PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
_Paper._ _Mystery._ _Idea._ _Analogy._ _Analysis._ _Logic._
_Quantity._ _Heresy._
The difference between Greek and Roman character, which is marked
so plainly by the way in which Aryan myths developed among the two
peoples and moulded the finer meanings of their languages, is evident
in many other English words besides those which we can actually
trace back to such myths. For instance, the Greek ‘scandalizein’
and the Latin ‘offendere’ both meant to ‘cause to stumble’, but for
us there is a subtle difference between _scandalize_ and _offend_;
for while _scandalize_ and _scandal_ merely hint at the liveliness
of an emotion, _offend_ and _offence_ convey a sober warning of its
probable results. ‘Discere’ in Latin and ‘mathein’ in Greek both
meant to ‘learn’; but the substantives which are derived from these
verbs have come down into our language, the one as _discipline_
and the other as _mathematics_. Rome turned instinctively to the
external, Greece to the inner world as a vehicle for the expression
of her impulses. And just as ‘learning’ for the Roman gradually
came to mean ‘learning to be a soldier’, so the ordinary Latin word
for ‘teacher’ (doctor) is now applied most commonly to a teacher
of physical health. And these two are not the only Latin words
which have hurried out of school in this way. ‘Magister’, for
instance, has exchanged the class-room for the police-court and
left behind the Greek ‘paidagόgos’ (pedagogue) to express the most
schoolmasterish kind of schoolmaster that can be imagined. Perhaps
the most significant of all is _school_ itself. Words for ‘teaching’
and ‘learning’ among the Romans inevitably came to express unacademic
ideas. When they did want a word for academic processes they had
to borrow it, like ‘schola’, from Greece. Yet, curiously enough,
the original meaning of ‘schole’ in Greek was not _school_ at all.
What the Roman felt about the whole business of book-learning and
disputing and thinking and talking philosophy is indeed conveyed to
us clearly enough by the meaning of the Latin ‘schola’, from which
we have taken _school_. But to a Greek all this had been merely the
natural way of spending his spare time. ‘Scholē’ was the common Greek
word for ‘leisure.’
Now this insatiable appetite of the Greek mind for thinking and
philosophy is a phenomenon in the history of the Western outlook as
sudden and unaccountable as the appearance of the Aryan peoples on
the stage of history. As far back as the seventh or eighth century
B.C. we find, side by side with the popular Greek mythology, a
developed and intricate system of philosophy—a kind of language and
thought, in fact, which, as the labyrinthine history of our own
tongue is enough to show us, could not possibly have sprung up in
the night. And in their writings the Greek philosophers themselves
allude to sources from which they may well have taken the seeds of
abstract thought. References are made as early as Pythagoras and as
late as Plato to the priestly wisdom of Egypt; and when we remember
that the time which elapsed between the rise of Egyptian civilization
and the birth of Homer is about as long as the period between
Homer’s day and our own, we need not be surprised. Moreover, we
find some evidence of the debt to Egypt in our language. Two almost
indispensable prerequisites for the development of philosophy are
the art of writing and something to write upon. It is interesting,
therefore, to observe that our word _alphabet_ comes to us, through
Latin, from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet—‘alpha’ and
‘beta’—which are themselves in the first place Phoenician words.
Greek mythology looked back to Cadmus, a Phoenician, as the founder
of the alphabet, and it is now believed that the Semitic Phoenicians
did indeed bring writing into Greece, and that they themselves took
it from the ‘hieratic script’ or priestly writing of Egypt. _Jot_,
in the phrase ‘jot or tittle’, is an English form invented by the
translators of the Authorised Version for the Greek letter ‘iota’,
which is also of Phoenician origin. _Bible_, on the other hand,
is from the Greek ‘biblos’, which meant ‘the inner bark of the
papyrus’, and so ‘a book’; and _paper_ was borrowed by the Angles
and Saxons from Latin ‘papyrus’, itself a transliteration of the
Greek ‘papuros’, meaning an Egyptian rush or flag, of which writing
material was made. Both these words are thought to be of Egyptian
origin.
External evidence tells us that already, a thousand years before
the Aryans began to move, Egypt had mapped out the stars in
constellations and divided the zodiac into twelve signs, and we are
told by Aristotle that the Egyptians “excelled in mathematics”.
But if there was among the priests a “philosophy” in our sense of
the word, we know little of it—perhaps because truth, unadorned by
myth, was regarded in those days as something dangerous, to be kept
religiously secret from all save those who were specially prepared
to receive it. This idea of inner religious teachings, guarded
carefully from the ignorant and impure, survived in great force
among the Greeks themselves, and we come across references in their
philosophy to institutions called _Mysteries_, which were evidently
felt by them to lie at the core of their national and intellectual
life. Thus that hard-worked little English trisyllable, without
which minor poetry and sensational journalism could barely eke out a
miserable existence, has a long and dignified history, into which we
must pry a little farther if we wish to understand how Greek thought
and feeling have passed over into our language.
We have adopted from Latin the word _initiate_, which meant ‘to admit
a person to these Mysteries’, and the importance attached to secrecy
is shown by the fact that ‘muein’, the Greek for ‘to _initiate_‘,
meant originally ‘to keep silent’. From it the substantive
‘mu-sterion’ was developed, thence the Latin ‘mysterium’, and so
the English word. The secrets of the Greek Mysteries were guarded
so jealously and under such heavy penalties that we still know very
little about them. All we can say is that the two principal ideas
attaching to them in contemporary minds were, firstly, that they
revealed in some way the inner meaning of external appearances,
and secondly, that the “initiate” attained immortality in a sense
different from that of the uninitiated. The ceremony he went through
symbolized dying in order to be “born again”, and when it was over,
he believed that the mortal part of his soul had died, and that what
had risen again was immortal and eternal. Such were the associations
which St. Paul had in mind, and which he called to the imaginations
of his hearers, when he made use of the impressive words: “Behold,
I tell you a mystery!” And it is the same whenever the word occurs
elsewhere in the New Testament and in writings of that period, for
it retained its technical meaning and associations well on into the
Christian era.[26]
The first man—as far as we know—to call himself a ‘philosophos’, or
lover of wisdom, was Pythagoras, who applied the label to himself and
his followers. _Philosophy_ among the Pythagoreans, with its emphasis
on astronomy, geometry, and number, was still decidedly Egyptian;
but gradually, from these starry beginnings, the Greek mind built
up a vast, independent edifice of thought and language. The words
that have come into our language directly from Greek philosophy are
numerous enough, but if we were to add those which have reached us in
Latinized form, and finally those words which are actually Latin, but
which take their whole meaning from the Greek thought they were used
to translate, we should fill several pages with the mere enumeration
of them. The list would spread itself all over the dictionary,
varying from such highly technical terms as _homonym_ and _noumena_
to common ones like _individual_, _method_, and _subject_.
Perhaps a more accurate term than Greek philosophy would be “Greek
thought”, for Greek thinkers took some time to arrive at the
distinction, so familiar to us, between philosophy and other branches
of study such as history. The Greek word ‘historia’ meant at first
simply ‘knowledge gained by inquiry’, and some of the words which
follow are first found in the works of Hesiod and Herodotus.
Among the words which have come to us from earlier Greek thought are
_cosmos_[27]—the name applied by the Pythagoreans to the universe,
which they perceived as a “shapely” and harmonious whole—geometrical
terms such as _pyramid_ (probably of Egyptian origin), _hypotenuse_
and _isosceles_; many of the technical terms of music, as _chord_,
_harmony_, _melody_, _tone_; of literature: _hyperbole_, _metaphor_,
_rhetoric_, _syntax_, _trope_; and a host of common words of
wider significance, such as _academy_, _analogy_, _aristocracy_,
_astronomy_, _cosmogony_, _critic_, _democracy_, _eclipse_,
_economic_, _enthusiasm_, _ethical_, _genesis_, _grammatical_,
_hypothesis_, _mathematical_, _method_, _phenomenon_, _physical_,
_poetic_, _politics_, _rhythm_, _theology_, _theory_. Of those
which were translated into Latin by Cicero and other Latin writers,
and possibly by Greek schoolmasters in Rome, we may mention _air_,
_element_, _essence_, _ideal_, _individual_, _quality_, _question_,
_science_, _species_, and _vacuum_, together with most of the
terminology of grammar, such as _adjective_, _case_, _gender_,
_noun_, _number_, _verb_,... _Type_ comes from ‘tupos’, the name of
the preliminary sketch made by a Greek painter before he started on
the work itself.
In a sense, the thought of the earlier Greek philosophers may be said
to have reached its consummation, its very fullest expression, in
the writings of Plato. Among the words which are first found in his
works are the Greek originals of _analogy_, _antipodes_, _dialectic_,
_enthusiasm_, _mathematical_, _synthesis_, and _system_; while he
imparted a new and special meaning to many others like _method_,
_musical_, _philosopher_, _sophist_, _theory_, _type_, _irony_ (the
name he gave to Socrates’s peculiar method of simulating ignorance
in order to impart knowledge), and, of course, _idea_ and _ideal_.
Before Plato used it, the word ἰδέα meant simply the form or
semblance of anything. It is connected with ‘idein’, ‘to see’[28],
and when Cicero came to translate it, he had to use the Latin
word ‘species’, which had a similar meaning, being connected with
‘specere’, ‘to see’ and ‘speculum’, ‘a mirror’. To-day _idea_ does
not mean to us quite what ἰδέα did to Plato; but tracing the whole
history of the word, we can see how it was Plato who, by his creative
use of these four letters, began to make it possible for us to get
outside our thoughts and look at them, to separate our “ideas” about
things from the things themselves.
Thus, it was not only Greek words of which he was to alter the
meanings, nor only Greek and Latin words. _Love_ and _good_, for
instance, are neither Greek nor Latin, and _beauty_ is only Latin
remotely, yet the spirit of Plato really works more amply in them,
and in a thousand others bearing on the presence or absence of
these qualities, than it does in such specifically Platonic terms
as _idea_ and _dialectic_. Let us try and trace the origin of some
of the meanings which are commonly attached to the word _love_. As
in the Mysteries, so at the heart of early Greek philosophy lay two
fundamental assumptions. One was that an inner meaning lay hid
behind external phenomena. Out of this Plato’s lucid mind brought
to the surface of Europe’s consciousness the stupendous conception
that all matter is but an imperfect copy of spiritual “types” or
“ideas”—eternal principles which, so far from being abstractions,
are the only real Beings, which were in their place before matter
came into existence, and which will remain after it has passed away.
The other assumption concerned the attainment by man of immortality.
The two were complementary. Just as it was only the immortal part
of man which could get into touch with the eternal secret behind
the changing forms of Nature, so also it was only by striving to
contemplate that eternal that man could develop the eternal part
of himself and put on incorruption. There remained the question
of how to rise from the contemplation of the transient to the
contemplation of the eternal, and, for answer, Plato and Socrates
evolved that other great conception—perhaps even more far-reaching in
its historical effects—that love for a sensual and temporal object
is capable of gradual metamorphosis into love for the invisible and
eternal. It is not only in the New Testament and the Prayer Book, in
the _Divine Comedy_, Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_, and all great Romantic
poetry that the results of this thinking are to be seen. Through the
Church and the poets to the dramatist and the novelist, and through
them to the common people—there is no soulful drawing-room ballad,
no cinema-plot, no day-dream novelette or genteel text on the wall
of a cottage parlour through which, every time the hackneyed word is
brought into play, the authentic spirit of Plato does not peep for a
moment forlornly out upon us.
In the latter days of Plato’s life there came to the “Academy” where
he taught a young man from Stagira, in Macedonia. His name was
Aristotle, and after he left Plato he became for a time the tutor of
Alexander the Great. In spite of their proximity in time and space,
the difference between Plato’s method of thought and the Aristotelian
or _peripatetic_ system can hardly be exaggerated. While Plato had
concentrated his intellectual effort on mapping out what we should
now call the “inner” world of human consciousness; starting from the
point of view of ancient tradition and myth, and working outward;
relating his thoughts to one another in accordance, as it were, with
their own inherent qualities; and deducing the sense-world from the
spiritual world; Aristotle turned to the acquisition of knowledge
about the outer world of matter and energy—that is to say, that
part of the world which can be apprehended by the five senses and
the brain. The two philosophers were alike in their emphasis on the
importance of cultivating immortality—or rather of “immortalling”
(for they used a special verb which we have lost), but otherwise
there were few resemblances indeed. To Plato the soul of the universe
had seemed inseparable from his own soul, and natural phenomena
such as the revolutions of the planets had interested him rather as
tangible, outward pictures of the life within that soul. To Aristotle
the world outside himself was interesting more for its own sake.
Plato had looked up to “Ideas”—real Beings with an existence of their
own, which stood behind physical phenomena rather than within them.
Aristotle deliberately attacked this doctrine, maintaining that the
Ideas were immanent; they could not have existed before visible
Nature, nor could they have any being apart from it; and they could
only be arrived at, he said, by investigating Nature itself. When
Aristotle laid down his pen after writing the _Metaphysics_, the
word _idea_ had taken a long step towards its present meaning.
Thus in Aristotle’s imagination the two worlds, outer and inner, met
and came into contact in quite a new way. The mind was, as it were,
put at the absolute disposal of matter; it ceased to brood on what
arose from within, and turned its attention outwards. The result of
this was, of course, an enormous increase in the amount of knowledge
concerning the material processes of the outer world. But that was
not the first result. For, curiously enough, the first result was
a pronounced hardening and sharpening of the mind’s own outlines.
Struggling to fit herself, as into a glove, to the processes of cause
and effect observed in physical phenomena, the mind became suddenly
conscious of her own shape. She was astonished and delighted. She had
discovered _logic_. The actual Greek word ‘logic’ (ή λογική τέχνη) is
first found with its present meaning in Cicero, but he is speaking
of Aristotle; the thing itself and the technique of it was the
invention of Aristotle, and it was Aristotle who first used the word
_syllogism_ in its modern sense.
Perhaps the most significant of all those words which are first
found in Aristotle’s treatise on _Logic_ is _analytic_. Here is
indeed a new word made to express a new kind of thinking. _Energy_,
_entelechy_, _ethics_, _physiology_, and _synonym_, are further
examples of words which, as far as we know, were actually created
by Aristotle, while we owe _metaphysics_ to the accident of his
having treated that subject after (‘meta’) his treatise on _Physics_.
_Axiom_, _category_, _mechanics_, _organic_, _physics_, and
_synthesis_ are Greek words which take their modern meanings chiefly
from Aristotle; but his emphasis on the concrete and his constant
gravitation towards a kind of knowledge which might turn out to be
practically useful evidently made him a favourite with the Roman
mind. Consequently many of his words have come down to us translated
into Latin. Among those which we can actually trace are _absolute_,
_actual_, _definition_, _equivocal_, _induction_, _instance_,
_moral_, _potential_, _property_, _quintessence_, _subject_,[29]
_substance_, _virtual_, and the grammatical term _particle_; of the
plentiful number which have flown more indirectly from his mind we
may mention _conceit_ and _concept_, _deduction_, _difference_,
_experiment_, _principle_, and _universal_. In _quantity_ (a
translation of the Greek ‘posotes’—‘how-muchness’—and seemingly
formed by Aristotle on the analogy of Plato’s ‘poiotēs’, from which
we have _quality_) we can perhaps see the beginning of that interest
in the _calculable_ aspect of the objects of the visible world from
which the exact sciences have arisen. The human mind had now begun
to weigh and measure, to examine and compare; and that weighing and
measuring has gone on—with intervals—for twenty-three centuries.
Thus, Platonic philosophy fades from our view in the person of
Socrates, proving by _analogy_ the immortality of the soul of man and
the soul of the world; and the fatal chill has scarcely risen to his
heart when Aristotelian philosophy comes over the horizon, vigorously
investigating by _analysis_ the structure and composition of the
body of man and the body of the world. Thanks to his friendship with
Alexander, Aristotle himself had hitherto unparalleled opportunities
for collecting information on every conceivable subject. Knowledge,
often inaccurate enough, was garnered from the four quarters of the
civilized world, old manuscripts were edited and compared, and, above
all, Nature herself was observed in a way which was quite new. After
his death his followers went on putting his methods into practice.
Side by side with the weighing and measuring went naming. And so to
the three or four hundred years which followed we owe a good deal
of the technical terminology of our arts and sciences. It was at
this time, for instance, that botany first developed into a science.
Many of the names of our commonest wildflowers can be traced back
to writings of the period, and the following examples are all taken
from the first half of the alphabet: _aconite_, _amaranth_, _balsam_,
_balm_, _box_, _calamint_, _celandine_, _cherry_, _chestnut_,
_chicory_, _germander_, _heliotrope_, _marjoram_, _melilot_.
Moreover, nearly all the technical terms of botany are Greek, and
though most of them, including the word _botany_ itself, were created
later, writers of this period may be said to have given the lead with
such learned labels as _calyx_, _perianth_, and _gymnosperm_.
When we are “dating” a word in this way, however, we must remember
that only a fragment of the whole of Greek literature has come down
to us. Thus we cannot be sure, because a flower-name first occurs
in a writer of the Alexandrian period, that it was actually created
by him or his contemporaries. _Anemone_, _asparagus_, _bugloss_,
_celery_, _centaury_, _clematis_, _coriander_, _crocus_, _lily_,
_medlar_, and _mint_ all go right back to Classical Greek, while
_petal_ and possibly _spore_ are botanical terms which were already
in use. On the whole, the Alexandrians probably collected, arranged,
and renewed the meanings of more words than they actually created.
This is even truer in the case of medicine. The _analytical_ method
of thought led naturally in Alexandria to the actual dissection of
bodies, living and dead. Aristotle himself is still regarded as the
founder of comparative _anatomy_ (cutting up), and it was he who
first used this word in its medical sense. The peculiar meaning of
the word _empirical_, moreover, derives from a set of physicians
who held that practice was the one thing necessary in their art. It
might be thought that with this foreshadowing of modern “methods”
there would have been a great influx of new information and new
terminology. In actual fact we find that the Greek words (and their
name is legion) in the terminology of medical science were either
created later by the different European peoples, or else they
appear in the works of Hippocrates, a physician who had a large
practice in Attica before Plato was born. Among the words found in
Hippocrates are the Greek originals of _arthritis_, _bronchial_,
_catalepsy_, _catarrh_, _diarrhoea_, _dropsy_, _dysentery_,
_epidemic_, _erysipelas_, _haemorrhage_, _hypochondriac_, _hysteria_,
_nephritis_, _ophthalmia_, _paregoric_, _phlebotomy_, _phthisis_,
_quinsy_, _rheum_, _sciatica_, and _hypochondriac_; while _apoplexy_
is particularly interesting because its Latin translation,
‘sideratio’, shows that it originally had the sense of ‘star-struck’
or ‘planet-struck’. _Crisis_ is Hippocrates’s name for the crucial
point at which a disease takes a turn for the worse or the better.
It came to England with this meaning in the sixteenth century, and
was gradually extended to cover first “the conjunction of stars on
which this ‘crisis’ depended”, and then “any critical situation”.
_Anaemia_, however, and possibly _enteric_, seem to have been first
used by Aristotle.
The centre of all this furious intellectual activity was the city
of Alexandria. Nor was it confined to scientific spheres; for the
results of religious and philosophical developments which now took
place in and around the cosmopolitan city in the north of Egypt were,
if anything, more far-reaching than those of empirical science.
Indeed, it was from this point in history that theology and science
first[30] began to be two separate studies, science following
eagerly in the footsteps of Aristotle and religion brooding over the
profundities of Platonic philosophy and saturating them with feeling.
Between Aristotle and Plato is the great divide from which flowed in
two different directions two separate streams, as it were, of human
outlook; and just as the modern European, whether or no he possesses
any genuine scientific knowledge, can trace the general shape and
method of his thinking back to the former, so, whether or no he calls
himself a Christian, he must trace much of what he regards as his
ordinary “feelings” back to the latter.
For the stream of Platonic thought was now to join itself with
other influences coming, for the most part, from farther East. One
of the few Egyptian words which have come down into our language
is _ammonia_. It is the name of an alkali which was said to have
been found near a certain spot in the Libyan desert, where there
was an Egyptian temple to Zeus Ammon, and it will serve to remind
us that Alexander the Great was deeply under the influence of the
Egyptian priesthood when, in 332 B.C., after his brilliant career
of conquests, he visited this temple to pay his devotions before
founding the city of Alexandria. We find, therefore—as might be
expected—a strong Egyptian element blending with what was Greek
in the thoughts and feelings that began to ferment in the more
enterprising Alexandrian bosoms. And that is not all. A third
influence was added. In the third century B.C. a certain capable
ruler of Alexandria invited a body of Egyptian Jews to translate
the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The Septuagint, as it was called,
was so successful that Greek soon became the official language of
the Hebrew religion. Thus, the Greek version found its way into the
synagogues of Palestine, and it must have been the Greek version
which was read by Jesus of Nazareth.
Without making a study of the Septuagint, it is easy to perceive how
passionate Hebrew meanings were gradually imported into the cold
and clear-cut Greek words, until classical Greek had grown slowly
into the “Hellenistic” Greek of the New Testament. Seeking for words
to convey such notions as ‘sin’, ‘righteousness’, ‘defilement’,
‘abomination’, ‘ungodly’, the Jewish translators had to do the best
they could with vocables which to Heraclitus and Plato had implied
something more like ‘folly’, ‘integrity’, ‘dirt’, ‘objectionable
practice’, ‘ignorant’. Any number of such examples could be found.
The harmless Greek word ‘eidōlon’ (_idol_), which had formerly meant
any sort of mental image, including a mere mental fancy, suddenly
found itself selected from its fellows to be spit upon and cast into
outer darkness. ‘Paradeisos’, on the other hand—the park of a Persian
nobleman—was spirited away, as though by the four Djinns of Arabian
legend, first to the Garden of Eden and then to the heavens. It may
well be that in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, more
than anywhere else, is crystallized out for us that process which
went on in and about Alexandria for three or four hundred years, and
which remained almost unaffected by the inclusion of the city within
the Roman Empire. Language never ceases growing, but an important
document such as this is like a cross-section of its stem. In it we
can see clearly what an enormous part that Alexandrian mingling of
Jewish, Egyptian, and Greek conceptions of the Almighty has played
in determining the subtler part of the words we use every day—in
building up those delicate associations of which few of us ever
become fully conscious, but which we all instinctively bring into
play when we are speaking under the influence of emotion.
And later, in the work of a writer like Philo the Jew, who lived and
wrote about A.D. 50, we can discern some of the religious activities
which had followed the translation of the Septuagint; how the Jew,
with his expectation of the Messiah, the Egyptian devotee, with his
reverence for Horus—the child of a virgin mother, Isis—who died and
rose again as the sun-god Osiris, and the Greek, with his elaborated
Platonic doctrine, met together, speaking Greek; how innumerable
sects, ascetic and licentious, philosophical and superstitious,
wise and foolish, had been springing up and dying down all over
the Alexandrian world—all of them, to whatever extravagant lengths
they may have carried their philosophies and their dreams, working
unconsciously at the long task of altering the meaning, the emotional
colour, the evocative power of common Greek words. Concepts such as
‘God’, ‘world’, ‘love’, ‘soul’, ‘life’, ‘death’, ‘spirit’, ‘self’,
and a hundred others were first resolved by the chemical action upon
them of similar concepts from the minds of other nations and races,
and then they began to be built up anew and to take on the form
in which they are presented, as he learns to speak, to the modern
European child.
Greek philosophy had developed in many directions since Plato’s day.
We hear of _Cynics_, _Sceptics_, _Epicureans_, _Stoics_, all of which
words originated as the names of different schools of philosophy.
The last two, whose doctrines were to take such a firm hold on the
educated classes of imperial Rome, have given us one or two important
words. Apart from their moral teachings, they appear to have directed
their philosophical inquiries more especially to the point of
contact between thoughts and things or, as we should say, between
objective and subjective. ‘Phantasia’, from which we have _fantasy_
and _fancy_, was a popular word with the Stoics, who gave it much
of its modern meaning; _notion_ and _comprehension_ are Cicero’s
translations of Stoic terms; while _image_ in the sense of ‘mental
image’ and _spectre_ are Latin renderings of Epicurean expressions.
Epicurus had founded his doctrines on those of Democritus, and
these last two words were employed by Cicero and one of his friends
in discussing that philosopher’s odd theory of perception. He had
held that the surfaces of all objects are continually throwing off
‘images’—a kind of films or husks which float about in space and at
last penetrate to the mind through the pores of the body. Both the
Stoic ‘phantasia’ and this Democritan word ‘eidōlon’, which Cicero
translated by ‘imago’, seem to have contributed a part of their
meaning to the later ‘imaginatio’, from which, of course, we have
taken our _imagination_.
It was the Stoics, too, who gradually burdened the little Greek
word ‘logos’ with the weight of a whole metaphysical theory of the
relation between spirit and matter. ‘Logos’ in Greek had always
meant both ‘word’ and the creative faculty in human beings—‘Reason’,
as it is often translated—which expresses itself by making and using
words. The Stoics were the first to identify this human faculty
with that divine Mind (Nous) which earlier Greek philosophers had
perceived as pervading the visible universe. They were the first
to make the progressive incarnation of thought in audible sound a
part of the creative working of God in the world; and it is to them
accordingly, with their deep sense of the divine significance of
words and their origin, that we owe the word _etymology_, the first
half of which is composed of a poetical Greek adjective meaning
‘true’. Though he had never heard of Christianity, Philo, importing
into the theory a certain Semitic awfulness, actually called this
mysterious ‘logos’ the ‘only-begotten-son’.
It must not be imagined that the majority of Alexandrian citizens
were interested in these matters. Israel and Egypt resembled Greece
in this, that they had in the first place their inner religious
traditions, and in the second their stock of popular myth and
legend. And just as, in Athens, the average citizen had accepted
the teachings of ordinary Greek mythology, without knowing anything
at all about the thoughts of contemporary philosophy, so was it in
Alexandria, where the majority lived a life of easy-going frivolity
and dissipation, paying to the gods the regular outward observances
demanded by the calendar, and otherwise not bothering to think much
about them until they were frightened or ill. Throughout the course
of history the many have accepted, as far as they were able, the
thoughts which have been, made for them by the few in the past, and
the few have gone on constructing the opinion of the future.
In Palestine Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught and died. As the
years passed by, an increasing number of sages and religious teachers
began to agree among themselves that recently something had actually
occurred which had before only been talked about or erroneously
believed to have occurred. Certain of the Jews, for instance,
admitted that their Messiah had now come and gone. Egyptians and
followers of the Egyptian cults were persuaded that a real Horus
had been born of a virgin, and had risen again as an Osiris. Some
of the more forward-looking among those who had been initiated into
the Mysteries felt that what had so often been enacted dramatically
within the sacred precincts had now taken place in a peculiar way
on the great stage of the world, this time not for a few, but for
all to see. A God had himself died in order to rise again to eternal
life. Thus, those who had not been initiated—the poorer classes,
most of the women, and the slaves—had a joyous feeling that at last
the Mysteries had been revealed, that “many things which were hid
had been made plain”. And some students of Platonic philosophy could
admit that this might be true, that henceforth those who could not
rise to the contemplation of the eternal in Nature might yet win
immortality by contemplating the life and death of Jesus. For they
could see in Christ one who had first taught in a new and simpler
way, and had then Himself demonstrated, a truth which nearly every
one of the Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, had been trying
to say all their lives—that, in order to achieve immortality, it is
necessary to “die” to this world of the senses and the appetites,
and that he who thus “dies” is already living in eternity during
his bodily life and will continue to do so after his bodily death.
“Whosoever shall lose his life shall find it.” Lastly, followers of
Philo and his school saw in the Christ the Logos itself incarnate in
human form, the Word made Flesh.
Such were some of the numerous ideas and emotions which had become
embedded in the Greek language by the time that, somewhere about a
hundred years after His death, the life of Christ was written by the
four Evangelists and others. Out of these ideas and emotions arose,
in the first place, the dogma and ritual of the Catholic Church,
and in the second place a great part of the ordinary thoughts and
feelings and impulses of will which flourish in the bosoms of modern
Europeans and Americans.
Very early in its career the leaders of the infant Church must have
realized two things—firstly, that those who, like the Gnostics, were
passionately interested in philosophical and mystical interpretations
of the life of Christ, not only differed very widely among
themselves, but also often paid little attention to that personal
life of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, whose sweetness was
beginning to bind men together with marvellous new ties; secondly,
that the simple and ignorant people to whom, according to the
Gospels, Jesus addressed Himself almost exclusively, would be quite
incapable of grasping these interpretations. If Christianity was to
spread, it must be simplified. For these reasons the leading spirits
gradually set their faces more and more rigidly against those long
and laboriously evolved ideas which had actually created the language
of the Gospels. And no doubt there were other reasons too: the most
shocking immorality was rampant everywhere, and in those days opinion
and behaviour were more closely bound up with one another. Moreover,
in all but the strongest natures an extreme love of moral purity is
often accompanied by an extreme love of exerting authority.
Therefore incredibly industrious Fathers busied themselves in editing
and selecting from the literature and traditions of a hundred
semi-Christian sects. Doctrines which had taken a very strong hold
on many imaginations were accepted, given the orthodox stamp, and
incorporated in the canon; others were rejected, and, being pursued
at first with a mixture of genuine logic, misrepresentation, and
invective, and, as the Church grew stronger, with active persecution,
gradually vanished away or dwindled down to obscure apocryphal
manuscripts, some of which have only been partially translated within
the last twenty-five years. Thus, for more than ten centuries,
creeds and dogmas, to the accompaniment of immense intellectual and
physical struggles, were petrified into ever clearer and harder
forms. Christianity became identified with Catholic doctrine,
and, soon after the Church’s authority was backed by that of the
Roman Empire, any other form of it might be punished by death amid
excruciating tortures. The stigma which still attaches to the
ordinary Greek word for ‘choosing’ (_heresy_) is a fair indication of
the zeal with which the early Popes and Bishops set about expunging
from the consciousness of Christendom all memory of its history and
all understanding of its external connections; while their success
may be judged from the fact that as late as the last century an
Englishman of public position who should have openly interpreted the
Old Testament as Origen, for instance, interpreted it in the third
century, would have incurred serious disabilities.
Consequently it is not surprising if we have found ourselves digging
in somewhat unfamiliar places. Later on, the Catholic outlook spanned
the whole imagination of the Middle Ages like the vaulted nave of
a vast cathedral. By laying bare some of the foundations of that
outlook and applying to them a little knowledge of the histories of
words and their meanings, we can do something which we could hardly
do else but by a long and difficult study of the arcana of the Dark
Ages, their Neoplatonism, their monastic traditions, their Schools,
and their cults of the Virgin. We can, in some degree, be present
with our own imaginations at the building of the cathedral. And this
is worth while, not only for its own sake, but because, as that huge
edifice slowly ruined, we filched its worn but shapely stones and
began to build up with them those bridges of feeling which join us
to-day to our husbands and our wives, our children, our lovers, our
friends.