WHENCE CAME RELIGION TO MAN?
What has Mr. Wells to say on the origin of religion in matters less
than, but connected with, the Idea of God; for instance, Sacrifice,
Worship, the Future Life? I leave Priesthood to a later discussion, in
the place where Mr. Wells himself deals with it.
I take for my text a sentence drawn from his own work, page 67:
“_Fetichism is only incorrect science based on guesswork or false
analogy._”
That sentence is an accurate and exhaustive summary of what Mr. Wells
has to tell us on the origin of religion. It is exactly that. It is
“incorrect science based on guesswork or false analogy.”
I have said that the origin of all the errors which he copies from his
predecessors of half a lifetime ago is the neglect of the obvious fact
that _Man is a fixed type_. It is the point I so emphasized in my last
chapter, because it is capital to the whole discussion.
If you pretend, or try to believe, that Man alone, out of all creation,
is not a definable being, but in a ceaseless process of rapid change,
then, of course, you can invent at will any mythology to account for
anything you prefer to hope happened to him in the past. You can imagine
any monstrous lack of human faculty in the past so as to make your facts
fit in with your theory. But if you regard Man as Man, since the time
when first True Man (Mr. Wells’s own term) appeared upon earth; if you
regard palæolithic man as Man, a known animal, just as you regard the
palæolithic reindeer as a reindeer; if you consider a known thing called
“Man” and not a succession of imaginary beings made up as you go along,
then you have three certain guides to go upon, to wit: (1) your own
knowledge of your own self, (2) your knowledge of your fellow-beings,
(3) the record of Man’s actions and being since he has kept records.
Let us first see what are the accompaniments of religion in the human
mind, and how they tend to work in the fallen nature of man.
What is the _known_ way in which the human mind proceeds in its
religious activities?
Those activities are all connected together by being each of them
dependent on the original Idea of God.
If God be, then these religious practices—sacrifices, sacraments,
prayers, awe, the sanctity of special deeds, places, and things,
restrictions, rituals, _Fas et nefas_—are more or less consonant to that
Supreme Reality. However perverted, each religious action will, _if
there be indeed a Creator and Sustainer_, correspond to and resemble
what might have been an _un_perverted action of the same kind; and that
_un_perverted religious action would be an action in exact tune with
reality. The perverted Sacrament argues a true Sacrament; the perverted
Sacrifice a true form of Sacrifice, and in general the perverted Worship
a true Worship.
If God be not, then Sacrifice, Sacrament, Prayer, Inhibition, Ritual,
are even worse perversions than the original illusion of a God from
which they all derive.
These main religious functions I have just put down by their popular
names. Let me give them a more exact order. They are, first of all,
Veneration; next, the offerings of gratitude and propitiation, that is
Sacrifice; next, the Communion of the Human Spirit with God, that is
Prayer; next, a recognition of Being, spiritual and incorporeal, which
involves the possibility of man’s surviving death; next, Ritual—the
necessary human framework of any continuous human Veneration, Sacrifice,
Prayer, or affirmation of Immortality.
The Veneration natural to That which made us and by which we are, That
which overshadows all possible things (including ourselves), produces a
multitude of results: love quite as much as fear or wonder; a vast
curiosity and search; and, above all, the ineradicable desire to
_worship_—that is, to put up monuments (within the limits of our powers)
bearing testimony to our Veneration; to perform acts consonant with that
Veneration; to ask for aid, to admit wrongdoing, to expect justice in
social relations, to enforce it, and so forth.
That, I say, is the very first action of the human mind, as we know it,
where the conception of the Divine comes into its action: _worship_.
There is no race of men whatsoever, even where it has lost the
conception of the Universal God, or has let that conception become
obscure and indifferent, which does not still preserve the derivatives
from the original idea of God. Treat the simplest savage with gross
injustice, and you will soon see what he has to say to you: it will be
of exactly the same sort as what the most corrupt of Londoners or
Parisians would have to say to you. Propose that there is no ultimate
vengeance for injustice, and you will discover despair in those who
admit such a doctrine. You will find those who deny God—and those who
find the Universe unjust are deniers of God—to be in despair, and you
will find this despair showing just as clearly in the most corrupt
Parisian or Londoner as you would in the most candid savage. Yet with
this difference, that the savage is much less likely to accept such a
proposition than the worn-out dregs of a luxurious civilization are
likely to accept it.
Now on this chapter of Veneration—which must of necessity come first in
order, and which we know does in practice, to our own human minds, come
first in order—Mr. Wells has nothing to say.
He, or rather those from whom he got his mythology, have plenty to say
of a base fear at the origin of religion, but nothing of Veneration.
Men feel Veneration in varying degrees, just as they feel colour or
music in varying degrees; but it is not for those who feel it least to
teach those who feel it normally and fully. It is not for the man almost
colour-blind to instruct the average man on colour; it is not for a man
almost tone-deaf to instruct you and me on the insufficiency of music.
Mr. Wells does not apparently feel Veneration—even for great things near
at hand, let alone for his Maker—at all.
Next to Veneration as a religious function proceeding from the Idea of
God comes Sacrifice. If you will look at your own mind and see how the
idea of Sacrifice arises in it you will discover that there is in that
suggestion essentially the motive of offering a gift; _after_ that (not
before it) there may also be a motive of propitiation. There may also
come a motive, perhaps, sooner or later, of direct ritual connection
between cause and effect: the feeling that a Sacrifice made by you will
have a spiritual result. At any rate, the main motive is certainly
_offering_. It is so with Sacrifice made for the sake of human beings
whom we love or venerate. Still more is it so with Sacrifice to and for
the Supreme Power: “I owe you all things: so take back this, yours
though it is, in gratitude.”
Now, this is a noble and generous emotion; why in Mr. Wells’s account do
we only hear of its perversions and especially of its beastliest
perversions? The very primitive races among us enjoy that very feeling
of owing gratitude; we enjoy it in the full light of revelation. Many
men continue to sacrifice all day long. The better they are, the more
they do it. It is an essential factor in religion, subsidiary to and
derivative from the Idea of God.
Now let us proceed to the survival of man after death. It is not true
that all primitive men everywhere have been (or are) equally conscious
of survival after death and of the immortality of the human spirit. It
is still less true to-day that all men in our refined and fatigued
civilization are conscious of it. But it is true that some consciousness
of it is almost universal in unspoilt men, and that, wherever it exists,
it is accompanied by certain natural and almost necessary acts. We find
these acts, on examining our own emotions, to be often rather symbolic
than positively religious; but they are intricately bound up—whether
symbolic (such as putting flowers on a grave or objects into it) or
actively religious (such as prayers for and to the dead)—with the
conception of survival.
If you find that a particular set of men bury their dead with care,
deposit with them loved or valuable objects, or objects with which their
lives were associated, or even sink to the superstition of sacrificing
companions to accompany them into the other world, you may be certain
that these people believed in the survival of man.
Here again I repeat that warning which I have brought in over and over
again in these notes. We must distinguish between what is evidence for
truth and what is evidence only of human mood. We Christians may argue
from philosophy upon the survival of the soul, or we may argue from
authority upon it; and we shall triumph in that argument, for we have
all the trumps in our hands. We may, and I hope, do, accept Immortality
simply on faith, as a truth which the Church teaches; and we affirm it
equally strongly whether we _feel_ it little or much; for the Faith is
the best ground for certitude. But we are not here concerned with either
of these processes, Faith or mood. We are not here concerned with
whether man be right or wrong in generally accepting survival after
death; we are concerned only with the value of Mr. Wells as a would be
historian when he tells us that man has not accepted the idea.
I am not examining whether primitive man was right or wrong in this or
that religious practice, or even in his acceptance of God. I am asking,
Did he, in point of fact, act as Mr. Wells says he acted? If a
materialist seeks to upset my faith in the Catholic dogma of Immortality
by philosophical argument, he may be formidable in his assault on that
ground. But if he produces the _historical_ argument, and says that my
forefathers did not believe in their own survival, I must test his
statement. If he prove to be quite wrong in his affirmation, then he
ceases to be a formidable opponent in that respect: as an _historian_ he
is, on that prime matter, worthless.
Let us see how our Author deals with very early palæolithic sepulture.
Here Mr. Wells depends for his views directly upon Morillet, one of the
great founders of modern archæology. Morillet laid it down (in a book
dating from 1883) that palæolithic man was without religion, and only
came to religion by a gradual exercise of invention: by an increasing
illusion. Morillet based that negation of his _on the supposed fact
(accepted in 1883) that there were no palæolithic tombs_. Mr. Wells
knows that since 1883 those tombs have been discovered, but he is too
rootedly conservative to admit the effect of the evidence. He is still a
devoted pupil of Morillet, forty-two years after his master—it is a
terribly long time for a man to cling to the superstitions of his youth!
As palæolithic sepulture _has_ been discovered since Morillet—and
objects buried with the dead—instead of modifying his old-fashioned
error, Mr. Wells begins forcing new facts to fit exploded theory. He
tells us (on p. 68) that men buried the dead with ornaments and little
domestic sanctities of food and arms, not because men loved the dead,
and could not be rid of the idea of their spirit carrying on, but
because “they doubted they were dead”! He makes it very clear what he
means by this. He means that men doubted whether the actual physical
body were dead or no! He adds that this “is just as reasonable to
suppose” as that men showed by such burial offerings an idea of
Immortality!
Well, to such a knock-down sentence as that one can only have one
answer: It is nonsense. It is not “just as reasonable” to suppose that a
man didn’t know a corrupting carcase to be dead. It is wildly
_un_reasonable to suppose that man would carefully bury his fellow-man
in a carefully made tomb, deposit with him objects that showed great
toil in their making, and were, therefore, a sacrifice of value, and at
the same time did not know that he was physically dead. That such
nonsense can be talked at all is the best proof that, rather than give
up a false theory, men will do anything with facts. It is exactly of a
piece with the Bible Christian naturalists and geologists of the
mid-nineteenth century, who said that fossils were freakish tricks to
try their faith in the literal interpretation of Genesis. It is False
Faith afraid to reason.
It is the very mark of False Faith that it fights shy of reason. So did
the Bible Christian of the Victorian Age, who would not face geological
science. So does his immediate lineal descendant, Mr. Wells.
When a False Faith is challenged by awkward facts it suppresses, denies,
or distorts them. The facts have got to fit the dogma.
Materialistic Faith is at this warping of scientific truth
perpetually—and nowhere more than in Mr. Wells’s book.
If I thought this straining, ignoring, and twisting of ascertained
fact—that is, of true science—to be an insincere trick in Mr. Wells, I
would call it that. But I do not think it is. I think it is the
unconscious action of a man untrained to clear thinking.
Take, for example, his attitude towards the known facts with regard to
palæolithic man, so far as they regard the origin of religion in
departments other than burial. Palæolithic man made the pictures
everyone has heard of in the depths of the caves and elsewhere. Mr.
Wells remarks on page 68 that “one sees no scope in such a life” (that
of the palæolithic hunter) “for superstition or speculation.”
Why on earth not? Are superstition and speculation absent from wild
hunters as we know them to-day? Would they be absent from us if we
turned to wild hunting again? Why should they be?
The only answer is that common sense and plain fact must not be
admitted, because they would interfere with a preconceived theory that
religion was an illusion coming late in the human story. The palæolithic
hunter must be free from the taint of religion. The religious illusion
must come far on in the development in order that it may be associated
at its origin with ritual murder and known savage customs. Yet the same
writer is perpetually telling us that religious ideas are of bestial
origin and came from the brutal cruelty to females and young of an aged
monkey-like fellow myriads of years before the palæolithic hunters
existed.
There is here a complete lack of consecutive thought. Religion began
long before men were men, says Mr. Wells; yet there is no trace of it
when men first _were_ men! And then again (in a separate and
contradictory proposition) religion began, very late, with the neolithic
culture.
But indeed in his necessity for forcing facts to fit theory he makes a
hash of palæolithic man from beginning to end. We have seen in how
extraordinary a fashion he stretches fact to fit theory in the matter of
palæolithic burial. Let us see now how he stretches it to fit theory in
the matter of palæolithic art.
Mr. Wells says, on page 53, of the men who made the cave drawings
(palæolithic men), that they “drew with increasing skill as the
centuries passed.” He says that because he thinks they _ought_ to have
done so according to all the Darwinian dogma of slow, minute, mechanical
evolution. The plain fact is that they did _not_. Their painting
followed a cycle precisely like that which the painting of higher
cultures has followed: it sprang suddenly, or very rapidly, into
existence as a vivid, intense realization of the thing drawn. It sank
into mere convention and then disappeared.
The more I look into Mr. Wells’s book, the more I find this
characteristic straining of facts to meet a mythological doctrine and
neglect of facts (or, to be more charitable, ignorance of facts) which
might upset theory.
Thus, I find, on page 47, “with regard to the cave drawings there is
scarcely anything we can suppose to be a religious or mystical symbol at
all,” and he argues throughout this page that the cave drawings had no
religious signification.
There are only two possible explanations of so strange a remark. One is
that Mr. Wells knew the evidence and suppressed it. The other is the
much more probable one, that his reading is too slight for him to be
acquainted even with the main lines of the evidence.
We can prove that the latter, more charitable, explanation is the true
one. That the cave drawings were religious in character everybody now
knows—except, apparently, Mr. Wells—from two discovered characters.
_First_, a large proportion of them are in the very depths and recesses
of dark passages—sometimes deliberately obstructed—where they could have
had no utilitarian or merely artistic object. But apart from this we
have, _secondly_, the famous Phallic Dance, at Cogul, which is
conclusively ritual, in garment and circle and all else.
I have a further right to conclude that Mr. Wells was simply ignorant of
the evidence, and not merely shirking it, from his confused writing upon
details not religious. Upon page 55 he writes, concerning the
palæolithic men of the cave drawings, this sentence, “_It is doubtful if
they knew of the bow._”
When I first read that sentence, I was so staggered I could hardly
believe that I had read it right.
I have already confessed to a native inaccuracy in detail. I often have
to read a thing several times to be certain I have not missed anything.
I often skip a modifying phrase or word. I went carefully over several
pages to make certain that I had not overlooked any qualifying term. But
no. There was the thing in black and white.
It was the more extraordinary because here before me, in Mr. Wells’s own
book, were reproductions of these cave paintings with the bow and arrow
appearing all over them!
We have the clear statement that later palæolithic men—who knew not the
bow nor domestic animals nor tillage—were succeeded by another culture
which knew all these things, and that can only mean the neolithic
culture. Yet, _after_ saying this, Mr. Wells remembers, or is told,
that, after all there were palæolithic men who used the bow and made
pictures of it. So he devotes a section to them, contradicting what he
has just said. It is as though a man wishing to deny the Red Indians
were to say “They did not know the horse, but were succeeded by a new
culture of white men who did.” But having said that (and allowed his
publisher to illustrate the remark with a picture of a Red Indian on
horseback!) were to add a supplementary chapter saying, “By the way,
before they disappeared they did get the horse.”
Mr. Wells would not have written thus if he had not been driven by the
necessity of denying facts which did not fit in with his theology.
What is the point of saying that the cave painters, who made their
drawings so often under conditions obviously religious, and who painted
an unmistakable religious ceremonial dance, had “as yet no religion”?
What is the motive producing so absurd a saying as that later
palæolithic men did not know the bow and arrow which they painted so
clearly, and then, as an afterthought, bringing in palæolithic men who
_did_ know the bow and arrow? What is the driving force which makes a
man write—in the teeth of the evidence—that this art arose very
gradually from rude beginnings and progressed—instead of declining (as,
in fact, it did)?
What is the point of saying that Neanderthal man may have spoken (_may_
have spoken! A man who made instruments, lit fires and buried his
dead!)? Or why add that he had “nothing we should call language”? (On
which point neither Mr. Wells nor any other man has the least
information and which on the face of it is wildly improbable.)
The answer is that you have to imagine facts without evidence, you have
also to distort facts, you have also to suppress them if you are to
present to your readers a childishly simple scheme of regular and, above
all, slow “progress.”
You must make Early Man last as long as possible and be as base as
possible. If the facts will not fit in with that very slow process of
development, which was felt (stupidly enough!) to make a Creator less
necessary, so much the worse for the facts. Such very slow advance,
unconscious, of imperceptible degrees—mechanical—such prolonged
bestiality in true man, was dogma with all cultured people thirty or
forty years ago. It is still dogma with Mr. Wells. Being dogma, and
dogma divorced from reason, the facts must give way to it.
Or turn to the origins of Sacrifice. We come at the outset on the very
true remark that the killing of a man is a very violent and striking
act. But immediately after we find the quite false remark that such
ritual murder would be “naturally” associated with any propitiatory
offer. Mr. Wells at once proceeds to postulate this horrible perversion
as a universal human action and a precursor of all religion. He has no
basis for that at all. It is made up, not indeed by him, but by the
older men whom he copies—the writers who were authorities half a
lifetime ago, notably Frazer.
There is plenty of evidence to show that men have put their
fellow-beings to death here and there, and have done so in _all_ states
of culture and for all manner of widely differing reasons—ritual,
vindictive, military, magical, judicial. But there is not a scrap of
evidence to show that such murder was original to religion, and most
certainly it was not universal. The attempt to prove it universal has
not only failed, but ought never to have been made: for it is nonsense.
Frazer, in _The Golden Bough_, gathered all the evidence he could—most
of it negligible, some of it doubtful, a little of it firm and good—upon
human sacrifice as connected with harvest. All he could show was that
some few sets of men have here and there, in places unconnected and wide
apart in time, killed men in a ritual fashion from a superstition that
such ritual murder would procure them a good harvest. There is no sort
of proof that it was a general human custom; and what is worse, there is
no distinction in Frazer between certain evidence, uncertain and
worthless.
I should have thought that by this time educated opinion was alive to
that criticism: it is many years since Andrew Lang died; and Andrew Lang
(in this country—it had little acceptance abroad) blew the theory
sky-high—I mean the theory that human sacrifice was an original
universal accompaniment of the sowing or the harvest.
Human sacrifice being a violent because a horrible thing, has
occasionally accompanied the desire for victory in war. It has
accompanied mourning for the great. It has been the product of terror
under defeat or pestilence. It has appeared in all sorts of forms,
connected with pretty well any violent emotion of desire or dread. It
has been particularly noticeable in very high civilizations; Carthage
had it at the very height of her luxury and greatness. Mexico had
it—most highly developed just when Mexico was, apparently, at the
highest point of her material civilization. Some savages have had it
also. You get it in the Moabite Stone; you get echoes of it in the
Jewish folk-lore of the Old Testament. You get it in a totally different
form among the Gauls, where it is commonly an act of vengeance on
criminals and prisoners, and in no way an act of magic. You also get an
abhorrence of it among societies which have not fallen to the
degradation of practising it; and these societies (by the way) usually
prove the masters and the betters of those who practise it. But of human
sacrifice as an original and universal habit, there is not a sign. To
believe _that_ you have to swallow whole the fourfold trick of Frazer’s
_Golden Bough_, which is:
(1) To gather all scraps of evidence indifferently, including a mass of
vague hearsay and stuff at third hand, and vague analogies, and any
custom, game, lark, or legend, however remote from killing, which can be
guessed to be—or asserted to be—a memory of that perversion. (2) To
leave out all counter evidence. (3) To put the thing cumulatively and
(4) Then to present it as proved.
In such fashion any theory, however wild, could be demonstrated to
satisfaction. Mr. Chesterton has wittily shown how it can be used to
prove that History (what with Calvus, Socrates, Cæsar, tonsured Priests,
and Calvin) is dominated by bald heads.
Such is Frazer’s “proof” of universal original ritual human sacrifice.
Yet upon the assumption that this horror was universal and original, all
Mr. Wells’s argument in this department is based; including what is not
argument at all, but mere fiction, his elaborate and purely imaginary
description of human sacrifice at Stonehenge.
Oh! That Human Sacrifice at Stonehenge! How well we know it! In how many
cheap magazines, in how many journalistic allusions! With such a lineage
it could hardly fail to turn up in such a best-seller as this _Outline
of History_.
In point of fact we have no knowledge whatever of the use of Stonehenge
or its purpose, and not a scintilla of evidence on its being used for
human sacrifice. But the cinema public will have it so.
Historically the whole talk of human sacrifice as original to religion
is quite worthless. There is no general evidence of the thing in the
remains of prehistoric civilization; no picture, no sculpture, no
language test. We may safely prophesy that if this nameless perversion
reappears among men—as it well may—it will reappear not in their
simplest societies, but rather in their most refined.
The bulwark against all such things—and such murder is but one out of
myriads of possible monstrosities—is that general tradition of our
morals and culture which depends upon the Catholic Church. Men do not
grow out of their evils: they return to them, lacking a Divine guide.
When, therefore, I lay down Mr. Wells’s book (not without relief) and
find my eyes following the phrase upon page 72, “it _must_ be clear from
what has gone before that primitive man could have had no idea of God or
of religion,” I leave that comic phrase “it must be clear” to the
judgment of the reader.
There never was any writer _less_ clear in his ideas than the author of
this work when he deals with Early Man: and as to the few real facts and
his conclusions from them, they dance such a saraband that you never
know where you are, nor which is first or last, nor which is top and
which is tail.
First religion arises in some beast living before man who gets a
“complex” of terror from his horrible old father; then it is neolithic
man who gets it—after an immense interval with no religion at all. On
one page a thing is possible; two pages later probable; four pages on it
is certain. A man having put forward a theory in 1893, it is still
gospel in 1926, though exploded in 1895. A feathered chieftain waving
bows and arrows at you is ignorant of the bow, and the poor devils of
deer with arrows stuck into them everywhere are told that their hunters
knew nothing of arrows.
It is on science of this kind, instruction of that calibre, and culture
of such a tone, that we are asked to abandon the Faith, which made, and
on whose retention depends, the civilization of our race.