PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE
(B)
THE MAGIAN SOUL
I
The world, as spread out for the Magian waking-consciousness, possesses
a kind of extension that may be called cavern-like,[397] though it is
difficult for Western man to pick upon any word in his vocabulary that
can convey anything more than a hint of the meaning of Magian “space.”
For “space” has essentially unlike meanings for the perceptions of
the two Cultures. The world-as-cavern is just as different from the
world-as-extent of the passionate, far-thrusting Faustian as it is from
the Classical world-as-sum-of-bodily-things. The Copernican system, in
which the earth, as it were, loses itself, must necessarily seem crazy
and frivolous to Arabian thought. The Church of the West was perfectly
right when it resisted an idea so incompatible with the world-feeling
of Jesus, and the Chaldean _cavern-astronomy_, which was wholly natural
and convincing for Persians, Jews, peoples of the Pseudomorphosis, and
Islam, became accessible to the few genuine Greeks who knew of it at
all only after a process of transvaluing its basic notions of space.
The tension between Macrocosm and Microcosm (which is identical
with the waking-consciousness) leads, in the world-picture of every
Culture, to further oppositions of symbolic importance. All a man’s
sensations or understanding, faith or knowledge, receive their shape
from a primary opposition which makes them not only activities of the
individual, but also expressions of the totality. In the Classical
the opposition that universally dominates the waking-consciousness is
the opposition of matter and form; in the West it is that of force
and mass. In the former the tension loses itself in the small and
particular, and in the latter it discharges itself in the character of
work. In the World-Cavern, on the other hand, it persists in traversing
and swaying to and fro in unsure strugglings, and so becomes that
“Semitic” primary-dualism which, ever the same under its thousand
forms, fills the Magian world. The light shines through the cavern and
battles against the darkness (John i, 5). Both are Magian substances.
Up and down, heaven and earth become powers that have entity and
contend with one another. But these polarities in the most primary
sensations mingle with those of the refined and critical understanding,
like good and evil, God and Satan. Death, for the author of the
John Gospel as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a
Something, a death-force, that contends with a life-force for the
possession of man.
But still more important than all this is the opposition of Spirit
and Soul (Hebrew _Ruach_ and _nephesh_, Persian _ahu_ and _urvan_,
Mandæan _monuhmed_ and _gyan_, Greek _pneuma_ and _psyche_) which
first comes out in the basic feeling of the prophetic religions, then
pervades the whole of Apocalyptic, and finally forms and guides the
world-contemplations of the awakened Culture--Philo, Paul and Plotinus,
Gnostics and Mandæans, Augustine and the Avesta, Islam and the
Kabbalah. _Ruach_ means originally “wind” and _nephesh_ “breath.”[398]
The _nephesh_ is always in one way or another related to the bodily
and earthly, to the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is
the “upward.” The _ruach_ belongs to the divine, to the above, to
the light. Its effects in man when it descends are the heroism of a
Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlightenment of the judge
(the Solomon passing judgment,[399]) and all kinds of divination
and ecstasy. It is poured out.[400] From Isaiah xi, 2, the Messiah
becomes the incarnation of the _ruach_. Philo and the Islamic theology
divide mankind into born Psychics and born Pneumatics (the “elect,”
a concept thoroughly proper to the world-cavern and Kismet). All the
sons of Jacob are pneumatics. For Paul (1 Cor. xv) the meaning of
the Resurrection lies in the opposition of a psychic and a pneumatic
body, which alike for him and Philo and the author of the Baruch
apocalypse coincides with the opposition of heaven and earth, light and
darkness.[401] For Paul, the Saviour is the heavenly Pneuma.[402] In
the John Gospel he fuses as Logos with the Light; in Neoplatonism he
appears as _Nus_ or, in the Classical terminology, the All-One opposed
to _Physis_.[403] Paul and Philo, with their “Classical” (that is,
western) conceptual criteria, equated soul and body with good and bad
respectively, Augustine, as a Manichæan[404] with Persian-Eastern bases
of distinction, lumps soul and body together as the naturally bad, in
contrast to God as the sole Good, and finds in this opposition the
source of his doctrine of Grace, which developed also, in the same form
(though quite independently of him) in Islam.
But souls are at bottom discrete entities, whereas the Pneuma is
one and ever the same. The man _possesses_ a soul, but he only
_participates_ in the spirit of the Light and the Good; the divine
descends into him, thus binding all the individuals of the Below
together with the one in the Above. This primary feeling, which
dominates the beliefs and opinions of all Magian men, is something
perfectly singular, and not only characterizes their world-view, but
marks off the essence and kernel of their religiousness in all its
forms from that of every other kind of man. This Culture, as has been
shown, was characteristically the Culture of the middle. It could have
borrowed forms and ideas from most of the others, and the fact that
it did not do so, that in the face of all pressure and temptation
it remained so profoundly mistress of its own inward form, attests
an unbridgeable gulf of difference. Of all the wealth of Babylonian
and Egyptian religion it admitted hardly more than a few names; the
Classical and the Indian Cultures, or rather the Civilizations heir to
them--Hellenism and Buddhism--distorted its expression to the point of
pseudomorphosis, but its essence they never touched. All religions of
the Magian Culture, from the creations of Isaiah and Zarathustra to
Islam, constitute a complete inward unit of world-feeling; and, just as
in the Avestan beliefs there is not to be found one trait of Brahmanism
nor in early Christianity one breath of Classical feeling, but merely
names and figures and outward forms, so also not a trace of this
Jesus-religion could be absorbed by the Germanic-Catholic Christianity
of the West, even though the stock of tenets and observances was taken
over in its entirety.
Whereas the Faustian man is an “I” that in the last resort draws its
own conclusions about the Infinite; whereas the Apollinian man, as one
_soma_ among many, represents only himself; the Magian man, with his
spiritual kind of being, is only a _part of a pneumatic “We”_ that,
descending from above, is one and the same in all believers. As body
and soul he belongs to himself alone, but something else, something
alien and higher, dwells in him, making him with all his glimpses
and convictions just a member of a consensus which, as the emanation
of God, excludes error, but excludes also all possibility of the
self-asserting Ego. Truth is for him something other than for us. All
our epistemological methods, resting upon the _individual_ judgment,
are for him madness and infatuation, and its scientific results a
work of the Evil One, who has confused and deceived the spirit as to
its true dispositions and purposes. Herein lies the ultimate, for us
unapproachable, secret of Magian thought in its cavern-world--the
impossibility of a thinking, believing, and knowing Ego is the
presupposition inherent in all the fundamentals of all these religions.
While Classical man stood before his gods as one body before another;
whereas the Faustian willing “I” in its wide world feels itself
confronted by deity, also Faustian, also willing, effective everywhere;
the Magian deity is the indefinite, enigmatic Power on high that pours
out its Wrath or its Grace, descends itself into the dark or raises
the soul into the light as it sees fit. The idea of individual wills
is simply meaningless, for “will” and “thought” in man are not prime,
but already effects of the deity upon him. Out of this unshakable
root-feeling, which is merely re-expressed, never essentially altered,
by any conversions, illumination or subtilizing in the world--there
emerges of necessity the idea of the Divine Mediator, of one who
transforms this state from a torment into a bliss. All Magian religions
are by this idea bound together, and separated from those of all other
Cultures.
The Logos-idea in its broadest sense, an abstraction of the Magian
light-sensation of the Cavern, is the exact correlative of this
sensation in Magian thought. It meant that from the unattainable
Godhead its Spirit, its “Word,” is released as carrier of the light
and bringer of the good, and enters into relation with human being to
uplift, pervade, and redeem it. This distinctness of three substances,
which does not contradict their oneness in religious thought, was
known already to the prophetic religions. Ahuramazda’s light-gleaming
soul is the Word (Yasht 13, 31), and in one of the earliest Gathas his
Holy Spirit (_spenta mainyu_) converses with the Evil Spirit (_angra
mainyu_, Yasna 45, 2). The same idea penetrates the whole of the old
Jewish literature. The thought which the Chaldeans built up on the
separation of God and His Word and the opposition of Marduk and Nabu,
which breaks forth with power in the whole Aramæan Apocalyptic remained
permanently active and creative; by Philo and John, Marcion and Mani,
it entered into the Talmudic teachings and thence into the Kabbalistic
books Yesirah and Sohar, into the Church Councils and the works of
the Fathers, into the later Avesta, and finally into Islam, in which
a Mohammed gradually became the Logos and, as the mystically respent,
_living_ Mohammed of the popular religion, fused into the figure of
Christ.[405] This conception is for Magian man so self-evident that
it was able to break through even the strictly monotheistic structure
of the original Islam and to appear with Allah as the Word of God
(_kalimah_), the Holy Spirit (_ruh_), and the “light of Mohammed.”
For, for the popular religion, the first light that comes forth from
the world-creation is that of Mohammed, in the shape of a peacock[406]
“formed of white pearls” and walled about by veilings. But the peacock
is the Envoy of God and the prime soul[407] as early as the Mandæans,
and it is the emblem of immortality on Early Christian sarcophagi. The
light-diffusing pearl that illumines the dark house of the body is the
Spirit entered into man, and thought of as substance, for the Mandæans
as in the Acts of Thomas.[408] The Jezidi[409] reverence the Logos as
peacock and light; next to the Druses they have preserved most purely
the old Persian conception of the substantial Trinity.
Thus again and again we find the Logos-idea getting back to the
light-sensation from which the Magian understanding derived it. _The
world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling._[410]
Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him.
There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings,
and beings, secret letters, Solomon’s Seal, the Philosophers’ Stone.
And over all this is poured the quivering cavern-light that the
spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up. If this profusion of
figures astonishes the reader, let him remember that Jesus lived in it,
and Jesus’s teachings are only to be understood from it. Apocalyptic
is only a vision of fable intensified to an extreme of tragic power.
Already in the Book of Enoch we have the crystal palace of God, the
mountains of precious stone, and the imprisonment of the apostate
stars. Fantastic, too, are the whole overpowering idea-world of the
Mandæans, that of the Gnostics and the Manichæans, the system of
Origen, and the figures of the Persian “Bundahish”; and when the time
of the great visions was over, these ideas passed into a legend-poesy
and into the innumerable religious romances of which we have Christian
specimens in the gospels concerning Jesus’s childhood, the Acts of
Thomas and the anti-Pauline Pseudo-Clementines. One such story is
that of Abraham’s having minted the thirty pieces of silver of Judas.
Another is the tale of the “treasure-cave” in which, deep under the
hill of Golgotha, are stored the golden treasure of paradise and the
bones of Adam.[411] Dante’s poetic material was after all poetic, but
this was sheer actuality, the only world in which these people lived
continuously. Such sensations are unapproachably remote from men who
live in and with a dynamical world-picture. If we would obtain some
inkling of how alien to us all the inner life of Jesus is--a painful
realization for the Christian of the West, who would be glad indeed if
he could make that inner life the point of contact for his own inward
piety--if we would discover why nowadays only a pious Moslem has the
capacity livingly to experience it, we should sink ourselves in this
wonder-element of a world-image that was Jesus’s world-image. And then,
and only then, shall we perceive how little Faustian Christianity has
taken over from the wealth of the Church of the Pseudomorphosis--of its
world-feeling nothing, of its inward form little, and of its concepts
and figures much.
II
The When, for the Magian Soul, issues from the Where. Here too, is no
Apollinian clinging to pointlike Present, nor Faustian thrust and drive
towards an infinitely distant goal. Here Being has a different pulse,
and consequently Waking-being has another sense of time, which is the
counter-concept to Magian space. The prime thing that the humanity of
this Culture, from poor slaves and porters to the prophets and the
caliphs themselves, feels as the Kismet above him is not a limitless
flight of the ages that never lets a lost moment recur, but a Beginning
and an End of “This Day,” which is irrevocably ordained and in which
the human existence takes the place assigned to it from creation
itself. Not only world-space, but world-time also is cavern-like. Hence
comes the thoroughly Magian certainty that _everything has “a” time_,
from the origins of the Saviour, whose hour stood written in ancient
texts, to the smallest detail of the everyday, in which Faustian hurry
would be meaningless and unimaginable. Here, too, is the basis of the
Early Magian (and in particular the Chaldean) astrology, which likewise
presupposes that all things are written down in the stars and that the
scientifically calculable course of the planets authorized conclusions
as to the course of earthly things.[412] The Classical oracle answered
the only question that could perturb Apollinian man--the form, the
“How?” of coming things. But the question of the Cavern is “When?”
The whole of Apocalyptic, the spiritual life of Jesus, the agony of
Gethsemane, and the grand movement that arose out of his death are
unintelligible if we have not grasped this primary question of Magian
being and the presuppositions lying behind it. It is an infallible
sign of the extinction of the Classical Soul that astrology in its
westward advance drove the oracle step by step before it. Nowhere is
the stage of transition more clearly visible than in Tacitus, whose
entire history is dominated by the confusion and dislocation of his
world-picture. First of all, as a true Roman, he brings in the power
of the old city-deities; then, as an intelligent cosmopolitan, he
regards this very belief in their intervention as a superstition; and
finally, as a Stoic (by that time the spiritual outlook of the Stoa
had become _Magian_), he speaks of the power of the seven planets that
rule the fortunes of men. And thus it comes about that in the following
centuries Time itself as vessel of fate--namely, the Vault of Time,
limited each way and therefore capable of being grasped as an entity by
the inner eye--is by Persian mysticism set above the light of God as
Zrvan, and rules the world-conflict of Good and Evil. Zrvanism was the
State religion of Persia in 438-457.
Fundamentally, too, it is this belief that all stands written in the
stars, that makes the Arabian Culture characteristically that of
“eras”--that is, of time-reckonings that begin at some event felt
as a peculiarly significant act of Providence. The first and most
important is the generic Aramæan era, which begins about 300 B.C. with
the growth of apocalyptic tension and is the “Seleucid era.” It was
followed by many others, amongst them the Sabæan (about 115 B.C.), the
starting-point of which is not exactly known to us; that of Diocletian;
the Jewish era, beginning with the Creation, which was introduced by
the Synedrion in 346;[413] the Persian, from the accession of the last
Sassanid Jezdegerd in 632; and the Hijra, by which at last the Seleucid
was displaced in Syria and Mesopotamia. Outside this land-field there
is mere imitation for practical ends, like Varro’s “_ab urbe condita_”;
that of the Marcionites, beginning with Marcion’s breach with the
Church in 144; and that of the Christians, introduced shortly after 500
and beginning with the birth of Jesus.
World-history is the picture of the living world into which man sees
himself woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives
to comprehend from out of his world-feeling. The historical picture
of Classical man concentrates itself upon the pure Present. Its
content is no true Becoming, but a foreground Being with a conclusive
background of timeless myth, rationalized as “the Golden Age.” This
Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups and downs, good
and ill fortune, a blind “thereabouts,” an eternal alteration, yet
ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or “Time.”
The cavern-feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history
consisting in a beginning and an end to the world _that is also the
beginning and the end of man_--acts of God of mighty magic--and between
these turns, spellbound to the limits of the Cavern and the ordained
period, the battle of light and darkness, of the angels and Jazatas
with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his Soul, and his Spirit
are involved. The present Cavern God can destroy and replace by a
new creation. The Persian-Chaldean apocalyptic offers to the gaze a
whole series of such æons, and Jesus, along with his time, stood in
expectation of the end of the existing one.[414] The consequence of
this is a historic outlook like that which is natural to Islam even
to-day--the view over a given time. “The world-view of the people falls
naturally into three major parts--world-beginning, world-development,
and world-catastrophe. For the Moslem who feels so deeply ethically,
the chief essentials in world-development are the salvation-story and
the ethical way of life, knit into one as the ‘life’ of man. This
debouches into the world-catastrophe, which contains the sanction of
the moral history of humanity.”[415]
But, further, for the Magian human-existence, the issue of the feeling
of _this_ sort of Time and the view of _this_ sort of space is a quite
peculiar type of piety, which likewise we may put under the sign of
the Cavern--a _will-less_ resignation, to which the spiritual “I” is
unknown, and which feels the spiritual “We” that has entered into
the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine Light. The
Arab word for this is Islam (= submission) but this Islam was equally
Jesus’s normal mode of feeling and that of every other personality
of religious genius that appeared in this Culture. Classical piety
is something perfectly different,[416] while, as for that of our own
Culture, if we could mentally abstract from the piety of St. Theresa
and Luther and Pascal their Ego--that Ego which wills to maintain
itself against, to submit to, or even to be extinguished by the Divine
Infinite--there would be nothing left. The Faustian prime-sacrament
of Contrition presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome
itself. But it is precisely the _impossibility of an Ego as a free
power_ in the face of the divine that constitutes “Islam.” Every
attempt to meet the operations of God with a personal purpose or even a
personal opinion is “_masiga_,”--that is, not an evil willing, but an
evidence that the powers of darkness and evil have taken possession of
a man and expelled the divine from him. The Magian waking-consciousness
is merely the _theatre_ of a battle between these two powers and not,
so to say, a power in itself. Moreover, in this kind of world-happening
there is no place for individual causes and effects, let alone any
universally effective dynamic concatenation thereof, and consequently
there is no _necessary_ connexion between sin and punishment, no
_claim_ to reward, no old-Israelitish “righteousness.” Things of this
order the true piety of this Culture regards as far beneath it. The
laws of nature are not something settled for ever that God can alter
only by the method of miracle--they are (so to put it) the ordinary
state of an autocratic divine will, not possessing in themselves
anything of the logical necessity that they have for Faustian souls.
In the entire world-cavern there is but _one_ Cause, which lies
_immediately_ behind all visible workings, and this is the Godhead,
which, as itself, acts without causes. Even to speculate upon causes in
connexion with God is sinful.
From this basic feeling proceeds the Magian idea of Grace. This
underlies all sacraments of this Culture (especially the Magian
proto-sacrament of Baptism) and forms a contrast of the deepest
intensity with the Faustian idea of Contrition. Contrition presupposes
the will of an Ego, but Grace knows of no such thing. It was
Augustine’s high achievement to develop this essentially Islamic
thought with an inexorable logic, and with a penetration so thorough
that since Pelagius the Faustian Soul has tried by any and every route
to circumvent this certainty--which for _it_ constitutes an imminent
danger of self-destruction--and in using Augustinian propositions to
express its own proper consciousness of God has ever misunderstood and
transvalued them. Actually, Augustine was the last great thinker of
Early Arabian Scholasticism, anything but a Western intellect.[417]
Not only was he at times a Manichæan, but he remained so even as a
Christian in some important characteristics, and his closest relations
are to be found amongst the Persian theologians of the later Avesta,
with their doctrines of the Store of Grace of the Holy and of absolute
guilt. For him grace is the substantial inflowing of something divine
into the human Pneuma, itself also substantial.[418] The Godhead
radiates it; man receives it, but does not acquire it. From Augustine,
as from Spinoza so many centuries later,[419] the notion of force is
absent, and for both the problem of freedom refers not to the Ego and
its Will, but to the part of the universal Pneuma that is infused into
a man and its relation to the rest of him. Magian waking-being is the
_theatre_ of a conflict between the two world-substances of light
and darkness. The Early Faustian thinkers such as Duns Scotus and
William of Occam, on the contrary, see a contest inherent in dynamic
waking-consciousness _itself_, a contest of the two forces of the
Ego--namely, will and reason,[420] and so imperceptibly the question
posed by Augustine changes into another, which he himself would have
been incapable of understanding--are willing and thinking free forces,
or are they not? Answer this question as we may, one thing at any rate
is certain, that the individual ego has _to wage_ this war and not to
suffer it. The Faustian Grace refers to the success of the Will and not
to the species of a substance. Says the Westminster Confession of the
Presbyterians (1646): “The rest of Mankind, God was pleased, according
to the unsearchable Counsel of his own Will, whereby he extendeth, or
withholdeth Mercy, as he pleaseth, for the Glory of his Sovereign Power
over his Creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to Dishonour and
Wrath, for their Sin, to the Praise of his glorious Justice.” The other
conception, that the idea of Grace excludes every individual will and
every cause but the One, that it is sinful even to question why man
suffers, finds an expression in one of the most powerful poems known to
world-history, a poem that came into being in the midst of the Arabian
pre-Culture and is in inward grandeur unparalleled by any product of
that Culture itself--the Book of Job.[421] It is not Job, but his
friends who look for a sin as the cause of his troubles. They--like the
bulk of mankind in this and every other Culture, present-day readers
and critics of the work, therefore, included--lack the metaphysical
depth to get near the ultimate meaning of suffering within the
world-cavern. Only the Hero himself fights through the fulfilment, to
pure Islam, and he becomes thereby the only possible figure of tragedy
that Magian feeling can set up by the side of our Faust.[422]
III
The waking-consciousness of every Culture allows of two ways of
inwardness, that in which contemplative feeling spreads into
understanding, and that in which the reverse takes place. The Magian
contemplation is called by Spinoza “intellectual love of God,” and by
his Sufist contemporaries in Asia “extinction in God” (_mahw_); it may
be intensified to the Magian ecstasy that was vouchsafed to Plotinus
several times, and to his pupil Porphyry once in old age. The other
side, the rabbinical dialectic, appears in Spinoza as geometrical
method and in the Arabian-Jewish “Late” philosophy in general as
Kalaam. Both, however, rest upon the fact that there in Magian there
is no individual-ego, but a single Pneuma present simultaneously in
each and all of the elect, which is likewise Truth. It cannot be too
strongly emphasized that the resultant root-idea of the _ijma_ is much
more than a concept or notion, that it can be a lived experience of
even overwhelming force, and that all community of the Magian kind
rests upon it and, as doing so, is removed from community in any other
Culture. “The mystic Community of Islam extends from the here into the
beyond; it reaches beyond the grave, in that it comprises the dead
Moslems of earlier generations, nay, even the righteous of the times
before Islam. The Moslem feels himself bound up in one unity with them
all. They help him, and he, too, can in turn increase their beatitude
by the application of his own merit.”[423] The same, precisely, was
what the Christians and the Syncretists of the Pseudomorphosis meant
when they used the words _Polis_ and _Civitas_--these words, which had
formerly implied a sum of bodies, now denoted a consensus of fellow
believers. Augustine’s famous _Civitas Dei_ was neither a Classical
Polis nor a Western Church, but a unity of believers, blessed,
and angels, exactly as were the communes of Mithras, of Islam, of
Manichæism, and of Persia. As the community was based upon consensus,
it was in spiritual things infallible. “My people,” said Mohammed,
“can never agree in an error,” and the same is premised in Augustine’s
State of God. With him there was not and could not be any question of
an infallible Papal ego or of any other sort of authority to settle
dogmatic truths; that would completely destroy the Magian concept of
the Consensus. And the same applied in this Culture generally--not only
to dogma, but also to law[424] and to the State. The Islamic community,
like that of Porphyry and that of Augustine, embraces the _whole_ of
the world-cavern, the here and the beyond, the orthodox and the good
angels and spirits, and within this community the State only formed a
_smaller unit of the visible side_, a unit, therefore, of which the
operations were governed by the major whole. In the Magian world,
consequently, the separation of politics and religion is theoretically
impossible and nonsensical, whereas in the Faustian Culture the battle
of Church and State is inherent in the very conceptions--logical,
necessary, unending. In the Magian, civil and ecclesiastical law are
simply identical. Side by side with the Emperor of Constantinople stood
the Patriarch, by the Shah was the Zarathustratema, by the Exilarch
the Gaon, by the Caliph the Sheikh-ul-Islam, at once superiors and
subjects. There is not in this the slightest affinity to the Gothic
relation of Emperor and Pope; equally, all such ideas were alien to
the Classical world. In the constitution of Diocletian this Magian
embedding of the State in the community of the faithful was for the
first time actualized, and by Constantine it was carried into full
effect. It has been shown already that State, Church, and Nation formed
a spiritual unit--namely, that part of the orthodox consensus which
manifested itself in the living man. And hence for the Emperor, as
ruler of the Faithful--that is, of that portion of the Magian community
which God had entrusted to him--it was a self-evident duty to conduct
the Councils so as to bring about the consensus of the elect.
IV
But besides the consensus there is another sort of revelation of
Truth--namely, the “Word of God,” in a perfectly definite and purely
Magian sense of the phrase, which is equally remote from Classical
and from Western thought, and has, in consequence, been the source
of innumerable misunderstandings. The sacred book in which it has
become visibly evident, in which it has been captured by the spell of
a sacred script, is part of the stock of every Magian religion.[425]
In this conception three Magian notions are interwoven each of which,
even by itself, presents extreme difficulties for us, while their
simultaneous separateness and oneness is simply inaccessible to our
religious thought, often though that thought has managed to persuade
itself to the contrary. These ideas are: God, the Spirit of God,
the Word of God. That which is written in the prologue of the John
Gospel--“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God”--had long before come to perfectly natural
expression as something self-evident in the Persian ideas of Spenta
Mainyu,[426] and Vohu Mano,[427] and in corresponding Jewish and
Chaldean conceptions. And it was the kernel for which the conflicts of
the fourth and fifth centuries concerning the substance of Christ were
fought. But, for Magian thought, truth is itself a substance,[428] and
lie (or error) second substance--again the same dualism that opposes
light and darkness, life and death, good and evil. As substance, truth
is identical now with God, now with the Spirit of God, now with the
Word. Only in the light of this can we comprehend sayings like “I am
the truth and the life” and “My word is the truth,” sayings to be
understood, as they were meant, with reference to substance. Only so,
too, can we realize with what eyes the religious man of this Culture
looked upon his sacred book: in it the invisible truth has entered
into a visible kind of existence, or, in the words of John i, 14: “The
Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” According to the Yasna the
Avesta was sent down from heaven, and according to the Talmud Moses
received the Torah volume by volume from God. A Magian revelation is a
mystical process in which the eternal and unformed word of God--or the
Godhead as Word--enters into a man in order to assume through him the
manifest, sensible form of sounds and especially of letters. _“Koran”
means “reading.”_ Mohammed in a vision saw in the heaven treasured
rolls of scripture that he (although he had never learned how to read)
was able to decipher “in the name of the Lord.”[429] This is a form of
revelation that in the Magian Culture is the rule and in other Cultures
is not even the exception,[430] but it was only from the time of Cyrus
that it began to take shape. The old Israelitish prophets, and no doubt
Zarathustra also, see and hear in ecstasy things that afterwards they
spread abroad. The Deuteronomic code (621) was given out as having
been “found in the Temple,” which meant that it was to be taken as
the wisdom of the Father. The first (and a very deliberate) example
of a “Koran” is the book of Ezekiel, which the author received in a
thought-out vision from God and “swallowed” (iii, 1-3). Here, expressed
in the crudest imaginable form, is the basis on which later the idea
and shape of all apocalyptic writing was founded. But by degrees this
_substantial_ form of reception came to be one of the requisites for
any book to be canonical. It was in post-Exilic times that the idea
arose of the Tables of the Law received by Moses on Sinai; later
such an origin came to be assumed for the whole Torah, and about the
Maccabæan period for the bulk of the Old Testament. From the Council
of Jabna (about 90 B.C.) the whole word was regarded as inspired and
delivered in the most literal sense. But the same evolution took place
in the Persian religion up to the sanctification of the Avesta in the
third century, and the same idea of a literal delivery appears in the
second vision of Hermas, in the Apocalypses, and in the Chaldean and
Gnostic and Mandæan writings; lastly, it underlies, as a tacit natural
basis, all the ideas that the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Neo-Platonists
formed of the writings of their old masters. “Canon” is the technical
expression for the totality of writings that are accepted by a religion
as delivered. It was as canons in this sense that the Hermetic
collection and the corpus of Chaldean oracles came into being from
200--the latter a sacred book of the Neoplatonists which alone was
admitted by Proclus, the “Father” of this Church, to stand with Plato’s
_Timæus_.
Originally, the young Jesus-religion, like Jesus himself, recognized
the Jewish canon. The first Gospels set up no sort of claim to be the
Word made visible. _The John Gospel is the first Christian writing
of which the evident purpose is that of a Koran_, and its unknown
author is the originator of the idea that there could be and must be
a Christian Koran. The grave and difficult decision whether the new
religion should break with that which Jesus had believed in clothed
itself of deep necessity in the question whether the Jewish scriptures
might still be regarded as incarnations of the one truth. The answer of
the John Gospel was tacitly, and that of Marcion openly, no, but that
of the Fathers was, quite illogically, yes.
It followed from this metaphysical conception of the essence of a
sacred book that the expressions “God speaks” and “the Scripture says”
were, in a manner wholly alien to our thought, completely identical.
To us it is suggestive of the Arabian Nights that God himself should
be spellbound in these words and letters and could be unsealed and
compelled to reveal the truth by the adepts of this magic. Exegesis
no less than inspiration and delivery is a process of mystical
under-meaning (Mark i, 22). Hence the reverence--in diametrical
opposition to the Classical feeling--with which these precious
manuscripts were cared for, their ornamentation by every means known
to the young Magian art, and the appearance again and again of new
scripts which, in the eyes of their users, alone possessed the power of
capturing the truth sent down.
But such a Koran is by its very nature unconditionally right, and
therefore unalterable and incapable of improvement.[431] There arose,
in consequence, the habit of secret interpretations meant to bring
the text into harmony with the convictions of the time. A masterpiece
of this kind is Justinian’s Digests, but the same applies not only to
every book of the Bible, but also (we need not doubt) to the Gathas
of the Avesta and even to the then current manuscripts of Plato,
Aristotle, and other authorities of the Pagan theology. More important
still is the assumption, traceable in every Magian religion, of a
secret revelation, or a secret meaning of the Scriptures, preserved
not by being written down, but in the memory of adepts and propagated
orally. According to Jewish notions, Moses received at Sinai not
only the written, but _also a secret oral Torah_,[432] which it was
forbidden to commit to writing. “God foresaw,” says the Talmud, “that
one day a time would come when the Heathen would possess themselves of
the Torah and would say to Israel: ‘We, too, are sons of God.’ Then
will the Lord say: ‘Only he who knows my secrets is my son.’ And what
are the secrets of God? The oral teachings.”[433] The Talmud, then, in
the form in which it is generally accessible, contains only a part of
the religious material, and it is the same with Christian texts of the
early period. It has often been observed[434] that Mark speaks of the
Visitation and of the Resurrection only in hints, and that John only
touches upon the doctrine of the Paraclete and omits the institution
of the Lord’s Supper entirely. The initiates understood what was
meant, and the unbeliever ought not to know it. Later there was a
whole “secret discipline” which bound Christians to observe silence in
the presence of unbelievers concerning the baptismal confession and
other matters. With the Chaldeans, Neopythagoreans, Cynics, Gnostics,
and especially the sects from Jewish to Islamic, this tendency went
to such lengths that the greater part of their secret doctrines is
unknown to us. Concerning the Word thus preserved only in the minds
there was a _consensus of silence_, the more so as each believer was
certain that the other “knew.” We ourselves, as it is upon the most
important things that we are most emphatic and forthright, run the
risk of misinterpreting Magian doctrines through taking the part that
was expressed for the whole that existed, and the profane literal
meaning of words for their real significance. Gothic Christianity had
no secrets and hence it doubly mistrusted the Talmud, which it rightly
regarded as being only the foreground of Jewish doctrine.
Pure Magian, too, is the Kabbalah, which out of numbers, letter-forms,
points, and strokes, unfolds secret significances, and therefore cannot
but be as old as the Word itself that was sent down as Substance. The
secret dogma of the creation of the world out of the two-and-twenty
letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and that of the throne-chariot of
Ezekiel’s Vision, are already traceable in Maccabæan times. Closely
related to this is the allegorical exegesis of the sacred texts. All
the tractates of the Mishnah, all the Fathers, all the Alexandrian
philosophers are full of it; in Alexandria the whole Classical
mythology and even Plato were treated in this way and brought into
analogy (Moses = Musæus) with the Jewish prophets.
The only strictly _scientific_ method that an unalterable Koran leaves
open for progressive opinion is that of commentary. As by hypothesis
the “word” of an authority cannot be improved upon, the only resource
is reinterpretation. No one in Alexandria would ever have asserted
that Plato was in “error”; instead, he was glossed upon. It was done
in the strictly constructed forms of the Halakha, and the fixation of
this exegesis in writing takes the commentary shape that dominates
all religious, philosophical, and savant literatures of this Culture.
Following the procedure of the Gnostics, the Fathers compiled written
commentaries upon the Bible, and similarly the Pehlevi commentary
of the Zend appeared by the side of the Avesta, and the Midrash by
the side of the Jewish canon. But the “Roman” jurists of about A.D.
200 and the “Late Classical” philosophers--that is, the Schoolmen of
the growing cult-Church--went just the same way; the Apocalypse of
this Church, commented over and over again after Posidonius, was the
_Timæus_ of Plato. The Mishnah is one vast commentary upon the Torah.
And when the oldest exegetes had become themselves authorities and
their writings Korans, commentaries were written upon commentaries, as
by Simplicius, the last Platonist, in the West, by the Amoraim, who
added the Gemara to the Mishnah in the East, and by the jurists who
compiled the Imperial Constitutions into the Digests at Byzantium.
This method, which fictitiously refers back every saying to an
immediate inspired delivery, was brought to its keenest edge in
the Talmudic and the Islamic theologies. A new Halakha or a Hadith
is only valid when it can be referred through an unbroken chain of
guarantors back to Moses or Mohammed.[435] The solemn formula for this
in Jerusalem was “Let it come over me! So have I heard it from my
teacher.”[436] In the Zend the citation of the chain of warranty is the
rule, and Irenæus justifies his theology by the fact that a chain goes
back from him through Polycarp to the primitive Community. Into the
Early Christian literature this Halakha-form entered so self-evidently
that no one remarked it for what it was. Apart altogether from the
constant references to the Law and the Prophets, it appears in the
superscription of the four Gospels (“_according to_” Mark), each of
which had thus to present its warrant if authority was to be claimed
for the words of the Lord that it presented.[437] This established
the chain back to the Truth that was incarnate in Jesus, and it is
impossible to exaggerate the intense reality of this in the world-idea
of an Augustine or a Jerome. This is the basis of the practice,
which spread even more widely from the time of Alexander onwards, of
providing religious and philosophical writings with names,[438] like
Enoch, Solomon, Ezra, Hermes, Pythagoras--guarantors and vessels of
divine wisdom, in whom, therefore, the Word had been made Flesh of
old. We still possess a number of Apocalypses bearing the name of
Baruch, who was then compared with Zarathustra, and we can scarcely
form an idea of what in the way of literature circulated under the
names of Aristotle and Pythagoras. The “Theology of Aristotle” was
one of the most influential works of Neoplatonism. And, lastly,
this the metaphysical presupposition for the style and the deeper
meaning of _citation_, which was employed by Fathers, Rabbis, “Greek”
philosophers, and “Roman” jurists, and eventuated on the one hand in
the Law of Valentinian III,[439] and on the other in the elimination
from the Jewish and Christian canons of apocryphal writings--a
fundamental notion, which differentiated the literary stock according
to difference of _substance_.
V
With such researches to build upon, it will become possible in the
future to write a history of the _Magian group of religions_. It forms
an inseparable unit of spirit and evolution, and let no one imagine
that any individual one of them can be really comprehended without
reference to the rest. Their birth, unfolding, and inward confirmation
occupy the period 0-500. It corresponds exactly to the rise of the
Western religion from the Cluniac movement to the Reformation. A
mutual give-and-take, a confusingly rich blossoming, ripening,
transformation--overlayings, migrations, adaptations, rejections--fill
these centuries, without any sort of dependence of one system upon
the others being demonstrable. But only the forms and the structures
change; in the depths it is one and the same spirituality, and in all
the languages of this world of religions it is always itself that it
brings to expression.
In the wide realm of old-Babylonian fellahdom young peoples lived.
There everything was making ready. The first premonitions of the future
awoke about 700 B.C. in the prophetic religions of the Persians, Jews,
and Chaldeans. An image of creation of the same kind that later was to
be the preface of the Torah showed itself in clear outlines, and with
that an orientation, a direction, a goal of desire, was set. Something
was descried in the far future, indefinitely and darkly still, but with
a profound certainty that it would come. From that time on men lived
with the vision of this, with the feeling of a mission.
The second wave swelled up steeply in the Apocalyptic currents after
300. Here it was the Magian waking-consciousness that arose and built
itself a metaphysic of Last Things, based already upon the prime-symbol
of the coming Culture, the Cavern. Ideas of an awful End of the World,
of the Last Judgment, of Resurrection, Paradise, and Hell, and with
them the grand thought of a process of salvation in which earth’s
destiny and man’s were one, burst forth everywhere--we cannot say what
land or people it was that created them--mantled in wondrous scenes and
figures and names. The Messiah-figure presents itself, complete at one
stroke. Satan’s temptation of the Saviour[440] is told as a tale. But
simultaneously there welled up a deep and ever-increasing fear before
this certainty of an implacable--and imminent--limit of all happening,
before the moment in which there would be only Past. Magian Time, the
“hour,” directedness under the Cavern, imparted a new pulse to life and
a new import to the word “Destiny.” Man’s attitude before the Deity
suddenly became completely different. In the dedicatory inscription of
the great basilica of Palmyra (which was long thought to be Christian)
Baal was called the good, the compassionate, the mild; and this feeling
penetrated, with the worship of Rahman, right to southern Arabia.
It fills the psalms of the Chaldeans and the teachings _about_ the
God-sent Zarathustra that took the place of his teachings. And it
stirred the Jewry of Maccabæan time--most of the psalms were written
then--and all the other communities, long forgotten now, that lay
between the Classical and the Indian worlds.
The third upheaval came in the time of Cæsar and brought to birth the
great religions of Salvation. And with this the Culture rose to bright
day, and what followed continuously throughout one or two centuries was
an intensity of religious experience, both unsurpassable and at long
last unbearable. Such a tension bordering upon the breaking point the
Gothic, the Vedic, and every other Culture-soul has known, once and
once only, in its young morning.
Now arose in the Persian, the Mandæan, the Jewish, the Christian,
circles of belief, and in that of the Western Pseudomorphosis as
well--just as in the Indian, the Classical, and the Western ages
of Chivalry--the Grand Myth. In this Arabian Culture religious and
national heroism are no more distinctly separable than nation,
church, and state, or sacred and secular law. The prophet merges with
the fighter, and the story of a great Sufferer rises to the rank of
a national epic. The powers of light and darkness, fabulous beings,
angels and devils, Satan and the good spirits wrestle together; all
nature is a battle-ground from the beginning of the world to its
annihilation. Down below in the world of mankind are enacted the
adventures and sufferings of the heralds, the heroes, and the martyrs
of religion. Every nation, in the sense of the word attaching to this
Culture, possessed its heroic saga. In the East the life of the Persian
prophet inspired an epic poetry of grand outlines. At his birth the
Zarathustra-laughter pealed through the heavens, and all nature echoed
it. In the West the suffering of Jesus, ever broadening and developing,
became _the veritable epic of the Christian nation_, and by its side
there grew up a chain of legends of his childhood which in the end
fructified a whole genre of poetry. The figure of the Mother of God
and the deeds of the Apostles became, like the stories of the Western
Crusade-heroes, the centre of extended romances (Acts of Thomas,
Pseudo-Clementines) which in the second century sprang up everywhere
from the Nile to the Tigris. In the Jewish Haggada and in the Targums
is brought together a rich measure of legends about Saul, David, the
Patriarchs, and the great Tannaim, like Schuda and Akiba,[441] and the
insatiable fancy of the age seized also upon what it could reach of the
Late-Classical cult-legends and founder-stories (lives of Pythagoras,
Hermes, Apollonius of Tyana).
With the end of the second century the sounds of this exaltation
die away. The flowering of epic poetry is past, and the mystical
penetration and dogmatic analysis of the religious material begin. The
doctrines of the new Churches are brought into theological systems.
Heroism yields to Scholastism, poetry to thought, the seer and seeker
to the priest. The early Scholasticism which ends about 200 (as the
Western about 1200) comprises the whole Gnosis--in the very broadest
sense, the great Contemplation--the author of the John Gospel,
Valentinus, Bardesanes, and Marcion, the Apologists and the early
Fathers, up to Irenæus and Tertullian, the last Tannaim up to Rabbi
Jehuda, the completer of the Mishna, the Neopythagoreans and Hermetics
of Alexandria. All this corresponds with, in the West, the School of
Chartres, Anselm, Joachim of Floris, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugo de St.
Victor. Full Scholasticism begins with Neoplatonism, with Clement and
Origen, the first Amoraim, and the creators of the newer Avesta under
Ardeshir (226-241) and Sapor I, the Mazdaist high-priest Tanvasar
above all. Simultaneously a higher religiousness begins to separate
from the peasant’s piety of the countryside, which still lingered in
the apocalyptic disposition, and thenceforth maintained itself almost
unaltered under various names right into the fellahdom of the Turkish
age, while in the urban and more intellectual upper world the Persian,
Jewish, and Christian community was absorbed by that of Islam.
Slowly and steadily now the great Churches moved to fulfilment. It
had been decided--the most important religious result of the second
century--that the outcome of the teaching of Jesus was not to be
a transformation of Judaism, but a new Church, which took its way
westward while Judaism, without loss of inward strength, turned itself
to the East. To the third century belong the great mental structures of
theology. A _modus vivendi_ with historical actuality had been reached,
the end of the world had receded into the distance, and a new dogmatic
grew up to explain the new world-picture. The arrival of mature
Scholasticism presupposes faith in the duration of the doctrines that
it sets itself to establish.
Viewing the results of their efforts, we find that the Aramæan
motherland developed its forms in three directions. In the East, out
of the Zoroastrian religion of Achæmenid times and the remains of
its sacred literature, there formed itself the Mazdaist Church, with
a strict hierarchy and laborious ritual, with sacraments, mass, and
confession (_patet_). As mentioned above, Tanvasar made a beginning
with the collection and ordering of the _new_ Avesta; under Sapor I
(as contemporaneously in the Talmud) the profane texts of medicine,
law, and astronomy were added; and the rounding-off was the work of
the Church magnate Mahraspand under Sapor II (309-379). The immediate
accretion of a commentary in Pehlevi was only what was to be expected
in the Magian Culture. The new Avesta, like the Jewish and the
Christian Bibles, was a canon of separate writings, and we learn
that amongst the Nasks (originally twenty-one) now lost there was a
gospel of Zarathustra, the conversion-story of Vishtaspa, a Genesis, a
law-book, and a genealogical book with trees from the Creation to the
Persian kings, while the Vendidad, which Geldner calls the Leviticus of
the Persians, was--most significantly--preserved complete.
A new religious founder appeared in 242, in the reign of Sapor I. This
was Mani, who, rejecting “redeemerless” Judaism and Hellenism, knit
together the whole mass of Magian religions in one of the most powerful
theological creations of all times--for which in 276 the Mazdaist
priesthood crucified him. Equipped by his father (who quite late in
life abandoned his family to enter a Mandæan order) with all the
knowledge of the period, he unified the basic ideas of the Chaldeans
and Persians with those of Johannine, Eastern, Christianity--a task
which had been attempted before in the Christian-Persian Gnosis of
Bardesanes, but without any idea of founding a new church.[442] He
conceived of the mystical figures of the Johannine Logos (for him
identical with the Persian Vohu Mano), the Zarathustra of the Avesta
legends, and the Buddha of the late texts as divine Emanations, and
himself he proclaimed to be the Paraclete of the John Gospel and
the Saoshyant of the Persians. As we now know, thanks to the Turfan
discoveries which included parts of Mani’s works (till then completely
lost), the Church-language of the Mazdaists, Manichæans, and Nestorians
was--independently of the current languages--Pehlevi.
In the West the two cult-Churches developed (in Greek[443]) a theology
that was not only cognate with this, but to a great extent identical
with it. In the time of Mani began the theological fusion of the
Aramæan-Chaldean sun-religion and the Aramæan-Persian Mithras cult into
one system, whose first great “Father” was Iamblichus (_c._ 300)--the
contemporary of Athanasius, but also of Diocletian, the Emperor who in
295 made Mithras the God of a henotheistic State-religion. Spiritually,
at any rate, its priests were in nowise distinguishable from those of
Christianity. Proclus (he, too, a true “Father”) received in dreams
elucidations of a difficult text-passage; to him the _Timæus_ and the
Chaldean oracles were canonical, and he would gladly have seen all
other writings of the philosophers destroyed. His hymns, tokens of
the lacerations of a true eremite, implore Helios and other helpers
to protect him against evil spirits. Hierocles wrote a moral breviary
for the believers of the Neopythagorean community, which it needs a
keen eye to distinguish from Christian work. Bishop Synesius was a
prince-prelate of Neoplatonism before becoming one of Christianity--and
the change did not involve an act of conversion; he kept his theology
and only altered its names. It was possible for the Neoplatonist
Asclepiades to write a great work on the likeness of all theologies. We
possess Pagan gospels and hagiologies as well as Christian. Apollonius
wrote the life of Pythagoras, Marinus that of Proclus, Damascius that
of Isidore; and there is not the slightest difference between these
works, which begin and end with prayers, and the Christian Acts of the
Martyrs. Porphyry describes faith, love, hope, and truth as the four
divine elements.
Between these Churches of the East and the West we see, looking south
from Edessa, the Talmudic Church (the “Synagogue”) with Aramaic
as its written language. Against these great and firm foundations
Jewish-Christians (such as Ebionites and Elkazites), Mandæans, and
likewise Chaldeans (unless we regard Manichæism as a reconstruction
of that religion) were unable to hold their own. Breaking down into
numberless sects, they either faded out in the shadow of the great
Churches or were absorbed in their structure as the last Marcionites
and Montanists were absorbed into Manichæism. By about 300, outside the
Pagan, Christian, Persian, Jewish, and Manichæan Churches no important
Magian religions remained in being.
VI
Along with this ripe Scholasticism, there set in also, from 200,
the effort to identify the _visible_ community, as its organization
became ever stricter, with the organism of the State. This followed of
necessity from the world-feeling of Magian man, and in turn it led to
the transformation of the rulers into caliphs--lords of a creed-society
far more than of domains--to the idea of orthodoxy as the premiss of
real citizenship; to the duty of persecuting false religions (the
“Holy War” of Islam is as old as the Culture itself, and the first
centuries were full of it); and to a special régime within the State
of unbelievers--just tolerated and under laws and governance of their
own[444] (for the law God had given was not for heretics)--and, with
it, the ghetto manner of living.
First, Osrhoene, in the centre of the Aramæan landscape, adopted
Christianity as the State religion about 200. Then Mazdaism assumed the
same position in the Sassanid Empire (226) while under Aurelian (d.
275) and above all Diocletian (295) Syncretism as a compound of the
Divus, Sol, and Mithras cults became the state religion of the Roman
Imperium. Constantine in 312, King Trdat of Armenia about 321, and
King Mirian of Georgia a few years later, went over to Christianity.
In the far South, Saba must already have become Christian in the
third century, Axum in the fourth; on the other hand, simultaneously
with these, the Himaryite State became Jewish, and there was one more
effort, that of Julian, to bring back the Pagan Church to supremacy.
In opposition to this--likewise in all the religions of this
Culture--we find the spread of Monasticism, with its radical aversion
from State, history, and actuality in general. For after all the
conflict of being and waking-being--that is, of politics and religion,
of history and nature--could not be completely mastered by the form
of the Magian Church and its identification with State and nation.
Race breaks forth into life in these mind-creations and overpowers the
divine, precisely because the latter has absorbed the worldly into
itself. But here there was no conflict of Church and State as in the
Gothic age, and consequently the split in the nation was between the
worldly-pious and the ascetics. A Magian religion relates exclusively
to the divine spark, the Pneuma, in the man, that which he shares
with the invisible community of the faithful and blessed spirits. The
rest of the man belongs to Evil and Darkness. But in the man it is
the divine that must rule, overcoming, suppressing, destroying the
other. In this Culture the askete is not only the veritable priest--the
secular priest, as to-day in Russia, is never really respected, and
mostly he is allowed to marry--but, what is more, he is the true man
of piety. Outside monasticism it was simply not possible to fulfil
the demands of religion, and consequently communities of repentance,
monasteries, and convents assume quite early a position that, for
metaphysical reasons, they could never have had in India or China--let
alone in the West, where the Orders were working and fighting--that
is, dynamic--units.[445] Consequently, we must not regard the people
of the Magian world as divided into the “world” and the “cloister” as
two definitely separate modes of life, with equal possibilities of
fulfilling all the demands of religion. Every pious person _was_ a monk
in some sort.[446] Between world and cloister there was no opposition,
but only a difference of _degree_. Magian churches and orders are
homogeneous communities which are only to be distinguished from one
another by extent. The community of Peter was an Order, that of Paul a
Church, while the Mithras religion is at once almost too wide for the
one designation and too narrow for the other.
_Every Magian Church is itself an Order_ and it was only in respect
of human weakness that there were stages and grades of askesis, and
these not ordered, but only permitted, as among the Marcionites
and the Manichæans (_electi, auditores_). And, in truth, a Magian
nation is nothing but the sum, _the order of all the orders_, which,
constituted in smaller and smaller, stricter and stricter groups, come
out finally in the eremites, dervishes, and stylites, in whom nothing
more is of the world, whose waking-consciousness now belongs only
to the Pneuma. Setting aside the prophetic religions--out of which,
and between which, the excitation of Apocalypse generated numerous
order-like communities--the two cult-Churches of the West produced
unnumbered monks, friars, and orders, distinguishable from one another
in the end only by the name of the Deity upon whom they called. All
observed fasting, prayer, celibacy, poverty. It is very doubtful which
of the two Churches in 300 was the more ascetic in its tendency. The
Neoplatonist monk Sarapion went into the desert in order to devote
himself entirely to studying the hymns of Orpheus. Damascius, guided
by a dream, withdrew into a noisome cave in order to pray continuously
to Cybele.[447] The schools of philosophy were nothing but ascetic
orders; the Neopythagoreans stood close to the Jewish Essenes; the
Mithras cult, a true order, admitted only men to its communion and
its fraternities; the Emperor Julian had the intention of endowing
pagan monasteries. The Mandæan religion seems to have been a group
of order-communities of varying rigour; amongst them was that of
John the Baptist. Christian monasticism did not begin with Pachomius
(320); he was merely the builder of the first cloister. The movement
began with the original community in Jerusalem itself. The Gospel of
Matthew and almost all “Acts of the Apostles” testify to rigorously
ascetic sentiment.[448] The Persian and Nestorian Churches developed
the monastic idea further, and finally Islam assimilated it to the
full. To this day Oriental piety is dominated by the Moslem Orders and
Brotherhoods. And Jewry followed the same line of evolution, from the
Karæi[449] (Qaraites) of the eighth century to the Polish Hasidim of
the eighteenth.[450]
Christianity, which even in the second century was hardly more than an
extended Order, and whose public influence was out of all proportion
to the number of its adherents, grew suddenly vast about the year
250. This is the epochal moment in which the last city-cults of the
Classical effaced themselves before, _not Christianity, but the
new-born Pagan Church_. The records of the Fratres Arvales in Rome
break off in 241, and the last cult-inscriptions at Olympia are of
265. At the same time, the cumulation of the most diverse priestly
characters in one man became customary,[451] implying that these usages
were felt no longer as specific, but as usages of one single religion.
And this religion set out to _convert_, spreading itself far and wide
over the lands of the Hellenistic-Roman stock. The Christian religion,
on the other hand, was alone in spreading (_c._ 300) over the great
Arabian field. And for that very reason it was inevitable that inner
contradiction should now be set up in it. Due, not now to the spiritual
dispositions of particular men, but to the spirit of the particular
landscapes, these contradictions led to the break-up of Christianity
into several religions--and for ever.
The _controversy concerning the nature of Christ_ was the issue on
which this conflict came up for decision. The matter in dispute was
just those problems of substance which in the same form and with
the same tendency fill the thoughts of all other Magian theologies.
Neoplatonic Scholasticism, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and above all Proclus
treated it in a Western formulation, by modes of thought closely akin
to Philo’s and even to Paul’s. The relation between the Primary One,
Nus, Logos, the Father, and the Mediator was considered with reference
to the substantial. Was the process thereof one of emanation, of
partition, or of pervasion? Was one contained in the other, are they
identical, or mutually exclusive? Was the Triad at the same time a
Monad? In the East a different constitution of the problem is evidenced
already in the premisses of the John Gospel and the Bardesanian Gnosis:
the relation of Ahuramazda to the Holy Spirit (Spenta Mainyu) and
the nature of Vohu Mano gave plenty of occupation to the Avestan
“fathers”; and it was just at the time of the decisive Councils of
Ephesus and Chalcedon that we find the temporary triumph of Zrvanism
(438-457), with its primacy of the divine world-course (Zrvan as
historic Time) over the divine substances marking a peak of dogmatic
battle. Later, Islam took up the whole subject over again and sought to
solve it in relation to the nature (_Wesenheit_) of Mohammed and the
Koran. The problem had been there, ever since a Magian mankind had come
into being--very much as the specifically Western will-problem, our
counterpart to the substance-problem, was posed in the beginnings of
Faustian thought. There is no need to look for these problems; they are
there as soon as the Culture thinks, they are the fundamental form of
its thought, and come to the front, uncalled-for and sometimes not even
perceived, in all its studies.
But the three Christian solutions predetermined by the three landscapes
of East, West, and South were all present from the first, implicit
already in the main tendencies of Gnosticism, which we may indicate by
the names of Bardesanes, Basilides, and Valentinus. Their meeting-point
was Edessa, where the streets rang with the battle-cries of the
Nestorians against the victors of Ephesus and, anon, with the εἷς θεός
shout of the Monophysites, demanding that Bishop Ibas should be thrown
to the wild beasts of the circus.
The great question was formulated by Athanasius, whose intellectual
origins lay in the Pseudomorphosis and who had many affinities with
his Pagan contemporary Iamblichus. Against Arius, who saw in Christ
a demigod, merely _like_ in substance to the Father, he maintained
that Father and Son were of _the same_ substance (θεότης) which
in Christ had assumed a human σῶμα. “The Word became Flesh”--this
formula of the West depends upon visible facts of the cult-Churches,
and the understanding of the Word upon constant contemplation of the
picturable. Here in the iconodule West, where in these very times
Iamblichus wrote his book concerning God-statues in which the divine
was substantially present and worked miracles,[452] the abstraction of
the Triunity was always effectively accompanied by the sensuous-human
relation of Mother and Son, and it is the latter which it is impossible
to eliminate from the thought-processes of Athanasius.
With the recognition of the homoousia of Father and Son the real
problem was for the first time posed--namely, the attitude of the
Magian dualism to the historical phenomenon of the Son himself. In the
world-cavern there was divine and human substance, in man a part in
divine Pneuma and the individual soul somehow related to the “flesh.”
But what of Christ?
It was a decisive factor--one of the results of Actium--that the
contest was fought out in the Greek tongue and in the territory of the
Pseudomorphosis--that is, under the full influence of the “Caliph”
of the Western Church. Constantine had even been the convener and
president of the Council of Nicæa, where the doctrine of Athanasius
carried the day. In the East, with its Aramaic speech and thought,
these doings were (as we know from the letters of Aphrahat) hardly
followed at all; there men saw no cause to quarrel about what, so far
as they were concerned, had long ago been settled. The breach between
East and West, a consequence of the Council of Ephesus (431) separated
two Christian _nations_, that of the “Persian Church” and that of
the Greek Church, but this was no more than the manifestation of a
difference, inherent from the first, between _modes of thought_ proper
to the two different landscapes. Nestorius and the whole East saw in
Christ the Second Adam, the Divine Envoy of the last æon. Mary had
borne a _man_-child in whose human and created substance (_physis_)
the godly, uncreated element _dwelt_. The West, on the contrary, saw
in Mary the Mother of a _God_: the divine and the human substance
formed in his body (_persona_, in the Classical idiom[453]) a unity,
named by Cyril ἕνωσις.[454] When the Council of Ephesus had recognized
the mother of God, her who gave birth to God, the city of Diana’s old
renown burst into a truly Classical orgy of celebration.[455]
But long ere this the Syrian Apollinaris[456] had heralded the
“Southern” idea of the matter--that in the living Christ there was not
merely a substance, but a single substance. The divine had transmuted
itself into, not mingled itself with, a human substance (no κρᾶσις,
as Gregory Nazianzen maintained in opposition; significantly enough,
the best way of expressing the Monophysite idea is through concepts of
Spinoza--the _one_ substance in another mode). The Monophysites called
the Christ of the Council of Chalcedon (451, where the West once more
prevailed) “the idol with the two faces.” They not only fell away
from the Church, they broke out in fierce risings in Palestine and
Egypt; and when in Justinian’s time the troops of Persia--that is, of
Mazdaism--penetrated to the Nile, they were hailed by the Monophysites
as liberators.
The fundamental meaning of this desperate conflict which raged
for a century--not over scholarly concepts, but over the soul of
a landscape that sought to be set free _in its people_--was the
_reversal of the work of Paul_. If we can transport ourselves into
the inmost soul of the two new-born nations, making no reservations
and ignoring all minor points of dogmatics, then we see how the
direction of Christianity towards the Greek West and its intellectual
affinity with the Pagan Church culminated in the position that the
Ruler of the West was the Head of Christianity in general. In the
mind of Constantine it was self-evident that the Pauline foundation
_within_ the Pseudomorphosis was synonymous with Christianity. The
Jewish Christians of Petrine tendency were to him a heretical sect,
and the Eastern Christians of “Johannine” type he never even noticed.
When the spirit of the Pseudomorphosis had, in the three determining
councils of Nicæa, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, put _its_ seal upon dogma,
once and for all, the real Arabian world rose up with the force of
nature and set up a barrier against it. With the end of the Arabian
Springtime, Christianity fell apart for good into three religions,
which can be symbolized by the names of Paul, Peter, and John, and of
which none can henceforth claim to be regarded by the historically and
doctrinally unprejudiced eye as _the_ true and proper Christianity.
These three religions are at the same time three nations, living in
the old race-areas of Greeks, Jews, and Persians, and the tongues that
they used were the Church-languages borrowed from them--namely, Greek,
Aramaic, and Pehlevi.
VII
The Eastern Church, since the Council of Nicæa, had organized itself
with an episcopal constitution, at the head of which stood the
Katholikos of Ctesiphon, and with councils, liturgy, and law of its
own. In 486 the Nestorian doctrine was accepted as binding, and the tie
with Constantinople was thus broken. From that point on, Mazdaists,
Manichæans, and Nestorians have a common destiny, of which the seed was
sown in the Gnosis of Bardesanes. In the Monophysite Churches of the
South, the spirit of the primitive Community emerged again and spread
itself further; with its uncompromising monotheism and its hatred of
images its closest affinity was with Talmudic Judaism, and its old
battle-cry of εἷς θεός had already marked it to be, with that Judaism,
the starting-point of Islam (“Allah il Allah”). The Western Church
continued to be bound up with the fate of the Roman Empire--that is,
the cult-Church became the State. Gradually it absorbed into itself the
adherents of the Pagan Church, and thenceforth its importance lay not
so much in itself--for Islam almost annihilated it--but in the accident
that it was _from it_ that the young peoples of the Western Culture
received the Christian system as the basis for a new creation,[457]
receiving it, moreover, in the Latin guise of the extreme West--which
for the Greek Church itself was unmeaning, since Rome was now a Greek
city, and the Latin language was far more truly at home in Africa and
Gaul.
The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being
that consists in extension, had been from the beginning active in
extending itself. All these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully,
and successfully, missionary Churches. But it was not until men had
at last ceased to think of the end of the world as imminent, and
dogma appropriate to prolonged existence in this World’s Cavern had
been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their standpoint
towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture
took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all
others and found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no
means its only example. Of these mighty facts Western theologians and
historians give an entirely false picture. All that their gaze, riveted
upon the Mediterranean lands, observes is the Western direction that
fits in with their “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” schema, and even within
these limits, accepting the ostensible unity of Christianity, they
regard it as passing at a certain period from a Greek into a Latin
form, whereby the Greek residue is lost sight of altogether.
But even before Christianity--and this is a fact of which the immense
significance has never been observed, which has not even been correctly
interpreted as _mission_ effort--the Pagan Church had won for the
Syncretic Cult the greater part of the population of North Africa,
Spain, Gaul, Britain, and the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Of the
Druidism that Cæsar had found in Gaul, little remained extant by
the time of Constantine. The assimilation of indigenous local gods
under the names of the great Magian divinities of the Cult-Church
(and especially Mithras-Sol-Jupiter) from the second century on, was
essentially a process of conquest, and the same is true of the later
emperor-worship.[458] The missionary efforts of Christianity here would
have been less successful than they were if the other cult-Church--its
near relative--had not preceded it. But the latter’s propaganda was by
no means limited to barbarian fields; even in the fifth century the
missionary Asclepiodotus converted Aphrodisias, a Carian city, from
Christianity to Paganism.
The Jews, as has been shown already, directed missionary effort on a
large scale towards the East and the South. Through southern Arabia
they drove into the heart of Africa, possibly even before the birth
of Christ, while on the side of the East their presence in China is
demonstrable, even in the second century. To the north the realm
of the Khazars[459] and its capital, Astrakhan, later went over to
Judaism. From this area came the Mongols of Jewish religion who
advanced into the heart of Germany and were defeated, along with the
Hungarians, in the battle of the Lechfeld in 955. Jewish scholars of
the Spanish-Moorish universities petitioned the Byzantine Emperor (in
A.D. 1000) for safe-conduct for an embassy that was to ask the Khazars
whether they were the Lost Tribes of Israel.
From the Tigris, Mazdaists and Manichæans penetrated the empires on
either hand, Roman and Chinese, to their utmost frontiers. Persian,
as the Mithras cult, invaded Britain; Manichæism had by 400 become
a danger to Greek Christianity, and there were Manichæan sects in
southern France as late as the Crusades[460]; but the two religions
drove eastwards as well, along the Great Wall of China (where the great
polyglot inscription of Kara Balgassun testifies to the introduction of
the Manichæan faith in the Oigur realm) and even to Shantung. Persian
fire-temples arose in the interior of China, and from 700 Persian
expressions are found in Chinese astrological writings.
The three Christian Churches everywhere followed up the blazed trails.
When the Western Church converted the Frankish King Chlodwig in 496,
the missionaries of the Eastern Church had already reached Ceylon and
the westernmost Chinese garrisons of the Great Wall, and those of
the Southern were in the Empire of Axum. At the same time as, after
Boniface (718), Germany became converted, the Nestorian missionaries
were within an ace of winning China itself. They had entered Shantung
in 638. The Emperor Gao-dsung (651-84) permitted churches to be built
in all provinces of the Empire, in 750 Christianity was preached in
the Imperial palace itself, and in 781, according to the Aramaic and
Chinese inscriptions upon a memorial column in Singafu which has been
preserved, “all China was covered with the palaces of Concord.” But it
is in the highest degree significant that the Confucians, who cannot
be called inexpert in religious matters, regarded the Nestorians,
Mazdaists, and Manichæans as adherents of a single “Persian”
religion,[461] just as the population of the Western Roman provinces
were unable to discriminate between Mithras and Christ.
Islam, therefore, is to be regarded as the Puritanism of the whole
group of Early Magian religions, emerging as a religion only formally
new, and in the domain of the Southern Church and Talmudic Judaism. It
is this deeper significance, and not merely the force of its warlike
onslaught, that gives the key to its fabulous successes. Although
on political grounds it practised an astounding toleration--John
Damascenus, the last great dogmatist of the Greek Church, was, under
the name of Al Manzor, treasurer to the Caliph--Judaism, Mazdaism,
and the Southern and Eastern churches of Christianity were swiftly
and almost completely dissolved in it. The Katholikos of Seleucia,
Jesujabh III, complains that tens of thousands of Christians went
over to it as soon as it came on the scene, and in North Africa--the
home of Augustine--the entire population fell away to Islam at once.
Mohammed died in 632. In 641 the whole domain of the Monophysites and
the Nestorians (and, therefore, of the Talmud and the Avesta) were in
the possession of Islam. In 717 it stood before Constantinople, and
the Greek Church was in peril of extinction. Already in 628 a relative
of the prophet had brought presents to the Chinese Emperor Tai-dsung
and obtained leave to institute a mission. From 700 there were mosques
in Shantung, and in 720 Damascus sent instructions to the Arabs long
established in southern France to conquer the realm of the Franks. Two
centuries later, when in the West a new religious world was arising out
of the remains of the old Western Church, Islam was in the Sudan and in
Java.
For all this, Islam is significant only as a piece of _outward_
religious history. The inner history of the Magian religion ends
with Justinian’s time, as truly as that of the Faustian ends with
Charles V and the Council of Trent. Any book on religious history
shows “_the_” Christian religion as having had _two ages of grand
thought-movements_--0-500 in the East and 1000-1500 in the West.[462]
_But these are two springtimes of two Cultures_, and in them
are comprised also the non-Christian forms which belong to each
religious development. The closing of the University of Athens by
Justinian in 529 was not, as is always stated, the end of Classical
philosophy--there had been no Classical philosophy for centuries.
What he did, forty years before the birth of Mohammed, was to end
the theology of the Pagan Church by closing this school and--as
the historians forget to add--_to end the Christian theology also_
by closing those of Antioch and Alexandria. Dogma was complete,
finished--just as it was in the West with the Council of Trent
(1564) and the Confession of Augsburg (1540), for with the city and
intellectualism religious creative force comes to an end. So also
in Jewry and in Persia, the Talmud was concluded about 500, and
when Chosroës Nushirvan in 529 bloodily suppressed the Reformation
of Mazdak--which was not unlike our Anabaptism in its rejection of
marriage and worldly property, and had been supported by King Kobad
I as counteracting the power of Church and nobility--Avestan dogma
similarly passed into fixity.