The Religious Temperament of the
Eastern and Western Peoples.
{190}
A more interesting and fruitful ground of comparison is that which
looks at the inward sentiment or psychic emotion of the different
religions, at the personal emotional relation of the individual
towards the godhead. As I observed before, a clear judgment on this
question is only possible when the religious memorials of a people are
numerous, varied, and personal, so that some of them at least may be
regarded as the expression of the individual spirit. Even if the
priest or the ritual dictates the expression, the pious and frequent
votary may come to feel genuinely what is dictated to him. Hence we
can gather direct testimony concerning the ancient Babylonian as we
can of the ancient Hebrew religious temper and emotion; for though
most of the Mesopotamian documents are concerned with the royal
ceremonial, which does not usually reveal genuine personal feeling,
yet in this case the royal inscriptions, whether religious narrative
or liturgies or prayers, are unusually convincing as revelations of
self. And besides these, we have many private hymns of penance and
formulae of exorcism.
On the other hand, the ancient Western world and even historic Greece
is singularly barren of this kind of religious testimony. We know much
about the {191} State religion, but we have very few ritual formulae
or public or private prayers. Our evidence is mainly the religious
utterances of the higher poetry and literature and a few lyric hymns
composed not for the solitary worshipper, but for common and tribal
ritual-service. But we have also the mythology and the art and the
general manifestations of the Hellenic spirit in other directions that
enable us to conclude something concerning the religious psychology of
the average man in the historic periods, and if we find this markedly
different from that of the oriental, we shall find it hard to believe
that the Babylonian spirit could have worked with any strong influence
on the proto-Hellene.
A sympathetic study of the Babylonian-Assyrian documents impresses us
with certain salient traits of the Mesopotamian religious spirit, some
of which are common to other members of the great Semitic race. In a
certain sense the Babylonian might be described as “ein
Gott-betrunkener Mensch”: as one possessed with the deepest
consciousness of the ineffable greatness of God, of his own utter
dependence, and at the same time of the close personal association
between himself and the divinity. The ecstatic adoration we have
marked in the liturgies is the result of a purely mental
contemplation, will-power, and conviction, not of mystic
initiation--for Babylonia had no mysteries--nor of orgiastic rites
that could afford a physico-psychic stimulus. The individual seems to
have regarded himself at times as the son, more often as the
bond-slave, of his own tutelary divinity, who is angry when he sins
and becomes favourable and a mediator in his behalf with other gods
when he repents. In private letters of the time of Hammurabi we find
the greeting, “May thy protecting god keep thy head well.” A {192}
common formula occurs in the incantations: “I, whose god is so-and-so,
whose goddess is so-and-so.”[192.1] In the penance-liturgy the priest
speaks thus of the suppliant sinner, “Thy slave who bears the weight
of thy wrath is covered with dust,… commend him to the god who created
him.”[192.2] With this we may compare certain phrases in a well-known
penitential psalm, “Oh mighty Lady of the world, Queen of mankind.…
His god and goddess in sorrow with him, cry out unto thee.… As a dove
that moans I abound in sighings.”[192.3] Abject remorse, tears and
sighing, casting-down of the countenance, are part of the ritual that
turns away the anger of the deity: hence fear of God and humility are
recognised religious virtues. Merodach-Baladin of Babylon, in Sargon’s
inscription, is described as a fool “who did not fear the name of the
Lord of Lords,”[192.4] and the idea is shaped in a general ethical
maxim in another inscription, “He who does not fear his god is cut
down like a reed.”[192.5] “I love the fear of God,” says Nebukadnezar
in the record of his life.[192.6]
Such emotion and mental attitude is consonant with the Hebraic and
with much of the modern religious temper; but entirely out of harmony
with all that we know of the Hellenic. The religious habit of the
Hellene strikes us by comparison as sober, well-tempered, often
genial, never ecstatically abject, but even--we may
say--self-respecting. Tears for sin, lamentations {193} and sighs, the
countenance bowed to the ground, the body cleaving to the pavement,
these are not part of his ritual; the wrath of God was felt as a
communal more often than as an individual misfortune, and in any case
was averted, not by emotional outpourings of the individual heart, but
by ritual acts, solemn choruses, soothing sacrifice and songs, or by
special piacular lustrations that wiped off the taint of sin. Tears
are never mentioned,[193.1] except indirectly in the fictitious
lamentations for some buried hero, annually and ceremoniously
lamented, such as Achilles. Nor can we find in earlier Hellenic ethic
the clear recognition of fear and humility among the religious
virtues,[193.2] while both are paraded in the inscriptions of the
later Babylonian kings, even in those that reveal a monstrous excess
of pride.[193.3] The Hellenic god might punish the haughty and
high-minded, he did not love the grovelling, but rather the man of
moderate life, tone, and act. Such is God for the civic religion of
the free man; while the Babylonian liturgy reflects the despotic
society. The Hellene, for instance, does not try to win for himself
the favour of the divinity by calling himself his slave. And the
common phrase found on the Greek Christian tombs, ὁ δοῦλος τοῦ Θεοῦ,
has passed into Christianity from Semitic sources.[193.4] This single
fact illustrates, perhaps better than any other, {194} the different
temper of the old Oriental and old European religions; and there is a
curious example of it in the bilingual Graeco-Phoenician inscription
found in Malta,[194.1] commemorating a dedication to Melkarth or to
Herakles Ἀρχηγέτης: the Phoenicians recommend themselves to the god as
“thy slaves,” the Greeks use neither this nor any other title of
subservient flattery. In this connection it is well to note the
significance of marking the body of the worshipper by branding,
cutting, or tattooing with some sign that consecrated him as slave or
familiar follower to the divinity. The practice, which may have been
of great antiquity, though the evidence is not earlier than the sixth
century B.C., was in vogue in Syria, Phrygia, and in early Israel, and
was adopted by some Christian enthusiasts, but no proof of it has yet
been adduced from Mesopotamia. It was essentially un-Hellenic, but was
apparently followed by some of the Dionysiac thiasoi as a Thracian
tradition.[194.2]
In fact, it is only in the latest periods that we find in Hellas an
individual personal religion approaching the Babylonian in intensity.
The older cult was communal and tribal rather than personal; even the
household gods, such as Zeus Κτήσιος and Ἑρκεῖος, the gods of the
closet and storehouse, the hearth-goddess, were shared by the
householder in common with the nearest circle of kindred. These cults
were partly utilitarian, and the moral emotion that they quickened was
the emotion of kinship: they do not appear to have inspired a high
personal and emotional faith and trust. Nor usually had the average
Hellene of the {195} earlier period the conception of a personal
tutelary divinity who brought him to life, and watched over his
course, preserving, rebuking, and interceding for him. The Babylonian
fancy of the great king sitting in infancy on the lap of the goddess
and drinking milk from her breasts would not commend itself to the
religious sense in Greece.
In Mesopotamia and in the other Semitic communities the fashion of
naming a child after the high god or goddess was very common--commoner
I am inclined to think than in Hellas, though in the latter country
such names as Demetrios, Apollodoros, Zenon, Diogenes, point to the
same religious impulse; but they appear to have arisen only in the
later period. The Hellenic language did not admit, and Hellenic
thought would not have approved of, those mystic divine names, which
express as in a sacred text some quality or action of the divinity,
such as we find in the Bible (“the Lord will provide”), and in
pre-Islamitic inscriptions of Arabia, Ili-kariba, “My God hath
blessed”; Ili-azza, “My God is mighty”; Ili-padaja, “My God hath
redeemed.”[195.1] Such names served as spells for the protection of
the child, and are speaking illustrations of the close personal
dependence of the individual upon the god.
This is also illustrated by another fashion, possibly ancient, of
Semitic religious nomenclature: not only was the individual frequently
named after the deity, but the deity might sometimes receive as a
cult-title the name of the individual. Of this practice among the
polytheistic Semites the only examples of which I am aware come from a
late period and from the region of Palmyra: Greek inscriptions of the
late Imperial era give such curious forms as Θεὸς Ἀὐμοῦ, Θεὸς {196}
Οὐασεάθου, Θεὸς Ἀμέρου:[196.1] and these descriptive names in the
genitive must designate the principal worshipper or founder of the
cult; they are mostly un-Greek, as the religious custom certainly is,
which is illustrated by such ancient Biblical expressions as “the God
of Abraham,” “the God of Jacob.” We may find an example of the same
point of view in the Phrygian title of Μὴν Φαρνάκου in Pontus, if we
take the most probable explanation, namely, that it is derived from
the Persian Pharnakes, the founder of the cult;[196.2] and again in a
Carian dedication to Zeus Panamaros Ἀργύρου, as Ἄργυρος is found in
the same neighbourhood as the name of a living man.[196.3]
The only parallel that Hellenic religion offers is the doubtful one,
Athena Αἰαντίς, whose temple is recorded at Megara:[196.4] it may be
that the goddess took her title from the hero because his grave was
once associated with the temple. In any case, it is not so striking
that the mythic hero should stand in this intimate relation with the
deity as that the living individual should.
The ecstatic and self-prostrating adoration of divinity which is
characteristic of the Babylonian temper might manifest itself at times
in that excess of sentiment that we call sentimentality: we catch this
tone now and again in the childlike entreaties with which the
supplicator appeals to the deity as his father or mother; in the
poetic pathos of the hymns to Tammuz, which sometimes remind us of the
sentimentality {197} of some of our modern hymns: he is called “Lord
of the tender voice and shining eyes”; “he of the dove-like
voice.”[197.1] Such language may be called “hypokoristic,” to use a
Greek phrase; it belongs to the feminine sentiment in religion, and we
are familiar with it in our own service. No echo of it is heard in the
older Greek religious literature nor in any record of Greek liturgy.
We can, indeed, scarcely pronounce on the question as to the tone to
which primitive Greek wailing-services were attuned. We have only a
few hints of some simple ancient ritual of sorrow: the pre-Homeric
Greek may have bewailed Linos and Hyakinthos, as we hear that the
Elean women in a later period bewailed Achilles; but if, indeed, the
fragment of a Linos-threnody that the Scholiast on Homer has preserved
for us is really primitive,[197.2] it has some pathos, but much
brightness and nothing of the Babylonian sentimentality. The spirit of
the Greek religious lyric strikes us as always virile, and as likely
to be unsympathetic with the violent and romantic expression of sorrow
or with endearing ecstasy of appeal.
The other trait that should be considered here in the religious spirit
of the Mesopotamian Semites is fanaticism, an emotional quality which
often affords a useful basis of comparison between various religions.
This religious phenomenon is best known by its deadly results; but in
itself it is most difficult to define, as are other special moral
terms that imply blame and are highly controversial. It is only found
among those who feel their religion so deeply as to be relatively
indifferent to other functions of life. We impute fanaticism {198}
when the tension of religious feeling destroys the moral equilibrium
or stunts development of other parts of our nature, or prompts to acts
which, but for this morbid influence, would excite moral indignation.
It may display itself in the artistic and intellectual sphere, as by
iconoclasm or the suppression of arts and sciences; or in the
discipline of individual life, as by over-ascetic self-mortification.
Its coarsest and most usual manifestation is in war and the
destruction of peoples of alien creed. A war or a slaughter is called
fanatical, if its leading motive is the extermination of a rival
religion, not for the sake of morality or civilisation, but as an act
in itself acceptable to one’s own jealous god. The ascetic type of
fanaticism is specially a product of the Far East: the murderous type
is peculiar to the Semitic spirit, when unchastened by a high ethical
sympathy or a sensitive humanism; for the chief record of it is in the
pages of the history of Israel, Islam, and Christianity, so far as
this last religion has been in bondage to certain Semitic influence.
It is a question of interest whether we find fanaticism of this type
in the Mesopotamian area and in the ancient polytheistic communities
of the Western Semites. We might expect to find it because of the
intensity of the religious spirit that seems to have been a common
inheritance of all these stocks. The more fervent the worship, the
more is the likelihood that the dangerous idea of a “jealous” god will
emerge, especially when races are living under the illusion of the
“fallacy of names.” By a fatal logic of devotion, the jealous god may
be thought to favour or ordain the destruction of those who worship
the deity under other names, which meant, for the old world, other
gods. Only this must be carefully distinguished from the other more
innocent {199} idea, proper to all tribal religions, that the deity of
the tribe, like a good citizen, will desire victory for his people’s
arms.
As regards Mesopotamia, in his _History of Ancient Religions_ Tiele
finds in Assyrian history the same traces of murderous fanaticism as
in Israelitish.[199.1] So far as I have been able as yet to collect
the evidence, this statement appears to contain some exaggeration. For
I have not found any record of a war that an Assyrian or Babylonian
ruler undertakes at the command of a “jealous god” against a people
whose only offence is an alien worship. The motives for a war appear
to be of the ordinary human and secular kind; Palestine, for instance,
is attacked, not because Marduk or Asshur personally hates Jahwé, but
because the country holds the key of the route to Egypt. Such Biblical
narratives as the destruction of Jericho, Ai, and the Amalekites find
no real parallel in Mesopotamian chronicles. Yet in these also the
temper of homicidal religion is strong enough to be dangerous. Neither
in the Babylonian nor in the Assyrian divinities is there any spirit
of mercy to the conquered. On that early relief of Annabanini of the
third millennium B.C., the goddess leads to the king the captives by a
hook in their noses to work his will upon them.[199.2] And in the
later records of the great Assyrian Empire, the deities appear
prominently as motive forces, and the most cruel treatment of captives
is regarded as acceptable to them. The worst example that Tiele quotes
is the great inscription of Assurbanipal, who, after speaking of
himself as “the Compassionate, the King who cherishes no
grudge,”[199.3] naïvely proceeds to narrate how he tore out the
tongues {200} of the rebels of Babylon, hewed their flesh into small
pieces, and flung it to the dogs, swine, and vultures; and “after I
had performed these acts, I softened the hearts of the Great Gods, my
Lords.” But the lines that follow suggest that what “softened their
hearts” was not so much the tortures and massacres, which they might
approve of without directly commanding, but the religious measures
that Assurbanipal immediately undertook for the purification of
Babylon, whose temples had been polluted with corpses. Again,
Tiglath-Pileser III. speaks of himself as the Mighty One “who in the
service of Asshur broke in pieces like a potter’s vessel all those who
were not submissive to the will of his god”;[200.1] and a little
later, Sargon recounts how “Merodach-Baladin, King of the Chaldaeans,…
who did not fear the name of the Lord of Lords… broke the statues of
the great gods and refused his present to me.”[200.2] Yet it would be
a misunderstanding to speak of these, as Tiele does, as if they were
wars of religion, like the Crusades or the war against the Albigenses.
Asshur sends the king to the war invariably, but rather for the sake
of the king’s profit and glory than for the propagation of Asshur’s
religion; for his enemies are very frequently of the same religion as
himself. The above phrases must be understood probably in a political
sense rather than a religious; the god and the king are so intimately
associated that whoever insults or injures one, insults or injures the
other. We may suspect that Merodach-Baladin’s breach of the divine
statutes consisted in his omitting to send his usual tribute to
Sargon. When two men had spoken scornfully of the gods of
Assurbanipal, both the king and the gods would wish to avenge the
insult:[200.3] it was natural, therefore, for Assurbanipal {201} to
torture and flay them. In warring against an alien people, the king is
warring against alien gods; therefore if he sacks the alien city he
may capture and take away, or--more rarely--destroy, the city’s gods.
Thus Asarhaddon had taken away the idols of Hazailu, King of Arabia,
and of Laili, King of Iadi; but when these kings had made submission
and won his favour he returned to them the holy images, having first
inscribed them with his own ideogram and a mark of the might of
Asshur:[201.1] thus the gods, having the brandmark of the great king
and the imperial deity, become tributary divinities. Or if he wished
to wipe a people out, the Assyrian conqueror might break their idols
to dust. Thus Assurbanipal broke in pieces the gods of the
Elamites--the most deadly foes of Babylon--and thereby “eased the
heart of the Lord of Lords.”[201.2] But many of the Elamite deities
he led away; and of one of them he speaks in terms of reverence,
Sašinak, the god of destiny, “who dwells in hidden places, whose
working no one sees.”[201.3] It is more difficult to understand why
Sanherib should boast to have destroyed the deities of Babylon after
his capture of the city; for the leading Babylonian divinities
certainly belonged to the Assyrian Pantheon.
The evidence here quoted justifies us in attributing fanaticism to the
religious temper of Babylonia and Assyria; not because the wars were
evangelising, undertaken in the service of religion, but because the
savage cruelty that accompanied them is deemed, as it is in the early
Hebraic view, acceptable to the national gods. The idea of divine
mercy is potent in the liturgies; but neither morality nor religion
would appear to have inculcated any mercy towards the alien foe; and
this lack {202} of moral sympathy may be termed a passive fanaticism.
The same fanatic temper might be traced in the savagery of the
punishments for offences against the State-religion, and was reflected
also at times in the legal code.[202.1]
From other polytheistic Semitic communities we have no record, so far
as I am aware, that bears on the phenomenon that we are considering,
except the famous Moabite Stone, of which the style is in this respect
strikingly Biblical. Mesha regards himself as sent by his god Chĕmosh
to take Nebo from Israel, and he explains why he slaughtered all
within the walls, man, woman, and child, “for I had devoted it to
Chĕmosh.” Fanaticism does not so naturally belong to polytheism as to
monotheism; yet it seems that at times the polytheistic Semites could
be as prone to this vice of the religious temper as the monotheistic
Israelites.
Speaking generally, and in comparison with the ancient Semitic and the
mediaeval and even later spirit of Europe, we must pronounce the
Hellenic temperament of the earlier and classical period as wholly
innocent of fanaticism. The history of Hellas is not stained by any
“war of religion”; and no religious hierarchy in Hellas ever possessed
the power or displayed the will to suppress art or persecute science
and thought. It might occasionally happen that individuals were in
danger of punishment if they insulted or openly flouted the civic
worship or introduced new deities; but that the State should protect
itself thus is not fanaticism. The least tolerant of cities was the
enlightened Athens. But her record in this matter is a spotless page
compared {203} with the history of any later European State. Hellas
owed this happy immunity to her cooler religious temper, to the
equilibrium of the other life-forces within her, and to her
comparative freedom from dark and cruel superstitious fears.
It is specially in regard to such salient features of the religious
temperament as we have been considering that the early Hellene
asserted his spiritual independence of the East.