secessions, rebellions, concussions, convulsions that deified Hatred
until Jahveh, in the person of Nebuchadnezzar, talked Assyrian, and
then, in the person of Cyrus, talked Zend, the god of Israel, even in
Israel, was not unique. He had a home, his first, the Temple, built
gorgeously by Solomon, where invisibly, mysteriously, perhaps
terribly, beneath the wings of cherubim that rose from the depths of
the Holy of Holies, he dwelled. But the shrine, however ornate, was
not the only one. There were other altars, other gods; the plentiful
sanctuaries of Ashera, of Moloch and of Baal. On the adjacent hilltops
the phallus stood. In the neighbouring groves the kisses of Ishtar
consumed.
The Lady of Girdles was worshipped there not by men and women only,
but by girls with girls; by others too, not in couples, but singly,
girls who in their solitary devotions had instruments for aid.[36]
Religion, as yet, had but the slightest connection with morality, a
circumstance explicable perhaps by the fact that it resumed the
ethnical conscience of a race. Between the altar of El Shaddai and the
shrines of other gods there were many differences, of which geography
was the least. Jahveh, from a tutelary god, had indeed become the
national divinity of a chosen people. But the Moabites were the chosen
people of Chemos; the Ammonites were the chosen people of Rimmon; the
Babylonians were the chosen people of Bel. The title conferred no
distinction. As a consequence, to differentiate Jahveh from all other
gods, and Israel from all other people, to make the one unique and the
other pontiff and shepherd of the nations of the world, became the
dream of anonymous poets, one that prophets, sometimes equally
anonymous, proclaimed. It was the prophets that reviled the false
gods, denounced the abominations of Ishtar, and purified the Israelite
heart. While nothing discernible, or even imaginable, menaced, however
slightly, the great empires of that day, the prophets were the first
to realize that the Orient was dead. When the Christ announced that
the end of the world was at hand, he but reiterated anterior
predictions that presently were fulfilled. A world did end. That of
antiquity ceased to be.
[Footnote 36: _Cf._ Deut. xxiii. 17, where _'alamoth_ (puellae) is
rendered in the Sapphist sense. Ezekiel xvi. 17. _Fecisti tibi
imagines masculinas._]
It was the prophets that foretold it. Gloomy, fanatic, implacable and,
it may be, mad, yet inspired at least by genius which itself, while
madness, is a madness wholly divine, they heralded the future, they
established the past. Abraham they drew from allegory, Moses from
myth. They made them live, and so immortally that one survives in
Islam, the other in words that are a law of grace for all.
If, in visions possibly ecstatic, they beheld heights that lost
themselves in immensity, and saw there an ineffable name seared by
forked flames on a tablet of stone; if that spectacle and the
theophany of it were but poetry, the decalogue is a fact, one so solid
that though ages have gone, though empires have crumbled, though the
customs of man have altered, though the sky itself have changed, still
is obeyed the commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
From Chemos in Moab, from Rimmon among the Ammonites, no such edict
had come. It felled them. Amon-Ra it tore from the celestial Nile, and
Bel-Marduk from the Silver Sky. The Refaim hid them in shadows as
surely as they buried there the high and potent lords of Greece and
Rome. These interments, completed by others, the prophets began. For
it was they who, in addition to the command, revealed the commandant,
creator of whatever is: the Being Absolute that abhorred evil, loved
righteousness, punished the transgressor and rewarded the just; El
Shaddai, then really Lord of Hosts.
It may be that already in Israel there had been some prescience of
this. But it lacked the authority of inspired text. The omission was
one that only seers could remedy. It was presumably in these
circumstances that an agreement was imagined which, construed as a
condition of a covenant, assumed to have been made with Abraham, was
further assumed to have been renewed to Moses. The resulting poetry
was enveloped in a romance of which Continental scholarship has
discovered two versions, woven together, perhaps by Ezra, into a
single tale.
"In the beginning Elohim created the heaven and earth." That abrupt
declaration, presented originally in but one of the versions, had
already been pronounced of Indra and also of Ormuzd. The Hebraic
announcement alone prevailed. It emptied the firmament of its
monsters, dislodged the gods from the skies, and enthroned there a
deity at first multiple but subsequently unique. Afterward seraphs and
saints might replace the evaporated imaginings of other creeds; Satan
might create a world of his own and people it with the damned;
theology might evolve from elder faiths a newer trinity and set it
like a diadem in space; angels and archangels might refill the
devastated heavens of the past; none the less, in the light of that
austere pronouncement, for a moment Israel dwelled in contemplation of
the Ideal.
At the time it is probable that the story of the love of the sons of
Jahveh for the daughters of men, together with the pastel of Eden as
it stands to-day, were not contained in existing accounts of that
ideal. These legends, which regarded as legends are obviously false,
but which, construed as allegories, may be profoundly true, were
probably not diffused until after the captivity, when Israel was not
more subtle, that is not possible, but, by reason of her contact with
Persia, more wise.
The origin of evil these myths related but did not explain. Since
then, from no church has there come an adequate explanation of the
malediction under which man is supposed to labour because of the
natural propensities of beings that never were. That explanation these
myths, which orthodoxy has gravely, though sometimes reluctantly,
accepted, both provide and conceal. They date possibly from the
Ormuzdian revelation: "In the beginning was the living Word."
John, or more exactly his homonym, repeated the pronouncement, adding:
"The word was made flesh." But, save for a mention of the glory which
he had before the world was, he omitted to further follow the thought
of Ormuzd, who, in describing paradise to Zarathrustra, likened it, in
every way, to heaven. There the first beings were, exempt from
physical necessities, pure intelligences, naked as the compilers of
Genesis translated, naked and unashamed, but naked and unashamed
because incorporeal, unincarnate and clothed in light, a vestment
which they exchanged for a garment of flesh, coats of skin as it is in
Genesis, when, descended on earth, their intelligence, previously
luminous, swooned in the senses of man.
In Egypt, the harper going out from Amenti sang: "Life is death in a
land of darkness, death is life in a land of light." There perhaps is
the origin of evil. There too perhaps is its cure. But the view
accepted there too is pre-existence and persistence, a doctrine
blasphemous to the Jew as it was to the Assyrian, to whom the gods
alone were immortal, and to whom, in consequence, immortal beings
would be gods. In the creed of both, man was essentially evanescent.
To the Hebrew, he lived a few, brief days and then went down into
silence, where no remembrance is. There, gathered among the Refaim to
his fathers, he remained forever, unheeded by God.
The conception, passably rationalistic and not impossibly correct,
veiled the beautiful allegory that was latent in the Eden myth. It had
the further defect, or the additional advantage, of eliminating any
theory of future punishment and reward. In lieu of anything of the
kind, there was a doctrine that evil, in producing evil, automatically
punished itself. The doctrine is incontrovertible. But, for corollary,
went the fallacy that virtue is its own reward. Against that idea Job
protested so energetically that mediaeval monks were afraid to read
what he wrote. Yet it was perhaps in demonstration of the real
significance of the allegory that a spiritualistic doctrine--always an
impiety to the orthodox--was insinuated by the Pharisees and instilled
by the Christ.
The basis of it rested perhaps partially in the idealism of the
prophets. The clamour of their voices awoke the dead. It transformed
the skies. It transfigured Jahveh. It divested him of attributes that
were human. It outlined others that were divine. It awoke not merely
the dead, but the consciousness that a god that had a proper name
could not be the true one. Thereafter mention of it was avoided. The
vowels were dropped. It became unpronounceable, therefore
incommunicable. For it was substituted the term vaguer, and therefore
more exact, of Lord, one in whose service were fulfilled the words of
Isaiah: "I am the first and I am the last, and beside me there is no
God."
In the marvel of that miraculous realization were altitudes hitherto
undreamed, peaks from whose summits there was discernible but the
valleys beneath, and another height on which stood the Son of man. Yet
marvellous though the realization was, instead of diminishing, it
increased. It did not pass. It was not forgot. Ceaselessly it
augmented.
In the Scriptures there are many marvels. That perhaps is the
greatest. Amon, originally an obscure provincial god of Thebes, became
the supreme divinity of Egypt. Bel, originally a local god of Nippur,
became in Babylon Lord of Hosts. But Jahveh, originally the tutelary
god of squalid nomads, became the Deity of Christendom. The fact is
one that any scholarship must admit. It is the indisputable miracle of
the Bible.
VI
ZEUS
In Judea, when Jahveh was addressed, he answered, if at all, with a
thunderclap. Since then he has ceased to reply. Zeus was more
complaisant. One might enter with him into the intimacy of the
infinite. The father of the Graces, the Muses, the Hours, it was
natural that he should be debonair. But he had other children. Among
them were Litai, the Prayers. In the _Vedas_, where Zeus was born, the
Prayers upheld the skies. Lame and less lofty in Greece, they could
but listen and intercede.
The detail is taken from Homer. In his Ionian Pentateuch is the
statement that beggars are sent by Zeus, that whoever stretches a hand
is respectable in his eyes, that the mendicant who is repulsed may
perhaps be a god[37]--suggestions which, afterward, were superiorly
resumed in the dictum: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of
these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
[Footnote 37: Odyssey, xviii. 485, v. 447, xiv. 56.]
The Litai were not alone in their offices. There were the oracles of
Delphi, of Trophonios and of Mopsos, where one might converse with any
divinity, even with Pan, who was a very great god. But Olympos was
neighbourly. It was charming too. There was unending spring there,
eternal youth, immortal beauty, the harmonies of divine honey-moons,
the ideal in a golden dream; a stretch of crystal parapets, from
which, leaning and laughing, radiant goddesses and resplendent gods
looked down, and to whom a people, adolescent still, looked up.
In that morning of delight fear was absent, mystery was replaced by
joy. The pageantry of the hours may have been too near to nature to
know of shame, it was yet too close to the divine to know of hate.
Man, then, for the first time, loved what he worshipped and worshipped
what he loved. His brilliant and musical Bible moved his heart without
tormenting it. It conducted but did not constrain. It taught him that
in death all are equal and that in life the noble-minded are serene.
In the Genesis of this Bible there is an account of a golden age and
of a paradise into which evil was introduced by woman. The account is
Hesiod's, to whom the Orient had furnished the details. It may be that
both erred. If ever there were a golden age it must have been in those
days when heaven was on earth and, mingling familiarly with men, were
processions of gods, gods of love, of light, of liberty, thousands of
them, not one of whom had ever heard an atheist's voice. Related to
humanity, of the same blood, sons of the same Aryan mother, they
differed from men only in that the latter died because they were real,
while they were deathless because ideal.
The ideal was too fair. Presently Pallas became the soul of Athens.
But meanwhile from the East there strayed swarms of enigmatic faces;
the harlot handmaids of her Celestial Highness Ishtar, Princess of
Heaven; the mutilated priests of Tammuz her lover; dual conceptions
that resulted in Aphrodite Pandemos, the postures of Priapos, the leer
of the Lampsacene, and, with them, forms of worship comparable, in the
circumadjacent beauty, to latrinae in a garden, ignoble shapes that
violated the candour of maidens' eyes, but with which Greece became so
accustomed that on them moral aphorisms were engraved. "In the mind of
Hellas, these things," Renan, with his usual unctuousness, declared,
"awoke but pious thoughts."
Pious at heart Hellas was. Even art, which now is wholly profane, with
her was wholly sacred. The sanctity was due to its perfection. The
perfection was such that imbeciles who fancy that it has been or could
be surpassed show merely that they know nothing about it. At Athens,
where Pheidias created a palpable Olympos, Pallas stood colossally, a
torch in her hand, a lance at her shoulder, a shield at her side, a
plastron of gold on her immaculate breast, a golden robe about her
ivory form, and on her immortal brow a crown of gold, beneath which,
sapphire eyes, that saw and foresaw, glittered. To-day the place where
the marvellous creation stood is vacant. With the gorgeous host Pallas
has departed. But the torch she held still burns. From the emptiness
of her virginal arms, that never were filled, proceeds all
civilization.
Adjacently at Eleusis was Demeter. Pallas was the soul of Greece.
Eleusis was the Jerusalem, Demeter the Madonna.
Demeter--the earth, the universal mother--had, in a mystic hymen with
her brother Zeus, conceived Persephone. The latter, when young and a
maiden, beckoned perhaps by Eros, wandered from Olympos and was
gathering flowers when Pluto, borne by black horses, erupted, raped
her, and tore her away. The cries of the indignant Demeter sterilized
the earth. To assuage her, Zeus undertook to have Persephone
recovered, provided that in Hades, of which Pluto was lord, she had
eaten nothing. But the girl had--a pomegranate grain. It was the
irrevocable. Demeter yielded, as the high gods had to yield, to what
was higher than they, to Destiny. Meanwhile, in the shadows below,
Persephone was transfigured.
Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh and
that weep;
For these give joy and sorrow: but thou, Proserpina, sleep....
O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.
In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night
where thou art,
Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from
the heart, ...
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star.
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find place and forget what was done or
undone.
Thou art more than the gods that number the days of our temporal breath
For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.
Like Hesiod, Swinburne erred, though perhaps intentionally, as poets
should, for the greater glory of the Muses. Persephone brought not
death but life. The aisles of despair she filled with hope.
Transfigured herself, Pluto she transformed. She changed what had been
hell into what was to be purgatory. It was not yet Elysium, but it was
no longer Hades. Plato said that those who were in her world had no
wish at all for this.
It is for that reason that Demeter is the Madonna of Greece, as her
ethereal daughter was the saviour. The myth of it all, brought by
Pythagoras from Egypt is very old. Known in Memphis, it was known too
in Babylon, perhaps before Memphis was. But the legend of Isis and
that of Ishtar--both of whom descended into hell--lack the transparent
charm which this idyl unfolds and of which the significance was
revealed only to initiate in epiphanies at Eleusis.
Before these sacraments Greece stood, a finger to her lips. Yet the
whispers from them that have reached us, while furtive perhaps, are
clear. They furnished the poets with notes that are resonant still.
They lifted the drama to heights that astound. Even in the fancy balls
of Aristophanes, where men were ribald and the gods were mocked,
suddenly, in the midst of the orgy, laughter ceased, obscenities were
hushed. Afar a hymn resounded. It was the chorus of the Initiate going
measuredly by.
The original mysteries were Hermetic. Enterable only after a prolonged
novitiate, the adept then beheld an unfolding of the theosophy of the
soul. In visions, possibly ecstatic, he saw the series of its
incarnations, the seven cycles through which it passed, the Ship of a
Million Years on which the migrations are effected and on which, at
last, from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, it sails to its primal
home.
That home was colour, its sustenance light. There, in ethereal
evolutions, its incarnations began. At first unsubstantial and wholly
ineffable, these turned for it every object into beauty, every sound
into joy. Without needs, from beatitude to beatitude blissfully it
floated. But, subjected to the double attraction of matter and of sin,
the initiate saw the memories and attributes of its spirituality fade.
He saw it flutter, and fluttering sink. He saw that in sinking it
enveloped itself in garments that grew heavier at each descent.
Through the denser clothing he saw the desires of the flesh pulsate.
He saw them force it lower, still lower, until, fallen into its
earthly tenement, it swooned in the senses of man. From the chains of
that prison he learned that the soul's one escape was in a recovery of
the memory of what it had been when it was other than what it had
become.
That memory the mysteries provided. Those of Eleusis differed from the
Egyptian only in detail. At Eleusis, in lieu of visions, there were
tableaux. Persephone, beckoned by desire, straying then from Olympos,
afterward fainting in the arms of Pluto, but subsequently, while
preparing her own reascension, saving and embellishing all that
approach, was the symbol, in an Hellenic setting, of the fall and
redemption of man.
The human tragedy thus portrayed was the luminous counterpart of the
dark dramas that Athens beheld. There, in the theatre--which itself
was a church with the stage for pulpit--man, blinded by passions, the
Fates pursued and Destiny felled.
The sombre spectacle was inexplicable. At Eleusis was enlightenment.
"Eskato Bebeloi"--_Out from here, the profane_--the heralds shouted as
the mysteries began. "Konx ompax"--_Go in peace_--they called when the
epiphanies were completed.
In peace the initiate went, serenely, it is said, ever after. From
them the load of ignorance was lifted. But what their impressions were
is unrecorded. They were bound to secrecy. No one could learn what
occurred without being initiated, or without dying. For death too is
initiation.
The mysteries were schools of immortality. They plentifully taught
many a lesson that Christianity afterward instilled. But their drapery
was perhaps over ornate. Truth does not need any. Truth always should
be charming. Yet always it should be naked as well. About it the
mysteries hung a raiment that was beautiful, but of which the rich
embroideries obscured. The mysteries could not have been more
fascinating, that is not possible, but, the myths removed, in simple
nudity they would have been more clear. Doubtless it was for that very
reason, in order that they might not be transparent, that the myths
were employed. It is for that very reason, perhaps, that Christianity
also adopted a few. Yet at least from cant they were free. Among the
multiple divinities of Greece, hypocrisy was the unknown god.
Consideration of the others is, to-day, usually effected through the
pages of Ovid. One might as well study Christianity in the works of
Voltaire. Christianity's brightest days were in the dark ages. The
splendid glamour of them that persists is due to many causes, among
which, in minor degree, may be the compelling glare of Greek genius.
That glare, veiled in the mysteries, philosophy reflects.
Philosophy is but the love of wisdom. It began with Socrates. He had
no belief in the gods. The man who has none may be very religious. But
though Socrates did not believe in the gods he did not deny them. He
did what perhaps was worse. He ignored their perfectly poetic
existence. He was put to death for it, though only at the conclusion
of a long promenade during which he delivered Athenian youths of their
intelligence. Facility in the operation may have been inherited.
Socrates was the son of a midwife. His own progeny consisted in a
complete transfiguration of Athenian thought. He told of an
Intelligence, supreme, ethical, just, seeing all, hearing all,
governing all; a creator made not after the image of man but of the
soul, and visible only in the conscience. It was for that he died.
There was no such god on Olympos.
There was an additional indictment. Socrates was accused of perverting
the _jeunesse doree_. At a period when, everywhere, save only in
Israel, the abnormal was usual, Socrates was almost insultingly
chaste. The perversion of which he was accused was not of that order.
It was that of inciting lads to disobey their parents when the latter
opposed what he taught.
"I am come to set a man against his father," it is written in
_Matthew_. The mission of Socrates was the same. Because of it he
died. He was the first martyr. But his death was overwhelming in its
simplicity. Even in fairyland there has been nothing more calm. By way
of preparation he said to his judges: "Were you to offer to acquit me
on condition that I no longer profess what I believe, I would answer;
'Athenians, I honour and I love you, but a god has commanded me and
that god I will obey, rather than you.'"
In the speech was irony, with which Athens was familiar. But it also
displayed a conception, wholly new, that of maintaining at any cost
the truth. The novelty must have charmed. When Peter and the apostles
were arraigned before the Sanhedrin, their defence consisted in the
very words that Socrates had used: "We should obey God rather than
man."[38]
[Footnote 38: Acts v. 29.]
Socrates wrote nothing. The Buddha did not either. Neither did the
Christ. These had their evangelists. Socrates had also disciples who,
as vehicle for his ideas, employed the nightingale tongue of beauty
into which the Law and the Prophets were translated by the Septuagint
and into which the Gospels were put.
It would be irreverent to suggest that the latter are in any way
indebted to Socratic inspiration. It would be irrelevant as well. For,
while the Intelligence that Socrates preached differed as much from
the volage and voluptuous Zeus as the God of Christendom differs from
the Jahveh of Job, yet, in a divergence so wide, an idealist, very
poor except in ideas; a teacher killed by those who knew not what they
did; a philosopher that drained the cup without even asking that it
pass from him; a mere reformer, though dangerous perhaps as every
reformer worth the name must be; but, otherwise, a mere man like any
other, only a little better, could obviously have had no share. For
reasons not minor but major, Plato could have had none either.
It is related that a Roman invader sank back, stricken with
_deisidaimonia_--the awe that the gods inspired--at the sight of the
Pheidian Zeus. It is with a wonder not cognate certainly, yet in a
measure relative, that one considers what Socrates must have been if
millennia have gone without producing one mind approaching that of his
spiritual heir. It was uranian; but not disassociated from human
things.