CHAPTER IX

PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

(C)

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL

I[463]

Religion may be described as the Waking-Being of a living creature

in the moments when it overcomes, masters, denies, and even destroys

Being. Race-life and the pulse of its drive dwindle as the eyes gaze

into an extended, tense, and light-filled world, and _Time yields to

Space_. The plantlike desire for fulfilment goes out, and from primary

depths there wells up the animal fear of the fulfilment, of the ceasing

of direction, of death. Not hate and love, but fear and love are the

basic feelings of religion. Hate and fear differ as Time and Space,

blood and eye, pulse and tension, heroism and saintliness. And love in

the race-sense differs from love in the religious sense in the same way.

All religion is turned to light. The extended itself becomes religious

as a world of the eye comprehended from the ego as centre of light.

Hearing and touch are adjusted to what is seen and the _Invisible_,

whose workings are sensed, becomes the sum of the dæmonic. All

that we designate by the words “deity,” “revelation,” “salvation,”

“dispensation,” is in one way and another an element of illumined

actuality. Death, for man, is something that he sees, and knows by

seeing, and in relation to death birth is _the other_ secret. They are

the two visible limits of the sensible cosmic that is incarnate in a

live body in lighted space.

There are two sorts of deeper fear--one is fear (known even to the

animals) _in presence of_ microcosmic freedom in space, before space

itself and its powers, before death; the other is fear _for_ the cosmic

current of being, for life, for directional time. The first awakens a

dark feeling that freedom in the extended is just a new and deeper sort

of dependence than that which rules the vegetable world, and it leads

the individual being, sensible of its weakness, to seek the propinquity

and alliance of others. Anxiety produces speech, and our sort of speech

is religion--every religion. Out of the fear of Space arise the numina

of the _world-as-nature_ and the _cults of gods_; out of the fear

for time arise the numina of _life_, of sex and breed, of the State,

centring on _ancestor-worship_. That is the difference between Taboo

and Totem[464]--for the totemistic, too, always appears in religious

form, out of holy awe of that which passeth all understanding and is

for ever alien.

The higher religion requires tense alertness against the powers of

blood and being that ever lurk in the depths ready to recapture

their primeval rights over the _younger_ side of life. “_Watch_ and

pray, that ye fall not into temptation.” Nevertheless, “liberation”

is a fundamental word in every religion and an eternal wish of

every waking-being. In this general, almost prereligious, sense, it

means the desire for freedom from the anxieties and anguishes of

waking-consciousness; for relaxation of the tensions of fear-born

thought and search; for the obliteration and removal of the

consciousness of the Ego’s loneliness in the universe, the rigid

conditionedness of nature, the prospect of the immovable boundary of

all Being in eld and death.

Sleep, too, liberates--“Death and his brother Sleep.” And holy wine,

intoxication, breaks the rigour of the spirit’s tension, and dancing,

the Dionysus art, and every other form of stupefaction and ecstasy.

These are modes of slipping out of awareness by the aid of being, the

cosmic, the “it,” _the escape out of space into time_. But higher

than all these stands the genuinely religious overcoming of fear _by

means of the understanding itself_. The tension between microcosm and

macrocosm becomes something that we can love, something in which we

can wholly immerse ourselves.[465] We call this _faith_, and it is the

beginning of all man’s intellectual life.

Understanding is causal only, whether deductive or inductive, whether

derived from sensation or not. It is wholly impossible to distinguish

being-understood from being-caused--both express the same thing.

When something is “actual” for us, we see it and think it in causal

(_ursächlich_) form, just as we feel and know ourselves and our

activities as things originating, causes (_Ursache_). The assignment

of causes is, however, different from case to case, not only in the

religious, but also generally in the inorganic logic of man. A fact

is thought of at one moment as having such-and-such, at another

moment as having something else, as its cause. Every kind of thinking

has for every one of its domains of application a proper “system.”

In everyday life a causal connexion in thought is never exactly

repeated. Even in modern physics working hypotheses--that is, causal

systems--which partially exclude one another are in use side by side;

for instance, the ideas of electrodynamics and those of thermodynamics.

The significance of the thought is not thereby nullified, for during

a continuous spell of waking-consciousness we “understand” always in

the form of single acts of which each has its own causal inception.

The viewing of the entire world-as-nature in relation to the

individual consciousness as a single causally-ordered concatenation

is something perfectly unrealizable by our thought, inasmuch as our

thinking proceeds always by unit acts. It remains a belief. It is

indeed Faith itself, for it is the basis of religious understanding of

the world, which, wherever something is observed, postulates numina

as a necessity of thought--ephemeral numina for incidental events

which are not again thought of, and enduring numina as place-definite

indwellers (of springs, trees, stones, hills, stars, and so forth)

or as universals (like the gods of Heaven, of War, of Wisdom) which

can be present anywhere. These numina are limited only in virtue of

the individualness of each separate act of thought. That which to-day

is a property of the god is to-morrow itself the god. Others are

now a plurality, now a unity, now a vague Ent. There are invisibles

(shapes) and incomprehensibles (principles), which, to those to whom

it is vouchsafed, may become phenomenal or comprehensible. Fate[466]

in the Classical (εἰμαρμένη) and in the Indian (_rta_) is something

which stands as origin-thing (_Ur-Sache_) above the picturable

divinities; Magian Destiny, on the contrary, is the operation of the

one and formless supreme God. Religious thought ever lets itself

graduate values and rank within the causal succession, and leads up to

supreme beings or principles, as very first and “governing” causes;

“dispensation” is the word used for the most comprehensive of all

systems based upon valuation. Science, on the contrary, is a mode of

understanding which fundamentally abhors distinctions of rank amongst

causes; what it finds is not dispensation, but law.

The understanding of causes sets free. Belief in the linkages

discovered compels the world-fear to retreat. God is man’s refuge from

the Destiny which he can feel and livingly experience, but not think

on, or figure, or name, and which sinks into abeyance for so long--only

for so long--as the “critical” (literally, the _separating_) fear-born

understanding can establish causes behind causes comprehensibly; that

is, in order visible to the outer or inner eye. It is the desperate

dilemma of the higher grade of man that his powerful will to understand

is in constant contradiction with his being. It has ceased to serve

his life, but is unable to rule it, and consequently in all important

conjunctures there remains an insoluble element. “One has merely to

declare oneself free, and one feels the moment to be conditioned. But

if one has the courage to declare oneself conditioned, then one has the

feeling of being free” (Goethe).

We name a causal linkage within the world-as-nature, as to which we

are convinced that no further reflection can alter it--Truth. Truths

are established, and they are timeless--“absolute” means detached

from Destiny and history, but detached also from the facts of our own

living and dying--and they are an inward liberation, consolation,

and salvation, in that they disvalue and overcome the incalculable

happenings of the world of facts. Or, as it mirrors itself in the mind,

men may go, but truth remains.

In the world-around something is established--that is, fixed,

spellbound. Understanding man has the secret in the hands,

whether this be, as of old, some potent charm or, as nowadays, a

mathematical formula. A feeling of triumph, even to-day, accompanies

every experimental step in the realm of Nature which determines

something--about the purposes and powers of the god of heaven or the

storm-spirits of the ground-dæmons; or about the numina of natural

science (atom-nuclei, the velocity of light, gravitation); or even

about the abstract numina that thought conceives in contemplating its

own image (concept, category, reason)--and, in determining, fixes it

in the prison of an unalterable system of causal relations. Experience

in this inorganic, killing, preserving sense, which is something quite

different from life-experience and knowledge of men, takes place in

two modes--_theory and technique_,[467] or, in religious language,

_myth and cult_--according as the believer’s intention is to open up

or to confine the secrets of the world-around. Both demand a high

development of human understanding. _Both may be born of either fear or

love._ There is a mythology of fear, like the Mosaic and the primitive

generally, and a mythology of love, like that of early Christianity

and Gothic mysticism. Similarly there is a technique of defensive,

and another technique of postulant, magic, and this, no doubt the

most fundamental, distinction between sacrifice and prayer[468]

distinguishes also primitive and mature mankind. Religiousness is a

trait of soul, but religion is a talent. “Theory” demands the gift

of vision that few possess to the extent of luminous insight and

many possess not at all. It is world-view, “_Weltanschauung_” in the

most primary sense, whether what one sees in that world is the hand

and the loom of powers, or (in a colder urban spirit, not fearing or

loving, but inquisitive) the theatre of law-conform forces. The secrets

of Taboo and Totem are beheld in god-faiths and soul-faiths, and

calculated in theoretical physics and biology. “Technique” presupposes

the intellectual gift of binding and conjuring. The theorist is the

critical seer, the technician is the priest, the discoverer is the

prophet.

The means, however, in which the whole force of intellect concentrates

itself is the _form_ of the actual, which is abstracted from vision by

speech, and of which not every waking-consciousness can discern the

quintessence--the conceptual circumscription, the communicable law,

name, number. Hence every conjuration of the deity is based on the

knowledge of its real name and the use of rites and sacraments, known

and available only to the initiated, of which the form must be exact

and the words correct. This applies not merely to primitive magic, but

just as much to our physical (and particularly our medical) technique.

It is for this reason that mathematics have a character of sanctity and

are regularly the product of a religious milieu (Pythagoras, Descartes,

Pascal); that there is a mysticism of sacred numbers (3, 7, 12) in

every religion,[469] and that Ornament (of which cult-architecture is

the highest form) is essentially number felt as shape. It is rigid,

compelling forms, expression-motives and communication-signs[470]

that the microcosm employs in the world of waking-consciousness to

get into touch with the macrocosm. In sacerdotal technique they are

called precepts, and in scientific, laws--but both are really name and

number, and primitive man would discover no difference between the

magic wherewith the priests of his villages command the dæmons and that

wherewith the civilized technician commands his machines.

The first, and perhaps the only, outcome of man’s will-to-understanding

is _faith_. “I believe” is the great word against metaphysical fear,

and at the same time it is an avowal of love. Even though one’s

researches or accumulation of knowledge may culminate in sudden

illumination or conclusive calculation, yet all one’s own sense and

comprehension would be meaningless unless there were set up along

with it an inward certainty of a “something” which as other and alien

_is_--and is, moreover, exactly under the ascertained shape--in the

concatenation of cause and effect. The highest intellectual possession,

therefore, known to man as a being of speech-deduced thought, is the

firm and hard-won belief in this something, withdrawn from the courses

of time and destiny, which he has separated out by contemplation and

labelled by name and number. But _what_ that something is remains

in the last analysis obscure. Was it the something of secret logic

of the universe that was touched, or only a silhouette? And all the

struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious investigation directs

itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair. He needs

in his intellectual boring of belief a _final_ something attainable

by thought, an end of dissection that leaves no remainder of mystery.

The corners and pockets of his world of contemplation must all be

illuminated--nothing less will give him his release.

Here belief passes over into the knowledge evoked by mistrust, or,

more accurately, becomes belief in that knowledge. For the latter

form of the understanding is radically dependent upon the former; it

is posterior, more artificial, more questionable. Further, religious

theory--that is, the contemplation of the believer--_leads to_ priestly

practice, but scientific theory, on the contrary, _liberates itself_ by

contemplation _from_ the technical knowledge of every day life.[471]

The firm belief that is bred by illuminations, revelations, sudden

deep glimpses, can dispense with critical work. But critical knowledge

presupposes the belief that its methods will lead to just that which

is desired--that is, not to fresh imaginings, but to the “actual.”

History, however, teaches that doubt as to belief leads to knowledge,

and doubt as to knowledge (after a period of critical optimism) back

again to belief. As theoretical knowledge frees itself from confiding

acceptance, it is marching to self-destruction, after which what

remains is simply and solely technical experience.

Belief, in its primitive, unclear condition, acknowledges superior

sources of wisdom by which things that man’s own subtlety could never

unravel are more or less manifest--such as prophetic words, dreams,

oracles, sacred scriptures, the voice of the deity. The critical

spirit, on the contrary, wants, and believes itself able, to look

into everything for itself. It not only mistrusts alien truths, but

even denies their possibility. Truth, for it, is only knowledge

that it has proved for itself. But if pure criticism creates its

means out of itself solely, it did not long go unperceived that this

position assumed the reality of the result. _De omnibus dubitandum_

is a proposition that is incapable of being actualized. It is apt

to be forgotten that critical activity must rest upon a _method_,

and the possibility of obtaining this method in turn by the way of

criticism is only apparent. For, in reality, it follows from the

momentary disposition of the thought.[472] That is, the results of

criticism themselves are determined by the basic method, but this in

turn is determined by the stream of being which carries and perfuses

the waking-consciousness. The belief in a knowledge that needs no

postulates is merely a mark of the immense naïveté of rationalist

periods. A theory of natural science is nothing but a historically

older dogma in another shape. And the only profit from it is that

which life obtains, in the shape of a successful technique, to which

theory has provided the key. It has already been said that the value

of a working hypothesis resides not in its “correctness” but in its

usableness. But discoveries of another sort, findings of insight,

“Truths” in the optimistic sense, cannot be the outcome of purely

scientific understanding, since this always presupposes an existing

view upon which its critical, dissecting activity can operate; the

natural science of the Baroque is one continuous dissection of the

religious world-picture of the Gothic.

The aim of faith and science, fear and curiosity, is not to experience

life, but to know the world-as-nature. Of world-as-history they are the

express negation. But the secret of waking-consciousness is a twofold

one; two fear-born, causally ordered pictures arise for the inner

eye--the “outer world” and as its counter-image the “inner world.” In

both are true problems, and the waking-consciousness is not only a

look-out, but is very busy within its own domains as well. The Numen

out there is called God; in here Soul. By the critical understanding

the deities of the believer’s vision are transmuted in thought into

mechanical magnitudes referable to its world, but their essence and

kernel remain the same--Classical matter and form, Magian light and

darkness, Faustian force and mass--and its mode is ever the same

dissection of the primitive soul-belief, and its end is ever the

same, a _predetermined_ result. The physics of the within is called

systematic psychology and it discovers in man, if it is Classical

science, thing-like soul-_parts_ (νοῦς, θυμός, ἐπιθυμία); if Magian,

soul-substance (ruach, nephesh); if Faustian, soul-_forces_ (thinking,

feeling, willing). These are the shapes that religious meditation, in

fear and in love, then follows up in the causal relations of guilt,

sin, pardon, conscience, reward, and punishment.

Being is a mystery that, as soon as faith and science turn their

attention to it, illudes them into fateful error. Instead of the cosmic

itself being reached (which is completely outside the possibilities

of the active waking-consciousness) the sensible mobility of body in

the field of the eye, and the conceptual image of a mechanical-causal

chain abstracted therefrom, are subjected to analysis. But real life

_is led_, not cognised. _Only the Timeless is true._ Truths lie

beyond history and life, and vice versa life is something beyond all

causes, effects, and truths. Criticism in both cases, critique of

waking-consciousness and critique of being, are contrary to happening

and alien to life. But in the first case the application of a critique

is entirely justified by the critical intention and the inner logic

of the object that is referred to; in the second case it is not. It

follows that the distinction between faith and knowledge, or fear and

curiosity, or revelation and criticism, is not, after all, the ultimate

distinction. Knowledge is only a late form of belief. But _belief and

life_, love springing from the secret fear of the world, and love

springing from the secret hate of the sexes, knowledge of inorganic and

sense of organic logic, Causes and Destinies--_this_ is the deepest

opposition of all. And here we distinguish men, not according to what

their modes of thinking are--religious or critical--nor according

to the objects of their thought, but according to whether they are

thinkers (no matter about what) _or doers_.

In the realm of doing the waking-consciousness takes charge only when

it becomes _technique_. Religious knowledge, too, is power--man is

not only ascertaining causations, but handling them. He who knows

the secret relationship between microcosm and macrocosm commands

it also, whether the knowledge has come to him by revelation or by

eavesdropping. Thus the magician and conjuror is truly the Taboo-man.

He compels the deity through sacrifice and prayer; he practises the

true rites and sacraments because they are causes of inevitable

results, and whosoever knows them, him they must serve. He reads in the

stars and in the sacred books; in his power lies, timeless and immune

from all accident, the _causal_ relation of sin and propitiation,

repentance and absolutions, sacrifice and grace. His chain of sacred

origins and results makes him himself a vessel of mysterious power and,

therefore, a cause of new effects, in which one must have faith before

one may have them imparted.

From this starting-point we can understand (what the European-American

world of to-day has wellnigh forgotten) the ultimate meaning of

religious ethics, _Moral_. It is, wherever true and strong, a relation

that has the full import of _ritual act and practice_; it is (to use

Loyola’s phrase) “_exercitium spirituale_,” performed before the

deity,[473] who is to be softened and conjured thereby. “What shall I

do to be saved?” This “what?” is the key to the understanding of all

real moral. In its deeps there is ever a “wherefore” and a “why,” even

in the case of those few sublimate philosophers who have imagined a

moral that is “for its own sake”--confessing in the very phrase that

deep down they feel a “wherefore,” even though but a sympathetic few of

their own kind can appreciate it. _There is only causal moral_--that

is, _ethical technique_--on the background of a convinced metaphysic.

Moral is a conscious and planned causality of the conduct, apart from

all particulars of actual life and character, something eternal and

universally valid, not only without time, but hostile to time and for

that very reason “true.” Even if mankind did not exist, moral would

be true and valid--this is no mere conceit, but an expression of the

ethical inorganic logic of the world conceived as system that has

actually been used. Never would the philosopher concede that it could

have a historical evolution and fulfilment. Space denies Time; true

moral is absolute, eternally complete and the same. In the depths of it

there is ever a negation of life, a refraining and renunciation carried

to the point of askesis and death itself. Negation is expressed in its

very phrases--religious moral contains prohibitions, not precepts.

Taboo, even where it ostensibly affirms, is a list of disclaimers. To

liberate oneself from the world of fact, to evade the possibilities

of Destiny, always to look upon the race in oneself as the lurking

enemy--nothing but hard system, doctrine, and exercise will give

that. No action must be causal or impulsive--that is, left to the

blood--everything must be considered according to motives and results

and “carried out” according to orders. Extreme tension of awareness

is required lest we fall into sin. First of all things, continence in

what pertains to the blood, love, marriage. Love and hate in mankind

are cosmic and evil; the love of the sexes is the very polar opposite

of timeless love and fear of God, and therefore it is the prime sin,

for which Adam was cast forth from paradise and burdened man with the

heritage of guilt. Conception and death define the life of the body in

space, and the fact that it is the _body_ that is in question makes

the former sin and the latter punishment. Σῶμα σῆμα (the Classical

body a grave!) was the confession of the Orphic religion. Æschylus

and Pindar comprehended Being as a reproach, and the saints of all

Cultures feel it as an impiety that has to be killed off by askesis or

(what is nearly related thereto) orgiastic squandering. Action, the

field of history, the deed, heroism, delight in battle and victory and

spoil, are evil. For in them the pulse of cosmic being knocks on the

door too loudly and disturbingly for contemplativeness and thought.

The whole world--meaning the world-as-history--is infamous. It fights

instead of renouncing; it does not possess the idea of sacrifice.

It prevails over truth by means of facts. As it follows impulse, it

baffles thought about cause and effect. And therefore the highest

sacrifice that intellectual man can offer is to make a personal present

of it to the powers of nature. _Every moral action is a piece of this

sacrifice_, and an ethical life-course is an unbroken chain of such

sacrifices. Above all, the offering of sympathy, com-passion {sic}, in

which the inwardly strong gives up his superiority to the powerless.

The compassionate man kills something within himself. But we must not

confuse this sympathy in the grand religious sense with the vague

sentimentality of the everyday man, who cannot command himself, still

less with the _race-feeling of chivalry_ that is not a moral of reasons

and rules at all, but an upstanding and self-evident _custom_ bred of

the unconscious pulsations of a keyed-up life. That which in civilized

times is called social ethics has nothing to do with religion, and

its presence only goes to show the weakness and emptiness of the

religiousness of the day, which has lost that force of metaphysical

sureness that is the condition precedent of strong, convinced, and

self-denying moral. Think for instance of the difference between Pascal

and Mill. Social ethic is nothing but practical politics. It is a very

Late product of _the same_ historical world whose Springtime (in all

Cultures alike) has witnessed the flowering of an ethic of high courage

and knightliness in a strong stock that does not wince under the life

of history and fate; an ethic of natural and acquired reactions that

polite society to-day would call “the instincts of a gentleman”; an

ethic of which vulgarity and not sin is the antithesis. Once again it

is the Castle versus the Cathedral. The castle character does not ask

about precepts and reasons. In fact, it does not ask questions at all.

Its code lies in the blood--which is pulse--and its fear is not of

punishment or requital, but of contempt and especially self-contempt.

It is not selfless; on the contrary, it springs from the very fullness

of a strong self. But Compassion likewise demands inward greatness

of soul, and so it is those selfsame Springtimes that produce the

most saintly servants of pity, the Francis of Assisi, the Bernard of

Clairvaux, in whom renunciation was a pervading fragrance, to whom

self-offering was bliss, whose _caritas_ was ethereal, bloodless,

timeless, historyless, in whom fear of the universe had dissolved

itself into pure, flawless love, a summit of causal moral of which Late

periods are simply no longer capable.

To constrain one’s blood, one must have blood. Consequently it is

only in knightly warrior-times that we find a monasticism of the

great style, and the highest symbol for the complete victory of

Space over Time is the warrior become ascetic--not the born dreamer

and weakling, who belongs by nature to the cloister, nor again the

scholar, who works at a moral system in the study. Putting cant aside,

that which is called moral to-day--a proper affection for one’s

nearest, or the exercise of worthy inclinations, or the practice of

_caritas_ with an _arrière-pensée_ of acquiring political power by

that means--is not honour-moral, or even a low grade of it, according

to Springtime standards. To repeat: there is grand moral only with

reference to death, and its sources are a fear, pervading the whole

waking-consciousness, of metaphysical causes and consequences, a love

that overcomes life, a consciousness that one is under the inexorable

magic of a causal system of sacred laws and purposes, which are

honoured as truths and which one must either wholly belong to or wholly

renounce. Constant tension, self-watching, self-testing, accompany the

exercise of this moral, which is an art, and in the presence of which

the world-as-history sinks to nothingness. Let a man be either a hero

or a saint. In between lies, not wisdom, but banality.

II

If there were truths independent of the currents of being, there could

be no history of truths. If there were one single eternally right

religion, religious history would be an inconceivable idea. But,

however highly developed the microcosmic side of an individual’s life

may be, it is nevertheless something stretched like a membrane over

the developing life, perfused by the pulsing blood, ever betraying

the hidden drive of cosmic directedness. Race dominates and forms all

apprehension. It is the destiny of each moment of awareness to be a

cast of Time’s net over Space.

Not that “eternal truths” do not exist. Every man possesses

them--plenty of them--to the extent that he exists and exercises the

understanding faculty in a world of thoughts, in the connected ensemble

of which they are, in and for the instant of thought, unalterable

fixtures--ironbound as cause-effect combinations in hoops of premisses

and conclusions. Nothing in this disposition can become displaced, he

believes. But in reality it is just _one_ surge of life that is lifting

his waking self and its world together. Its unity remains integral,

but _as_ a unit, a whole, _a fact_, it has a history. Absolute and

relative are to one another as transverse and longitudinal sections of

a succession of generations, the latter ignoring Space, and the former

Time. The systematic thinker stays in the causal order of a moment;

only the physiognomist who reviews the sequence of positions realizes

the constant alteration of that which “is” true.

_Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis_ holds good for the eternal

truths also, as soon as we follow their course in the stream of

history, and watch them move on as elements in the world-picture of the

generations that live and die. For each man, during the short space of

his existence, the _one_ religion is eternal and true which Destiny,

through the time and place of his birth, has ordained for him. With it

he feels, out of it he forms, the views and convictions of his days. To

its words and forms he holds fast, although what he means by them is

constantly changing. In the world-as-nature there are eternal truths;

in the world-as-history there is an eternally changing trueness.

_A morphology of religious history_, therefore, is a task that the

Faustian spirit alone could ever formulate, and one that it is

only now, at this present stage of its development, fit to deal

with. The problem is enunciated, and we must dare the effort of

getting completely away from our own convictions and seeing before

us everything indifferently as equally alien. And how hard it is!

He who undertakes the task must possess the strength not merely to

imagine himself in an illusory detachment from the truths of his

world-understanding--illusory even to one for whom truths are just a

set of concepts and methods--but actually to penetrate his own system

physiognomically to its very last cells. And even then is it possible,

in a single language, which structurally and spiritually carries the

whole metaphysical content of its own Culture, to capture transmissible

ideas of the truths of other-tongued men?

There is, to begin with, over the thousands of years of the first

age,[474] the colourless throng of primitive populations, which stand

fearfully agape in the presence of the chaotic environment, whose

enigmas continually weigh upon them, for no man amongst them is able

logically to master it. Lucky in comparison with them is the animal,

who is awake and yet not thinking. An animal knows fear only from case

to case, whereas early man trembles before the whole world. Everything

inside and outside him is dark and unresolved. The everyday and the

dæmonic are tangled together without clue and without rule. The day is

filled with a frightened and painful religiousness, in which it is rare

to find even the suggestion of a religion of confidence--for from this

elementary form of the world-fear no way leads to the understanding

love. Every stone on which a man stumbles, every tool that he takes in

his hand, every insect buzzing past him, food, house, weather, all can

be dæmonic; but the man believes in the powers that lurk in them only

so long as he is frightened or so long _as he uses them_--there are

quite enough of them even so. But one can love something only if one

believes in its _continued_ existence. Love presupposes the thought of

a world-order that has acquired stability. Western research has been at

great pains, not only to set in order individual observations gathered

from all parts of the world, but to arrange them according to assumed

gradations that “lead up” from animism (or other beginnings, as you

please) to the beliefs that it holds itself. Unfortunately, it is one

particular religion that has provided the values of the scheme, and

Chinese or Greeks would have built it quite differently. In reality

no such gradation, leading a general human evolution up to one goal,

exists. Primitive man’s chaotic world-around, born of his discontinuous

understanding of separate moments and yet full of impressive meaning,

is always something grown-up, self-complete, and closed off, often with

chasms and terrors of deep metaphysical premonition. Always it contains

a system, and it matters little whether this is partially abstracted

from the contemplation of the light-world or remains wholly within

it. Such a world-picture does not “progress”; nor is it a fixed sum

of particulars from which this one and that one ought to be (though

usually they are) picked out for comparison irrespective of time, land,

and people. In reality they form a _world of organic religions_, which,

all over the world, possessed (and, where they linger, still possess)

proper and very significant modes of originating, growing, expanding,

and fading out, and a well-established specific character in point

of structure, style, tempo, and duration. The religions of the high

Cultures are not developed from these, but different. They lie clearer

and more intellectual in the light, they know what understanding love

means, they have problems and ideas, theories and techniques, of strict

intellect, but the religious symbolism of everyday light they know no

more. The primitive religiousness penetrates everything; the later and

individualized religions are self-contained form-worlds of their own.

All the more enigmatic, therefore, are the “pre-” periods of the

grand Cultures, still primitive through and through, and yet more and

more distinctly anticipating and pointing in a definite direction.

It is just these periods, of some centuries’ duration, that ought to

have been accurately examined and compared amongst themselves and

for themselves. In what shape does the coming phenomenon prepare

itself? In the case of the Magian religions the threshold period, as

we have seen, produced the type of the Prophetic religion, which led

up to the Apocalyptic. How comes it that this particular form is more

deeply grounded in the essence of this particular Culture? Or why

is it that the Mycenæan prelude of the Classical is filled from one

end to the other with imaginings of beast-formed deities?[475] They

are not the gods of the warriors up in the megaron of the Mycenæan

castle, where soul- and ancestor-worship was practised with a high

and noble piety evidenced still in the monuments, but the gods of

down below, the powers believed in in the peasant’s hut. The great

menlike gods of the Apollinian religion, which must have arisen

about 1100 out of a mighty religious upheaval, bear traces of their

dark past on all sides. Hardly one of these figures is without some

cognomen, attribute, or telltale transformation-myth indicative of

its origin. To Homer Hera is invariably the cow-eyed; Zeus appears

as a bull, and the Poseidon of the Thelpusan legend as a horse.

Apollo comes to be the name for countless primitive numina; now he

was wolf (Lycæus) like the Roman Mars, now dolphin (Delphinius), and

now serpent (the Pythian Apollo of Delphi). A serpent, too, is the

form of Zeus Meilichios on Attic grave-reliefs and of Asclepios, and

of the Furies even in Æschylus;[476] and the sacred snake kept on the

Acropolis was interpreted as Erichthonios. In Arcadia the horse-headed

figure of Demeter in the temple of Phigalia was still to be seen

by Pausanias; the Arcadian Artemis-Callisto appears as a she-bear,

but in Athens too the priestesses of Artemis Brauronia were called

“_arktoi_” (bears).[477] Dionysus--now a bull, now a stag--and Pan

retained a certain beast-element to the end. Psyche (like the Egyptian

corporal-soul, _bai_) is the soul-bird. And upon all this supervened

the innumerable semi-animal figures like sirens and centaurs that

completely fill up the Early Classical nature-picture.[478]

But what are the features, now, of the primitive religion of

Merovingian times that foreshadow the mighty uprising of the Gothic

that was at hand? That both are _ostensibly_ the same religion,

Christianity, proves nothing when we consider the entire difference

in their deeps. For (we must be quite clear in our own mind on this)

the primitive character of a religion does not lie in its stock of

doctrines and usages, but in the specific spirituality of the mankind

that adopts them and feels, speaks, and thinks with them. The student

has to familiarize himself with the fact that primitive Christianity

(more exactly, the early Christianity of the Western Church) has twice

subsequently become the expression-vehicle of a primitive piety, and

therefore itself a primitive religion--namely, in the Celtic-Germanic

West between 500 and 900, and in Russia up to this day. Now, how did

the world mirror itself to these “converted” minds? Leaving out of

account some few clerics of, say, Byzantine education, what did one

actually think and imagine about these ceremonies and dogmas. Bishop

Gregory of Tours, who, we must remember, represents the highest

intellectual outlook of his generation, once lauded the powder rubbed

from a saint’s tombstone in these words: “O divine purgative, superior

to all doctors’ recipes, which cleanses the belly like scammony and

washes away all stains from our conscience!” For him the death of

Jesus was a crime which filled him with indignation, but no more; the

Resurrection, on the contrary, which hovered before him vaguely, he

felt deep down as an athletic _tour de force_ that stamped the Messiah

as the grand wizard and so legitimated him as the true Saviour. Of any

mystic meaning in the story of the Passion he has not an inkling.[479]

In Russia the conclusions of the “Synod of a Hundred Chapters,” of

1551, evidence a wholly primitive order of belief. Shaving of the

beard and wrong handling of the cross both figure here as deadly

sins--they were affronts to the dæmons. The “Synod of Antichrist,”

of 1667, led to the vast secession of the Raskol movement, because

thenceforward the sign of the cross was to be made with three fingers

instead of two, and the name “Jesus” was to be pronounced “Yissus”

instead of “Issus”--whereby, for the strict believer, the power of

this magic over the dæmons would be lost.[480] But this effect of

fear is, after all, not the only one nor even the most potent. Why

is it that the Merovingian period shows not the slightest trace of

that glowing inwardness and longing to sink into the metaphysical

that suffuses the Magian seed-time of Apocalyptic and the closely

analogous period of the Holy Synod (1721-1917) in Russia? What was

it that from Peter the Great’s time on led all those martyr-sects of

the Raskolniki to celibacy, poverty, pilgrimage, self-mutilation, and

asceticism in its most fearful forms, and in the seventeenth century

had driven thousands, in religious frenzy, to throw themselves _en

masse_ into the flames? The doctrines of the Chlysti, with their

“Russian Christs” (of whom seven are counted so far); the Dukhobors

with their Book of Life, which they use as their Bible and hold to

contain psalms of Jesus orally transmitted; the Skoptsi with their

ghastly mutilation-precepts--manifestations, one and all, of something

without which Tolstoi, Nihilism, and the political revolutions are

incomprehensible[481]--how is it that in comparison the Frankish period

seems so dull and shallow? Is it that only Aramæans and Russians

possess religious genius--and, if so, what have we to expect of the

Russia that is to come, now that (just in the decisive centuries) the

obstacle of scholarly orthodoxy has been destroyed?

III

Primitive religions have something homeless about them, like the clouds

and the wind. The mass-souls of the proto-peoples have accidentally

and fugitively condensed into _one_ being, and accidental, therefore,

is and remains the “where”--which is an “anywhere”--of the linkages

of waking-consciousness arising from the fear and defensiveness that

spread over them. Whether they stay or move on, whether they alter or

not, is immaterial so far as concerns their inward significance.

From life of this order the high Cultures are separated by a

deep soil-boundness. Here there is a mother-landscape behind all

expression-forms, and just as the State, as temple and pyramid and

cathedral, _must_ fulfil their history _there_ where their idea

originated, so too the great religion of every Springtime is bound by

all the roots of its being to the land over which its world-image has

risen. Sacral practices and dogmas may be carried far and wide, but

their inner evolution stays spellbound in the place of their birth. It

is simply an impossibility that the slightest trace of evolution of

Classical city-cults should be found in Gaul, or a dogmatic advance of

Faustian Christianity in America. Whatever disconnects itself from the

land becomes rigid and hard.

It begins, in every case, like a great cry. The dull confusedness of

terror and defence suddenly passes into a pure awakening of inwardness

that blossoms up, wholly plantwise, from mother earth, and sees and

comprehends the depth of the light-world with _one_ outlook. Wherever

introspectiveness exists as a living sense, this change is felt and

welcomed as an inward rebirth. In this moment--never earlier, and

never (at least with the same deep intensity) later--it traverses the

chosen spirits of the time like a grand light, which dissolves all fear

in blissful love and lets the invisible appear, all suddenly, in a

metaphysical radiance.

Every Culture actualizes here its prime symbol. Each has its own sort

of love--we may call it heavenly or metaphysical as we choose--with

which it contemplates, comprehends, and takes into itself its godhead,

and which remains to every other Culture inaccessible or unmeaning.

Whether the world be something set under a domed light-cavern, as it

was for Jesus and his companions, or just a vanishingly small bit of a

star-filled infinity, as Giordano Bruno felt it; whether the Orphics

take their bodily god into themselves, or the spirit of Plotinus,

soaring in ecstasy, fuses in henosis with the spirit of God, or St.

Bernard in his “mystic union” becomes one with the operation of

infinite deity--the deep urge of the soul is governed always by the

prime symbol of the particular Culture and of no other.

In the Vth Dynasty of Egypt (2680-2540), which followed that of the

great pyramid-builders, the cult of the Horus-falcon, whose _ka_

dwelt in the reigning monarch, faded. The old local cults and even

the profound Thot religion of Hermopolis fell into the background.

The sun-religion of Re appears. Out from his palace westward every

king erects a Re-sanctuary by his tomb-temple, the latter a symbol

of a life directional from birth to sarcophagus-chamber, the former

a symbol of grand and eternal nature. Time and Space, being and

waking-being, Destiny and sacred Causality are set face to face in

this mighty twin-creation as in no other architecture in the world. To

both a covered way leads up; that to the Re is accompanied by reliefs

figuring the power of the sun-god over the plant and animal worlds and

the changings of seasons. No god-image, no temple, but only an altar of

alabaster adorns the mighty terrace on which at day-break, high above

the land, the Pharaoh advances out of the darkness to greet the great

god who is rising up in the East.[482]

This youthful inwardness proceeds always out of a townless

country-side, out of villages, hovels, sanctuaries, solitary cloisters,

and hermitages. Here is formed the community of high awareness, of

the spiritual elect, which inwardly is separated by a whole world

from the great being-currents of the heroic and the knightly. The

two prime estates, priesthood and nobility--contemplation in the

cathedral and deeds before the castles, askesis and _Minne_, ecstasy

and high-bred custom--begin their special histories from this point.

Though the Caliph was also worldly ruler of the faithful, though the

Pharaoh sacrificed in both holy places, though the German King built

his family vault under the cathedral, nothing gets rid of the abyssal

opposition of Time and Space that is reflected in the contrast of

these two social orders. Religious history and political history, the

histories of truths and facts, stand opposed and irreconcilable. Their

opposition begins in cathedral and castle, it propagates itself in the

ever-growing towns as the opposition of wisdom and business, and in the

last stages of historical capacity it closes as a wrestle of intellect

and power.

But both these movements take place on the _heights_ of humanity.

Peasantdom remains historyless under it all, comprehending politics as

little as it understands dogmatics. Out of the strong young religion of

saintly groups, scholasticism and mysticism develop in the early towns;

reformation, philosophy, and worldly learning in the increasing tumult

of streets and squares; enlightenment and irreligion in the stone

masses of the late megalopolis. The beliefs of the peasant outside

remain “eternal” and always the same. The Egyptian hind understood

nothing of this Re. He heard the name, but while a grand chapter of

religious history was passing over his head in the cities, he went on

worshipping the old Thinite beast-gods, until with the XXVIth Dynasty

and its fellah-religion they regained supremacy. The Italian peasant

prayed in Augustus’s time just as he had done long before Homer and as

he does to-day. Names and dogmas of big religions, blossoming and dying

in turn, have penetrated to him from the towns and have altered the

sounds of his words--but the meaning remains ever the same. The French

peasant lives still in the Merovingian Age. Freya or Mary, Druids or

Dominicans, Rome or Geneva--nothing touches the innermost kernel of his

beliefs.

But even in the towns one stratum hangs back, historically, relatively

to another. Over the primitive religion of the country-side there is

another popular religion, that of the small people in the underground

of the towns and in the provinces. The higher a Culture rises--Middle

Kingdom, Brahman period, Pre-Socratics, Pre-Confucians, Baroque--the

narrower becomes the circle of those who possess the final truths of

their time as reality and not as mere name and sound. How many of

those who lived with Socrates, Augustine, and Pascal understood them?

In religion as otherwise the human pyramid rises with increasing

sharpness, till at the end of the Culture it is complete--thereafter,

bit by bit, to crumble.

About 3000 in Egypt and Babylon two great religions began their

life-courses. In Egypt the “reformation” period at the end of the

Old Kingdom saw solar monotheism firmly founded as the religion of

priests and educated persons. All other gods and goddesses--whom the

peasantry and the humble people continued to worship in their former

meaning--are now only incarnations or servants of the one Re. Even the

particular religion of Hermopolis, with its cosmology, was adapted to

the grand system, and a theological negotiation brought even the Ptah

of Memphis into harmony with dogma as an abstract prime-principle of

creation.[483] Exactly as in the times of Justinian and Charles V, the

city-spirit asserted mastery over the soul of the land; the formative

power of the Springtime had come to an end; the dogma was essentially

complete, and its subsequent treatment by rational processes took down

more of the structure than it improved. Philosophy began. In respect of

dogma, the Middle Kingdom was as unimportant as the Baroque.

From 1500 three new religious histories begin--first the Vedic in

the Punjab, then the Early Chinese in the Hwang-ho, and lastly the

Classical on the north of the Ægean Sea. Distinctly as the Classical

man’s world-picture and his prime symbol of the unit body is presented

to us, it is difficult even to guess the details of the great Early

Classical religion. For this lacuna we have to thank the Homeric

poems, which hinder rather than help us in comprehending it. The new

notion of godhead that was the special ideal of this Culture is the

human-formed body in the light, the hero as mediator between man and

god--so much, at any rate, the Iliad evidences. This body might be

light-transfigured by Apollo or disjected to the winds by Dionysus, but

in every case it was the basic form of Being. The σῶμα as ideal of the

extended, the cosmos as sum of these unit bodies, “Being” and “the one”

as the extended-in-itself and “Logos”[484] as the order thereof in the

light--all this came up before the eyes of priest-men, grandly visible

and having the full force of a new religion.

But the Homeric poetry is purely aristocratic. Of the two worlds--that

of the noble and that of the priest, that of Taboo and that of Totem,

that of heroism and that of sanctity--only the one is here living. It

not only does not understand, but actually despises, the other. As in

the Edda, so in Homer, it is the greatest glory of an immortal to know

the way and code of nobility. The thinkers of the Classical Baroque,

from Xenophanes to Plato, regarded these scenes of god-life as impudent

and trivial, and they were right; they felt exactly as the theology

and philosophy of the later West felt about the Germanic hero-sagas

and even about Gottfried of Strassburg, Wolfram, and Walther. If the

Homeric epics did not vanish as the hero-songs collected by Charlemagne

vanished, it was only because there was no fully formed Classical

priesthood, with the result that the Classical cities, when they

arose, were intellectually dominated by a knightly and not a religious

literature. The original doctrines of this religion, which out of

opposition to Homer linked themselves with the (probably) still older

name of Orpheus, were never written down.

All the same, they existed. Who knows what and how much is hidden

behind the figures of Calchas and Tiresias? A mighty upheaval there

must have been at the beginning of this Culture, as at that of

others--an upheaval extending from the Ægean Sea as far as Etruria--but

the Iliad shows as few signs of it as the lays of the Nibelungs and

of Roland show of the inwardness and mysticism of Joachim of Floris,

St. Francis, and the Crusades, or of the inner fire of that _Dies Iræ_

of Thomas of Celano, which would probably have excited mirth at a

thirteenth-century court of love. Great personalities there must have

been to give a mystical-metaphysical form to the new world-outlook, but

we know nothing of them and it is only the gay, bright, easy side of

it that passed into the song of knightly halls. Was the “Trojan War” a

feud, or was it also a Crusade? What is the meaning of Helen? Even the

Fall of Jerusalem has been looked at from a worldly point of view as

well as from a spiritual.

In the nobles’ poetry of Homer, Dionysus and Demeter, as priests’

gods, are unhonoured.[485] But even in Hesiod, the herdsman of Ascra,

the enthusiast-searcher inspired by his folk-beliefs, the ideas of

the great early time are not to be found pure, any more than in Jakob

Böhme the cobbler.[486] That is the second difficulty. _The great

early religions, too, were the possession of a class_, and neither

accessible to nor understandable by the generality; the mysticism of

earliest Gothic, too, was confined to small elect circles, sealed by

Latin and the difficulty of its concepts and figures, and neither

nobility nor peasantry had any distinct idea of its existence. And

excavation, therefore, important as it is in respect of the Classical

country-faiths, can tell us as little about the Early Classical

_religion_ as a village church can tell us about Abelard or Bonaventura.

But Æschylus and Pindar, at any rate, were under the spell of a great

priestly tradition, and before them there were the Pythagoreans, who

made the Demeter-cult their centre (thereby indicating where the

kernel of that mythology is to be sought), and earlier still were

the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic reformation of the seventh

century; and, finally, there are the fragments of Pherecydes and

Epimenides, who were not the first _but the last_ dogmatists of a

theology in reality ancient. The idea that impiety was a heritable

sin, visited upon the children and the children’s children, was known

to Hesiod and Solon, as well as the doctrine (Apollinian also) of

“Hybris.”[487] Plato, however, as an Orphic opponent of the Homeric

conception of life, sets forth very ancient doctrines of hell and

the judgment of the dead in his _Phædo_. We know the tremendous

formula of Orphism, the Nay of the mysteries that answered the Yea

of the agon, which arose, certainly by 1100 at latest, as a protest

of Waking-Consciousness against Being--σῶμα σῆμα, that splendid

Classical body a grave! Here man is no longer _feeling_ himself as a

thing of breeding, strength, and movement; he _knows_ himself and is

terrified by what he knows. Here begins the Classical askesis, which

by strictest rites and expiations, even by voluntary suicide, seeks

deliverance from this Euclidean body-being. It is an entirely erroneous

interpretation of the Pre-Socratics to suppose that it was from the

view-point of enlightenment that they spoke against Homer. It was as

_ascetics_ that they did so. These “contemporaries” of Descartes and

Leibniz were brought up in the strict traditions of the old great

Orphism, which were as faithfully preserved in the almost claustral

meditation-schools--old and famous holy places--as Gothic Scholasticism

was treasured in the wholly intellectual universities of the Baroque.

From the self-immolation of Empedocles the line runs straight forward

to the suicide of the Roman Stoic, and straight back to “Orpheus.”

Out of these last surviving traces, however, an outline of the Early

Classical religion emerges bright and distinct. Just as all Gothic

inwardness directed itself upon Mary, Queen of Heaven and Virgin

and Mother, so in that moment of the Classical World there arose a

garland of myths, images, and figures around Demeter, the bearing

mother, around Gaia and Persephone, and also Dionysus the begetter,

chthonian[488] and phallic cults, festivals and mysteries of birth and

death. All this, too, was characteristically Classical, conceived under

the aspect of present corporeality. The Apollinian religion venerated

body, the Orphic rejected it, that of Demeter celebrated the moments

of fertilization and birth, in which body acquired being. There was a

mysticism that reverently honoured the secret of life, in doctrine,

symbol, and mime, but side by side with it there was orgiasm too, for

the squandering of the body is as deeply and closely akin to asceticism

as sacred prostitution is to celibacy--both, all, are negations of

time. It is the reverse of the Apollinian “halt!” that checks on the

threshold of Hybris; detachment is not kept, but flung away. He who has

experienced these things in his soul has “from being a mortal become

a god.” In those days there must have been great saints and seers who

towered as far above the figures of Heraclitus and Empedocles as the

latter above the itinerant teachers of Cynicism and Stoicism--things

of this order do not happen namelessly and impersonally. As the

songs of Achilles and Odysseus were dying down everywhere, a grand,

strict doctrine arose at the famous old cult-places, a mysticism and

scholasticism with developed educational methods and a secret oral

tradition, as in India. But all that is buried, and the relics of the

later times barely suffice to prove that it once existed.

By putting the knightly poetry and folk-cults quite aside, then, we can

even now determine something more of this (_the_) Classical religion.

But in doing so there is a third pitfall to be avoided--the opposing

of Greek religion to Roman religion. For in reality there was no such

opposition.

Rome is only _one_ of innumerable city-states that arose during the

great epoch of colonization. It was built by Etruscans. From the

religious point of view it was re-created under the Etruscan dynasty of

the sixth century, and it is possible indeed that the Capitoline group

of deities, Jupiter, Juno, Minerva--which at that time replaced the

ancient trinity, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, of the “Numa” religion--was

in some way connected with the family cult of the Tarquins, in which

case Minerva, as goddess of the city, is unmistakably a copy of Athene

Polias.[489] The cults of this single city are properly comparable only

with those of _individual_ Greek-speaking cities of the same degree of

maturity, say Sparta or Thebes, which were in nowise more colourful.

The little that in these latter discloses itself as generally Hellenic

will also prove to be generally Italian. And as for the claim that the

“Roman” religion is distinguished from that of the Greek city-states by

the absence of myth--what is the basis of our knowledge on the point?

We should know nothing at all of the great god-sagas of the Springtime

if we had only the festival-calendar and the public cults of the Greek

city-states to go upon, just as we should learn nothing of Jesus’s

piety from the proceedings of the Council of Ephesus or of that of St.

Francis from a church constitution of the Reformation. Menelaus and

Helen were for the Laconian state-cult tree-deities and nothing more.

The Classical myth derives from a period when the Poleis with their

festivals and sacral constitutions were not yet in existence, when

there was not only no Rome, but no Athens. With the religious duties

and notions of the cities--which were eminently rational--it has no

connexion at all. Indeed, myth and cult are even less in touch with one

another in the Classical Culture than in others. The myth, moreover, is

in no way a creation of the Hellenic culture-field as a whole--it is

not “Greek”--but originated (like the stories of Jesus’s childhood and

the Grail legend) in this and that group, quite local, under pressure

of deep inward stirrings. For instance, the idea of Olympus arose in

Thessaly and thence, as a common property of _all_ educated persons,

spread out to Cyprus and to Etruria, thus, of course, involving Rome.

Etruscan painting presupposes it as a thing of common knowledge, and

therefore the Tarquins and their court must have been familiar with

it. We may attach any implications we please to “belief” (whatever that

may mean) in this myth; the point is that they will be as valid for

Romans of the period of the Kings as for the inhabitants of Tegea or

Corcyra.

That the pictures of Greek and Roman mythology that modern research has

developed are quite different from this is the result not of the facts,

but of the _methods_. In the case of Rome (Mommsen) the festal calendar

and the State cults, in that of Greece the poetic literature, were

taken as the starting-points. Apply the “Latin” method which has led up

to Wissowa’s picture to the Greek cities, and the result is a wholly

similar picture, as, for example, in Nilsson’s _Griechische Festen_.

When this is taken into consideration, the Classical religion is seen

to be a whole possessing an inner unity. The grand god-legends of the

eleventh century, which have the dew of Spring upon them, and in their

tragic holiness remind us of Gethsemane, Balder’s death, and Francis,

are the purest essence of “theoria,” contemplation, a world-picture

before the inner eye, and born of the common inward awakening of a

group of chosen souls from the world of chivalry.[490] But the much

later city-religions are wholly _technique_, formal worship, and as

such represent only one side (and a different side) of piety. They

are as far from the great myth as they are from the folk-belief. They

are concerned neither with metaphysic nor with ethic, but only with

the fulfilment of sacral acts. And, finally, the choice of cults by

the several cities very often originated, not, like the myth, from a

single world-view, but from the accidental ancestor- and family-cults

of great houses, which (precisely as in the Gothic) made their sacred

figures the tutelary deities of the city and at the same time reserved

to themselves the rights of celebrating and worshipping them. In Rome,

for example, the Lupercalia in honour of the field-god Faunus were a

privilege of the Quinctii and Fabii.

The Chinese religion, of which the great “Gothic” period lies between

1300 and 1100 and covers the rise of the Chóu dynasty, must be treated

with extreme care. In presence of the superficial profundity and

pedantic enthusiasm of Chinese thinkers of the Confucius and Lao-tse

type--who were all born in the _ancien régime_ period of their

state-world--it seems very hazardous to try to determine anything

at all as to high mysticism and grand legends in the beginning.

Nevertheless, such a mysticism and such legends must once have existed.

But it is not from these over-rationalized philosophies of the great

cities that we shall learn anything about them--as little as Homer can

give us in the Classical parallel, though for another reason. What

should we know about Gothic piety if all its works had undergone the

censorship of Puritans and Retioralists like Locke, Rousseau, and

Wolff! And yet we treat the Confucian _close_ of Chinese inwardness

as its beginning--if, indeed, we do not go farther and describe the

syncretism of Han times as “the” religion of China.[491]

We know nowadays that, contrary to the usual assumption, there was

a powerful old-Chinese priesthood.[492] We know that in the text of

the Shu-Ching, relics of the ancient hero-sagas and god-myths were

worked over rationalistically, and were thus able to survive, and

similarly the Hou-li, Ngi-li, and Shi-King[493] would still reveal a

good deal more if only they were attacked with the conviction that

there was in them something far deeper than Confucius and his like

were capable of comprehending. We hear of chthonian and phallic cults

in early Chóu times; of orgiastic rites in which the service of the

gods was accompanied by ecstatic mass-dances; of mimic representations

and dialogues between god and priestess, out of which probably (as

in Greece) the Chinese drama evolved.[494] And we obtain an inkling

finally of why the luxuriant growth of early Chinese god-figures

and myths was necessarily swallowed up in an emperor-mythology. For

not only all saga-emperors, but also most of the figures of the

Hia and Shang dynasties before 1400 are--all dates and chronicles

notwithstanding--nothing but nature transformed into history. The

origins of such a process lie deep in the possibilities of every young

Culture.[495] Ancestor-worship ever seeks to gain power over the

nature-dæmons. All Homeric heroes, and Minos and Theseus and Romulus,

are gods become kings. In the _Heliand_,[496] Christ is about to

become so. Mary is the crowned Queen of Heaven. It is the supreme (and

perfectly unconscious) mode which enables men of breeding to venerate

something--that is, for them, what is great must have breeding, race,

must be mighty and lordly, the ancestor of whole families. A strong

priesthood is able to make short work of this mythology of Time, but it

won through partially in the Classical and completely in China--exactly

in proportion to the disappearance of the priestly element. The old

gods are now emperors, princes, ministers, and retainers; natural

events have become acts of rulers, and onsets of peoples social

enterprises. Nothing could have suited the Confucians better. Here was

a myth which could absorb social-ethical tendencies to an indefinite

extent, and all that was necessary was to expunge the traces of the

original nature-myth.

To the Chinese waking-consciousness heaven and earth were halves of

the macrocosm, without opposition, each a mirror-image of the other.

In this picture there was neither Magian dualism nor Faustian unity of

active force. Becoming appears in the unconstrained reciprocal working

of two principles, the _yang_ and the _yin_, which were conceived

rather as periodic than as polar. Accordingly, there are two souls

in man, the _kwei_ which corresponded with the _yin_, the earthly,

the dark, the cold, and disintegrated with the body; and the _sen_,

which is higher, light, and permanent.[497] But, further, there are

innumerable multitudes of souls of both kinds outside man. Troops of

spirits fill the air and the water and the earth--all is peopled and

moved by _kweis_ and _sens_. The life of nature and that of man are

in reality made out of the play of such units. Wisdom, will, force,

and virtue depend on their relationship. Asceticism and orgiasm;

the knightly custom of _hiao_, which requires the noble to revenge

an impiety towards an ancestor even after centuries, and commands

him never to survive defeat;[498] and the reasoning moral of the

_yen_, which, according to the judgment of rationalism, followed from

knowledge--all proceed from conceptions of the forces and possibilities

of the _kwei_ and the _sen_.

All this is concentrated in the basic word “_tao_.” The conflict

between the _yang_ and the _yin_ in man is the _tao_ of his life; the

warp and woof of the spirit-swarms outside him are the _tao_ of Nature.

The world possesses _tao_ inasmuch as it possesses beat, rhythm, and

periodicity. It possesses _li_, tension, inasmuch as man knows it and

abstracts from it fixed relationships for future use. Time, Destiny,

Direction, Race, History--all this, contemplated with the great

world-embracing vision of the early Chóu times, lies in this one word.

The path of the Pharaoh through the dark alley to his shrine is related

to it, and so is the Faustian passion of the third dimension, but _tao_

is nevertheless far removed from any idea of the technical conquest of

Nature. The Chinese park avoids energetic perspective. It lays horizon

behind horizon and, instead of pointing to a goal, tempts to wander.

The Chinese “cathedral” of the early time, the Pi-Yung, with its paths

that lead through gates and thickets, stairs and bridges and courts,

has never the inexorable march of Egypt or the drive into depth of the

Gothic.

When Alexander appeared on the Indus, the piety of these three

Cultures--Chinese, Indian, Classical--had long been moulded into the

historyless forms of a broad Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. But

it was not long before the group of Magian religions arose in the

region intermediate between the Classical and the Indian field, and

it must have been at about the same time that the religious history

of the Maya and Inca, now hopelessly lost to us, began. A thousand

years later, when here also all was inwardly fulfilled and done with,

there appeared on the unpromising soil of France, sudden and swiftly

mounting, Germanic-Catholic Christianity. It was in this case as in

every other; whether the whole stock of names and practices came from

the East, or whether thousands of particular details were derived

from primeval Germanic and Celtic feelings, the Gothic religion is

something so new and unheard-of, something of which the final depths

are so completely incomprehensible by anyone outside its faith, that

to contrive linkages for them on the historical surface is meaningless

jugglery.

The mythic world that thereupon formed itself around this young soul,

an integer of force, will, and direction seen under the symbol of

Infinity, a stupendous action-into-distance, chasms of terror and of

bliss suddenly opening up--it was all, for the elect of this early

religiousness, something so entirely natural that they could not even

detach themselves sufficiently to “know” it as a unit. They lived in

it. To us, on the contrary, who are separated from these ancestors by

thirty generations, this world seems so alien and overpowering that we

always seek to grasp it in detail, and so misunderstand its wholeness

and undividedness.

The father-godhead men felt as Force itself, eternal, grand, and

ever-present activity, sacred causality, which could scarcely assume

any form comprehensible by human eyes. But the whole longing of the

young breed, the whole desire of this strongly coursing blood, to

bow itself in humility before the _meaning of the blood_ found its

expression in the figure of the Virgin and Mother Mary, whose crowning

in the heavens was one of the earliest motives of the Gothic art. She

is a light-figure, in white, blue, and gold, surrounded by the heavenly

hosts. She leans over the new-born Child; she fells the sword in her

heart; she stands at the foot of the cross; she holds the corpse of

the dead Son. From the turn of the tenth century on, Petrus Damiani

and Bernard of Clairvaux developed her cult; there arose the Ave Maria

and the angelic greeting and later, among the Dominicans, the crown

of roses. Countless legends gathered round her figure.[499] She is

the guardian of the Church’s store of Grace, the Great Intercessor.

Among the Franciscans arose the festival of the Visitation, amongst

the English Benedictines (even before 1100) that of the Immaculate

Conception, which elevated her completely above mortal humanity into

the world of light.

But this world of purity, light, and utter beauty of soul would

have been unimaginable without the counter-idea, inseparable from

it, an idea that constitutes one of the maxima of Gothic, one of

its unfathomable creations--one that the present day forgets, and

_deliberately_ forgets. While she there sits enthroned, smiling in

her beauty and tenderness, there lies in the background another world

that throughout nature and throughout mankind weaves and breeds

ill, pierces, destroys, seduces--namely, the realm of the Devil. It

penetrates the whole of Creation, it lies ambushed everywhere. All

around is an army of goblins, night-spirits, witches, werewolves, all

in human shape. No man knows whether or not his neighbour has signed

himself away to the Evil One. No one can say of an unfolding child

that it is not already a devil’s temptress. An appalling fear, such

as is perhaps only paralleled in the early spring of Egypt, weighs

upon man. Every moment he may stumble into the abyss. There were black

magic, and devils’ masses and witches’ sabbaths, night feasts on

mountain-tops, magic draughts and charm-formulæ. The Prince of Hell,

with his relatives--mother and grandmother, for as his very existence

denies and scorns the sacrament of marriage, he may not have wife or

child--his fallen angels and his uncanny henchmen, is one of the most

tremendous creations in all religious history. The Germanic Loki is

hardly more than a preliminary hint of him. Their grotesque figures,

with horns, claws, and horses’ hoofs, were already fully formed in

the mystery plays of the eleventh century; everywhere the artist’s

fancy abounded in them, and, right up to Dürer and Grünewald, Gothic

painting is unthinkable without them. The Devil is sly, malignant,

malicious, but yet in the end the powers of light dupe him. He and

his brood, bad-tempered, coarse, fiendishly inventive, are of a

monstrous imaginativeness, incarnations of hellish laughter opposed

to the illumined smile of the Queen of Heaven, but incarnations, too,

of Faustian world-humour[500] opposed to the panic of the sinner’s

contrition.

It is not possible to exaggerate either the grandeur of this forceful,

insistent picture or the depth of sincerity with which it was believed

in. The Mary-myths and the Devil-myth formed themselves side by side,

neither possible without the other. Disbelief in either of them was

deadly sin. There was a Mary-cult of prayer, and a Devil-cult of

spells and exorcisms. Man walked continuously on the thin crust of

the bottomless pit. Life in this world is a ceaseless and desperate

contest with the Devil, into which every individual plunges as a

member of the Church Militant, to do battle for himself and to win his

knight’s spurs. The Church Triumphant of angels and saints in their

glory looks down from on high, and heavenly Grace is the warrior’s

shield in the battle. Mary is the protectress to whose bosom he can fly

to be comforted, and the high lady who awards the prizes of valour.

Both worlds have their legends, their art, their scholasticism, and

their mysticism--for the Devil, too, can work miracles. Characteristic

of this alone among the religious Springtimes is the symbolism of

_colour_--to the Madonna belong white and blue, to the Devil black,

sulphur-yellow, and red. The saints and angels float in the æther, but

the devils leap and crouch and the witches rustle through the night. It

is the two together, light and night, which fill Gothic art with its

indescribable inwardness--that, and not any “artistic” fancifulness.

Every man knew the world to be peopled with angel and devil troops. The

light-encircled angels of Fra Angelico and the early Rhenish masters,

and the grimacing things on the portals of the great cathedrals,

_really_ filled the air. Men saw them, felt their presence everywhere.

To-day we simply no longer know what a myth is; for it is no mere

æsthetically pleasing mode of representing something to oneself, but

a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every corner of the

waking-consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being. These

creatures were about one all the time. They were glimpsed without

being seen. They were believed in with a faith that felt the very

thought of proof as a desecration. What we call myth nowadays, our

littérateur’s and connoisseur’s taste for Gothic colour, is nothing but

Alexandrinism. In the old days men did not “enjoy” it--behind it stood

Death.[501]

For the Devil gained possession of human souls and seduced them into

heresy, lechery, and black arts. It was war that was waged against

him on earth,[502] and waged with fire and sword upon those who had

given themselves up to him. It is easy enough for us to-day to think

ourselves out of such notions, but if we eliminate this appalling

reality from Gothic, all that remains is mere romanticism. It was not

only the love-glowing hymns to Mary, but the cries of countless pyres

as well that rose up to heaven. Hard by the Cathedral were the gallows

and the wheel. Every man lived in those days in the consciousness of

an immense danger, and it was hell, not the hangman, that he feared.

Unnumbered thousands of witches genuinely imagined themselves to be

so; they denounced themselves, prayed for absolution, and in pure love

of truth confessed their night rides and bargains with the Evil One.

Inquisitors, in tears and compassion for the fallen wretches, doomed

them to the rack in order to save their souls. That is the Gothic myth,

out of which came the cathedral, the crusader, the deep and spiritual

painting, the mysticism. In its shadow flowered that profound Gothic

blissfulness of which to-day we cannot even form an idea.

In Carolingian times, all this was still strange and far. Charlemagne

in the first Saxon Capitulary (787) put a ban on the ancient Germanic

belief in werewolves and night-gangers (_strigæ_), and as late as

1120 it was condemned as an error in the decree of Burkard of Worms.

But twenty years later it was only in a dilute form that the anathema

reappeared in the _Decretum Gratiani_. Cæsarius of Heisterbach,

already, was familiar with the whole devil-legend and in the _Legenda

Aurea_ it is just as actual and as effective as the Mary-legends. In

1233, when the Cathedrals of Mainz and Speyer were being vaulted,

appeared the bull _Vox in Rama_, by which the belief in Devil and witch

was made canonical. St. Francis’s “Hymn to the Sun” had not long been

written, and the Franciscans were kneeling in intimate prayer before

Mary and spreading her cult afar, when the Dominicans armed themselves

for battle with the Devil by setting up the Inquisition. Heavenly love

found its focus in the Mary-image, and _eo ipso_ earthly love became

akin to the Devil. Woman is Sin--so the great ascetics felt, as their

fellows of the Classical, of China, and of India had felt. The Devil

rules only through woman. The witch is the propagator of deadly sin.

It was Thomas Aquinas who evolved the repulsive theory of Incubus and

Succuba. Inward mystics like Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus,

developed a full metaphysic of the devilish.

The Renaissance had ever the strong faith of the Gothic at the back

of its world-outlook. When Vasari eulogized Cimabue and Giotto for

returning to Nature as their teacher, it was this Gothic nature that

he had in mind, a nature influenced in every nook by the encircling

troops of angels and devils that stood there, ever threatening, in

the light. “Imitation” of Nature meant imitation of its soul, not

of its surface. Let us be rid at last of the fable of a renewal of

Classical “Antiquity.” Renaissance, _Rinascita_, meant then the Gothic

uplift from A.D. 1000 onward,[503] the new _Faustian_ world-feeling,

the new personal experience of _the Ego in the Infinite_. For some

individual spirits, no doubt, it meant a sentimental enthusiasm for

the Classical (or what was thought to be the Classical), but that

was a manifestation of taste, nothing more.[504] The Classical myth

was entertainment-material, an allegorical play, through the thin

veil of which men saw, no less definitely than before, the old Gothic

actuality. When Savonarola stood up, the antique trappings vanished

from the surface of Florentine life in an instant. It was all for the

church that the Florentines laboured, and with conviction. Raphael

was the most deeply intimate of all Madonna-painters. A firm belief

in the realm of Satan, and in deliverance from it through the saints,

lay at the root of all this art and literature; and every one of

them, painters, architects, and humanists--however often the names of

Cicero and Virgil, Venus and Apollo were on their lips--looked upon

the burning of witches as something entirely natural and wore amulets

against the devil. The writings of Marsilius Ficinus are full of

learned disquisitions on devils and witches. Francesco della Mirandola

wrote (in elegant Latin) his dialogue “The Witch” in order to warn the

fine intellects of his circle against a danger.[505] When Leonardo da

Vinci, at the summit of the Renaissance, was working upon his “Anna

Selbdritt,”[506] the “Witches’ Hammer” was being written in Rome (1487)

in the finest Humanistic Latin. It was _these_ that constitute the real

myth of the Renaissance, and without them we shall never understand the

glorious and truly Gothic force of this anti-Gothic movement.[507] Men

who did not feel the Devil very near at hand could not have created the

_Divina Commedia_ or the frescoes of Orvieto[508] or the ceiling of the

Sistine Chapel.

It was the tremendous background of this myth that awakened in the

Faustian soul a feeling of what it was. An Ego lost in Infinity, an

Ego that was all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity

of greater forces;[509] that was all will, but a will full of fear

for its freedom. Never has the problem of Free-will been meditated

upon more deeply or more painfully. Other Cultures have simply not

known it. But precisely because here Magian resignation was totally

impossible--because that which thought was not an “it” or particle

of an all-soul, but an individual, fighting Ego, seeking to maintain

itself--every limitation upon freedom was felt as a chain that had to

be dragged along through life, and life in turn was felt as a living

death. And if so--why? For _what_?

The result of this in-looking was that immense sense of guilt which

runs throughout these centuries like one long, desperate lament. The

cathedrals rose ever more supplicatingly to heaven, the Gothic vaulting

became a joining of hands in prayer, and little comfort of light

shone through the high windows into the night of the long naves. The

choking parallel-sequences of the church chants, the Latin hymns, tell

of bruised knees and flagellations in the nocturnal cell. For Magian

man the world-cavern had been close and the heaven impending, but for

Gothic man heaven was infinitely far. No hand seemed to reach down from

these spaces, and all about the lone Ego the mocking Devil’s world lay

in leaguer. And, therefore, the great longing of Mysticism was to lose

created form (as Heinrich Seuse said), to be rid of self and all things

(Meister Eckart), to abandon selfness (_Theologie deutsch_).[510] And

out of these longings there grew up an unending dogged subtilizing on

notions which were ever more and more finely dissected to get at the

“why,” and finally a universal cry for Grace--not the Magian Grace

coming down as substance, but the Faustian Grace that unbinds the Will.

_To be able to will freely_ is, at the very bottom, the one gift

that the Faustian soul asks of heaven. The seven sacraments of the

Gothic, felt as one by Peter Lombard, elevated into dogma by the

Lateran Council of 1215, and grounded in mystical foundations by

Thomas Aquinas, mean this and only this. They accompany the unit soul

from birth to death and protect it against the diabolical powers that

seek to nest themselves in its will. For to sell oneself to the Devil

means to deliver up _one’s will_ to him. The Church Militant on earth

is the visible community of those who are enabled, by enjoyment of

the sacraments, to will. This certainty of free being is held to be

guaranteed in the altar-sacrament, which accordingly suffers a complete

change of meaning. The miracle of the holy transformation which takes

place daily under the hands of the priest--the consecrated Host in the

high altar of the cathedral, wherein the believer sensed the presence

of him who of old sacrificed himself to secure for his own the _freedom

to will_--called forth a sigh of relief of such depth and sincerity as

we moderns can hardly imagine. It was in thanksgiving, therefore, that

the chief feast of the Catholic Church, Corpus Christi, was founded in

1264.[511]