DAVID AND MOSES
The Greek translation of the Scriptures shewn me by Sosia was in several
volumes of various sizes and in various conditions. Unrolling the one
that shewed most signs of use, I found that, although it was in prose, it
was a translation of Hebrew poems, mostly very short, and of a lyrical
character. One of them had in its title the name of “David,” which I had
met with in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Sosia told me that he was the
greatest of the ancient kings of the Jews. Ordering the other volumes
to be sent to my rooms, I took this back with me, and began to read it
immediately, beginning with the poem on which I had chanced in the shop.
It was a prayer for purification from sin: “Pity me, O God, according to
thy great pity, and according to the multitude of thy compassions blot
out my transgression. Cleanse me still more from my crime, and purify me
from my sin.” So far, the poem was intelligible to me. I was familiar
with the religious rites of cleansing from blood-guiltiness—mentioned in
connexion with Orestes and many others by the Greek poets and recognised
in various forms all over the world. So I said, “This king has committed
homicide. He has been purified with lustral rites and sacrifices. But he
needs some further rites: ‘Cleanse me still more,’ he says. The poem will
tell me, I suppose, what more he needs.”
After adding some words to the effect that the transgression was
against God, against God alone, the king continued, “For behold, in
transgressions was I created at birth, and in sins did my mother conceive
me. For behold, thou hast ever loved truth; thou hast shewn unto me the
hidden secrets of thy wisdom. Thou wilt sprinkle me with hyssop and I
shall be purified; thou wilt wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.”
Here I was at a stand. It seemed to me a great and sudden descent to a
depth of superstition, to suppose that this particular additional rite of
“cleansing with hyssop” could satisfy the king’s conscience. Moreover I
thought that “wisdom” must mean the wisdom of the Greeks. It was not till
afterwards that I discovered how great a gulf separates our syllogistic
or rhetorical or logical “wisdom” from that of the Jews—which means
“knowledge of the righteousness of the Creator based upon reverence.”
Thence comes their saying, “Reverence for God is the beginning of
_wisdom_.”
These two misunderstandings almost led me to put down the book in
disgust. But the passionateness of the king’s prayer made me read
its opening words once again. Then I felt sure I must have done him
injustice. So I read on. Presently I came to the words, “Create in me a
clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away
from thy countenance, and take not thy holy spirit from me.” These made
me ashamed of having taken “hyssop” literally. I saw now that it was just
as much metaphorical as “whiter than snow,” and that it meant a deep
and inward purification—of the heart, not of the body. Still more was I
ashamed when I came to the words, “If thou hadst delight in sacrifice
I would have given it to thee, but thou wilt take no pleasure in whole
burnt-offerings. The sacrifice for God is a broken spirit. A broken and
contrite heart God will not despise.”
This was all new and strange doctrine to me. The graceful lines of Horace
about the efficacy of the simplest sacrifice—of meal and salt—from the
hand of an innocent country girl, and about its superiority to the
proffered bribe of a hecatomb from a man of guilt, these I knew by heart;
but they did not touch the present question, which was as to how the
man of guilt could receive purification, without a hecatomb, without
the blood of bulls and goats. And the question went even beyond that.
For the king said that he had been “in sins” even from the beginning,
even before birth. Did he speak of himself alone, or of himself as the
type of erring mankind? I thought the latter. He seemed to me to say,
“Man is from the first an animal, born to follow appetite. In part (no
doubt) he is a divine being, born to follow the divine will; but in part
he is an animal, born to follow animal propensity.” So far this agreed
with Epictetus’s doctrine about the Beast. The Beast, at the beginning,
tyrannizes over the divine Man, so that the human being may be said to
be in sin—and indeed is in sin, as soon as he becomes conscious of the
tyranny within him. “No lustral rites, no blood of bulls and goats,” the
king seemed to say, “can purify this human heart of mine now that it has
been tainted and corrupted by submitting to the Beast within me. A moment
ago, my prayer was ‘Purge me with hyssop,’ but now it is ‘Destroy me and
create me anew,’ ‘Take away my old heart and give me a new heart.’”
These last words were quite contrary to the doctrine of Epictetus, who
taught us that we are to receive strength and righteousness from that
which is within our own hearts. And, thought I, is not the king’s prayer
superstitious? The witches in Rome suppose they can draw down the moon
by incantations. This king David in Judæa supposes he can draw down “a
clean heart” and “a right spirit” by passionate invocation to the God of
the Jews! Are not the two superstitions parallel? Would not Epictetus
say so? Would not all the Cynics say so? I thought they would: and, as
I was rolling up the little book, I said, “It is a fine and passionate
poem, but the prayer is not one for a philosopher.” Then, however, it
occurred to me that there was a true and a deep philosophy—though I knew
not of what school—in the doctrine that the true and purifying sacrifice
for guilt is a penitent heart. That set me pondering the whole matter
again and reflecting on some of the things in my own life of which I
was most ashamed, things that I would have given much to forget, and a
great deal more to undo. In the end, I found myself thinking—not saying,
but thinking of it as a possible prayer—“In me, in me, too, create a
clean heart, O thou God of forgiveness!” It might not be a prayer for
philosophers, but I could not help feeling that it might be a good prayer
for me.
While I was placing my new volume by the side of Paul’s epistles it
occurred to me that the words I had just been reading might throw some
light on a passage in the epistle to the Romans at which I had glanced
last night. Then I could make nothing of it. Now I read it again: “I know
that in me, that is, in my flesh, there dwelleth no good thing. To will
[that which is good] is present with me, but to do is not present. I will
to do good and I do it not. I will not to do evil, and I do it.” This
now seemed to me a truer description of the state of things (within me
at all events) than the view mostly presented to us in our lecture-room.
Epictetus often talked as though we had merely to will, and then what we
willed—at least so far as concerns the mind and the things in the mind’s
province—would at once come to pass. True, he did not always say this.
Sometimes he insisted on the need of training or practice, and then he
likened the Cynic to an athlete preparing for the Olympian games. But it
seemed to me that he habitually underrated the difficulty of conforming
the human to the divine will: and he never—never even once, as far as I
know—recognised the need or efficacy of repentant sorrow.
My immediate conclusion was that, although it was not for me to decide
between the “feeling” of the Jews and the “reason” of the Greeks in
general, yet one thing was certain—I had a good deal to learn from the
former. So I welcomed the arrival of Sosia’s servant bringing the rest
of my new books. A good many of them I unrolled and cursorily inspected
at once. Both from their number, and from the variety of their subjects,
it was clear that I should only be able to study a few. I resolved to
confine myself to such parts as bore on Paul’s epistles, and to dispense
with lectures for a day or two. Then it occurred to me that Arrian, who
had proposed to resume to-day our conversation on the Jews and Galilæans,
might come in at any moment. I put away the Jewish books and went to his
lodging, thinking that I could perhaps tell my friend of my new studies
in order to explain to him my non-attendance at lecture. Instead of
Arrian, however, I found a note informing me that he had been obliged to
go suddenly to Corinth (in connexion with some business of his father’s)
but hoped to return before long.
This saved explanation; and I spent several days (during his prolonged
absence) in studying my new volumes. They led me into a maze—or rather,
maze after maze—of bewildering novelties. Sosia had told me that my
first volume, containing five books, was called by the Jews “the Law.”
But it included pedigrees, poems, prophecies, histories of nations, and
stories of private persons. The legal portion of it was largely devoted
to details about feasts and purificatory sacrifices—the very things that
David appeared to call needless. However, when I came to look into the
Law more closely, I found that its fundamental enactments were humane
and gentle—so much so as to give me the impression of being unpractical.
It enjoined on the Jews kindness to strangers as well as to citizens.
While retaining capital punishment, it prohibited torture. At least I
took that to be a fair inference from the fact that it even forbade the
infliction of more than forty blows with the scourge, on the ground
that a “brother”—that was the word—must not be so far degraded as to
become “vile” in the eyes of his fellow-citizens. It also placed some
limitations on the right of masters to punish slaves, even when the
latter were foreigners.
Having been accustomed to regard the Jews as unique for their moroseness
and unneighbourliness I was all the more astonished at these things. It
occurred to me then, as it does sometimes now, that the Law was almost
too humane to have been ever fully obeyed by the greater part of the
people. For example, even the slaves, even the beasts of burden, were to
have one day in seven as a holiday, on which all labour was forbidden.
Periodic remission of debts was enacted by law! This surprised me most
of all. To think that the revolutionary measure—so our Roman historians
called it—for which our tribunes of the people had contended in vain
under the Republic, should here be found legalised by the Law of
Moses—and this, too, not as an exceptional and isolated condonation, but
as a regular remission after a fixed number of years!
“How,” I asked, “could the Lawgiver expect people to lend money to
borrowers if the creditor knew that in the course of a few months
the obligation to pay the debt would cease?” Was he blind to the most
manifest tendencies of human nature? No, I found he was not blind to
them. He simply said that they must be resisted: “Beware,” said he, “that
there be not a base thought in thine heart, saying, The seventh year, the
year of release, is at hand.”
This notion of forbidding an action, or abstinence from action, in a
code of laws as being “base”—not as being “subject to a penalty of such
a kind,” or “a fine of so much,” was quite new to me. I had given some
time to the study of Roman law, and had always assumed that when the law
says “Do this,” it adds a punishment in some form or other, “Do this, or
you shall suffer this or that.” But here, embedded in the Law of Moses,
was a law, or rather a recommendation, without penalty. And presently I
found that the last of their Ten Greater Laws—if I may so call them—was
of the same kind. It could not possibly be enforced—for it forbade
“coveting”! Only a few days ago, before I had bought these books from
Sosia, I had read in Paul’s epistle to the Romans “I should not have
known covetousness if the law had not said, _Thou shalt not covet_”; and
these words had puzzled me a good deal. I had thought that they must
refer to some “law” of a spiritual kind, such as we might call “the law
of the conscience” or “the law of our higher nature,” or the like. Yet I
felt that this interpretation did not quite agree with the context. Now
I found, to my utter astonishment, that this was the very letter of the
first clause of the tenth of the Greater Laws, “Thou shalt not covet.”
To crown all, I found that elsewhere the whole of the code was based by
the Lawgiver on two fundamental precepts. The first was, “Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God,” and this love was to call forth all the powers of
mind and soul and body. The second was, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour
as thyself.” How was either of these to be enforced? “Love,” say all the
poets, “is free.” The Law neither prescribed nor suggested any means of
enforcing these two Great Commandments of “loving.” And how could “love”
be at once “free,” as poetry protests, and yet a part of the Law, as
Moses testified? There seemed no answer to this question, unless some
God could make us willing and eager to enforce the two commandments on
ourselves, constraining us (so to speak) by love to love both Him and
one another. “Truly,” said I, “this Law of Moses is very ambitious.” It
seemed to aim at more than Law could accomplish. It reminded me of a
sentence I had found in one of my new volumes, entitled “Proverbs,” “The
light of the Lord is as the breath of men; He searcheth the storehouses
of the soul.”
Somewhat similar was a saying imputed to Epictetus—which I had not heard
from Arrian but from a fellow-student—reproving one of his disciples
in these words, “Man, where are you putting it? See whether the basin
is dirty!” The disciple, though an industrious scholar, was of impure
life; and Epictetus meant that, if the vessel of his soul was foul, all
the knowledge put into that vessel would also become foul. The moral
was, “First cleanse the vessel!” So the Jewish Proverb seemed to say,
“The light of the Lord must first search the storehouse of the soul:
then the food taken out from the storehouse will be pure and wholesome.”
This brought me back to the words of David, who seemed to think that
the searching and cleansing must come from God and not from man alone,
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me!”
Comparing these two fundamental or Greatest Laws of Moses with the
fundamental law of Epictetus, “Keep the things that are thine own,”
I thought at first that the Jew and the Greek were entirely opposed.
On second thoughts, however, I perceived that in “the things that are
thine own” Epictetus would include justice and kindness, and all social
so-called virtues so far as they did not interfere with one’s own peace
of mind—for he would perhaps exclude pity, and certainly sympathy in
the full sense of the term. But Epictetus thought that people could be
sufficiently kind and just and virtuous without other aid than that of
the “logos” within them. David did not, in his own case, unless that
which was _within_ him had been cleansed or renewed by a Power regarded
as _outside_ him, to whom he prayed as God. There seemed to me, in this
difference of “within” and “outside,” more than a mere difference of
metaphor. But I had no time to think over the matter. For, just as I
was regretting that Arrian was not with me to talk over some of these
subjects, Glaucus, coming in to borrow a book, informed me that he had
met my friend late in the previous night coming from the quay. I had
intended to stay at home that morning. But now, finding that Glaucus was
on his way to the lecture, I resolved to accompany him, expecting to meet
Arrian there.