MAGIC, SACRIFICE, AND PRAYER
[Sidenote: Fear created the gods.]
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief
could be on so great a subject. To recognise an external power it is
requisite that we should find the inner stream and tendency of life
somehow checked or disturbed; if all went well and acceptably, we should
attribute divinity only to ourselves. The external is therefore evil
rather than good to early apprehension—a sentiment which still survives
in respect to matter; for it takes reflection to conceive that external
forces form a necessary environment, creating as well as limiting us,
and offering us as many opportunities as rebuffs. The first things which
a man learns to distinguish and respect are things with a will of their
own, things which resist his casual demands; and so the first sentiment
with which he confronts reality is a certain animosity, which becomes
cruelty toward the weak and fear and fawning before the powerful. Toward
men and animals and the docile parts of nature these sentiments soon
become defined accurately, representing the exact degree of friendliness
or use which we discover in these beings; and it is in practical terms,
expressing this relation to our interests, that we define their
characters. Much remains over, however, which we cannot easily define,
indomitable, ambiguous regions of nature and consciousness which we know
not how to face; yet we cannot ignore them, since it is thence that
comes what is most momentous in our fortunes—luck, disease, tempest,
death, victory. Thence come also certain mysterious visitations to the
inner mind—dreams, apparitions, warnings. To perceive these things is
not always easy, nor is it easy to interpret them, while the great
changes in nature which, perhaps, they forebode may indeed be watched
but cannot be met intelligently, much less prevented. The feeling with
which primitive man walks the earth must accordingly be, for the most
part, apprehension; and what he meets, beyond the well-conned ways of
his tribe and habitat, can be nothing but formidable spirits.
[Sidenote: Need also contributed.]
Impotence, however, has a more positive side. If the lightning and
thunder, startling us in our peace, suddenly reveal unwelcome powers
before which we must tremble, hunger, on the contrary, will torment us
with floating ideas, intermittent impulses to act, suggesting things
which would be wholly delightful if only we could find them, but which
it becomes intolerable to remain without. In this case our fear, if we
still choose to call it so, would be lest our cravings should remain
unsatisfied, or rather fear has given place to need; we recognise our
dependence on external powers not because they threaten but because they
forsake us.
[Sidenote: The real evidences of God’s existence.]
Obvious considerations like these furnish the proof of God’s existence,
not as philosophers have tried to express it after the fact and in
relation to mythical conceptions of God already current, but as mankind
originally perceived it, and (where religion is spontaneous) perceives
it still. There is such an order in experience that we find our desires
doubly dependent on something which, because it disregards our will, we
call an external power. Sometimes it overwhelms us with scourges and
wonders, so that we must marvel at it and fear; sometimes it removes, or
after removing restores, a support necessary to our existence and
happiness, so that we must cling to it, hope for it, and love it.
Whatever is serious in religion, whatever is bound up with morality and
fate, is contained in those plain experiences of dependence and of
affinity to that on which we depend. The rest is poetry, or mythical
philosophy, in which definitions not warranted in the end by experience
are given to that power which experience reveals. To reject such
arbitrary definitions is called atheism by those who frame them; but a
man who studies for himself the ominous and the friendly aspects of
reality and gives them the truest and most adequate expression he can is
repeating what the founders of religion did in the beginning. He is
their companion and follower more truly than are the apologists for
second-hand conceptions which these apologists themselves have never
compared with the facts, and which they prize chiefly for
misrepresenting actual experience and giving it imaginary extensions.
Religion is not essentially an imposture, though it might seem so if we
consider it as its defenders present it to us rather than as its
discoverers and original spokesmen uttered it in the presence of nature
and face to face with unsophisticated men. Religion is an interpretation
of experience, honestly made, and made in view of man’s happiness and
its empirical conditions. That this interpretation is poetical goes
without saying, since natural and moral science, even to-day, are
inadequate for the task. But the mythical form into which men cast their
wisdom was not chosen by them because they preferred to be imaginative;
it was not embraced, as its survivals are now defended, out of
sentimental attachment to grandiloquent but inaccurate thoughts.
Mythical forms were adopted because none other were available, nor could
the primitive mind discriminate at all between the mythical and the
scientific. Whether it is the myth or the wisdom it expresses that we
call religion is a matter of words. Certain it is that the wisdom is
alone what gives the myth its dignity, and what originally suggested it.
God’s majesty lies in his operation, not in his definition or his image.
[Sidenote: Practice precedes theory in religion.]
Fear and need, then, bring us into the presence of external powers,
conceived mythically, whose essential character is to be now terrible,
now auspicious. The influence is real and directly felt; the gods’
function is unmistakable and momentous, while their name and form, the
fabulous beings to which that felt influence is imputed, vary with the
resources of the worshipper’s mind and his poetic habits. The work of
expression, the creation of a fabulous environment to derive experience
from, is not, however, the first or most pressing operation employing
the religious mind. Its first business is rather the work of
propitiation; before we stop to contemplate the deity we hasten to
appease it, to welcome it, or to get out of its way. Cult precedes fable
and helps to frame it, because the feeling of need or fear is a
practical feeling, and the ideas it may awaken are only incidental to
the reactions it prompts. Worship is therefore earlier and nearer to the
roots of religion than dogma is.
[Sidenote: Pathetic, tentative nature of religious practices.]
At the same time, since those reactions which are directly efficacious
go to form arts and industrial habits, and eventually put before us the
world of science and common-sense, religious practice and thought are
confined to the sphere in which direct manipulation of things is
impossible. Cultus is always distinguishable from industry, even when
the worshipper’s motives are most sordid and his notions most material;
for in religious operations the changes worked or expected can never be
traced consecutively. There is a break, often a complete diversity and
disproportion, between effort and result. Religion is a form of rational
living more empirical, looser, more primitive than art. Man’s
consciousness in it is more immersed in nature, nearer to a vegetative
union with the general life; it bemoans division and celebrates harmony
with a more passive and lyrical wonder. The element of action proper to
religion is extremely arbitrary, and we are often at a loss to see in
what way the acts recommended conduce at all to the result foretold.
As theoretical superstition stops at any cause, so practical
superstition seizes on any means. Religion arises under high pressure:
in the last extremity, every one appeals to God. But in the last
extremity all known methods of action have proved futile; when resources
are exhausted and ideas fail, if there is still vitality in the will it
sends a supreme appeal to the supernatural. This appeal is necessarily
made in the dark: it is the appeal of a conscious impotence, of an
avowed perplexity. What a man in such a case may come to do to
propitiate the deity, or to produce by magic a result he cannot produce
by art, will obviously be some random action. He will be driven back to
the place where instinct and reason begin. His movement will be
absolutely experimental, altogether spontaneous. He will have no reason
for what he does, save that he must do something.
[Sidenote: Meanness and envy in the gods, suggesting sacrifice.]
What he will do, however, will not be very original; a die must fall on
some one of its six faces, shake it as much as you please. When Don
Quixote, seeking to do good absolutely at a venture, let the reins drop
on Rocinante’s neck, the poor beast very naturally followed the highway;
and a man wondering what will please heaven can ultimately light on
nothing but what might please himself. It is pathetic to observe how
lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the
deity, and from what a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been
drawn. To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to
be obeyed blindly and punctiliously—these have been thought points of
honour with the gods, for which they would dispense favours and
punishments on the most exorbitant scale. Indeed, the widespread
practice of sacrifice, like all mutilations and penances, suggests an
even meaner jealousy and malice in the gods; for the disciplinary
functions which these things may have were not aimed at in the
beginning, and would not have associated them particularly with
religion. In setting aside the fat for the gods’ pleasure, in
sacrificing the first-born, in a thousand other cruel ceremonies, the
idea apparently was that an envious onlooker, lurking unseen, might
poison the whole, or revenge himself for not having enjoyed it, unless a
part—possibly sufficient for his hunger—were surrendered to him
voluntarily. This onlooker was a veritable demon, treated as a man
treats a robber to whom he yields his purse that his life may be spared.
To call the gods envious has a certain symbolic truth, in that earthly
fortunes are actually precarious; and such an observation might inspire
detachment from material things and a kind of philosophy. But what at
first inspires sacrifice is a literal envy imputed to the gods, a spirit
of vengeance and petty ill-will; so that they grudge a man even the good
things which they cannot enjoy themselves. If the god is a tyrant, the
votary will be a tax-payer surrendering his tithes to secure immunity
from further levies or from attack by other potentates. God and man will
be natural enemies, living in a sort of politic peace.
[Sidenote: Ritualistic arts.]
Sacrifices are far from having merely this sinister meaning. Once
inaugurated they suggest further ideas, and from the beginning they had
happier associations. The sacrifice was incidental to a feast, and the
plenty it was to render safe existed already. What was a bribe, offered
in the spirit of barter, to see if the envious power could not be
mollified by something less than the total ruin of his victims, could
easily become a genial distribution of what custom assigned to each: so
much to the chief, so much to the god, so much to the husbandman. There
is a certain openness, and as it were the form of justice, in giving
each what is conventionally his due, however little he may really
deserve it. In religious observances this sentiment plays an important
part, and men find satisfaction in fulfilling in a seemly manner what is
prescribed; and since they know little about the ground or meaning of
what they do, they feel content and safe if at least they have done it
properly. Sacrifices are often performed in this spirit; and when a
beautiful order and religious calm have come to dignify the performance,
the mind, having meantime very little to occupy it, may embroider on the
given theme. It is then that fable, and new religious sentiments
suggested by fable, appear prominently on the scene.
[Sidenote: Thank-offerings.]
In agricultural rites, for instance, sacrifice will naturally be offered
to the deity presiding over germination; that is the deity that might,
perhaps, withdraw his favour with disastrous results. He commonly
proves, however, a kindly and responsive being, and in offering to him a
few sheaves of corn, some barley-cakes, or a libation from the vintage,
the public is grateful rather than calculating; the sacrifice has become
an act of thanksgiving. So in Christian devotion (which often follows
primitive impulses and repeats the dialectic of paganism in a more
speculative region) the redemption did not remain merely expiatory. It
was not merely a debt to be paid off and a certain quantum of suffering
to be endured which had induced the Son of God to become man and to take
up his cross. It was, so the subtler theologians declared, an act of
affection as much as of pity; and the spell of the doctrine over the
human heart lay in feeling that God wished to assimilate himself to man,
rather than simply from above to declare him forgiven; so that the
incarnation was in effect a rehabilitation of man, a redemption in
itself, and a forgiveness. Men like to think that God has sat at their
table and walked among them in disguise. The idea is flattering; it
suggests that the courtesy may some day be returned, and for those who
can look so deep it expresses pointedly the philosophic truth of the
matter. For are not the gods, too, in eternal travail after their ideal,
and is not man a part of the world, and his art a portion of the divine
wisdom? If the incarnation was a virtual redemption, the truest
incarnation was the laborious creation itself.
[Sidenote: The sacrifice of a contrite heart.]
If sacrifice, in its more amiable aspect, can become thanksgiving and an
expression of profitable dependence, it can suffer an even nobler
transformation while retaining all its austerity. Renunciation is the
corner-stone of wisdom, the condition of all genuine achievement. The
gods, in asking for a sacrifice, may invite us to give up not a part of
our food or of our liberty but the foolish and inordinate part of our
wills. The sacrifice may be dictated to us not by a jealous enemy
needing to be pacified but by a far-seeing friend, wishing we may not be
deceived. If what we are commanded to surrender is only what is doing us
harm, the god demanding the sacrifice is our own ideal. He has no
interests in the case other than our own; he is no part of the
environment; he is the goal that determines for us how we should proceed
in order to realise as far as possible our inmost aspirations. When
religion reaches this phase it has become thoroughly moral. It has
ceased to represent or misrepresent material conditions, and has learned
to embody spiritual goods.
Sacrifice is a rite, and rites can seldom be made to embody ideas
exclusively moral. Something dramatic or mystical will cling to the
performance, and, even when the effect of it is to purify, it will bring
about an emotional catharsis rather than a moral improvement. The mass
is a ritual sacrifice, and the communion is a part of it, having the
closest resemblance to what sacrifices have always been. Among the
devout these ceremonies, and the lyric emotions they awaken, have a
quite visible influence; but the spell is mystic, the god soon recedes,
and it would be purely fanciful to maintain that any permanent moral
effect comes from such an exercise. The Church has felt as much and
introduced the confession, where a man may really be asked to consider
what sacrifices he should make for his part, and in what practical
direction he should imagine himself to be drawn by the vague Dionysiac
influences to which the ritual subjects him.
[Sidenote: Prayer is not utilitarian in essence.]
As sacrifice expresses fear, prayer expresses need. Common-sense thinks
of language as something meant to be understood by another and to
produce changes in his disposition and behaviour, but language has
pre-rational uses, of which poetry and prayer are perhaps the chief. A
man overcome by passion assumes dramatic attitudes surely not intended
to be watched and interpreted; like tears, gestures may touch an
observer’s heart, but they do not come for that purpose. So the fund of
words and phrases latent in the mind flow out under stress of emotion;
they flow because they belong to the situation, because they fill out
and complete a perception absorbing the mind; they do not flow primarily
to be listened to. The instinct to pray is one of the chief avenues to
the deity, and the form prayer takes helps immensely to define the power
it is addressed to; indeed, it is in the act of praying that men
formulate to themselves what God must be, and tell him at great length
what they believe and what they expect of him. The initial forms of
prayer are not so absurd as the somewhat rationalised forms of it.
Unlike sacrifice, prayer seems to be justified by its essence and to be
degraded by the transformations it suffers in reflection, when men try
to find a place for it in their cosmic economy; for its essence is
poetical, expressive, contemplative, and it grows more and more
nonsensical the more people insist on making it a prosaic, commercial
exchange of views between two interlocutors.
Prayer is a soliloquy; but being a soliloquy expressing need, and being
furthermore, like sacrifice, a desperate expedient which men fly to in
their impotence, it looks for an effect: to cry aloud, to make vows, to
contrast eloquently the given with the ideal situation, is certainly as
likely a way of bringing about a change for the better as it would be to
chastise one’s self severely, or to destroy what one loves best, or to
perform acts altogether trivial and arbitrary. Prayer also is magic, and
as such it is expected to do work. The answer looked for, or one which
may be accepted instead, very often ensues; and it is then that
mythology begins to enter in and seeks to explain by what machinery of
divine passions and purposes that answering effect was produced.
[Sidenote: Its supposed efficacy magical.]
Magic is in a certain sense the mother of art, art being the magic that
succeeds and can establish itself. For this very reason mere magic is
never appealed to when art has been found, and no unsophisticated man
prays to have that done for him which he knows how to do for himself.
When his art fails, if his necessity still presses, he appeals to magic,
and he prays when he no longer can control the event, provided this
event is momentous to him. Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is a
desperate effort to work further and to be efficient beyond the range of
one’s powers. It is not the lazy who are most inclined to prayer; those
pray most who care most, and who, having worked hard, find it
intolerable to be defeated.
[Sidenote: Theological puzzles.]
No chapter in theology is more unhappy than that in which a material
efficacy is assigned to prayer. In the first place the facts contradict
the notion that curses can bring evil or blessings can cure; and it is
not observed that the most orthodox and hard-praying army wins the most
battles. The facts, however, are often against theology, which has to
rely on dialectical refinements to explain them away; but unfortunately
in this instance dialectic is no less hostile than experience. God must
know our necessities before we ask and, if he is good, must already have
decided what he would do for us. Prayer, like every other act, becomes
in a providential world altogether perfunctory and histrionic; we are
compelled to go through it, it is set down for us in the play, but it
lacks altogether that moral value which we assign to it. When our
prayers fail, it must be better than if they had succeeded, so that
prayer, with all free preference whatsoever, becomes an absurdity. The
trouble is much deeper than that which so many people find in
determinism. A physical predetermination, in making all things
necessary, leaves all values entire, and my preferences, though they
cannot be efficacious unless they express preformed natural forces, are
not invalidated ideally. It is still true that the world would have been
better to all eternity if my will also could have been fulfilled. A
providential optimism, on the contrary, not merely predetermines events
but discounts values; and it reduces every mortal aspiration, every
pang of conscience; every wish that things should be better than they
are, to a blind impertinence, nay, to a sacrilege. Thus, you may not
pray that God’s kingdom may come, but only—what is not a prayer but a
dogma—that it has come already. The mythology that pretends to justify
prayer by giving it a material efficacy misunderstands prayer completely
and makes it ridiculous, for it turns away from the heart, which prayer
expresses pathetically, to a fabulous cosmos where aspirations have been
turned into things and have thereby stifled their own voices.
[Sidenote: A real efficacy would be mechanical.]
The situation would not be improved if we surrendered that mystical
optimism, and maintained that prayer might really attract super-human
forces to our aid by giving them a signal without which they would not
have been able to reach us. If experience lent itself to such a theory
there would be nothing in it more impossible than in ordinary telepathy;
prayer would then be an art like conversation, and the exact personages
and interests would be discoverable to which we might appeal. A
celestial diplomacy might then be established not very unlike primitive
religions. Religion would have reverted to industry and science, to
which the grosser spirits that take refuge under it have always wished
to assimilate it. But is it really the office of religion to work upon
external powers and extract from them certain calculable effects? Is it
an art, like empiric medicine, and merely a dubious and mystic
industry? If so, it exists only by imperfection; were it better
developed it would coincide with those material and social arts with
which it is identical in essence. Successful religion, like successful
magic, would have passed into the art of exploiting the world.
[Sidenote: True uses of prayer.]
What successful religion really should pass into is contemplation,
ideality, poetry, in the sense in which poetry includes all imaginative
moral life. That this is what religion looks to is very clear in prayer
and in the efficacy which prayer consistently can have. In rational
prayer the soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its
welfare: it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it
accommodates itself to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it
conceives.
[Sidenote: It clarifies the ideal.]
If prayer springs from need it will naturally dwell on what would
satisfy that necessity; sometimes, indeed, it does nothing else but
articulate and eulogise what is most wanted and prized. This object will
often be particular, and so it should be, since Socrates’ prayer “for
the best” would be perfunctory and vapid indeed in a man whose life had
not been spent, like Socrates’, in defining what the best was. Yet any
particular good lies in a field of relations; it has associates and
implications, so that the mind dwelling on it and invoking its presence
will naturally be enticed also into its background, and will wander
there, perhaps to come upon greater goods, or upon evils which the
coveted good would make inevitable. An earnest consideration, therefore,
of anything desired is apt to enlarge and generalise aspiration till it
embraces an ideal life; for from almost any starting-point the limits
and contours of mortal happiness are soon descried. Prayer, inspired by
a pressing need, already relieves its importunity by merging it in the
general need of the spirit and of mankind. It therefore calms the
passions in expressing them, like all idealisation, and tends to make
the will conformable with reason and justice.
[Sidenote: It reconciles to the inevitable.]
A comprehensive ideal, however, is harder to realise than a particular
one: the rain wished for may fall, the death feared may be averted, but
the kingdom of heaven does not come. It is in the very essence of prayer
to regard a denial as possible. There would be no sense in defining and
begging for the better thing if that better thing had at any rate to be.
The possibility of defeat is one of the circumstances with which
meditation must square the ideal; seeing that my prayer may not be
granted, what in that case should I pray for next? Now the order of
nature is in many respects well known, and it is clear that all
realisable ideals must not transgress certain bounds. The practical
ideal, that which under the circumstances it is best to aim at and pray
for, will not rebel against destiny. Conformity is an element in all
religion and submission in all prayer; not because what must be is
best, but because the best that may be pursued rationally lies within
the possible, and can be hatched only in the general womb of being. The
prayer, “Thy will be done,” if it is to remain a prayer, must not be
degraded from its original meaning, which was that an unfulfilled ideal
should be fulfilled; it expressed aspiration after the best, not
willingness to be satisfied with, anything. Yet the inevitable must be
accepted, and it is easier to change the human will than the laws of
nature. To wean the mind from extravagant desires and teach it to find
excellence in what life affords, when life is made as worthy as
possible, is a part of wisdom and religion. Prayer, by confronting the
ideal with experience and fate, tends to render that ideal humble,
practical, and efficacious.
[Sidenote: It fosters spiritual life by conceiving it in its
perfection.]
A sense for human limitations, however, has its foil in the ideal of
deity, which is nothing but the ideal of man freed from those
limitations which a humble and wise man accepts for himself, but which a
spiritual man never ceases to feel as limitations. Man, for instance, is
mortal, and his whole animal and social economy is built on that fact,
so that his practical ideal must start on that basis, and make the best
of it; but immortality is essentially better, and the eternal is in many
ways constantly present to a noble mind; the gods therefore are
immortal, and to speak their language in prayer is to learn to see all
things as they do and as reason must, under the form of eternity. The
gods are furthermore no respecters of persons; they are just, for it is
man’s ideal to be so. Prayer, since it addresses deity, will in the end
blush to be selfish and partial; the majesty of the divine mind
envisaged and consulted will tend to pass into the human mind.
This use of prayer has not been conspicuous in Christian times, because,
instead of assimilating the temporal to the eternal, men have
assimilated the eternal to the temporal, being perturbed fanatics in
religion rather than poets and idealists. Pagan devotion, on the other
hand, was full of this calmer spirit. The gods, being frankly natural,
could be truly ideal. They embodied what was fairest in life and loved
men who resembled them, so that it was delightful and ennobling to see
their images everywhere, and to keep their names and story perpetually
in mind. They did not by their influence alienate man from his
appropriate happiness, but they perfected it by their presence. Peopling
all places, changing their forms as all living things must according to
place and circumstance, they showed how all kinds of being, if perfect
in their kind, might be perfectly good. They asked for a reverence
consistent with reason, and exercised prerogatives that let man free.
Their worship was a perpetual lesson in humanity, moderation, and
beauty. Something pre-rational and monstrous often peeped out behind
their serenity, as it does beneath the human soul, and there was
certainly no lack of wildness and mystic horror in their apparitions.
The ideal must needs betray those elemental forces on which, after all,
it rests; but reason exists to exorcise their madness and win them over
to a steady expression of themselves and of the good.
[Sidenote: Discipline and contemplation are their own reward.]
Prayer, in fine, though it accomplishes nothing material, constitutes
something spiritual. It will not bring rain, but until rain comes it may
cultivate hope and resignation and may prepare the heart for any issue,
opening up a vista in which human prosperity will appear in its
conditioned existence and conditional value. A candle wasting itself
before an image will prevent no misfortune, but it may bear witness to
some silent hope or relieve some sorrow by expressing it; it may soften
a little the bitter sense of impotence which would consume a mind aware
of physical dependence but not of spiritual dominion. Worship,
supplication, reliance on the gods, express both these things in an
appropriate parable. Physical impotence is expressed by man’s appeal for
help; moral dominion by belief in God’s omnipotence. This belief may
afterwards seem to be contradicted by events. It would be so in truth if
God’s omnipotence stood for a material magical control of events by the
values they were to generate. But the believer knows in his heart, in
spite of the confused explanations he may give of his feelings, that a
material efficacy is not the test of his faith. His faith will survive
any outward disappointment. In fact, it will grow by that discipline and
not become truly religious until it ceases to be a foolish expectation
of improbable things and rises on stepping-stones of its material
disappointments into a spiritual peace. What would sacrifice be but a
risky investment if it did not redeem us from the love of those things
which it asks us to surrender? What would be the miserable fruit of an
appeal to God which, after bringing us face to face with him, left us
still immersed in what we could have enjoyed without him? The real use
and excuse for magic is this, that by enticing us, in the service of
natural lusts, into a region above natural instrumentalities, it
accustoms us to that rarer atmosphere, so that we may learn to breathe
it for its own sake. By the time we discover the mechanical futility of
religion we may have begun to blush at the thought of using religion
mechanically; for what should be the end of life if friendship with the
gods is a means only? When thaumaturgy is discredited, the childish
desire to work miracles may itself have passed away. Before we weary of
the attempt to hide and piece out our mortality, our concomitant
immortality may have dawned upon us. While we are waiting for the
command to take up our bed and walk we may hear a voice saying: Thy sins
are forgiven thee.