law in a very vital matter. And this is a great achievement. But it
might easily evolve law which from our point of view would be unjust
and superstitious. The terrors of the ghost, the inequitable wrath of
a pure god, the insistence on the ritualistic view of impurity, might
retard progress and prevent the evolution of the highest law which
regards extenuating circumstances and admits justifiable homicide.
Such law is not heard of in the Mosaic books, but it {151} existed in
the Attic code,[151.1] which specially on this account may be called
civilised. The court which tried admitted cases of homicide where the
plea of justification was raised was the Delphinion, and its
foundation legend claimed that it was instituted to try Theseus for
slaying the Pallantids who attacked him, and that the plea of
justifiable homicide was allowed.[151.2] The name of the court shows
that its patron is the pure god, and points to Crete and Delphi, the
chief centres of the ritual of purification. Now it is quite possible
that this momentous advance in law may have been prompted by the
healthy rationalism of the early Greek mind, to some extent by secular
utilitarian thought, which reacted on the religious view of purity. We
shall then say that the religion adapted itself dexterously to a
secular movement, as it usually did in Greece. Or it may {152} be the
truth that the advance was due to a spontaneous movement within the
religion itself, beginning perhaps in the seventh century, and to the
growing consciousness that the purity or impurity of an act depended
on motive and will. If this idea penetrated at an early time, as it
certainly did at a later, into the sacerdotal circle, then the priest
of Apollo might grant or withhold purification according to the degree
of justification the homicide might prove:[152.1] in this case a
court would be established at the instigation of the purifying god to
consider the circumstances. This explanation must remain a hypothesis,
but it is one that assumes the action of real forces.
Enough has been said to illustrate the intimate association of the
idea of purity with legal progress,[152.2] and it only remains to
indicate {153} very briefly its impress and effect on religious
institutions. One of the methods most frequently employed to attain
mental purity or freedom from the evil spirit is fasting; from all
human societies, primitive and advanced, we could gather a copious
stock of illustration. And mankind has, on the whole, agreed as to the
occasions at which the ritual is desirable; in spring before the crops
and the first-fruits appear, before the warriors go forth to battle,
before any kind of intimate communion with God, when the family is in
mourning for a kinsman and evil influences are abroad, fasting has
been practised as a mode of purging the body and safeguarding it
against spiritual harm or preparing it for the privilege of divine
intercourse. It has been held necessary before any mystic
initiation,[154.1] {154} the early Christian Church prescribing it
for the days preceding the Easter communion; also before the
individual can attain the divine afflatus of prophecy or the
supernatural potency for expelling evil spirits or working
wonder-cures. “Such kind goeth not forth save by prayer and fasting.”
The psychological basis of the ritual is the belief that certain
foods, and finally all food, are liable to engender evil influences in
the body; and, moreover, the experience that the abstinence generates
a peculiar mental condition of exaltation, ecstasy, and supra-normal
self-confidence: other ideas, such as the discipline of self-denial,
that come to gather round the practice are of later growth.
From the same primitive view of the relations between our body and the
spiritual world has arisen the enforcement of celibacy upon the
priesthood. To trace the phenomenon, {155} which is commonly or
exceptionally found in all human societies, throughout the history of
the churches, would require a separate chapter. It is not a late
growth in religion, nor of necessity a sign of high development. And
here again the original psychological motive is not a spirit of
self-mortification, but the belief that the chaste body is the purer
abode for the Divine Spirit, and the mental experience that such
self-abnegation usually engenders a stronger consciousness of
religious power. There are signs that the idea is losing its hold on
the modern consciousness, but we see the deep impress it has made upon
some of the ideas and dogmas of our religion. The institution of a
sacerdotal rule of celibacy corresponds to the view prevalent in any
given society of the priestly function; it is likely to be enforced
when the priest is invested with a specially prophetic and mystic
character, and is required to mediate between the society and God by
means of frequent communion with the {156} divinity: it is rare when
the civic and semi-secular view of the sacerdotal office prevails,
rare therefore among the Northern Aryans and in the pre-Christian
Greek and Roman states, although the Hellenic ritual generally
required virginity, or at least a prolonged chastity, in the
prophetess and occasionally in the ordinary priest. It was common in
the ecstatic religions of Anatolia, and in the worship of Cybele was
pushed to an unnatural extreme. It is interesting again to trace the
association between the Phrygian-Christian heresy of Montanism and the
older Phrygian paganism; and we have noted that Montanus, its founder,
the champion of celibacy, is reported to have been in his unconverted
days a priest of Cybele.
Again, the baptismal rite is a form of purification of world-wide
prevalence, as has been already intimated. The washing of the new-born
has been generally interpreted as a purgation of dangerous and evil
influence among the lower as well as the higher races. An interesting
form of such lustration is {157} recorded of the old Aztec home-life:
the midwife washed the infant with the prayer, “May this water purify
and whiten thy heart: may it wash away all that is evil.”[157.1] The
adult, before initiation into any mystic society, usually needed
elaborate purification; and this often took the form of baptism with
water and occasionally with blood: and in certain of the Mediterranean
religions the lustration was not merely regarded as a washing away of
the old sin, but as a spiritual rebirth.[157.2] In the Isis rites the
baptism with water was supposed to raise the mortal to the divinity:
in the description of the baptismal purification of Setis I. the words
occur: “I have purified thee with life and power, so as to make thee
young, like thy father Ra.” And the gods themselves were believed to
be reborn through the sprinkling of lustral water over their
images.[157.3] We discover the same theories held by the {158} early
Church concerning the Christian rite: the font washes away the taint
of the flesh, while at the same time the divine potency of the water
revivifies and recreates the catechumen, who dies to the old life and
is born again; so that the font, which itself was exorcised and
purified in the early period, was in some sense the womb of spiritual
life, and the rite is both an exorcism and a communion. Very soon in
the history of the Church it came to be regarded as of such serious
and critical significance that the catechumen must prepare himself for
it by prior purifications and exorcisms: such ceremonies as the
breathing on his forehead by the priest, the sacramental partaking of
the salt, the anointing with oil, together with the utterance of a
prayer that “the enemy might be put to flight,” have an obvious
cathartic significance.[158.1]
We must also regard confession as a kind of purification; for the
“speaking out” of {159} sin would be regarded as a real purgation and
deliverance at that period of thought when words might be viewed as
things, or at least as controlling things. This was its meaning in the
preliminary ritual of the Samothracian Mysteries, in the Mexican
religion[159.1] where it was associated with purification and the
concept of rebirth, and finally in the early Christian Church, where
it was specially imposed upon the priest before the Easter communion
as part of the purificatory preparation.[159.2] An interesting
formula of confession is found among the Babylonian liturgical
tablets: the penitent prays to the god and the goddess--“Let the seven
winds carry away my sighs… let the bird bear my wickedness to the
heavens: let the fish carry off my misery, let the river sweep it
away. Let the beast of the field take it from me. Let the waters of
the river wash me clean.” Here the purificatory confessional {160}
works partly by prayer to the high god, partly by the old idea of the
magic transference of sin into an alien substance.[160.1]
These are examples of practices in the advanced religions aiming at
the purging of internal and spiritual sin. But the older and more
materialistic view of impurity as a physical taint or as the miasma of
an evil spirit, has not wholly faded even from historic Christianity:
the ceremony of the churching of women, though transformed into a
thanksgiving service, has descended from an old cathartic ritual that
purged away the dangerous pollution of child-birth: and the
consecration of churches was originally merely a special application
of the old-world practice of purifying the house against demons, as we
may see from the legendary example given in the apocryphal “Acts of St
Thomas.”[160.2]
{161}
The facts which I have collected and exposed, incomplete as the
statement is, may justify what was said at the outset of the inquiry,
that the aboriginal idea of purity has struck deep roots in the soil
on which much of our ethical thought and feeling, many of our legal
and religious institutions, have grown and developed. The concept,
owing perhaps to its immemorial continuity of life and deep primeval
instinctiveness, if the word may pass, is liable to fantastic
exaggerations. It has sometimes proved itself an insurmountable
barrier to moral and legal progress. When it has crystallised into a
hard “pharisaic” form, it has arrested and imprisoned the life of a
hitherto progressive people. On the other hand, though its innate
quality, so to speak, is never secular-utilitarian, its contributions
to our civilisation have been, as we have seen, of inestimable
service. It has engendered the modern horror of murder {162} and
bloodshed, and the ideal of the chaste life: we owe to it in great
degree the delicate sensitiveness of spiritually gifted characters.
For good and for evil, it has been an instinctive religious force more
potent than any other of these in the mental evolution of man.
LECTURE IV.
THE EVOLUTION OF PRAYER FROM LOWER TO HIGHER FORMS
{163}
There is no part of the religious service of mankind that so clearly
reveals the various views of the divine nature held by the different
races at the different stages of their development as the formulæ of
prayer, or reflects so vividly the material and psychologic history of
man. The historic material at our disposal is unfortunately modern,
not reaching back, that is to say, to a period earlier than some four
thousand years before Christ; but this can be supplemented, as usually
happens, by the evidence gathered from the lower societies, as well as
by the observation of practices that frequently accompany and are very
closely blended with prayer even in the higher religions, {164} and
that we may with confidence believe to have descended from an
immemorial antiquity. The question as to the origin of prayer is one
of great difficulty and of the deepest significance for the history
and philosophy of religion; for it inevitably involves the questions
concerning the origin of the belief in a personal divinity, concerning
the relation of magic to religion, of the spell-ritual which commands
or constrains to a prayer-ritual of humiliation and entreaty. Even if
I had an original and matured judgment to put before you on questions
of such importance, a single lecture would be a very inadequate space
for its exposition.[164.1] Therefore, though I may indicate, I will
not attempt in this lecture to decide on, the question of origin. I
will content myself with arranging the phenomena according as they
appear from our point of view to belong to a lower stratum of religion
or a higher; such an {165} arrangement begs no question, and agrees
with our experience that in all religions, whether savage or
civilised, lower and higher elements are able to coexist. I will first
give a general sketch of the facts, with some interpretation of them,
and will follow this with an illustrative selection of the prayers of
primitive and advanced communities.
According to the modern definition of prayer, man addresses uttered or
inaudible speech to a divine power conceived as Spirit or God, but
always as personal, in order to obtain material, moral, or spiritual
blessings: that part of the address that contains the actual prayer
will be often accompanied by words of homage, adoration, confession of
sin, expressions of doctrinal faith, statements concerning the
beneficent operations of the divinity in time past, self-assuring
utterances of confidence in divine protection or the divine promise.
Though the formulæ contain much positive statement and are by no
means confined to the optative mood, the attitude of the {166}
supplicator is always reverential and self-abased; modern religion
reprobates any idea of compelling the divinity; only it generally
seals its petitions with the mystic signature of a powerful name. If
this may pass as a fairly comprehensive and adequate account of modern
or advanced prayer, it will still be found to contain elements that
may descend from a very ancient mould of religious thought not easy to
reconcile with our higher religious consciousness; and it is no
adequate account of the various modes which less advanced societies
have used and are still using to express their desires to the
supernatural power. It has indeed been recently asserted, with some
plausibility,[166.1] that no savage community yet explored lacks the
conception of a high god making for righteousness; and certainly many
of the lower races have spontaneously developed genuine prayer in the
modern sense. Still it is sometimes reported by scientific observers
that some backward {167} peoples do not pray at all;[167.1] and it
appears not to be uncommon for the savage to regard his high god as
too remote to be addressed for any practical purpose.
But the savage, though he may pray as we do, has other ways of
addressing himself to the unseen personal agencies that he believes to
surround him; and these are the ways of magic and the magic-spell.
Having learned from human experience that he can project his
will-power by an occult process so as to subdue the mind of his
fellow-man, he experiments with this method upon the world of nature
and spirits: he deals with ghosts chiefly in this way, though he may
pray to them also; and he has no reluctance in applying his magic even
to the higher divinities. As magic-worker he stands on a different
footing altogether from the petitioner: his attitude towards the
supernatural power is self-confident and imperious, his speech is no
prayer but a command. He may project his will by dumb show, {168} by
action suggestive of his desire: but in most cases he will probably
prefer to accompany it with potent speech, so as to drive his will
home to the mark, so to speak: and the psychology of such magic
practices has been ably investigated by recent writers. The technical
name for such exercise of will upon another person is suggestion; a
modern application of it sometimes appears in the extreme form that we
call mesmerism or hypnotism. For the successful application of the
charm, it is often an essential condition that one should possess
oneself of the name of the person against whom it is directed, and at
times of his picture or effigy, for both the name and the picture are
regarded as vital parts of the whole individuality that one seeks to
control. The same ideas transferred into the world of supernatural
personalities account for the potency and deep significance that
attaches to the divine name, and for the prominence of the picture and
the effigy in the religious magic. But the savage has also {169}
learned from experience that he can work upon his fellows by entreaty,
flattery, soothing and endearing address: and it was obviously natural
for him to approach the divine powers in the same fashion, and to use
humble and prayerful petitions. Nor does there seem any reason why he
should not employ the methods of magic and prayer simultaneously or in
close conjunction on the same occasion. We may often in fact be in
doubt whether to interpret a certain primitive religious act from one
point of view or the other. Thus we are told that when the Khonds of
Orissa are about to enter on a campaign, “the priest cuts a branch and
dresses it and arms it, so as to personate one of the foe: thereupon
it is thrown down at the shrine of the war-god”:[169.1] This formal
appeal to the god is speechless, and may be thought to be a speechless
prayer; but it is of the same colour as a multifarious mass of
practices which are mimetic and which are intended to work by means of
suggestion. {170} A singular ritual is recorded of the rain societies
of North America:[170.1] emblems or picture-writing representing
clouds, with vertical drops symbolising rain, are placed on an altar,
ears of maize are placed by the side of them with other objects, and
the corn-ears are sprinkled with water, while at the same time prayers
are proffered to the ghosts that control the rain-supply. We would
wish to know what the manner of the praying is; but it seems clear
that we here have the ritual of prayer combined with magic-suggestion,
which consists in pretending to do the thing which it is desired to
bring about. Again, the primitive formulæ devised to drive out the
demons of disease and poverty are usually imperious commands and not
prayers: such as the Chinese “Let the devil of poverty
depart”;[170.2] the Greek, “Go out, hunger,”[170.3] and “To the
door, you ghosts.”[170.4]
{171}
But when, as in Buro, the bidding takes such a form as “Grandfather
small-pox, go away,”[171.1] the reverential and soothing address
allows us to approximate this to prayer, for in the liturgies of the
earlier as well as the advanced religions the divinity is commonly
addressed in terms of kinship. We shall note instances of real prayers
proffered by the uncultured races to a high god, yet retaining
something of the magic character and tone: we detect it in the mystic
employment of the name, in the reiteration of the same short phrase,
in the droning sing-song in which, according to Professor
Tylor,[171.2] savage prayers are usually intoned, the tone of a
mesmeric incantation. But gradually, as the concept of divinity
deepens in the progressive race, and the mind becomes penetrated with
the consciousness of the littleness of man and of the incomparable
greatness of God, the worshipper tends to become the humble petitioner
and prayer {172} comes to predominate over spell. And it has happened
in the legislation of the higher religions that magic at last becomes
“suspect” and tabooed: yet the most austere and purified religion
often unconsciously retains certain elements of spell-ritual, and even
legitimatises the spell by virtue of the distinction between white
magic and black. The distinction is morphologically unsound, and
arises generally from _ex-parte_ prejudice. We do not find, in fact,
if we broadly compare the phenomena of all religions, that cleavage
and irreconcilable antagonism between magic and religion which has
often been supposed. Even in religions that we must class as high, the
deity himself is often imagined to work by means of magic, and the
Christian Church itself has given its patronage and consecration to
practices of magical significance, such as the ordeal, purification,
certain forms of healing, exorcisms of evil spirits: all these will be
accompanied by prayers to God, but the prayers are so impregnated with
the ideas of {173} animistic magic that we can hardly regard them as
pure forms. Nevertheless, though the lower elements are so difficult
to eradicate, yet the experience of some few of the higher communities
may reassure us that as a religion progresses in spirituality it can
purge itself more and more thoroughly of these, and the progress is
from spell to prayer.
Again, we may compare the phenomena from the point of view of the
progress in aspiration. In the primitive period, when the struggle is
to live at all rather than to live well, the objects of prayer must be
material blessings, and these are still prominent in the liturgies of
the civilised societies. There is a sameness in all these, and the
chief distinction to note is between the prayers that look to the
individual alone and those that look to the good of the community. A
higher stage is reached when moral and spiritual qualities become the
object of prayer; and when this is attained, the principle of prayer
is likely to become more and more spiritual, and the {174} petitioner
more and more diffident in the expression of his material wants, and
with a growing consciousness that the Deity knows best what is good
for man, may rise to the height of the formula, “Thy will be done.” It
is interesting to note in how many races some such utterance has been
heard; and at times men may have been helped to it by the
consciousness which scientific advance had awakened, that the laws of
the material universe cannot be capriciously altered to suit the
temporary needs of the individual: a formula of acquiescence appears
then to be the deepest and truest prayer. Finally, in the evolution of
prayer we may consider that the consummation is marked by the theory,
maintained by later Greek philosophy and early Christian fathers
alike, that the true intention of prayer is not the mere petition for
some special blessing, but rather the communion with God, to whom it
is a spiritual approach. Here as often elsewhere, the highest
spiritual product of human thought {175} reveals its affinity with
some dimly remote primeval concept; for much of the spell-ritual at
which we have been glancing implies an idea of such communion, the
human agent endeavouring to charge himself with a potency drawn from a
quasi-divine source.
It remains now to take concrete examples from the record of prayer
illustrative of these phases of development. Looking first at the
savage races, we have already observed that some of their formulæ
seem to belong to the borderland between spell and prayer. When the
New Caledonian says over the fire that he kindles to increase the heat
of the sun, “Sun, I do this that you may be burning hot,” it is
obviously not a prayer that he utters to the sun-god but a formula
expressing the suggestion of his magic.[175.1] And when the Karens of
Burma at the threshing of the rice call out to the corn-mother, “Shake
thyself, grandmother, shake thyself. Let the paddy ascend till it
equals a hill, equals a mountain; shake thyself, {176} grandmother,
shake thyself,”[176.1] we have surely a command rather than a pure
prayer; for primitive vegetation-ritual works by compulsion rather
than entreaty. On the other hand, we have record of a genuine Karen
prayer addressed to “the God of heaven and earth, God of the mountains
and hills,” on the occasion when a sin of unchastity was supposed to
have sterilised the earth: “Do not be angry with me, do not hate me,
but have mercy on me and compassionate me.… Now I repair the
mountains, now I heal the hills.… Make thy paddy fruitful, thy rice
abundant.… If we cultivate but little, still grant that we may obtain
a little.” But the prayer is accompanied with rites that are purely
magical and aiming at the restoration of the earth.[176.2]