GOD AND THE WORLD
The Idea of God in General--Antithesis of God and the World; the
Supernatural and Nature--Theism and Pantheism--Chief Forms of
Theism--Polytheism--Triplotheism--Amphitheism--Monotheism--Religious
Statistics--Naturalistic Monotheism--Solarism--Anthropistic
Monotheism--The Three Great Mediterranean
Religions--Mosaism--Christianity--The Cult of the Madonna and
the Saints--Papal Polytheism--Islam--Mixotheism--Nature of
Theism--An Extra-mundane and Anthropomorphic God; a Gaseous
Vertebrate--Pantheism--Intramundane God (Nature)--The Hylozoism
of the Ionic Monists (Anaximander)--Conflict of Pantheism and
Christianity--Spinoza--Modern Monism--Atheism
For thousands of years humanity has placed the last and supreme basis
of all phenomena in an efficient cause, to which it gives the title of
God (_deus_, _theos_). Like all general ideas, this notion of God has
undergone a series of remarkable modifications and transformations in
the course of the evolution of reason. Indeed, it may be said that no
other idea has had so many metamorphoses; for no other belief affects
in so high a degree the chief objects of the mind and of rational
science, as well as the deepest interests of the emotion and poetic
fancy of the believer.
A comparative criticism of the many different forms of the idea of God
would be extremely interesting and instructive; but we have not space
for it in the present work. We must be content with a passing glance
at the most important forms of the belief and their relation to the
modern thought that has been evoked by a sound study of nature. For
further information on this interesting question the reader would do
well to consult the distinguished work of Adalbert Svoboda, _Forms of
Faith_ (1897).
When we pass over the finer shades and the variegated clothing of
the God-idea and confine our attention to its chief element, we can
distribute all the different presentations of it in two groups--the
_theistic_ and _pantheistic_ group. The latter is closely connected
with the monistic, or rational, view of things, and the former is
associated with dualism and mysticism.
I.--THEISM
In this view God is distinct from, and opposed to, the world as its
creator, sustainer, and ruler. He is always conceived in a more or
less human form, as an organism which thinks and acts like a man--only
on a much higher scale. This anthropomorphic God, polyphyletically
evolved by the different races, assumes an infinity of shapes in their
imagination, from fetichism to the refined monotheistic religions
of the present day. The chief forms of theism are polytheism,
triplotheism, amphitheism, and monotheism.
The polytheist peoples the world with a variety of gods and goddesses,
which enter into its machinery more or less independently. _Fetichism_
sees such subordinate deities in the lifeless body of nature, in rocks,
in water, in the air, in human productions of every kind (pictures,
statues, etc.). _Demonism_ sees gods in living organisms of every
species--trees, animals, and men. This kind of polytheism is found in
innumerable forms even in the lowest tribes. It reaches the highest
stage in Hellenic polytheism, in the myths of ancient Greece, which
still furnish the finest images to the modern poet and artist. At a
much lower stage we have Catholic polytheism, in which innumerable
"saints" (many of them of very equivocal repute) are venerated as
subordinate divinities, and prayed to to exert their mediation with the
supreme divinity.
The dogma of the "Trinity," which still comprises three of the chief
articles of faith in the creed of Christian peoples, culminates in the
notion that the one God of Christianity is really made up of _three_
different persons: (1) God the Father, the omnipotent creator of heaven
and earth (this untenable myth was refuted long ago by scientific
cosmogony, astronomy, and geology); (2) Jesus Christ; and (3) the Holy
Ghost, a mystical being, over whose incomprehensible relation to the
Father and the Son millions of Christian theologians have racked their
brains in vain for the last nineteen hundred years. The Gospels, which
are the only clear sources of this _triplotheism_, are very obscure as
to the relation of these three persons to each other, and do not give a
satisfactory answer to the question of their unity. On the other hand,
it must be carefully noted what confusion this obscure and mystic dogma
of the Trinity must necessarily cause in the minds of our children even
in the earlier years of instruction. One morning they learn (in their
religious instruction) that three times one are one, and the very next
hour they are told in their arithmetic class that three times one are
three. I remember well the reflection that this confusion led me to in
my early school-days.
For the rest, the "Trinity" is not an original element in Christianity;
like most of the other Christian dogmas, it has been borrowed from
earlier religions. Out of the sun-worship of the Chaldean magi was
evolved the Trinity of Ilu, the mysterious source of the world; its
three manifestations were Anu, primeval chaos; Bel, the architect of
the world; and Aa, the heavenly light, the all-enlightening wisdom.
In the Brahmanic religion the Trimurti is also conceived as a "divine
unity" made up of three persons--Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the
sustainer), and Shiva (the destroyer). It would seem that in this
and other ideas of a Trinity the "sacred number, three," as such--as
a "symbolical number"--has counted for something. The three first
Christian virtues--Faith, Hope, and Charity--form a similar _triad_.
According to the _amphitheists_, the world is ruled by two different
gods, a good and an evil principle, God and the Devil. They are engaged
in a perpetual struggle, like rival emperors, or pope and anti-pope.
The condition of the world is the result of this conflict. The
loving God, or good principle, is the source of all that is good and
beautiful, of joy and of peace. The world would be perfect if His work
were not continually thwarted by the evil principle, the Devil; this
being is the cause of all that is bad and hateful, of contradiction and
of pain.
Amphitheism is undoubtedly the most rational of all forms of belief in
God, and the one which is least incompatible with a scientific view
of the world. Hence we find it elaborated in many ancient peoples
thousands of years before Christ. In ancient India Vishnu, the
preserver, struggles with Shiva, the destroyer. In ancient Egypt the
good Osiris is opposed by the wicked Typhon. The early Hebrews had a
similar dualism of Aschera (or Keturah), the fertile mother-earth,
and Elion (Moloch or Sethos), the stern heavenly father. In the Zend
religion of the ancient Persians, founded by Zoroaster two thousand
years before Christ, there is a perpetual struggle between Ormuzd, the
good god of light, and Ahriman, the wicked god of darkness.
In Christian mythology the Devil is scarcely less conspicuous as the
adversary of the good deity, the tempter and seducer, the prince of
hell, and lord of darkness. A personal devil was still an important
element in the belief of most Christians at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Towards the middle of the century he was gradually
eliminated by being progressively explained away, or he was restricted
to the subordinate _rôle_ he plays as Mephistopheles in Goethe's great
drama. To-day the majority of educated people look upon "belief in a
personal devil" as a mediæval superstition, while "belief in God" (that
is, the personal, good, and loving God) is retained as an indispensable
element of religion. Yet the one belief is just as much (or as little)
justified as the other. In any case, the much-lamented "imperfection of
our earthly life," the "struggle for existence," and all that pertains
to it, are explained much more simply and naturally by this struggle of
a good and an evil god than by any other form of theism.
The dogma of the unity of God may in some respects be regarded as the
simplest and most natural type of theism; it is popularly supposed to
be the most widely accepted element of religion, and to predominate
in the ecclesiastical systems of civilized countries. In reality,
that is not the case, because this alleged "monotheism" usually turns
out on closer inquiry to be one of the other forms of theism we have
examined, a number of subordinate deities being generally introduced
besides the supreme one. Most of the religions which took a purely
monotheistic stand-point have become more or less polytheistic in the
course of time. Modern statistics assure us that of the one billion
five hundred million men who people the earth the great majority
are monotheists; of these, _nominally_, about six hundred millions
are Brahma-Buddhists, five hundred millions are called Christians,
two hundred millions are heathens (of various types), one hundred
and eighty millions are Mohammedans, ten millions are Jews, and ten
millions have no religion at all. However, the vast majority of
these nominal monotheists have very confused ideas about the deity,
or believe in a number of gods and goddesses besides the chief
god--angels, devils, etc.
The different forms which monotheism has assumed in the course of its
polyphyletic development may be distributed in two groups--those of
_naturalistic_ and _anthropistic_ monotheism. Naturalistic monotheism
finds the embodiment of the deity in some lofty and dominating natural
phenomenon. The sun, the deity of light and warmth, on whose influence
all organic life insensibly and directly depends, was taken to be
such a phenomenon many thousand years ago. Sun-worship (solarism,
or heliotheism) seems to the modern scientist to be the best of all
forms of theism, and the one which may be most easily reconciled
with modern monism. For modern astrophysics and geogeny have taught
us that the earth is a fragment detached from the sun, and that it
will eventually return to the bosom of its parent. Modern physiology
teaches us that the first source of organic life on the earth is the
formation of protoplasm, and that this synthesis of simple inorganic
substances, water, carbonic acid, and ammonia, only takes place under
the influence of sunlight. On the primary evolution of the plasmodomous
plants followed, secondarily, that of the plasmophagous animals, which
directly or indirectly depend on them for nourishment; and the origin
of the human race itself is only a later stage in the development of
the animal kingdom. Indeed, the whole of our bodily and mental life
depends, in the last resort, like all other organic life, on the
light and heat rays of the sun. Hence in the light of pure reason,
sun-worship, as a form of naturalistic monotheism, seems to have a much
better foundation than the anthropistic worship of Christians and of
other monotheists who conceive their god in human form. As a matter of
fact, the sun-worshippers attained, thousands of years ago, a higher
intellectual and moral standard than most of the other theists. When
I was in Bombay, in 1881, I watched with the greatest sympathy the
elevating rites of the pious Parsees, who, standing on the sea-shore,
or kneeling on their prayer-rugs, offered their devotion to the sun at
its rise and setting.[31]
Moon-worship (lunarism and selenotheism) is of much less importance
than sun-worship. There are a few uncivilized races that have adored
the moon as their only deity, but it has generally been associated with
a worship of the stars and the sun.
The humanization of God, or the idea that the "Supreme Being" feels,
thinks, and acts like man (though in a higher degree), has played a
most important part, as _anthropomorphic monotheism_, in the history
of civilization. The most prominent in this respect are the three
great religions of the Mediterranean peoples--the old Mosaic religion,
the intermediate Christian religion, and the younger Mohammedanism.
These three great Mediterranean religions, all three arising on the
east coast of the most interesting of all seas, and originating in an
imaginative enthusiast of the Semitic race, are intimately connected,
not only by this external circumstance of an analogous origin, but by
many common features of their internal contents. Just as Christianity
borrowed a good deal of its mythology directly from ancient Judaism, so
Islam has inherited much from both its predecessors. All the three were
originally monotheistic; all three were subsequently overlaid with a
great variety of polytheistic features, in proportion as they extended,
first along the coast of the Mediterranean with its heterogeneous
population, and eventually into every part of the world.
The Hebrew monotheism, as it was founded by Moses (about 1600 B.C.), is
usually regarded as the ancient faith which has been of the greatest
importance in the ethical and religious development of humanity.
This high historical appreciation is certainly valid in the sense
that the two other world-conquering Mediterranean religions issued
from it; Christ was just as truly a pupil of Moses as Mohammed was
afterwards of Christ. So also the New Testament, which has become the
foundation of the belief of the highest civilized nations in the short
space of nineteen hundred years, rests on the venerable basis of the
Old Testament. The Bible, which the two compose, has had a greater
influence and a wider circulation than any other book in the world.
Even to-day the Bible--in spite of its curious mingling of the best and
the worst elements--is in a certain sense the "book of books." Yet when
we make an impartial and unprejudiced study of this notable historical
source, we find it very different in several important respects from
the popular impression. Here again modern criticism and history have
come to certain conclusions which destroy the prevalent tradition in
its very foundations.
The monotheism which Moses endeavored to establish in the worship
of Jehovah, and which the prophets--the philosophers of the Hebrew
race--afterwards developed with great success, had at first to sustain
a long and severe struggle with the dominant polytheism which was
in possession. Jehovah, or Yahveh, was originally derived from the
heaven-god, which, under the title of Moloch or Baal, was one of
the most popular of the Oriental deities (the Sethos or Typhon of
the Egyptians, and the Saturn or Cronos of the Greeks). There were,
however, other gods in great favor with the Jewish people, and so the
struggle with "idolatry" continued. Still, Jehovah was, in principle,
the only God, explicitly claiming, in the first precept of the
decalogue: "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods beside
me."
Christian monotheism shared the fate of its mother, Mosaism; it was
generally only monotheistic in theory, while it degenerated practically
into every kind of polytheism. In point of fact, monotheism was
logically abandoned in the very dogma of the Trinity, which was adopted
as an indispensable foundation of the Christian religion. The three
persons, which are distinguished as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are
three distinct individuals (and, indeed, anthropomorphic persons), just
as truly as the three Indian deities of the Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu,
and Shiva) or the Trinity of the ancient Hebrews (Anu, Bel, and Aa).
Moreover, in the most widely distributed form of Christianity the
"virgin" mother of Christ plays an important part as a fourth deity;
in many Catholic countries she is practically taken to be much more
powerful and influential than the three male persons of the celestial
administration. The cult of the madonna has been developed to such an
extent in these countries that we may oppose it to the usual masculine
form of monotheism as one of a feminine type. The "Queen of Heaven"
becomes so prominent, as is seen in so many pictures and legends of the
madonna, that the three male persons practically disappear.
In addition, the imagination of the pious Christian soon came to
increase this celestial administration by a numerous company of
"saints" of all kinds, and bands of musical angels, who should see
that "eternal life" should not prove too dull. The popes--the greatest
charlatans that any religion ever produced--have constantly studied to
increase this band of celestial satellites by repeated canonizations.
This curious company received its most interesting acquisition in 1870,
when the Vatican Council pronounced the popes, as the vicars of Christ,
to be infallible, and thus raised them to a divine dignity. When we add
the "personal Devil" that they acknowledge, and the "bad angels" who
form his court, we have in modern Catholicism, still the most extensive
branch of Christianity, a rich and variegated polytheism that dwarfs
the Olympic family of the Greeks.
Islam, or the Mohammedan monotheism, is the youngest and purest form of
monotheism. When the young Mohammed (born 570) learned to despise the
polytheistic idolatry of his Arabian compatriots, and became acquainted
with Nestorian Christianity, he adopted its chief doctrines in a
general way; but he could not bring himself to see anything more than
a prophet in Christ, like Moses. He found in the dogma of the Trinity
what every emancipated thinker finds on impartial reflection--an
absurd legend which is neither reconcilable with the first principles
of reason nor of any value whatever for our religious advancement. He
justly regarded the worship of the immaculate mother of God as a piece
of pure idolatry, like the veneration of pictures and images. The
longer he reflected on it, and the more he strove after a purified idea
of deity, the clearer did the certitude of his great maxim appear: "God
is the only God"--there are no other gods beside him.
Yet Mohammed could not free himself from the anthropomorphism of the
God-idea. His one only God was an idealized, almighty man, like the
stern, vindictive God of Moses, and the gentle, loving God of Christ.
Still, we must admit that the Mohammedan religion has preserved the
character of pure monotheism throughout the course of its historical
development and its inevitable division much more faithfully than the
Mosaic and Christian religions. We see that to-day, even externally,
in its forms of prayer and preaching, and in the architecture and
adornment of its mosques. When I visited the East for the first time,
in 1873, and admired the noble mosques of Cairo, Smyrna, Brussa, and
Constantinople, I was inspired with a feeling of real devotion by the
simple and tasteful decoration of the interior, and the lofty and
beautiful architectural work of the exterior. How noble and inspiring
do these mosques appear in comparison with the majority of Catholic
churches, which are covered internally with gaudy pictures and gilt,
and are outwardly disfigured by an immoderate crowd of human and
animal figures! Not less elevated are the silent prayers and the
simple devotional acts of the Koran when compared with the loud,
unintelligible verbosity of the Catholic Mass and the blatant music of
their theatrical processions.
Under the title of _mixotheism_ we may embrace all the forms of
theistic belief which contain mixtures of religious notions of
different, sometimes contradictory, kinds. In theory this most widely
diffused type of religion is not recognized at all; in the concrete
it is the most important and most notable of all. The vast majority
of men who have religious opinions have always been, and still are,
_mixotheists_; their idea of God is picturesquely compounded from the
impressions received in childhood from their own sect, and a number
of other impressions which are received later on, from contact with
members of other religions, and which modify the earlier notions. In
educated people there is also sometimes the modifying influence of
philosophic studies in maturer years, and especially the unprejudiced
study of natural phenomena, which reveals the futility of the theistic
idea. The conflict of these contradictory impressions, which is
very painful to a sensitive soul, and which often remains undecided
throughout life, clearly shows the immense power of the _heredity_ of
ancient myths on the one hand and the early _adaptation_ to erroneous
dogmas on the other. The particular faith in which the child has been
brought up generally remains in power, unless a "conversion" takes
place subsequently, owing to the stronger influence of some other
religion. But even in this supersession of one faith by another the new
name, like the old one, proves to be merely an outward label covering
a mixture of the most diverse opinions and errors. The greater part
of those who call themselves Christians are not monotheists (as they
think), but amphitheists, triplotheists, or polytheists. And the same
must be said of Islam and Mosaism, and other monotheistic religions.
Everywhere we find associated with the original idea of a "sole and
triune God" later beliefs in a number of subordinate deities--angels,
devils, saints, etc.--a picturesque assortment of the most diverse
theistic forms.
All the above forms of theism, in the proper sense of the word--whether
the belief assumes a naturalistic or an anthropistic form--represent
God to be an extramundane or a supernatural being. He is always opposed
to the world, or nature, as an independent being; generally as its
creator, sustainer, and ruler. In most religions he has the additional
character of personality, or, to put it more definitely still, God as
a person is likened to man. "In his gods man paints himself." This
anthropomorphic conception of God as one who thinks, feels, and acts
like man prevails with the great majority of theists, sometimes in a
cruder and more naïve form, sometimes in a more refined and abstract
degree. In any case the form of theosophy we have described is sure
to affirm that God, the supreme being, is infinite in perfection, and
therefore far removed from the imperfection of humanity. Yet, when we
examine closely, we always find the same psychic or mental activity in
the two. God feels, thinks, and acts as man does, although it be in an
infinitely more perfect form.
The _personal anthropism_ of God has become so natural to the majority
of believers that they experience no shock when they find God
personified in human form in pictures and statues, and in the varied
images of the poet, in which God takes human form--that is, is changed
into a vertebrate. In some myths, even, God takes the form of other
mammals (an ape, lion, bull, etc.), and more rarely of a bird (eagle,
dove, or stork), or of some lower vertebrate (serpent, crocodile,
dragon, etc.).
In the higher and more abstract forms of religion this idea of bodily
appearance is entirely abandoned, and God is adored as a "pure spirit"
without a body. "God is a spirit, and they who worship him must worship
him in spirit and in truth." Nevertheless, the psychic activity of this
"pure spirit" remains just the same as that of the anthropomorphic
God. In reality, even this immaterial spirit is not conceived to be
incorporeal, but merely invisible, gaseous. We thus arrive at the
paradoxical conception of God as a _gaseous vertebrate_.
II.--PANTHEISM
Pantheism teaches that God and the world are one. The idea of God is
identical with that of nature or substance. This pantheistic view is
sharply opposed in principle to all the systems we have described, and
to all possible forms of theism although there have been many attempts
made from both sides to bridge over the deep chasm that separates the
two. There is always this fundamental contradiction between them, that
in theism God is opposed to nature as an _extramundane_ being, as
creating and sustaining the world, and acting upon it from without,
while in pantheism God, as an _intramundane_ being, is everywhere
identical with nature itself, and is operative _within_ the world
as "force" or "energy." The latter view alone is compatible with
our supreme law--the law of substance. It follows necessarily that
pantheism is _the world-system of the modern scientist_. There are,
it is true, still a few men of science who contest this, and think it
possible to reconcile the old theistic theory of human nature with the
pantheistic truth of the law of substance. All these efforts rest on
confusion or sophistry--when they are honest.
As pantheism is a result of an advanced conception of nature in the
civilized mind, it is naturally much younger than theism, the crudest
forms of which are found in great variety in the uncivilized races of
ten thousand years ago. We do, indeed, find the germs of pantheism in
different religions at the very dawn of philosophy in the earliest
civilized peoples (in India, Egypt, China, and Japan), several thousand
years before the time of Christ; still, we do not meet a definite
philosophical expression of it until the hylozoism of the Ionic
philosophers, in the first half of the sixth century before Christ.
All the great thinkers of this flourishing period of Hellenic thought
are surpassed by the famous Anaximander, of Miletus, who conceived the
essential unity of the infinite universe (_apeiron_) more profoundly
and more clearly than his master, Thales, or his pupil, Anaximenes.
Not only the great thought of the original unity of the cosmos and the
development of all phenomena out of the all-pervading primitive matter
found expression in Anaximander, but he even enunciated the bold idea
of countless worlds in a periodic alternation of birth and death.
Many other great philosophers of classical antiquity, especially
Democritus, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, had, in the same or an
analogous sense, a profound conception of this unity of nature and
God, of body and spirit, which has obtained its highest expression
in the law of substance of our modern monism. The famous Roman poet
and philosopher, Lucretius Carus, has presented it in a highly poetic
form in his poem "De Rerum Natura." However, this true pantheistic
monism was soon entirely displaced by the mystic dualism of Plato, and
especially by the powerful influence which the idealistic philosophy
obtained by its blending with Christian dogmas. When the papacy
attained to its spiritual despotism over the world, pantheism was
hopelessly crushed; Giordano Bruno, its most gifted defender, was
burned alive by the "Vicar of Christ" in the Campo dei Fiori at Rome on
February 17, 1600.
It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that pantheism
was exhibited in its purest form by the great Baruch Spinoza; he gave
for the totality of things a definition of substance in which God
and the world are inseparably united. The clearness, confidence, and
consistency of Spinoza's monistic system are the more remarkable when
we remember that this gifted thinker of two hundred and fifty years
ago was without the support of all those sound empirical bases which
have been obtained in the second half of the nineteenth century. We
have already spoken, in the first chapter, of Spinoza's relation to the
materialism of the eighteenth and the monism of the nineteenth century.
The propagation of his views, especially in Germany, is due, above
all, to the immortal works of our greatest poet and thinker, Wolfgang
Goethe. His splendid _God and the World_, _Prometheus_, _Faust_, etc.,
embody the great thoughts of pantheism in the most perfect poetic
creations.
Atheism affirms that there are no gods or goddesses, assuming that
god means a personal, extramundane entity. This "godless world-system"
substantially agrees with the monism or pantheism of the modern
scientist; it is only another expression for it, emphasizing its
negative aspect, the non-existence of any supernatural deity. In this
sense Schopenhauer justly remarks: "Pantheism is only a polite form
of atheism. The truth of pantheism lies in its destruction of the
dualist antithesis of God and the world, in its recognition that the
world exists in virtue of its own inherent forces. The maxim of the
pantheist, 'God and the world are one,' is merely a polite way of
giving the Lord God his _congé_."
During the whole of the Middle Ages, under the bloody despotism of the
popes, atheism was persecuted with fire and sword as a most pernicious
system. As the "godless" man is plainly identified with the "wicked"
in the Gospel, and is threatened--simply on account of his "want of
faith"--with the eternal fires of hell, it was very natural that every
good Christian should be anxious to avoid the suspicion of atheism.
Unfortunately, the idea still prevails very widely. The atheistic
scientist who devotes his strength and his life to the search for
the truth, is freely credited with all that is evil; the theistic
church-goer, who thoughtlessly follows the empty ceremonies of Catholic
worship, is at once assumed to be a good citizen, even if there be no
meaning whatever in his faith and his morality be deplorable. This
error will only be destroyed when, in the twentieth century, the
prevalent superstition gives place to rational knowledge and to a
monistic conception of the unity of God and the world.