Religion and Morality.
{141}
The comparison must also consider the relation in these various
societies between religion and morality, both social and individual.
From this point of view, as we are dealing with the second millennium
only, it must be a comparison mainly between the Mesopotamian and the
Hellenic; for except for a few Hittite letters that reveal little,
there is no evidence concerning our races of the west of Asia Minor,
since monuments can scarcely be direct witnesses concerning ethics; at
least, the Asia Minor monuments are not, and we must await the further
discovery and interpretation of Hittite literature. For the
proto-Hellenic period also, it may be said, we have no explicit and
direct evidence. But we have Homer, whose poems belong to the end of
that period and the beginning of the second; and we cannot suppose
that the average morality that they represent had all grown up in the
century before them, still less that Homer had discovered it as an
original teacher. Therefore, cautiously and critically handled, his
poems throw some light on the moral facts of the centuries behind
them. There is also some evidence to be gleaned from the rich field of
Greek mythology and cult; only we must realise that we rarely can
determine the date of the rise of an old Hellenic legend or the
institution of an old Hellenic cult. The Mesopotamian evidence, {142}
then, is direct and explicit, depending solely on the right
interpretation of documents; the Hellenic evidence concerning the
earliest period is indirect and often hypothetical.
A careful study of all the sources will allow this induction, that the
deities of this period in both societies are on the side of whatever
morality is current, inspiring it, protecting it, and avenging the
breach of it; we are dealing, in fact, with a religion of personal
moral powers. Concerning the Mesopotamian, this is a trite observation
to make; the most superficial glance of a few hymns confirms it.
Shamash is the great god of justice, the protector of the weak; Enlil
“destroyeth the evil-minded”;[142.1] Ishtar judges the cause
according to right--she maintains the right of the oppressed and the
downcast; Righteousness and Judgment are the sons of Shamash.
Ga-tum-duga, “she who produces good,” is an appellative of
Bau.[142.2] And yet this is not the whole account. The destructive
and evil character of some of the deities in Mesopotamia occasionally
appears in the hymns, and is expressed apparently in certain titles.
This might be the case at times when those deities are addressed that
were powers of death and the lower world; for instance, Nergal, the
lord of destruction; Isum, a little-known deity to whom a phrase is
attached that is said to mean “the exalted murderer.”[142.3] And this
might be explained by the fact that these powers personified, as it
were, the baneful forces of nature, or, as perhaps in the case of
Martu, whom Jeremias cites as one of the evil gods, were
aliens.[142.4] {143} We find also the name of an obscure deity,
“Ira,” who was a god of pestilence, and at times identified with
Nergal;[143.1] but that a direct cult was attached to him in this
baneful character is not shown. And it is unlikely that any Babylonian
deity was worshipped definitely as an evil power: moral speculation
could always explain the evil that he appeared to work as a punishment
for sin or as righteous vengeance on the enemy; that is to say, the
evil element becomes moralised, and the worshipper is always convinced
that the god can become good to him. Thus in the same context Nergal
is called the “Lord of Destruction,” and yet he is “the god of the
little ones, he of the beneficent visage.”[143.2] The dark storm-god
Adad, before whose wrath the high gods rise up in terror, the pitiless
one, can yet be implored as “the merciful among the great
gods.”[143.3] This transformation, by which a destructive
nature-power could become a benevolent being, follows a law of
religious psychology, which expresses itself in the quasi-magical
phraseology of prayer. The worshipper wishes to get some good from his
deity or some mercy: therefore he calls him good and merciful, feeling
that such spell-words constrain the god to be so; and belief will
arise from the continual repetition of formulae. Therefore, by the
time our record begins, all the deities that the Babylonian and
Assyrian worshipped are beneficent on the whole: the Epic of Creation
supposes the existence of primeval bad powers, but these had been
conquered, and some pardoned, by Marduk. The evil personal agencies
that remained active were demons, and these {144} were not worshipped,
but exorcised or averted by the good gods.[144.1]
And this may serve as a fairly accurate description of the moral
character of Greek religion at that stage of development where Homer
presents it to us. The high deities are worshipped on the whole as
moral beings and as beneficent: that is, as the guardians of the
social morality of the period, whatever that was. The usual popular
writer does not perceive this, because he is always liable to the
error of confusing mythology with worship, and supposing that if the
mythology is licentious or immoral, the deity is worshipped in that
character. All students of mythology and religion are aware that this
is false. We might be able to show that the religious imagination and
statement of Homer at times fall below the level of contemporary cult,
at times rise above it. At any rate, he is evidently addressing a
world of religious-minded people, who impute their own moral ideals to
their highest divinities, especially to their high god Zeus. Νέμεσις,
the social feeling of indignation which is at the psychic basis of
social morality, is the common emotion excited both in gods and men by
the same acts; and though much of Greek religion was still not yet
penetrated with morality, the higher personal gods were generally
regarded as on the side of righteousness. One or two Greek myths, such
as that of Prometheus, as Hesiod narrates it, might suggest that the
deity was not necessarily conceived as the friend, but sometimes even
as the enemy, of man. But Hesiod’s narrative does not strike us as
primitive or {145} popular; and, at any rate, such a view is
inconsistent with the earliest stage of worship that we can discover
or surmise. The poets and philosophers might dislike Ares; but the
Hellenes, who worshipped him, did not worship him as an evil god, with
apotropaeic rites: nor is it proved or likely that any deity to whom
actual service was paid, was regarded as in his nature maleficent by
his worshippers. The dread powers of the lower world were also givers
of vegetation. The Erinyes had scarcely a recorded cult, and their
wrath was moralised as righteous indignation; nor was ghost-cult, when
it arose, merely a service of terror and aversion. It is a striking
confirmation of the view here expressed, that among the very long list
of cult-appellatives attached to the Greek divinities, some of which
have a moral value, there are only two doubtful examples of an evil
connotation attaching to the word.[145.1]
We may affirm generally, then, that the Mesopotamian and Hellenic
religions are more or less on the same level of thought in respect of
the moral and beneficent character of the deities. But careful study
of the Hellenic will give us the impression that the terrible and
destructive power of divinity is far less emphasised by cult than it
was in the Eastern Semitic world. Every deity might be dangerous if
neglected, and certainly would be if insulted. The idea of the
“jealous god” is non-moral, and can easily become immoral: that is, it
tends to divorce the conception of the divine character from the
purely human moral ideal. And this idea is palpable not only in the
Hellenic and Mesopotamian, but still more in the Judaic religion, and
our own religion is not yet delivered from it. But apart {146} from
this, the Hellenic imagination, so far as we can discern it, even in
its infancy, did not construct manifold forms of fear out of the
dangerous powers in the nature-world, and worship them with the higher
forms of cult. We do not come upon aboriginal thunder gods and storm
gods _per se_ (I use the term “god” advisedly): Zeus the thunderer had
been civilised and moralised before Homer’s time. Poseidon had always
his wild side as god of storms and earthquakes; and to the end he
remains rather more a non-moral nature-power than the others; but
destructive force was certainly not the centre of his personality, and
in the pre-historic days he had become the father of the Minyan and
Ionic people, and the guardian of their family life. The wind-powers
might develop into beneficent gods or ancestors; or might occasionally
be regarded from the lower standpoint of polydaimonism, and averted by
magical means. The higher Hellenic religion did not admit such beings
as “Ira,” the god of pestilence, or a special god of storms or
earthquakes, and it is far less than the Babylonian a religion of
fear. This difference will emerge more clearly in the study of ritual.
One more difference strikes us in comparing the ethical character of
the two religions. The Greek high divinity is a moral being, but not
every divinity was moralised to such an extent as were the higher
powers of Mesopotamia. A few Hellenic deities remain ethically
undeveloped and crude, Ares, for instance, and in a certain sense
Hestia. A salient example is the contrast between the fire-god
Hephaistos and the Babylonian-Sumerian Nusku or Girru.[146.1] Both
are elemental powers of fire, both are therefore concerned with the
arts of metalwork; but Hephaistos remains a handicraftsman, and {147}
has little or nothing to do with moral life; whereas the Babylonian
deity acquires an exalted moral and spiritual character. Dionysos
becomes a most potent force in the later Hellenic world; yet an
irrepressible vein of wildness and a spirit that refuses to conform to
the ethical ideal of Hellas remains in him. A god so highly placed at
Babylon would have been clothed with moral attributes in many an
ecstatic phrase of temple liturgy.
It would be interesting to go more into detail concerning the special
moral virtues consecrated by the two religions, or the various moral
attributes specially attributed to the divinities. Such a study would
demand two long treatises on Greek and Babylonian ethics. I have only
time and power to indicate here a few points. The peoples of the old
world show many general points of resemblance with each other in their
moral ideas, and as compared with ourselves many salient points of
difference. And moral statistics have rarely any value for proving the
influence of one race upon another. As the Babylonian society was more
complex in the second millennium than was the Hellenic, so must its
morality have been; but it will not be found futile from the point of
view of our main purpose to compare the two in respect of some special
virtues, as we have already compared them incidentally in regard to
the ideas about homicide.
The idea of the sin of perjury belongs to the earliest stage of
religious ethic, and is the starting-point of much moral evolution. It
is magical in its origin; for the oath-taker enters into communion
with the divinity, by touching some sacred object or eating sacred
food charged with divine power, which, being now within him, will
blast him if he forswears. This dangerous power becomes interpreted as
the anger {148} of the deity by whom the person swears falsely. Hence
the belief arose in early Mesopotamia and Greece, and generally in the
cults of personal gods, that they punish perjury as a dire offence:
such punishment will fall on the community or individual, and often on
both: therefore a social moral instinct arises against perjury. This
might develop into a moral idea among a progressive people that
truthfulness, quite apart from the ritual of the oath, was dear to God
in any case, and was therefore a religious virtue. And of this
religious virtue attaching to truthfulness, however it came to attach,
we have evidence in a Babylonian ritual of confession; before the evil
demon can be exorcised, the priest asked certain questions of the
penitent, and twice he asks, “Has he said, yea for nay, and nay for
yea?”[148.1] But in no Hellenic record have I ever been able to find
a religious parallel to this. The Hellenic religious spirit was most
sensitive in respect to perjury, and no religion ever reprobated it
more. In regard to ordinary truthfulness, Hellenic religion had
nothing to say, no message to give, and Hellenic ethics very little.
In the poetic story, Athena smiles on the audacious mendacities of
Odysseus, and Hermes loves the liar Autolykos. Not that the religion
consecrated mendacity, only it failed to consecrate truth.
It is only the great Achilles who hates with the hate of hell the man
who says one thing with his tongue and hides another thing in his
heart.[148.2] This is the voice of northern honour, but it has no
religious import.
The ideas connected with perjury have this further value for the
history of ethics, that they contributed much to the growth of
international morality. It is {149} often supposed that the earliest
morality is merely tribal or clannish, and that in respect of the
alien it is nonexistent; but this account of morality is false
wherever perjury is found to be a sin. For one great occasion for
oath-taking is a treaty or a contract with an alien power. And Homer
is our witness that it was considered an immoral act for either
Achaeans or Trojans to break their mutual oath. And this early idea of
international morality inspires the Tel-El-Amarna correspondence and
the Hittite treaty with Rameses. International morality also includes
the duty of hospitality, and the pre-Homeric world had developed this
moral sense strongly, and no doubt through the aid of religion; the
stranger who puts himself into communion with Hestia, the holy hearth,
or with Zeus Xenios, has a moral right to protection, and the
abduction of Helen was regarded as a sin on the part of Paris against
Zeus the god of the guest-right. I have not yet been able to find a
cult-concept in Babylonian religion parallel to that of Zeus Xenios,
or any reference to hospitality as a sacred duty; yet we know that
this was and is as highly regarded by some Semitic races as it ever
was by the Hellenic. We may suspect, however, that as Babylonian
society was in many respects very modern and complex, the religious
sanction of hospitality had decayed.
Looking now at the moral code as regulating the relations of members
of the same tribe or community, we cannot doubt that clan-morality was
already highly developed in the proto-Hellenic period: the rights and
duties of kinsmen are the basis of this morality, and these were
consecrated by the worship around the altar of Zeus “in the
courtyard,” which may have been a primitive religious gathering-place
for the kinsfolk of the early Aryan household. Homer is our first
witness for the {150} cult of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος,[150.1] but it is evident
that it had been long in existence before his time. The earliest moral
duty that the tie of kinship imposes is the maintenance of peace and
goodwill, and as the kindreds grow into a political community, this
becomes the basis of political morality and the corner-stone of the
religion of the city. The Homeric age, and probably their
predecessors, have attained this ethical religious idea; and though
Homer is the first to give voice to it, we will not suppose that he
discovered it: “outcast from clan, from holy law, and holy hearth is
he who longs for bitter battle among the people of his own
township.”[150.2] And to this early age we must also impute the
religious morality of the monogamic family: the son fears the curse of
the father and of the mother, even of the elder brother: “thou knowest
that the powers of judgment defend the right of the elder-born”--Iris
says warningly to Poseidon.[150.3] The Erinyes are specially charged
with the preservation of the morality of the family and clan, and with
the punishment of the two chief offences against the sacred blood of
the kin, murder and incest. Of the first, enough has been said; the
religious view of the earliest Greeks concerning the second is first
attested by Homer, who mentions “the woes of Oedipus that the Furies
of his mother bring to pass for him”;[150.4] he is thinking more of
the incestuous marriage than of the parricide. As regards ordinary
adultery, it is only from the later period of Greek literature that we
hear protests against it as a sin, though the sentiment of moral
indignation against the adulterer is no doubt pre-Homeric. One or two
Greek myths that may reflect very early thought express the severe
reprobation on the part of the father of {151} unchastity in his
unmarried daughter; myths telling of cruel sentences of death imposed
for the offence. But these suggest no religious feeling; the sentiment
may well have arisen from the fact that under the patriarchal system
the virgin-daughter was the more marriageable and commanded a higher
bride-price.
Looking at the code of family and social duties in the ethical
religion of Babylon, of which the private penitential hymns and
confessional ritual of exorcism are the chief witnesses, we find no
figures whose concept and function remind us at all of the Erinyes,
the curse-powers on the side of righteousness; but there is evidence
in the literature of a family morality more advanced and more
articulate than the primitive Greek. Among the sins mentioned in the
ritual of confession, alluded to above, those indicated by the
following questions are of interest: “Has he caused variance between
father and son, mother and daughter, father-in-law and
daughter-in-law, brother and brother, friend and friend, partner and
partner? Has he conceived hatred against his elder brother, has he
despised his father and mother, insulted his elder sister?”[151.1]
All these acts of social misconduct are supposed to give a man into
the possession of the evil demon, which must be exorcised before God
will admit him to his fellowship again. Though magical ideas are
operative in the ceremony, yet we discern here a high religious
morality. And among the other moral offences clearly considered as
sins in the same formula are such as shedding one’s neighbour’s blood,
committing adultery with one’s neighbour’s wife, stealing from one’s
neighbour. We find also a certain morality in the matter of property
and commerce given a religious sanction in this text: “Thou shalt not
{152} remove thy neighbour’s landmark” was a religious law in ancient
Babylonian ethics as in our present liturgy; it would appeal to the
Hellene who reverenced Zeus Ὅριος; and there are reasons for believing
this cult-idea to have been in vogue very early in Greece. The
Babylonian code also recognises the sin of using false measure or
false coin. And the confessional liturgy agrees in many points with
the famous hymn to Shamash, where phrases occur such as “Shamash hates
him who falsifies boundaries and weights”; “Shamash hates the
adulterer.”[152.1] It excites our envy also, by stamping as sins
certain unpatriotic acts, such as “the spreading a bad report
concerning one’s city,” or “bringing one’s city into evil repute.”
We may say, then, that we find a high degree of morality in early
Greece, a still higher at a still earlier period in Babylon, and both
are obviously indigenous and natural products. And both reveal the
phenomenon that marks an early stage of social morality: as the tribe
or the family are one flesh, one corporate unit of life, so the
members are collectively responsible, and “the sins of the fathers are
visited on the children.” This was the familiar law of old Hellas, and
we may say of the ancient Mediterranean society; the first to make the
momentous protest against it, and to proclaim the responsibility of
the individual conscience, was Theognis for the Hellenes and Ezekiel
for the Hebrews. The Babylonian, advanced in moral thought as he was,
had not escaped the bondage of the older clan-faith: in an
incantation-hymn to Marduk,[152.2] the man who is seeking deliverance
prays “may the sins of my father, of my grandfather, my mother, my
grandmother, my family, {153} my whole circle of kindred, not come
near me, may they depart from my side.”
One other characteristic of early moral thought and feeling is that
the sense of sin is not wholly ethical according to our modern
criteria, but is partly regarded as something external to the will and
purpose, something inherent in certain acts or substances of which the
performance or the contagion renders a man a sinner. Thus in the
Babylonian confessional liturgy and hymns of penitence, while there is
much that would appeal to the most delicate moral consciousness, and
is on the same level with the most spiritual passages in the Hebrew
psalms, there is also a strong admixture of what is alien and
non-moral. The confessional formula[153.1] asks a man, for instance,
“whether he has sat in the chair of a person under a ban,” that is, “a
man forbid,” a person impure and under a curse; “whether he has met
him, has slept in his bed, has drunk from his cup.” In one of the
penitential hymns that might be addressed to any god, “to the god that
I know, and to the god that I do not know,” as the formula expresses
it, we find such sorrowful confessions as “without knowing it, I have
eaten of that which is abominable in the sight of my god: without
knowing it, I have trodden on that which is filthy in the sight of my
goddess”; “my sins are many, great is my transgression.”[153.2] This
must be taken quite literally: contact with unclean things or with
unclean persons, eating of forbidden food, is put in the same category
with serious offences against social morality, and all these expose a
man equally to the power of the evil demon and to the loss of his
God’s protection. And this is a half-civilised development in
Babylonian psychology of the primeval savage {154} law of tabu: nor,
as I think, is there yet any proof that the people of the Mesopotamian
culture ever attained to the highest plane of ethical enlightenment;
the later Zarathustrian religion of the Persian domination is strongly
fettered by this ritualistic morality, in which the distinction
between that which is morally wrong and that which is physically
unclean, is never clearly apprehended.
This mental attitude is supported in the older and later Mesopotamian
system by a vivid polydaimonism; the evil demon is on the alert to
destroy the family and the individual; and where the demon is in
possession the god departs. As the demon takes advantage of every
accidental act, whether conscious or unconscious, the idea arises in
the over-anxious spirit that one cannot be sure when or how often one
has sinned, and all illness or other misfortune is attributed to some
unknown offence.[154.1] The utterance of the Hebrew psalmist, “who
can tell how oft he offendeth: cleanse Thou me from my secret faults,”
may express the intense sensitiveness of a very spiritual morality, or
it may be merely ritualistic anxiety. This latter is certainly the
explanation of the strikingly similar phrases in a Babylonian
penitential hymn--“the sins that I have done I know not; the trespass
that I have committed I know not.”[154.2] The feeling of sin is here
deep and very moving--“take away from me my wickedness as a cloak… my
God, though my sins be seven times seven, yet undo my sins”; yet the
context that illustrates this passionate outpouring of the heart,
shows that the sin might be such as the accidental stepping on filth.
Such ideas, allowed to obsess the mind, easily engender despondency
and {155} pessimism; and this tone is heard and once or twice is very
marked in some of the most striking products of Babylonian religious
poetry; for instance, in the penitential hymn just quoted from, the
poet sorrowfully exclaims: “Men are dumb, and of no understanding: all
men who live on the earth, what do they understand? Whether they do
right, or wrong, they understand nothing.” But the strangest example
of this is a lyric of lamentation that reminds us vividly of the book
of Job, found in the library of Assurbanipal, and of great antiquity
and of wide vogue, as Zimmern shows.[155.1] It is a masterpiece of
the poetry of pessimism: the theme is the sorrow and tribulation of
the righteous who has served God faithfully all his life, and feels at
the last that he has had no profit of it; and his main thought is
expressed in the lines, “If I only knew that such things were pleasing
before God; but that which seems good to a man’s self, is evil in the
sight of God: and that which according to each man’s sense is to be
despised, is good in the sight of his God. Who can understand the
counsel of the Gods in heaven? A god’s plan is full of darkness, who
hath searched it out?”
It is easy in all this to detect the intimate associations with
Biblical thought and feeling; and we may trace back to Babylon the
daimonistic theory of morals that colours the New Testament, and has
prevailed throughout the centuries of Christendom, and is only slowly
losing its hold. But at the same time all this sharply divides early
Babylonian thought from what we can discern of the early Hellenic, and
more than any other evidence confirms the belief that the great
Eastern and Western races were not in close spiritual contact at the
time when Hellenism was in the making. Certain {156} external
resemblances in the thought and feeling about these matters are to be
found in Hellas and in Mesopotamia; that is to say, the germs are
identical, for they are broadcast all over the world; but the
intensity of their cultivation, and their importance in relation to
other life-forces, are immeasurably different. In the earliest Greek
legend we discover the reflex of that external unpurposive morality
that I have tried to define above: the acts of Oedipus were not
according to our moral judgment ethically wrong, for they were wholly
unintentional: yet in the oldest legend he is πᾶς ἄναγνος, as he calls
himself in Sophocles’ play, and a sinner in the eyes of the gods; nor
could all the virtue and valour of Bellerophon save him from the wrath
of heaven aroused by the accidental slaying of his brother. Certain
acts were supposed to put upon a man a quasi-physical, quasi-spiritual
miasma, without reference to will or purpose, and render him hateful
to God and man. But the bondage of the Greek mind to this idea was
slighter and more temporary. And after all, the external sins in these
legends were parricide, incest, and fratricide, dreadful things enough
in themselves. We do not hear of any Hellene’s agony of remorse on
account of treading accidentally on filth, or eating malodorous food.
Homer, indeed, is marvellously untroubled by any ritualistic pharisaic
code; we might even take him as a witness that there was none at all
in earliest Hellas. We should be undoubtedly wrong. The early Greek
must have had, like all mankind, his “tabus” in plenty; for to suppose
that all that we find in Hesiod and in the later inscriptions were a
sudden discovery, would be childish. I may be able to consider the
evidence concerning early Greek tabus when I compare the ritual. I
will only say here that we have {157} reason to believe that at no
period was the Hellene morbidly perturbed about these, or ever
moralised them up to that point where they could exercise a spiritual
tyranny over his moral sense. He might object to touching a corpse or
to approaching an altar with blood upon him; but it does not seem to
have occurred to him, as it did to the Persian, and with almost equal
force to the Babylonian, that accidental contact with an impure thing
instantly started into existence an army of demons, who would rush
abroad to destroy the world of righteousness.[157.1]
In fact, Hellenic tabus and purification-laws, except, indeed, the law
concerning purification from bloodshed, had only this contact with
religion, that the breach of them might offend an irritable divinity,
which it would be unwise to do; they were not religious, so far as we
can discern, in the sense that they were associated with a vivid
belief in evil spirits, as they were in the Babylonian and Persian
creeds. There were germs indeed which might have developed into a
vigorous daimonistic theory in early Hellas. We hear even in Homer of
such unpleasant things as “a black Kér”; and a mythic hero of Megara
kills a monster called a ποινή, almost, we may say, a devil. Certain
days, according to Hesiod, might be unlucky, because perhaps Erinyes
or ghosts were walking about, though that popular poet is not clear
about this. But certainly not in early nor often in later Greece were
men habitually devil-ridden: nor did they see devils in food or blood
or mud. Therefore, on the whole and comparatively, early Greek
religion, when we first catch a glimpse of it, appears bright and
sane, a religion of the healthy-minded and of men in the open air. And
{158} therefore, when secular philosophy arose, Greek moral theory
made no use of evil spirits except in certain Pythagorean circles
where we may detect Oriental influence. Superstition and magic must
have been more rife in ancient Greece than the Homeric picture would
lead us to suppose: yet the higher culture of the people, in the
earliest period which we are considering, was comparatively free from
these influences and refused to develop by religious speculation or
anxious brooding the germs of daimonism always embedded in the lower
stratum of the national mind. The Universe could not, therefore, be
viewed by the Hellene as it was by the Zarathustrian, and to some
extent by the Babylonian, as the arena of a cosmic struggle between
the powers of good and the powers of evil. Nor could the Hellene
personify the power of evil majestically, in such a guise as Ahriman
or Satan; he only was aware of certain little daemon-figures of death
and disease, ghostly shadows rather than fully outlined personages; or
such vaguely conceived personal agencies as Ate and Eris, which
belonged not to religion, but to the poetic-moral thought of the
people. When we compare the various rituals, we shall discern that the
Hellenic was by no means wholly bright or shallow, but that some of
its most ancient forms were gloomy and inspired by a sense of sin or
sorrow: nevertheless, it is just in respect of the comparative
weakness of this sense that it differed most markedly from the
Babylonian.
There are other aspects of the divine character interesting to compare
in the religious theory of East and West. Despite the apparent
grimness of the Babylonian-Assyrian theology, no divine trait is more
movingly insisted on in the liturgies than the mercifulness {159} of
the deity: Nebo is “the merciful, the gracious”;[159.1] Ishtar is
“the mighty lady of the world, queen of humanity, merciful one, whose
favour is propitious, who hath received my prayer”;[159.2] Sarpanitum
is addressed as “the intercessor, the protectress of the
captive”;[159.3] Shamash as “the merciful god, who liftest up those
that are bowed down and protectest the weak”;[159.4] Sin as “the
compassionate, gracious Father”; and “Gamlat the merciful” is
mentioned as a descriptive general epithet of an unknown Assyrian
deity.[159.5]
These phrases may attest in the end a genuine and fervent faith; but
originally they were probably inspired by the word-magic of penitence,
the sinner believing that he can make the deity merciful by repeatedly
calling him so. At any rate, Babylonian religion catches thus the glow
of a high ethical ideal; and as the deities were invoked and regarded
as by nature merciful, so the private man was required at certain
times to show mercy, as the confessional formula proves. The same
idea, though a less fervent and ecstatic expression is given to it, is
found in the oldest record of Greek religion: “Even the gods are moved
to pity… them men turn aside from wrath by sacrifice, libation, and
gentle prayers, when a man hath sinned and trespassed against them.
For prayers are the daughters of great God,… and if a man do them
honour when they come anigh him, to him they bring great blessings,
and hear him when he prayeth.” This Homeric utterance {160} in the
great speech of Phoenix[160.1] is the voice of a high and civilised
religion; and the idea inspires the ancient cults of Zeus μειλίχιος
and ἱκέσιος.
The Babylonian conception of divine mercy gave rise to an interesting
phrase which is attached as a quasi-liturgical formula to many of the
leading gods and goddesses--“the awakener of the dead,” “thou who
raisest up the dead”: a phrase which has erroneously been supposed to
refer to an actual resurrection of the dead:[160.2] various contexts
attest its real significance as an expression of the divine grace
shown in restoring the sick to health, in saving men from the hand of
death. Hellenic religious vocabulary affords no parallel to this
formula nor to that title of Enlil--“Lord of the breath of life of
Sumer”;[160.3] or that of Bel, “Lord of the life of the
Land.”[160.4] In some passages of Babylonian literature we mark the
glimmering of the idea that life in its varied forms on the earth is
a divine substance sustained by the personal deity. Ishtar is
described as the protectress of all animate existence, and all life
languishes when she descends to the nether regions.[160.5] The
goddess of Erech, identified with Ishtar, speaking of her own
functions, exclaims, “In the place of giving birth in the house of the
begetting mother, guardian of the home am I.”[160.6] It is specially
Tammuz who, by the side of Ishtar, impersonates the life of the soil,
as appears in the striking refrain recurring in his hymn of lament:
“When he slumbers, the sheep and the lambs slumber also; {161} when he
slumbers, the she-goats and the kids slumber also”;[161.1] and the
same thought may have inspired a phrase that is doubtfully translated
at the end of the hymn: “In the meadows, verily, verily, the soul of
life perishes.” Still more explicit is another Tammuz hymn, in which,
while bewailing the departed god, they wail for all the life of the
earth, “the wailing is for the herbs;… they are not produced: the
wailing is for the grain, ears are not produced: the wailing is for
the habitations, for the flocks, the flocks bring forth no more. The
wailing is for the perishing wedded ones, for the perishing children;
the dark-headed people create no more.”
In all this we see the reflection of a pantheistic feeling that links
the living world and the personal divine power in a mystic sympathy.
Now the idea of divinity immanent in living nature is inconsistent
with a severely defined anthropomorphic religion; hence we scarcely
find it in the earlier religion of Hellas. Zeus is called the father
of men and gods, but in a reverential rather than in any literal
creative sense: nor is there found any trace of the idea that divine
power is immanent in the life or soul of man, till we come to the
later period of philosophic speculation and Orphism. Only here and
there behind the anthropomorphism we discern in Hellenic myth or cult
the vaguer thought of diffused and immanent divinity; this reveals
itself more than once in the myth and cult of Demeter, whose anger and
sorrow at the loss of her daughter causes a sympathetic disappearance
of the crops and the fruits of the earth; and it is embodied in the
Attic cult on the Akropolis of Demeter Χλόη,[161.2] which title
expresses the immanence in the verdure of {162} the life-giving
potency of the goddess. The ancient folklore of Greece, and a few
cult-records of the primitive village-communities, reveal figures that
recall faintly the lineaments of Tammuz, Eunostos of Tanagra, Skephros
of Tegea, who may belong, as Linos certainly did, to that group of
heroes of crop and harvest, who die and are bewailed in the fall of
the year, and whose life is sympathetically linked with the life of
the earth. But we find this type of personage in other parts of
Europe, and there is every reason for believing that the western
shores of the Mediterranean had not been touched by the Tammuz-myth
and service in the second millennium B.C.
The evidence then suggests that the pregnant idea of the godhead as
the source of life was more prominent and more articulate in
Babylonian than in Hellenic religion.