STORIES OF CREATION
In stories of creation we have the imagination of primitive man at
work, trying to answer questions which it was no more prepared to
answer than a child of seven is in a position to understand higher
mathematics. The savage has an answer for every question because he
has no idea of the difficulty of the problems involved. A name or a
story will completely satisfy him because he is uncritical. Now the
stories of creation, or cosmogonies, as they are technically called,
are peculiarly interesting because they give us an insight into the
concrete terms which the imagination was forced to use in its attempt
to picture the past and the origin of things. Moreover, we can trace
the changes these naive stories underwent as man's experience broadened
and he was able to think more abstractly. We can become acquainted
with the materials with which the poet-priest of the pre-scientific
past worked to build himself a marvelous and soul-satisfying tale; and
we are able, as history unrolls, to watch myth gradually pass into
theology.
The desire to explain how nature came to be and how man arose was
well-nigh universal. Everywhere we find accounts of a distant past
when the gods walked on earth. Egyptians, Hindoos, Greeks, Japanese,
Polynesians, Hebrews and American Indians had tales of the origin of
things to tell. This desire to account for {31} origins is not hard to
understand. The same psychological tendency is at work to-day and
gives zest to the theory of evolution. Why did the _Descent of Man_
awaken such a storm throughout the Western World if not because it
shook the story of man's first coming, which had been handed down from
generation to generation since the mists of antiquity? Man wants to
know about himself, how he came here, and whither he is going. The
vogue of the _Rubaiyat_ of Omar Khayyam is in large measure due to the
haunting sense of man's ignorance of his place in the world. Who set
the stage and placed the puppets on it? Primitive man always answered
his questions in terms of Beings like himself, although more powerful
and longer lived. _All agency was for him personal agency_. And there
are, even now, a surprisingly large number of people who can think in
no other terms. The universe is for them the playground of spirits who
work their will upon it. Matter and energy and the slow growth of
years are ideas which strike them cold. Their view of the universe is
dramatic and even melodramatic; it is personal, mythical.
Let us glance at some of these attempts to account for the world. We
shall not find them very coherent or deep, but we shall always find
them instructive for the light they throw upon man, himself, and the
limits set to his theories about origins by the concrete agency to
which he perforce appealed. We shall then realize how natural were the
questions which man asked and which he sought to answer, and how
impossible it was for him to offer any other solutions than those
imaginative ones which grew up in folk-lore and which have been
developed and re-cast in the various religions.
No early race had the idea of an absolute beginning. {32} The attempt
made was simply to carry things back to different conditions, to a less
developed state of things, and then to trace the larger steps by means
of which the later world, as they saw it, came about. Those races
which had little power for abstract thinking and had achieved few
impersonal ideas kept very near to concrete phenomena and explained
their own origin in terms of a mythical ancestor, or animal magician,
while they left the earth and the sky very much as it was. The
Iroquois Indians, for instance, believed that their original female
ancestress fell from heaven. There was no land to receive her, but it
suddenly bubbled up under her feet and waxed bigger, so that ere long a
whole country was visible. Other branches of the tribe held that
otters and beavers hastened to dig up enough earth from beneath the
water to provide her with an island on which to dwell. The Athapascans
of Northwestern Canada asserted that a raven, whose eyes were fire,
whose glances were lightning, and the clapping of whose wings was
thunder, descended to the ocean. Instantly, the earth arose and
remained floating on the surface of the waters. It was from this Being
that the tribe traced its descent. We must remember how near akin are
animals and men at this stage of human development. Once throw oneself
into the atmosphere of myth and it is not difficult to comprehend how
such stories grew up.
But we are more interested in tracing the development of stories of
creation from primitive types to subtler and more abstract forms; and a
collection of savage folk-lore on the subject would, therefore, be of
little value. Let us pass, then, to the accounts given by races which
have played a part in history.
{33}
The Egyptian account is as follows: In the beginning was the primitive
ocean, a wild waste of waters. From this tossing chaos sprang land and
sky, and it was from their embrace that other things arose. The
general idea present in this account was probably derived from the Nile
floods or from glimpses of the ocean. The lifting of the watery mists
which are seen rising each morning from the Nile, the parting of them
from the earth and the raising of them to the sky was a work variously
attributed to Ra (the sun) or Shu (the atmosphere). Gradually the
Egyptians developed ideas of various deities all of whom derive from
objects and activities in nature. To these were then assigned the work
of creation. At first this work was thought of as a shaping or
fashioning in a literal sense. Ptah, the Great Artificer, shapes the
sun and moon eggs on his potter's wheel; Osiris, the god of vegetation,
formed with his hand the earth, its waters, its air, its plants, all
its cattle, all its birds, all its winged fowl, all its reptiles, all
its quadrupeds. Is this view very far different from the account given
in the so-called second story of creation beginning with verse four of
Genesis? There it is written: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust
of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and
man became a living soul."
Somewhat later developed the more priestly, or theological, account;
just as it did for the Hebrews. Creation was then conceived more
mystically as an act of will issuing in a word of command. We should
remember that, for primitive thought, words were not mere verbal signs,
useful to man as means of communication, but were conceived, more
realistically and naively, as essential parts of things, bound up with
their existence. {34} This same fact will explain much of the ritual
of magic. When God says, "Let there be light," light is selected and,
as it were, coerced into existence by the name. As time passed man
became reflective and critical. He had nothing essentially new to
offer, yet he felt dissatisfied with the crude imagery of tradition.
Step by step with the growth of society, we always find the passage
from creation myths built around the idea of spontaneous generation to
the idea of a god who molds men as a potter does his clay, and thence
to a _fiat_ in which the creative will of a supernatural and
transcendent deity finds expression. There is a remarkable similarity
in creation stories, just as we would expect. The same few motives
repeat themselves with local variations.
The oldest of the Greek myths of creation are to be found in Homer and
Hesiod. For Homer, Oceanus is the father of the gods, while Tethys,
called the suckling or nursing one, is the mother. Back of these
august, generative powers, however, lies Night whom even Zeus is afraid
to offend. We must remember that darkness is a presence for early man,
as real as water or air, and that man feared it as mysterious and
threatening. Always we must put aside the knowledge which science has
given us and sink down into this vague world of the past, filled with
tremendous shapes and forces. Hesiod's view is best given in his own
words:
"From chaos were generated Erebos and black Night,
And from Night again were generated Ether and Day,
Whom she brought forth, having conceived from the
embrace of Erebos."
Here we have the same sexual motive at work as among the Egyptians; a
motive which, as we should expect, {35} is well-nigh universal. During
the sixth century there was an efflorescence of creation myths among
the Greeks. These are associated with the name of Orpheus, and are
commonly classed together as Orphic cosmogonies. Soon after,
philosophic speculation began to come into its own and the Greeks "left
off telling tales." Burnet, a famous student of Greek culture, asserts
that "history teaches that science has never existed except among those
peoples which the Greeks have influenced." But we shall leave the
Greeks for the present; it may be that we shall meet them, and their
influence again.
The Hindoos passed from crude views to more abstract and refined
concepts just as the Egyptians and Greeks did. In the Vedic period,
there are many contradictory statements about the creation of the world
and of the gods. Heaven and earth are spoken of as the parents of the
gods, and at the same time the gods are said to have built, or woven,
the whole world. When we remember that there was little distinction at
first between nature and the gods, we are not surprised at this
contradiction. Moreover, as one writer suggests, this contradiction
seems only to have enhanced the mystery of the conception. When
religion enters, logic is not always desired.
Another conception which we find in Hindoo thought is that of a
world-egg. This analogy is so natural that we are not surprised to
discover it. Let us glance at one of the accounts given in the
Satapatha Brahmana: "In the beginning this universe was water, nothing
but water. The waters desired, 'How can we be reproduced?' So saying,
they toiled, they performed austerity. While they were performing
austerity, a golden egg came into existence. Being produced, {36} it
then became a year. Wherefore this golden egg floated about for the
period of a year. From it in a year a male came into existence, who
was Prajapati.... He divided this golden egg.... In a year he desired
to speak. He uttered 'bhur,' which became this earth; 'bhuvah,' which
became this firmament; and 'svar,' which became that sky.... Desiring
progeny, he went on worshiping and toiling. He conceived progeny in
himself; with his mouth he created the gods...."
This account of the creation is characteristic of Hindoo thought as it
passes from the frank admiration of nature, which distinguishes the
Vedic period, to what more nearly approaches theosophic speculation.
Yet there is no genuine break with the animism of primitive times. The
waters are thought of as desiring, that is, they are held to be alive
and vaguely conscious. The belief that words are inseparable from
things should again be noted. "Bhur" becomes the earth, and "svar"
becomes the sky.
In the course of time, Hindoo thought became more abstract and
sophisticated without having achieved any method which would lead to
tested knowledge. An analogy may make clearer to the reader the
vicious intellectual situation. Imagine the subtle minds of the
Mediaeval scholastics, without the material furnished them by the Greek
philosophy, and obliged to exercise themselves upon magic, myth and
legend. The very energy and subtlety of their intellects would lead
them into all sorts of phantasmagoria. Theosophy--and a large share of
what is called theology--is simply a refining and subtilizing of
mythology. The more difficult and abstract the thought, the more
significance {37} it is assumed to possess. The penetrative and
exploring power of mere untested speculation is taken for granted.
Words throw a spell over the mind because nothing of a more positive
character is before it to counteract their charm. Even to-day we all
know of people who like to employ such terms as force, and unity, and
spirit, and will. The very vagueness of the words exercises a
fascination which smothers the slight demand for explanation. Just as
the Jews of the Dispersion spoke of Wisdom as the first-born creature
of God and gave this abstraction an objective existence, so the Hindoo
poets and theosophists explained the world in terms which seem to the
scientifically trained mind subjective and irrelevant. For all its
apparent profundity, such an outlook represents a lower stage than that
which science has reached. Subtlety is not enough; it must be a
servant to the right methods of investigation. Dialectic and
imaginative vividness cannot give truth to ideas not adapted to explain
the sort of a world we live in.
Those creation stories developed by the Hebrews with the aid of the
Babylonians have had most influence on Western thought and, therefore,
deserve considerable attention. The motives and mental processes at
work are, however, essentially those which we have already examined.
Unfortunately, we have only hints here and there in the Old Testament
of the more primitive traditions which were worked over and built upon
by the priests and prophets. Moreover, the Yahweh religion seems to
have been adopted quite late and to have made easy a break with the
older tales. Probably few readers of the Bible, who have not made a
systematic study of Semitic literature, are aware that ancient strands
of {38} folk-lore are scattered through it. In Psalm 74, for instance,
there is a good instance of primitive views: "Thou didst divide the sea
by thy strength; Thou breakest the head of Leviathan in pieces....
Thou didst cleave fountain and flood." In Job, likewise, there are
references to these deeds of Yahweh in the far past. Very few casual
readers ask themselves who Rahab and the Flying Serpent and Leviathan
were. Now investigation has shown that we have, in these references to
the deeds of Yahweh, fragments of the Babylonian myth of creation.
These creatures are monsters whom Yahweh makes captive before he orders
the original chaos into a cosmos. In doing this, he is a counterpart
of Marduk, the Babylonian creator. These monsters, like the gods who
conquer them, are only personified forms of phenomena in the heavens
above and the earth beneath. Let us now consider the stories of
creation given in Genesis. It is not widely enough known that there
are two distinct accounts which, although they are externally combined,
can easily be separated even in the English translation. The oldest
version begins with chapter two, verse five. This version is called
the prophetic account. It assumes that the world already exists and
concerns itself only with man's appearance, the institution of
marriage, and the general features of man's life. God forms man out of
the dust of the ground, as a potter molds his clay, and breathes into
him the breath of life. He places him in a garden to dress and keep
it. But the incidents which follow are so familiar to every one that
there is no need to repeat them. Scholars have pointed out that this
account is very similar to that current in Babylonia. The motives are
like those found in the Gilgamish and Adapa {39} myths. The
differences in general tone and in geographical details can readily be
explained by the later date--about the eighth century--and the
character of the Palestinian landscape. Those who read Hebrew will
note the difference in vocabulary between the second chapter in Genesis
and the first, while those who are confined to the English translation
should especially note that the two words, Lord and God, are combined
in the prophetic account. There are many naive, and obviously
primitive, touches in this creation story which give it a quaint charm.
Only those, however, who are themselves naive in their outlook upon the
world can dream of taking it as other than folk-lore. I must confess
that it is a mystery to me that so many fairly educated men can take it
as anything but what it so obviously is, a creation myth.
The creation story, told in the first chapter, is called by scholars
the priestly account. It is post-exilic and, so, relatively late. The
foundation consists of mythical ideas which go back to the mists of
antiquity. From these were derived certain terms which are scarcely
translatable into English. The reader has been further confused by a
poetic and inexact rendering of many Hebrew phrases. The "spirit of
God" is literally the "wind of God," an idea which probably is
historically connected with the Babylonian tale of how Marduk uses the
wind as his instrument in his fight against Tiamat, the monster of the
deep. Tiamat has become Tehom, translated as the "deep."
In spite of the lapse in verse 26, into the language of polytheism, the
priestly account represents a late theological level in which creation
is conceived as the passage of will and word into existence. The
effect is {40} majestic and intensely dramatic in its simplicity. Yet
how else can critical thought portray creation? An omnipotent,
personal God is necessarily conceived as one who has the power to call
things into being. To ask how he does this is meaningless, for it
ignores the stark power which is assumed. In accordance with the
genius of the Semite, then, God was pictured as a monarch whose very
will brought forth without effort. But a little reflection must
convince us that this conception neither makes creation thinkable in
any genuine sense nor proves its occurrence. We have merely attained
the idealization of the creation myth, its most perfect form.
The Christian conception of the creation rests largely upon the Hebrew
account. The uncritical way in which this was studied and accepted,
previous to the rise of modern science and the higher criticism,
remains a marvel to those who are not acquainted with the psychology of
religion. Sanctioned by religion, idealized myth naturally held its
own until something positive arose to dispute it. The Church Fathers,
the scholastics, and the leaders of the Reformation accepted the
stories in Genesis as revelations. They believed that there was a God
and that he had revealed to man what he had done and what his plan of
salvation was. These myths fitted into their view of the world as an
essential and harmonious ingredient of it. What motive would there be
for skepticism? Luther states that "Moses is writing history and
reporting things that actually happened." "God was pleased," says
Calvin, "that a history of the creation should exist." Of course, no
really educated man of to-day can accept this attitude unless he wishes
to sin against his reason. It is {41} unfortunate that there has not
been sufficient openness of mind to make possible a wider extension of
the knowledge which scholars have been accumulating. The only candid
thing to do is to class these Hebrew stories of the creation with the
myths which grew up in other parts of the world. All represent
attempts to picture a beginning of things as they are, by appeal to a
magnified and magical personal agency. Those early thinkers did the
best they could do with the ideas they had at hand. They were innocent
of our modern understanding of nature as a scene of impersonal, causal
processes. To try to find science in mythology is like looking upon
Dante's _Divine Comedy_ as a tale of real adventure.
It is interesting to study the speculations which Christian thinkers
have evolved upon the question of creation. Usually, the idea of a
creation of the physical world out of nothing by a fiat has been
favored. "I am the Lord, that maketh all things; that stretches forth
the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth." Such is the
natural goal of the idea of a creation. Yet a moment's reflection
makes us realize that the position is entirely deductive and without a
shred of evidence. To assign to a hypothetical agent called God powers
sufficient to produce what experience tells us exists explains nothing.
The primary assumption, of course, is that there must have been a
creation. But the conception of evolution has attacked that assumption
at its very foundation.
Of late, there have been attempted compromises with the idea of
evolution. May not God guide the course of natural change? But this
outlook meets with certain difficulties. In the first place, was the
physical {42} world created? If so, it must have been the best of all
possible physical worlds, or else God is either not omnipotent or not
omniscient or not ideally good. And when these questions are raised,
we pass immediately into a field of mere speculation. The centuries
have been witnesses of disputes between advocates of different dogmas.
At present, there seems to be a revival of interest in the idea of a
limited and youthful deity struggling against odds to make the world
livable. But God becomes a part of the universe in every sense, and so
we are led to the idea that the physical world was not created but is,
rather, co-existent with deity. Of course, there are many possible
variations on the theme, and human ingenuity will exhaust itself in
combining these possibilities in various ways.
The truth is, that these theological speculations carry us nowhere.
Myth and dialectical acuteness, however skillfully blended, cannot add
to our genuine knowledge of the world. Instead, they create new
problems of their own which cannot be settled, because there is no way
of testing and verifying the various solutions. In short, the premises
are at fault and must be outgrown and left behind. Our experience no
longer suggests to us the idea of a supernatural agency at work, nor
are we so prone to think of an act of creation some few thousands of
years in the past. We have largely outgrown the mythological setting
out of which theology arose, and it is tradition and the lack of a more
positive view which enable it to retain for us any semblance of
plausibility. There is nothing inherently irrational in the idea of
creation; it simply bears witness to a looser, more personal world in
which annihilation and {43} origination were familiar events, because
man saw only the surface of things and was not able to follow the
continuities which bind things together underneath. The principle of
conservation, which is one of the grand achievements of science, is
like a two-edged sword: it destroys not only the belief in an absolute
annihilation but, likewise, the belief in an absolute beginning.
Slowly, but surely, this new view of nature will have its effect and
undermine the more naive hypothesis of a creation. The emotional
reverberation of the accustomed forms of speech, reenforced by the
mental habits encouraged by religion, will die out only gradually. Man
is instinctively romantic and tends to dramatize the world. His
favorite categories are personal, and he has a profound distaste for
the impersonalism of science. Only the slow pressure of actual
knowledge will lift him to a truer view of the world in which he finds
himself.
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