CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH
[Sidenote: Myth should dissolve with the advance of science.]
That magic and mythology have no experimental sanction is clear so soon
as experience begins to be gathered together with any care. As magic
attempts to do work by incantations, so myth tries to attain knowledge
by playing with lies. The attempt is in the first instance inevitable
and even innocent, for it takes time to discriminate valid from
valueless fancies in a mind in which they spring up together, with no
intrinsic mark to distinguish them. The idle notion attracts attention
no less than the one destined to prove significant; often it pleases
more. Only watchful eyes and that rare thing, conscience applied to
memory, can pluck working notions from the gay and lascivious vegetation
of the mind, or learn to prefer Cinderella to her impudent sisters. If a
myth has some modicum of applicability or significance it takes root all
the more firmly side by side with knowledge. There are many subjects of
which man is naturally so ignorant that only mythical notions can seem
to do them justice; such, for instance, are the minds of other men.
Myth remains for this reason a constituent part even of the most
rational consciousness, and what can at present be profitably attempted
is not so much to abolish myth as to become aware of its mythical
character.
The mark of a myth is that it does not interpret a phenomenon in terms
capable of being subsumed under the same category with that phenomenon
itself, but fills it out instead with images that could never appear
side by side with it or complete it on its own plane of existence. Thus
if meditating on the moon I conceive her other side or the aspect she
would wear if I were travelling on her surface, or the position she
would assume in relation to the earth if viewed from some other planet,
or the structure she would disclose could she be cut in halves, my
thinking, however fanciful, would be on the scientific plane and not
mythical, for it would forecast possible perceptions, complementary to
those I am trying to enlarge. If, on the other hand, I say the moon is
the sun’s sister, that she carries a silver bow, that she is a virgin
and once looked lovingly on the sleeping Endymion, only the fool never
knew it—my lucubration is mythical; for I do not pretend that this
embroidery on the aspects which the moon actually wears in my feeling
and in the interstices of my thoughts could ever be translated into
perceptions making one system with the present image. By going closer to
that disc I should not see the silver bow, nor by retreating in time
should I come to the moment when the sun and moon were actually born of
Latona. The elements are incongruous and do not form one existence but
two, the first sensible, the other only to be enacted dramatically, and
having at best to the first the relation of an experience to its symbol.
These fancies are not fore-tastes of possible perceptions, but are free
interpretations or translations of the perceptions I have actually had.
Mythical thinking has its roots in reality, but, like a plant, touches
the ground only at one end. It stands unmoved and flowers wantonly into
the air, transmuting into unexpected and richer forms the substances it
sucks from the soil. It is therefore a fruit of experience, an ornament,
a proof of animal vitality; but it is no _vehicle_ for experience; it
cannot serve the purposes of transitive thought or action. Science, on
the other hand, is constituted by those fancies which, arising like
myths out of perception, retain a sensuous language and point to further
perceptions of the same kind; so that the suggestions drawn from one
object perceived are only ideas of other objects similarly perceptible.
A scientific hypothesis is one which represents something continuous
with the observed facts and conceivably existent in the same medium.
Science is a bridge touching experience at both ends, over which
practical thought may travel from act to act, from perception to
perception.
[Sidenote: But myth is confused with the moral values it expresses.]
To separate fable from knowledge nothing is therefore requisite except
close scrutiny and the principle of parsimony. Were mythology merely a
poetic substitute for natural science the advance of science would
sufficiently dispose of it. What remained over would, like the myths in
Plato, be at least better than total silence on a subject that interests
us and makes us think, although we have no means of testing our thoughts
in its regard. But the chief source of perplexity and confusion in
mythology is its confusion with moral truth. The myth which originally
was but a symbol substituted for empirical descriptions becomes in the
sequel an idol substituted for ideal values. This complication, from
which half the troubles of philosophy arise, deserves our careful
attention.
European history has now come twice upon the dissolution of mythologies,
first among the Stoics and then among the Protestants. The circumstances
in the two cases were very unlike; so were the mythical systems that
were discarded; and yet the issue was in both instances similar. Greek
and Christian mythology have alike ended in pantheism. So soon as the
constructions of the poets and the Fathers were seen to be ingenious
fictions, criticism was confronted with an obvious duty: to break up the
mythical compound furnished by tradition into its elements, putting on
one side what natural observation or actual history had supplied, and on
the other what dramatic imagination had added. For a cool and
disinterested observer the task, where evidence and records were not
wanting, would be simple enough. But the critic in this case would not
usually be cool or disinterested. His religion was concerned; he had no
other object to hang his faith and happiness upon than just this
traditional hybrid which his own enlightenment was now dissolving. To
which part should he turn for support? In which quarter should he
continue to place the object of his worship?
[Sidenote: Neo-Platonic revision.]
From the age of the Sophists to the final disappearance of paganism
nearly a thousand years elapsed. A thousand years from the infliction of
a mortal wound to the moment of extinction is a long agony. Religions do
not disappear when they are discredited; it is requisite that they
should be replaced. For a thousand years the augurs may have laughed,
they were bound nevertheless to stand at their posts until the monks
came to relieve them. During this prolonged decrepitude paganism lived
on inertia, by accretions from the Orient, and by philosophic
reinterpretations. Of these reinterpretations the first was that
attempted by Plato, and afterward carried out by the neo-Platonists and
Christians into the notion of a supernatural spiritual hierarchy;
above, a dialectical deity, the hypostasis of intellect and its
ontological phases; below, a host of angels and demons, hypostases of
faculties, moral influences, and evil promptings. In other words, in the
diremption of myths which yielded here a natural phenomenon to be
explained and there a moral value to be embodied, Platonism attached
divinity exclusively to the moral element. The ideas, which were
essentially moral functions, were many and eternal; their physical
embodiments were adventitious to them and constituted a lapse, a
misfortune to be wiped out by an eventual reunion of the alienated
nature with its own ideal. Religion in such a system necessarily meant
redemption. In this movement paganism turned toward the future, toward
supernatural and revealed religion, and away from its own naturalistic
principle. Revelation, as Plato himself had said, was needed to guide a
mind which distrusted phenomena and recoiled from earthly pursuits.
[Sidenote: It made mythical entities of abstractions.]
This religion had the strength of despair, but all else in it was
weakness. Apart from a revelation which, until Christianity appeared,
remained nebulous and arbitrary, there could be no means of maintaining
the existence of those hypostasised moral entities. The effort to
separate them from the natural functions which they evidently expressed
could not succeed while any critical acumen or independence subsisted in
the believer. Platonism, to become a religion, had to appeal to
superstition. Unity, for instance (which, according to Plato himself, is
a category applicable to everything concomitantly with the complementary
category of multiplicity, for everything, he says, is evidently both one
and many)—unity could not become the One, an independent and supreme
deity, unless the meaning and function of unity were altogether
forgotten and a foolish idolatry, agape at words, were substituted for
understanding. Some one had to come with an air of authority and report
his visions of the One before such an entity could be added to the
catalogue of actual existences. The reality of all neo-Platonic
hypostasis was thus dependent on revelation and on forgetting the
meaning once conveyed by the terms so mysteriously transfigured into
metaphysical beings.
[Sidenote: Hypostasis ruins ideals.]
This divorce of neo-Platonic ideas from the functions they originally
represented in human life and discourse was found in the end to defeat
the very interest that had prompted it—enthusiasm for the ideal.
Enthusiasm for the ideal had led Plato to treat all beauties as
stepping-stones toward a perfect beauty in which all their charms might
be present together, eternally and without alloy. Enthusiasm for the
ideal had persuaded him that mortal life was only an impeded effort to
fall back into eternity. These inspired but strictly unthinkable
suggestions fell from his lips in his zeal to express how much the
burden and import of experience exceeded its sensuous vehicle in
permanence and value. A thousand triangles revealed one pregnant
proportion of lines and areas; a thousand beds and bridles served one
perpetual purpose in human life, and found in fulfilling it their
essence and standard of excellence; a thousand fascinations taught the
same lesson and coalesced into one reverent devotion to beauty and
nobility wherever they might bloom. It was accordingly a poignant sense
for the excellence of real things that made Plato wish to transcend
them; his metaphysics was nothing but a visionary intuition of values,
an idealism in the proper sense of the word. But when the momentum of
such enthusiasm remained without its motive power, and its transcendence
without its inspiration in real experience, idealism ceased to be an
idealisation, an interpretation of reality reaching prophetically to its
goals. It became a super-numerary second physics, a world to which an
existence was attributed which could be hardly conceived and was
certainly supported by no evidence, while that significance which it
really possessed in reference to natural processes was ignored, or even
denied. An idealism which had consisted in understanding and
discriminating values now became a superstition incapable of discerning
existences. It added a prodigious fictitious setting to the cosmos in
which man had to operate; it obscured his real interests and possible
happiness by seeking to transport him into that unreal environment, with
its fantastic and disproportionate economy; and, worst of all, it
robbed the ideal of its ideality by tearing it up from its roots in
natural will and in experienced earthly benefits. For an ideal is not
ideal if it is the ideal of nothing. In that case it is only a ghostly
existence, with no more moral significance or authority in relation to
the observer than has any happy creature which may happen to exist
somewhere in the unknown reaches of the universe.
[Sidenote: The Stoic revision.]
Meantime, a second reinterpretation of mythology was attempted by the
Stoics. Instead of moving forward, like Plato, toward the
supernaturalism that was for so many ages to dominate the world, the
Stoics, with greater loyalty to pagan principles, reverted to the
natural forces that had been the chief basis for the traditional
deities. The progress of philosophy had given the Stoics a notion of the
cosmos such as the early Aryan could not have possessed when he recorded
and took to heart his scattered observations in the form of divine
influences, as many and various as the observations themselves. To the
Stoics the world was evidently one dynamic system. The power that
animated it was therefore one God. Accordingly, after explaining away
the popular myths by turning them somewhat ruthlessly into moral
apologues, they proceeded to identify Zeus with the order of nature.
This identification was supported by many traditional tendencies and
philosophic hints. The resulting concept, though still mythical, was
perhaps as rationalistic as the state of science at the time could
allow. Zeus had been from the beginning a natural force, at once serene
and formidable, the thunderer no less than the spirit of the blue. He
was the ruler of gods and men; he was, under limitations, a sort of
general providence. Anaxagoras, too, in proclaiming the cosmic function
of reason, had prepared the way for the Stoics in another direction.
This “reason,” which in Socrates and Plato was already a deity, meant an
order, an order making for the good. It was the name for a principle
much like that which Aristotle called Nature, an indwelling prophetic
instinct by which things strive after their perfection and happiness.
Now Aristotle observed this instinct, as behoved a disciple of Socrates,
in its specific cases, in which the good secured could be discriminated
and visibly attained. There were many souls, each with its provident
function and immutable guiding ideal, one for each man and animal, one
for each heavenly sphere, and one, the prime mover, for the highest
sphere of all. But the Stoics, not trained in the same humane and
critical school, had felt the unity, of things more dramatically and
vaguely in the realm of physics. Like Xenophanes of old, they gazed at
the broad sky and exclaimed, “The All is One.” Uniting these various
influences, they found it easy to frame a conception of Zeus, or the
world, or the universal justice and law, so as to combine in it a
dynamic unity with a provident reason. A world conceived to be material
and fatally determined was endowed with foresight of its own changes,
perfect internal harmony, and absolute moral dignity. Thus mythology,
with the Stoics, ended in pantheism.
[Sidenote: The ideal surrendered before the physical.]
By reducing their gods to a single divine influence, and identifying
this in turn with natural forces, the Stoics had, in one sense, saved
mythology. For no one would be inclined to deny existence or power to
the cosmos, to the body the soul of which was Zeus. Pantheism, taken
theoretically, is only naturalism poetically expressed. It therefore was
a most legitimate and congenial interpretation of paganism for a
rationalistic age. On the other hand, mythology had not been a mere
poetic physics; it had formulated the object of religion; it had
embodied for mankind its highest ideals in worshipful forms. It was when
this religious function was transferred to the god of pantheism that the
paradox and impossibility of the reform became evident. Nature neither
is nor can be man’s ideal. The substitution of nature for the
traditional and ideal object of religion involves giving nature moral
authority over man; it involves that element of Stoicism which is the
synonym of inhumanity. Life and death, good and ill fortune, happiness
and misery, since they flow equally from the universal order, shall be
declared, in spite of reason, to be equally good. True virtue shall be
reduced to conformity. He who has no ideal but that nature should
possess her actual constitution will be wise and superior to all
flattery and calamity; he will be equal in dignity to Zeus. He who has
any less conformable and more determinate interests will be a fool and a
worm.
The wise man will, meantime, perform all the offices of nature; he will
lend his body and his mind to her predestined labours. For pantheistic
morals, though post-rational, are not ascetic. In dislodging the natural
ideal from the mind, they put in its place not its supernatural
exaggeration but a curtailment of it inspired by despair. The passions
are not renounced on the ground that they impede salvation or some
visionary ecstasy; they are merely chilled by the sense that their
defeat, when actual, is also desirable. As all the gods have been
reduced to one substance or law, so all human treasures are reduced to
one privilege—that of fortitude. You can always consent, and by a
forced and perpetual conformity to nature lift yourself above all
vicissitudes. Those tender and tentative ideals which nature really
breeds, and which fill her with imperfect but genuine excellences, you
will be too stolid to perceive or too proud to share.
Thus the hereditary taint of mythology, the poison of lies, survived in
the two forms of philosophic paganism which it concerns us to study. In
Plato’s school, myth helped to hypostasise the ideas and, by divorcing
them from their natural basis, to deprive them of their significance and
moral function, and render the worship of them superstitious. In the
Stoa the surviving mythological element turned nature, when her unity
and order had been perceived, into an idol; so that the worship of her
blasted all humane and plastic ideals and set men upon a vain and
fanatical self-denial. Both philosophies were post-rational, as befitted
a decadent age and as their rival and heir, Christianity, was also.
[Sidenote: Parallel movements in Christianity.]
Christianity had already within itself a similar duality; being a
doctrine of redemption, like neo-Platonism, it tended to deny the
natural values of this life; but, being a doctrine of creation and
providential government, comparable in a way to the Stoic, it had an
ineradicable inward tendency toward pantheism, and toward a consequent
acceptance of both the goods and evils of this world as sanctioned and
required by providence.
[Sidenote: Hebraism, if philosophical, must be pantheistic.]
The horror which pantheism has always inspired in the Church is like
that which materialism inspires in sentimental idealists; they attack it
continually, not so much because anybody else defends it as because they
feel it to be implied unmistakably in half their own tenets. The
non-Platonic half of Christian theology, the Mosaic half, is bound to
become pantheism in the hands of a philosopher. The Jews were not
pantheists themselves, because they never speculated on the relation
which omnipotence stood in to natural forces and human acts. They
conceived Jehovah’s omnipotence dramatically, as they conceived
everything. He might pounce upon anything and anybody; he might subvert
or play with the laws of nature; he might laugh at men’s devices, and
turn them to his own ends; his craft and energy could not but succeed in
every instance; but that was not to say that men and nature had no will
of their own, and did not proceed naturally on their respective ways
when Jehovah happened to be busy elsewhere. So soon, however, as this
dramatic sort of omnipotence was made systematic by dialectic, so soon
as the doctrines of creation, omniscience, and providential government
were taken absolutely, pantheism was clearly involved. The consequences
to moral philosophy were truly appalling, for then the sins God punished
so signally were due to his own contrivance. The fervours of his saints,
the fate of his chosen people and holy temples, became nothing but a
puppet-show in his ironical self-consciousness.
[Sidenote: Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.]
The strangest part of this system, or what would seem so if its
antecedents were not known, is that it is only half-conscious of its
physical temper, and in calling itself an idealism (because it makes
perception and will the substance of their objects), thinks itself an
expression of human aspirations. This illusion has deep historical
roots. It is the last stage of a mythical philosophy which has been
earnestly criticising its metaphors, on the assumption that they were
not metaphorical; whereby it has stripped them of all significance and
reduced them at last to the bare principle of inversion. Nothing is any
longer idealised, yet all is still called an idealism. A myth is an
inverted image of things, wherein their moral effects are turned into
their dramatic antecedents—as when the wind’s rudeness is turned into
his anger. When the natural basis of moral life is not understood, myth
is the only way of expressing it theoretically, as eyes too weak to see
the sun face to face may, as Plato says, for a time study its image
mirrored in pools, and, as we may add, inverted there. So the good,
which in itself is spiritual only, is transposed into a natural power.
At first this amounts to an amiable misrepresentation of natural things;
the gods inhabit Mount Olympus and the Elysian Fields are not far west
of Cadiz. With the advance of geography the mythical facts recede, and
in a cosmography like Hegel’s, for instance, they have disappeared
altogether; but there remain the mythical values once ascribed to those
ideal objects but now transferred and fettered to the sad realities that
have appeared in their place. The titles of honour once bestowed on a
fabled world are thus applied to the real world by right of inheritance.
[Sidenote: Truly divine action limited to what makes for the good.]
Nothing could be clearer than the grounds on which pious men in the
beginning recognise divine agencies. We see, they say, the hand of God
in our lives. He has saved us from dangers, he has comforted us in
sorrow. He has blessed us with the treasures of life, of intelligence,
of affection. He has set around us a beautiful world, and one still more
beautiful within us. Pondering all these blessings, we are convinced
that he is mighty in the world and will know how to make all things good
to those who trust in him. In other words, pious men discern God in the
excellence of things. If all were well, as they hope it may some day be,
God would henceforth be present in everything. While good is mixed with
evil, he is active in the good alone. The pleasantness of life, the
preciousness of human possessions, the beauty and promise of the world,
are proof of God’s power; so is the stilling of tempests and the
forgiveness of sins. But the sin itself and the tempest, which
optimistic theology has to attribute just as much to God’s purposes, are
not attributed to him at all by pious feeling, but rather to his
enemies. In spite of centuries wasted in preaching God’s omnipotence,
his omnipotence is contradicted by every Christian judgment and every
Christian prayer. If the most pious of nations is engaged in war, and
suffers a great accidental disaster, such as it might expect to be safe
from, _Te deums_ are sung for those that were saved and _Requiems_ for
those that perished. God’s office, in both cases, is to save only. No
one seriously imagines that Providence does more than _govern_—that is,
watch over and incidentally modify the natural course of affairs—not
even in the other world, if fortunes are still changeable there.
[Sidenote: Need of an opposing principle.]
The criterion of divine activity could not be placed more squarely and
unequivocally in the good. Plato and Aristotle are not in this respect
better moralists than is an unsophisticated piety. God is the ideal, and
what manifests the ideal manifests God. Are you confident of the
permanence and triumph of the things you prize? Then you trust in God,
you live in the consciousness of his presence. The proof and measure of
rationality in the world, and of God’s power over it, is the extent of
human satisfactions. In hell, good people would disbelieve in God, and
it is impious of the trembling devils to believe in him there. The
existence of any evil—and if evil is felt it exists, for experience is
its locus—is a proof that some accident has intruded into God’s works.
If that loyalty to the good, which is the prerequisite of rationality,
is to remain standing, we must admit into the world, while it contains
anything practically evil, a principle, however minimised, which is not
rational. This irrational principle may be inertia in matter, accidental
perversity in the will, or ultimate conflict of interests. Somehow an
element of resistance to the rational order must be introduced
somewhere. And immediately, in order to distinguish the part furnished
by reason from its irrational alloy, we must find some practical test;
for if we are to show that there is a great and triumphant rationality
in the world, in spite of irrational accidents and brute opposition, we
must frame an idea of rationality different from that of being. It will
no longer do to say, with the optimists, the rational is the real, the
real is the rational. For we wish to make a distinction, in order to
maintain our loyalty to the good, and not to eviscerate the idea of
reason by emptying it of its essential meaning, which is action
addressed to the good and thought envisaging the ideal. To pious
feeling, the free-will of creatures, their power, active or passive, of
independent origination, is the explanation of all defects; and
everything which is not helpful to men’s purposes must be assigned to
their own irrationality as its cause. Herein lies the explanation of
that paradox in religious feeling which attributes sin to the free will,
but repentance and every good work to divine grace. Physically
considered—as theology must consider the matter—both acts and both
volitions are equally necessary and involved in the universal order; but
practical religion calls divine only what makes for the good. Whence it
follows at once that, both within and without us, what is done well is
God’s doing, and what is done ill is not.
[Sidenote: The standard of value is human.]
Thus what we may call the practical or Hebrew theory of cosmic
rationality betrays in plainest possible manner that reason is primarily
a function of human nature. Reason dwells in the world in so far as the
world is good, and the world is good in so far as it supports the wills
it generates—the excellence of each creature, the value of its life,
and the satisfaction of its ultimate desires. Thus Hebrew optimism could
be moral because, although it asserted in a sense the morality of the
universe, it asserted this only by virtue of a belief that the universe
supported human ideals. Undoubtedly much insistence on the greatness of
that power which made for righteousness was in danger of passing over
into idolatry of greatness and power, for whatever they may make. Yet
these relapses into Nature-worship are the more rare in that the Jews
were not a speculative people, and had in the end to endow even Job with
his worldly goods in order to rationalise his constancy. It was only by
a scandalous heresy that Spinoza could so change the idea of God as to
make him indifferent to his creatures; and this transformation, in spite
of the mystic and stoical piety of its author, passed very justly for
atheism; for that divine government and policy had been denied by which
alone God was made manifest to the Hebrews.
If Job’s reward seems to us unworthy, we must remember that we have
since passed through the discipline of an extreme moral idealism,
through a religion of sacrifice and sorrow. We should not confuse the
principle that virtue must somehow secure the highest good (for what
should not secure it would not be virtue) with the gross symbols by
which the highest good might be expressed at Jerusalem. That Job should
recover a thousand she-asses may seem to us a poor sop for his long
anguish of mind and body, and we may hardly agree with him in finding
his new set of children just as good as the old. Yet if fidelity had led
to no good end, if it had not somehow brought happiness to somebody,
that fidelity would have been folly. There is a noble folly which
consists in pushing a principle usually beneficent to such lengths as to
render it pernicious; and the pertinacity of Job would have been a case
of such noble folly if we were not somehow assured of its ultimate
fruits. In Christianity we have the same principle, save that the fruits
of virtue are more spiritually conceived; they are inward peace, the
silence of the passions, the possession of truth, and the love of God
and of our fellows. This is a different conception of happiness,
incomplete, perhaps, in a different direction. But were even this
attenuated happiness impossible to realise, all rationality would vanish
not merely from Christian charity and discipline, but from the whole
Christian theory of creation, redemption, and judgment. Without some
window open to heaven, religion would be more fantastic than worldliness
without being less irrational and vain.
[Sidenote: Hope for happiness makes belief in God.]
Revelation has intervened to bring about a conception of the highest
good which never could have been derived from an impartial synthesis of
human interests. The influence of great personalities and the fanaticism
of peculiar times and races have joined in imposing such variations from
the natural ideal. The rationality of the world, as Christianity
conceived it, is due to the plan of salvation; and the satisfaction of
human nature, however purified and developed, is what salvation means.
If an ascetic ideal could for a moment seem acceptable, it was because
the decadence and sophistication of the world had produced a great
despair in all noble minds; and they thought it better that an eye or a
hand which had offended should perish, and that they should enter blind
and maimed into the kingdom of heaven, than that, whole and seeing, they
should remain for ever in hell-fire. Supernatural, then, as the ideal
might seem, and imposed on human nature from above, it was yet accepted
only because nothing else, in that state of conscience and imagination,
could revive hope; nothing else seemed to offer an escape from the
heart’s corruption and weariness into a new existence.