religion, than
Archimedes would have thought of setting up the Lever as a sort of idol
or fetish to be substituted for the Palladium of the city. Or we might
as well imagine Euclid building an altar to an isosceles triangle, or
offering sacrifices to the square on the hypotenuse. The one man
meditated on metaphysics as the other man did on mathematics; for the
love of truth or for curiosity or for the fun of the thing. But that
sort of fun never seems to have interfered very much with the other sort
of fun; the fun of dancing or singing to celebrate some rascally romance
about Zeus becoming a bull or a swan. It is perhaps the proof of a
certain superficiality and even insincerity about the popular
polytheism, that men could be philosophers and even sceptics without
disturbing it. These thinkers could move the foundations of the world
without altering even the outline of that coloured cloud that hung above
it in the air.
For the thinkers did move the foundations of the world; even when a
curious compromise seemed to prevent them from moving the foundations of
the city. The two great philosophers of antiquity do indeed appear to us
as defenders of sane and even of sacred ideas; their maxims often read
like the answers to sceptical questions too completely answered to be
always recorded. Aristotle annihilated a hundred anarchists and
nature-worshipping cranks by the fundamental statement that man is a
political animal. Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism,
as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally
fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men
exist. Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist
as men do not exist; or that the men need hardly be considered where
they conflict with the ideas. He had something of the social sentiment
that we call Fabian in his ideal of fitting the citizen to the city,
like an imaginary head to an ideal hat; and great and glorious as he
remains, he has been the father of all faddists. Aristotle anticipated
more fully the sacramental sanity that was to combine the body and the
soul of things; for he considered the nature of men as well as the
nature of morals, and looked to the eyes as well as to the light. But
though these great men were in that sense constructive and conservative,
they belonged to a world where thought was free to the point of being
fanciful. Many other great intellects did indeed follow them, some
exalting an abstract vision of virtue, others following more
rationalistically the necessity of the human pursuit of happiness. The
former had the name of Stoics; and their name has passed into a proverb
for what is indeed one of the main moral ideals of mankind: that of
strengthening the mind itself until it is of a texture to resist
calamity or even pain. But it is admitted that a great number of the
philosophers degenerated into what we still call sophists. They became a
sort of professional sceptics who went about asking uncomfortable
questions, and were handsomely paid for making themselves a nuisance to
normal people. It was perhaps an accidental resemblance to such
questioning quacks that was responsible for the unpopularity of the
great Socrates; whose death might seem to contradict the suggestion of
the permanent truce between the philosophers and the gods. But Socrates
did not die as a monotheist who denounced polytheism; certainly not as a
prophet who denounced idols. It is clear to any one reading between the
lines that there was some notion, right or wrong, of a purely personal
influence affecting morals and perhaps politics. The general compromise
remained; whether it was that the Greeks thought their myths a joke or
that they thought their theories a joke. There was never any collision
in which one really destroyed the other, and there was never any
combination in which one was really reconciled with the other. They
certainly did not work together; if anything the philosopher was a
rival of the priest. But both seemed to have accepted a sort of
separation of functions and remained parts of the same social system.
Another important tradition descends from Pythagoras; who is significant
because he stands nearest to the Oriental mystics who must be considered
in their turn. He taught a sort of mysticism of mathematics, that number
is the ultimate reality; but he also seems to have taught the
transmigration of souls like the Brahmins; and to have left to his
followers certain traditional tricks of vegetarianism and water-drinking
very common among the eastern sages, especially those who figure in
fashionable drawing-rooms, like those of the later Roman Empire. But in
passing to eastern sages, and the somewhat different atmosphere of the
East, we may approach a rather important truth by another path.
One of the great philosophers said that it would be well if philosophers
were kings, or kings were philosophers. He spoke as of something too
good to be true; but, as a matter of fact, it not unfrequently was true.
A certain type, perhaps too little noticed in history, may really be
called the royal philosopher. To begin with, apart from actual royalty,
it did occasionally become possible for the sage, though he was not what
we call a religious founder, to be something like a political founder.
And the great example of this, one of the very greatest in the world,
will with the very thought of it carry us thousands of miles across the
vast spaces of Asia to that very wonderful and in some ways that very
wise world of ideas and institutions, which we dismiss somewhat cheaply
when we talk of China. Men have served many very strange gods; and
trusted themselves loyally to many ideals and even idols. China is a
society that has really chosen to believe in intellect. It has taken
intellect seriously; and it may be that it stands alone in the world.
From a very early age it faced the dilemma of the king and the
philosopher by actually appointing a philosopher to advise the king. It
made a public institution out of a private individual, who had nothing
in the world to do but to be intellectual. It had and has, of course,
many other things on the same pattern. It creates all ranks and
privileges by public examination; it has nothing that we call an
aristocracy; it is a democracy dominated by an intelligentsia. But the
point here is that it had philosophers to advise kings; and one of those
philosophers must have been a great philosopher and a great statesman.
Confucius was not a religious founder or even a religious teacher;
possibly not even a religious man. He was not an atheist; he was
apparently what we call an agnostic. But the really vital point is that
it is utterly irrelevant to talk about his religion at all. It is like
talking of theology as the first thing in the story of how Rowland Hill
established the postal system or Baden Powell organised the Boy Scouts.
Confucius was not there to bring a message from heaven to humanity, but
to organise China; and he must have organised it exceedingly well. It
follows that he dealt much with morals; but he bound them up strictly
with manners. The peculiarity of his scheme, and of his country, in
which it contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom, is
that he insisted on perpetuating an external life with all its forms,
that outward continuity might preserve internal peace. Any one who knows
how much habit has to do with health, of mind as well as body, will see
the truth in his idea. But he will also see that the ancestor-worship
and the reverence for the Sacred Emperor were habits and not creeds. It
is unfair to the great Confucius to say he was a religious founder. It
is even unfair to him to say he was not a religious founder. It is as
unfair as going out of one’s way to say that Jeremy Bentham was not a
Christian martyr.
But there is a class of most interesting cases in which philosophers
were kings, and not merely the friends of kings. The combination is not
accidental. It has a great deal to do with this rather elusive question
of the function of the philosopher. It contains in it some hint of why
philosophy and mythology seldom came to an open rupture. It was not only
because there was something a little frivolous about the mythology. It
was also because there was something a little supercilious about the
philosopher. He despised the myths, but he also despised the mob; and
thought they suited each other. The pagan philosopher was seldom a man
of the people, at any rate in spirit; he was seldom a democrat and often
a bitter critic of democracy. He had about him an air of aristocratic
and humane leisure; and his part was most easily played by men who
happened to be in such a position. It was very easy and natural for a
prince or a prominent person to play at being as philosophical as
Hamlet, or Theseus in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. And from very early
ages we find ourselves in the presence of these princely intellectuals.
In fact, we find one of them in the very first recorded ages of the
world; sitting on that primeval throne that looked over ancient Egypt.
The most intense interest of the incident of Akhenaten, commonly called
the Heretic Pharaoh, lies in the fact that he was the one example, at
any rate before Christian times, of one of these royal philosophers who
set himself to fight popular mythology in the name of private
philosophy. Most of them assumed the attitude of Marcus Aurelius, who is
in many ways the model of this sort of monarch and sage. Marcus Aurelius
has been blamed for tolerating the pagan amphitheatre or the Christian
martyrdoms. But it was characteristic; for this sort of man really
thought of popular religion just as he thought of popular circuses. Of
him Professor Phillimore has profoundly said ‘a great and good man--and
he knew it.’ The Heretic Pharaoh had a philosophy more earnest and
perhaps more humble. For there is a corollary to the conception of being
too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the
fighting. Anyhow, the Egyptian prince was simple enough to take his own
philosophy seriously, and alone among such intellectual princes he
affected a sort of _coup d’état_; hurling down the high gods of Egypt
with one imperial gesture and lifting up for all men, like a blazing
mirror of monotheistic truth, the disc of the universal sun. He had
other interesting ideas often to be found in such idealists. In the
sense in which we speak of a Little Englander he was a Little Egypter.
In art he was a realist because he was an idealist; for realism is more
impossible than any other ideal. But after all there falls on him
something of the shadow of Marcus Aurelius; stalked by the shadow of
Professor Phillimore. What is the matter with this noble sort of prince
is that he has nowhere quite escaped being something of a prig.
Priggishness is so pungent a smell that it clings amid the faded spices
even to an Egyptian mummy. What was the matter with the Heretic Pharaoh,
as with a good many other heretics, was that he probably never paused to
ask himself whether there was _anything_ in the popular beliefs and
tales of people less educated than himself. And, as already suggested,
there was something in them. There was a real human hunger in all that
element of feature and locality, that procession of deities like
enormous pet animals, in that unwearied watching at certain haunted
spots, in all the mazy wandering of mythology. Nature may not have the
name of Isis; Isis may not be really looking for Osiris. But it is true
that Nature is really looking for something. Nature is always looking
for the supernatural. Something much more definite was to satisfy that
need; but a dignified monarch with a disc of the sun did not satisfy it.
The royal experiment failed amid a roaring reaction of popular
superstitions, in which the priests rose on the shoulders of the people
and ascended the throne of the kings.
The next great example I shall take of the princely sage is Gautama, the
great Lord Buddha. I know he is not generally classed merely with the
philosophers; but I am more and more convinced, from all information
that reaches me, that this is the real interpretation of his immense
importance. He was by far the greatest and the best of these
intellectuals born in the purple. His reaction was perhaps the noblest
and most sincere of all the resultant actions of that combination of
thinkers and of thrones. For his reaction was renunciation. Marcus
Aurelius was content to say, with a refined irony, that even in a palace
life could be lived well. The fierier Egyptian king concluded that it
could be lived even better after a palace revolution. But the great
Gautama was the only one of them who proved he could really do without
his palace. One fell back on toleration and the other on revolution. But
after all there is something more absolute about abdication. Abdication
is perhaps the one really absolute action of an absolute monarch. The
Indian prince, reared in Oriental luxury and pomp, deliberately went out
and lived the life of a beggar. That is magnificent, but it is not war;
that is, it is not necessarily a Crusade in the Christian sense. It does
not decide the question of whether the life of a beggar was the life of
a saint or the life of a philosopher. It does not decide whether this
great man is really to go into the tub of Diogenes or the cave of St.
Jerome. Now those who seem to be nearest to the study of Buddha, and
certainly those who write most clearly and intelligently about him,
convince me for one that he was simply a philosopher who founded a
successful school of philosophy, and was turned into a sort of _divus_
or sacred being merely by the more mysterious and unscientific
atmosphere of all such traditions in Asia. So that it is necessary to
say at this point a word about that invisible yet vivid border-line
that we cross in passing from the Mediterranean into the mystery of the
East.
Perhaps there are no things out of which we get so little of the truth
as the truisms; especially when they are really true. We are all in the
habit of saying certain things about Asia, which are true enough but
which hardly help us because we do not understand their truth; as that
Asia is old or looks to the past or is not progressive. Now it is true
that Christendom is more progressive, in a sense that has very little to
do with the rather provincial notion of an endless fuss of political
improvement. Christendom does believe, for Christianity does believe,
that man can eventually get somewhere, here or hereafter, or in various
ways according to various doctrines. The world’s desire can somehow be
satisfied as desires are satisfied, whether by a new life or an old love
or some form of positive possession and fulfilment. For the rest, we all
know there is a rhythm and not a mere progress in things, that things
rise and fall; only with us the rhythm is a fairly free and incalculable
rhythm. For most of Asia the rhythm has hardened into a recurrence. It
is no longer merely a rather topsy-turvy sort of world; it is a wheel.
What has happened to all those highly intelligent and highly civilised
peoples is that they have been caught up in a sort of cosmic rotation,
of which the hollow hub is really nothing. In that sense the worst part
of existence is that it may just as well go on like that for ever. That
is what we really mean when we say that Asia is old or unprogressive or
looking backwards. That is why we see even her curved swords as arcs
broken from that blinding wheel; why we see her serpentine ornament as
returning everywhere, like a snake that is never slain. It has very
little to do with the political varnish of progress; all Asiatics might
have tophats on their heads, but if they had this spirit still in their
hearts they would only think the hats would vanish and come round again
like the planets; not that running after a hat could lead them to heaven
or even to home.
Now when the genius of Buddha arose to deal with the matter, this sort
of cosmic sentiment was already common to almost everything in the East.
There was indeed the jungle of an extraordinarily extravagant and almost
asphyxiating mythology. Nevertheless it is possible to have more
sympathy with this popular fruitfulness in folk-lore than with some of
the higher pessimism that might have withered it. It must always be
remembered, however, when all fair allowances are made, that a great
deal of spontaneous eastern imagery really is idolatry; the local and
literal worship of an idol. This is probably not true of the ancient
Brahminical system, at least as seen by Brahmins. But that phrase alone
will remind us of a reality of much greater moment. This great reality
is the Caste System of ancient India. It may have had some of the
practical advantages of the Guild System of Medieval Europe. But it
contrasts not only with that Christian democracy, but with every extreme
type of Christian aristocracy, in the fact that it does really conceive
the social superiority as a spiritual superiority. This not only divides
it fundamentally from the fraternity of Christendom, but leaves it
standing like a mighty and terraced mountain of pride between the
relatively egalitarian levels both of Islam and of China. But the fixity
of this formation through thousands of years is another illustration of
that spirit of repetition that has marked time from time immemorial. Now
we may also presume the prevalence of another idea which we associate
with the Buddhists as interpreted by the Theosophists. As a fact, some
of the strictest Buddhists repudiate the idea and still more scornfully
repudiate the Theosophists. But whether the idea is in Buddhism, or only
in the birthplace of Buddhism, or only in a tradition or a travesty of
Buddhism, it is an idea entirely proper to this principle of
recurrence. I mean of course the idea of Reincarnation.
But Reincarnation is not really a mystical idea. It is not really a
transcendental idea, or in that sense a religious idea. Mysticism
conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of
a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation
need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them. It is no
more transcendental for a man to remember what he did in Babylon before
he was born than to remember what he did in Brixton before he had a
knock on the head. His successive lives _need_ not be any more than
human lives, under whatever limitations burden human life. It has
nothing to do with seeing God or even conjuring up the devil. In other
words, reincarnation as such does not necessarily escape from the wheel
of destiny; in some sense it is the wheel of destiny. And whether it was
something that Buddha founded, or something that Buddha found, or
something that Buddha entirely renounced when he found, it is certainly
something having the general character of that Asiatic atmosphere in
which he had to play his part. And the part he played was that of an
intellectual philosopher, with a particular theory about the right
intellectual attitude towards it.
I can understand that Buddhists might resent the view that Buddhism is
merely a philosophy, if we understand by a philosophy merely an
intellectual game such as Greek sophists played, tossing up worlds and
catching them like balls. Perhaps a more exact statement would be that
Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline; which might even be
called a psychological discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from
all this recurrent sorrow; and that was simply by getting rid of the
delusion that is called desire. It was emphatically _not_ that we should
get what we want better by restraining our impatience for part of it, or
that we should get it in a better way or in a better world. It was
emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. If once a man realised
that there is really no reality, that everything, including his soul, is
in dissolution at every instant, he would anticipate disappointment and
be intangible to change, existing (in so far as he could be said to
exist) in a sort of ecstasy of indifference. The Buddhists call this
beatitude, and we will not stop our story to argue the point; certainly
to us it is indistinguishable from despair. I do not see, for instance,
why the disappointment of desire should not apply as much to the most
benevolent desires as to the most selfish ones. Indeed the Lord of
Compassion seems to pity people for living rather than for dying. For
the rest, an intelligent Buddhist wrote, ‘The explanation of popular
Chinese and Japanese Buddhism is that it is not Buddhism.’ _That_ has
doubtless ceased to be a mere philosophy, but only by becoming a mere
mythology. One thing is certain: it has never become anything remotely
resembling what we call a Church.
It will appear only a jest to say that all religious history has really
been a pattern of noughts and crosses. But I do not by noughts mean
nothings, but only things that are negative compared with the positive
shape or pattern of the other. And though the symbol is of course only a
coincidence, it is a coincidence that really does coincide. The mind of
Asia can really be represented by a round O, if not in the sense of a
cypher at least of a circle. The great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with
its tail in its mouth is really a very perfect image of a certain idea
of unity and recurrence that does indeed belong to the Eastern
philosophies and religions. It really is a curve that in one sense
includes everything, and in another sense comes to nothing. In that
sense it does confess, or rather boast, that all argument is an argument
in a circle. And though the figure is but a symbol, we can see how sound
is the symbolic sense that produces it, the parallel symbol of the
Wheel of Buddha generally called the Swastika. The cross is a thing at
right angles pointing boldly in opposite directions; but the Swastika is
the same thing in the very act of returning to the recurrent curve. That
crooked cross is in fact a cross turning into a wheel. Before we dismiss
even these symbols as if they were arbitrary symbols, we must remember
how intense was the imaginative instinct that produced them or selected
them both in the East and the West. The cross has become something more
than a historical memory; it does convey, almost as by a mathematical
diagram, the truth about the real point at issue; the idea of a conflict
stretching outwards into eternity. It is true, and even tautological, to
say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.
In other words, the cross, in fact as well as figure, does really stand
for the idea of breaking out of the circle that is everything and
nothing. It does escape from the circular argument by which everything
begins and ends in the mind. Since we are still dealing in symbols, it
might be put in a parable in the form of that story about St. Francis,
which says that the birds departing with his benediction could wing
their way into the infinities of the four winds of heaven, their tracks
making a vast cross upon the sky; for compared with the freedom of that
flight of birds, the very shape of the Swastika is like a kitten chasing
its tail. In a more popular allegory, we might say that when St. George
thrust his spear into the monster’s jaws, he broke in upon the solitude
of the self-devouring serpent and gave it something to bite besides its
own tail. But while many fancies might be used as figures of the truth,
the truth itself is abstract and absolute; though it is not very easy to
sum up except by such figures. Christianity does appeal to a solid truth
outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as
eternal. It does declare that things are really there; or in other
words that things are really things. In this Christianity is at one with
common sense; but all religious history shows that this common sense
perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it.
It cannot otherwise exist, or at least endure, because mere thought does
not remain sane. In a sense it becomes too simple to be sane. The
temptation of the philosophers is simplicity rather than subtlety. They
are always attracted by insane simplifications, as men poised above
abysses are fascinated by death and nothingness and the empty air. It
needed another kind of philosopher to stand poised upon the pinnacle of
the Temple and keep his balance without casting himself down. One of
these obvious, these too obvious explanations is that everything is a
dream and a delusion and there is nothing outside the ego. Another is
that all things recur; another, which is said to be Buddhist and is
certainly Oriental, is the idea that what is the matter with us is our
creation, in the sense of our coloured differentiation and personality,
and that nothing will be well till we are again melted into one unity.
By this theory, in short, the Creation was the Fall. It is important
historically because it was stored up in the dark heart of Asia and went
forth at various times in various forms over the dim borders of Europe.
Here we can place the mysterious figure of Manes or Manichaeus, the
mystic of inversion, whom we should call a pessimist, parent of many
sects and heresies; here, in a higher place, the figure of Zoroaster. He
has been popularly identified with another of these too simple
explanations: the equality of evil and good, balanced and battling in
every atom. He also is of the school of sages that may be called
mystics; and from the same mysterious Persian garden came upon ponderous
wings Mithras, the unknown god, to trouble the last twilight of Rome.
That circle or disc of the sun set up in the morning of the world by
the remote Egyptian has been a mirror and a model for all the
philosophers. They have made many things out of it, and sometimes gone
mad about it, especially when as in these eastern sages the circle
became a wheel going round and round in their heads. But the point about
them is that they all think that existence can be represented by a
diagram instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of the childish
myth-makers are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view.
They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture.
Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that
really exists outside our minds. Sometimes the philosopher paints the
disc all black and calls himself a pessimist; sometimes he paints it all
white and calls himself an optimist; sometimes he divides it exactly
into halves of black and white and calls himself a dualist, like those
Persian mystics to whom I wish there were space to do justice. None of
them could understand a thing that began to draw the proportions just as
if they were real proportions, disposed in the living fashion which the
mathematical draughtsman would call disproportionate. Like the first
artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the suggestion of a
new purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern; he seemed only
to be distorting his diagram, when he began for the first time in all
the ages to trace the lines of a form--and of a Face.