more powerful than the gods of the heathen, as a God above all gods,
betrays itself again and again in the history of the Jews. The idea of
many gods is there, and wherever that idea exists, wherever the plural
of god is used in earnest, there is polytheism. It is not so much the
names of Zeus, Hermes, &c., which constitute the polytheism of the
Greeks; it is the plural [Greek: theoi], gods, which contains the
fatal spell. We do not know what M. Renan means when he says that
Jehovah with the Jews 'n'est pas le plus grand entre plusieurs dieux;
c'est le Dieu unique.' It was so with Abraham, it was so after Jacob
had been changed into Israel, it was so with Moses, Elijah, and
Jeremiah. But what is the meaning of the very first commandment, 'Thou
shalt have no other gods before me?' Could this command have been
addressed to a nation to whom the plural of God was a nonentity? It
might be answered that the plural of God was to the Jews as revolting
as it is to us, that it was revolting to their faith, if not to their
reason. But how was it that their language tolerated the plural of a
word which excludes plurality as much as the word for the centre of a
sphere? No man who had clearly perceived the unity of God, could say
with the Psalmist (lxxxvi. 8), 'Among the gods there is none like unto
Thee, O Lord, neither are there any works like unto Thy works.' Though
the same poet says, 'Thou art God alone,' he could not have compared
God with other gods, if his idea of God had really reached that
all-embracing character which it had with Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and
Jeremiah. Nor would God have been praised as the 'great king above all
gods' by a poet in whose eyes the gods of the heathen had been
recognised as what they were--mighty shadows, thrown by the mighty
works of God, and intercepting for a time the pure light of the
Godhead.
We thus arrive at a different conviction from that which M. Renan has
made the basis of the history of the Semitic race. We can see nothing
that would justify the admission of a monotheistic instinct, granted
to the Semitic, and withheld from the Aryan race. They both share in
the primitive intuition of God, they are both exposed to dangers in
framing names for God, and they both fall into polytheism. What is
peculiar to the Aryan race is their mythological phraseology,
superadded to their polytheism; what is peculiar to the Semitic race
is their belief in a national god--in a god chosen by his people as
his people had been chosen by him.
No doubt, M. Renan might say that we ignored his problem, and that we
have not removed the difficulties which drove him to the admission of
a monotheistic instinct. How is the fact to be explained, he might
ask, that the three great religions of the world in which the unity of
the Deity forms the key-note, are of Semitic origin, and that the
Aryan nations, wherever they have been brought to a worship of the One
God, invoke Him with names borrowed from the Semitic languages?
But let us look more closely at the facts before we venture on
theories. Mohammedanism, no doubt, is a Semitic religion, and its very
core is monotheism. But did Mohammed invent monotheism? Did he invent
even a new name of God? (Renan, p. 23.) Not at all. His object was to
destroy the idolatry of the Semitic tribes of Arabia, to dethrone the
angels, the Jin, the sons and daughters who had been assigned to
Allah, and to restore the faith of Abraham in one God. (Renan, p. 37.)
And how is it with Christianity? Did Christ come to preach a faith in
a new God? Did He or His disciples invent a new name of God? No,
Christ came not to destroy, but to fulfil; and the God whom He
preached was the God of Abraham.
And who is the God of Jeremiah, of Elijah, and of Moses? We answer
again, the God of Abraham.
Thus the faith in the One living God, which seemed to require the
admission of a monotheistic instinct, grafted in every member of the
Semitic family, is traced back to one man, to him 'in whom all
families of the earth shall be blessed' (Genesis xii. 3, Acts iii. 25,
Galatians iii. 8). If from our earliest childhood we have looked upon
Abraham, the friend of God, with love and veneration; if our first
impressions of a truly god-fearing life were taken from him, who left
the land of his fathers to live a stranger in the land whither God
had called him, who always listened to the voice of God, whether it
conveyed to him the promise of a son in his old age, or the command to
sacrifice that son, his only son Isaac, his venerable figure will
assume still more majestic proportions when we see in him the
life-spring of that faith which was to unite all the nations of the
earth, and the author of that blessing which was to come on the
Gentiles through Jesus Christ.
And if we are asked how this one Abraham possessed not only the
primitive intuition of God as He had revealed Himself to all mankind,
but passed through the denial of all other gods to the knowledge of
the one God, we are content to answer that it was by a special Divine
Revelation. We do not indulge in theological phraseology, but we mean
every word to its fullest extent. The Father of Truth chooses His own
prophets, and He speaks to them in a voice stronger than the voice of
thunder. It is the same inner voice through which God speaks to all of
us. That voice may dwindle away, and become hardly audible; it may
lose its Divine accent, and sink into the language of worldly
prudence; but it may also, from time to time, assume its real nature,
with the chosen of God, and sound into their ears as a voice from
Heaven. A 'divine instinct' may sound more scientific, and less
theological; but in truth it would neither be an appropriate name for
what is a gift or grace accorded to but few, nor would it be a more
scientific, i. e. a more intelligible word than 'special revelation.'
The important point, however, is not whether the faith of Abraham
should be called a divine instinct or a revelation; what we wish here
to insist on is that that instinct, or that revelation, was special,
granted to one man, and handed down from him to Jews, Christians, and
Mohammedans, to all who believe in the God of Abraham. Nor was it
granted to Abraham entirely as a free gift. Abraham was tried and
tempted before he was trusted by God. He had to break with the faith
of his fathers; he had to deny the gods who were worshipped by his
friends and neighbours. Like all the friends of God, he had to hear
himself called an infidel and atheist, and in our own days he would
have been looked upon as a madman for attempting to slay his son. It
was through special faith that Abraham received his special
revelation, not through instinct, not through abstract meditation, not
through ecstatic visions. We want to know more of that man than we do;
but, even with the little we know of him, he stands before us as a
figure second only to one in the whole history of the world. We see
his zeal for God, but we never see him contentious. Though Melchisedek
worshipped God under a different name, invoking Him as Eliun, the Most
High, Abraham at once acknowledged in Melchisedek a worshipper and
priest of the true God, or Elohim, and paid him tithes. In the very
name of Elohim we seem to trace the conciliatory spirit of Abraham.
Elohim is a plural, though it is followed by the verb in the singular.
It is generally said that the genius of the Semitic languages
countenances the use of plurals for abstract conceptions, and that
when Jehovah is called Elohim, the plural should be translated by 'the
Deity.' We do not deny the fact, but we wish for an explanation, and
an explanation is suggested by the various phases through which, as
we saw, the conception of God passed in the ancient history of the
Semitic mind. Eloah was at first the name for God, and as it is found
in all the dialects of the Semitic family except the Phenician (Renan,
p. 61), it may probably be considered as the most ancient name of the
Deity, sanctioned at a time when the original Semitic speech had not
yet branched off into national dialects. When this name was first used
in the plural, it could only have signified, like every plural, many
Eloahs, and such a plural could only have been formed after the
various names of God had become the names of independent deities, i.
e. during a polytheistic stage. The transition from this into the
monotheistic stage could be effected in two ways--either by denying
altogether the existence of the Elohim, and changing them into devils,
as the Zoroastrians did with the Devas of their Brahmanic ancestors;
or by taking a higher view, and looking upon the Elohim as so many
names, invented with the honest purpose of expressing the various
aspects of the Deity, though in time diverted from their original
purpose. This is the view taken by St. Paul of the religion of the
Greeks when he came to declare unto them 'Him whom they ignorantly
worshipped,' and the same view was taken by Abraham. Whatever the
names of the Elohim, worshipped by the numerous clans of his race,
Abraham saw that all the Elohim were meant for God, and thus Elohim,
comprehending by one name everything that ever had been or could be
called divine, became the name with which the monotheistic age was
rightly inaugurated,--a plural, conceived and construed as a singular.
Jehovah was all the Elohim, and therefore there could be no other God.
From this point of view the Semitic name of the Deity, Elohim, which
seemed at first not only ungrammatical but irrational, becomes
perfectly clear and intelligible, and it proves better than anything
else that the true monotheism could not have risen except on the ruins
of a polytheistic faith. It is easy to scoff at the gods of the
heathen, but a cold-hearted philosophical negation of the gods of the
ancient world is more likely to lead to Deism or Atheism than to a
belief in the One living God, the Father of all mankind, 'who hath
made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of
the earth; and hath determined the times before appointed, and the
bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply
they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from
every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as
certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also His
offspring.'
Taking this view of the historical growth of the idea of God, many of
the difficulties which M. Renan has to overcome by most elaborate and
sometimes hair-splitting arguments, disappear at once. M. Renan, for
instance, dwells much on Semitic proper names in which the names of
the Deity occur, and he thinks that, like the Greek names Theodorus or
Theodotus, instead of Zenodotus, they prove the existence of a faith
in one God. We should say they may or may not. As Devadatta, in
Sanskrit, may mean either 'given by God,' or 'given by the gods,' so
every proper name which M. Renan quotes, whether of Jews, or Edomites,
Ishmaelites, Ammonites, Moabites, and Themanites, whether from the
Bible, or from Arab historians, from Greek authors, Greek
inscriptions, the Egyptian papyri, the Himyaritic and Sinaitic
inscriptions and ancient coins, are all open to two interpretations.
'The servant of Baal' may mean the servant of the Lord, but it may
also mean the servant of Baal, as one of many lords, or even the
servant of the Baalim or the Lords. The same applies to all other
names. 'The gift of El' may mean 'the gift of the only strong God;'
but it may likewise mean 'the gift of the El,' as one of many gods, or
even 'the gift of the Els,' in the sense of the strong gods. Nor do we
see why M. Renan should take such pains to prove that the name of
Orotal or Orotulat, mentioned by Herodotos (III. 8), may be
interpreted as the name of a supreme deity; and that Alilat, mentioned
by the same traveller, should be taken, not as the name of a goddess,
but as a feminine noun expressive of the abstract sense of the deity.
Herodotos says distinctly that Orotal was a deity like Bacchus; and
Alilat, as he translates her name by [Greek: Ouranie], must have
appeared to him as a goddess, and not as the Supreme Deity. One verse
of the Koran is sufficient to show that the Semitic inhabitants of
Arabia worshipped not only gods, but goddesses also. 'What think ye of
Allat, al Uzza, and Manah, that other third goddess?'
If our view of the development of the idea of God be correct, we can
perfectly understand how, in spite of this polytheistic phraseology,
the primitive intuition of God should make itself felt from time to
time, long before Mohammed restored the belief of Abraham in one God.
The old Arabic prayer mentioned by Abulfarag may be perfectly genuine:
'I dedicate myself to thy service, O God! Thou hast no companion,
except thy companion, of whom thou art absolute master, and of
whatever is his.' The verse pointed out to M. Renan by M. Caussin de
Perceval from the Moallaka of Zoheyr, was certainly anterior to
Mohammed: 'Try not to hide your secret feelings from the sight of
Allah; Allah knows all that is hidden.' But these quotations serve no
more to establish the universality of the monotheistic instinct in the
Semitic race than similar quotations from the Veda would prove the
existence of a conscious monotheism among the ancestors of the Aryan
race. There too we read, 'Agni knows what is secret among mortals'
(Rig-veda VIII. 39, 6): and again, 'He, the upholder of order,
Varu_n_a, sits down among his people; he, the wise, sits there to
govern. From thence perceiving all wondrous things, he sees what has
been and what will be done.'[104] But in these very hymns, better than
anywhere else, we learn that the idea of supremacy and omnipotence
ascribed to one god did by no means exclude the admission of other
gods, or names of God. All the other gods disappear from the vision of
the poet while he addresses his own God, and he only who is to fulfil
his desires stands in full light before the eyes of the worshipper as
the supreme and only God.
[Footnote 104: 'History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,' by M. M., p.
536.]
The Science of Religion is only just beginning, and we must take care
how we impede its progress by preconceived notions or too hasty
generalizations. During the last fifty years the authentic documents
of the most important religions of the world have been recovered in a
most unexpected and almost miraculous manner. We have now before us
the canonical books of Buddhism; the Zend-Avesta of Zoroaster is no
longer a sealed book; and the hymns of the Rig-veda have revealed a
state of religion anterior to the first beginnings of that mythology
which in Homer and Hesiod stands before us as a mouldering ruin. The
soil of Mesopotamia has given back the very images once worshipped by
the most powerful of the Semitic tribes, and the cuneiform
inscriptions of Babylon and Nineveh have disclosed the very prayers
addressed to Baal or Nisroch. With the discovery of these documents a
new era begins in the study of religion. We begin to see more clearly
every day what St. Paul meant in his sermon at Athens. But as the
excavator at Babylon or Nineveh, before he ventures to reconstruct the
palaces of these ancient kingdoms, sinks his shafts into the ground
slowly and circumspectly lest he should injure the walls of the
ancient palaces which he is disinterring; as he watches every
corner-stone lest he mistake their dark passages and galleries, and as
he removes with awe and trembling the dust and clay from the brittle
monuments lest he destroy their outlines, and obliterate their
inscriptions, so it behoves the student of the history of religion to
set to work carefully, lest he should miss the track, and lose himself
in an inextricable maze. The relics which he handles are more precious
than the ruins of Babylon; the problems he has to solve are more
important than the questions of ancient chronology; and the
substructions which he hopes one day to lay bare are the world-wide
foundations of the eternal kingdom of God.
We look forward with the highest expectations to the completion of M.
Renan's work, and though English readers will differ from many of the
author's views, and feel offended now and then at his blunt and
unguarded language, we doubt not that they will find his volumes both
instructive and suggestive. They are written in that clear and
brilliant style which has secured to M. Renan the rank of one of the
best writers of French, and which throws its charm even over the dry
and abstruse inquiries into the grammatical forms and radical elements
of the Semitic languages.
_April, 1860._
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