the_everlasting_man
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| + | <h1> | ||
| + | THE<br /> | ||
| + | EVERLASTING MAN</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | G. K. CHESTERTON< | ||
| + | <br /> | ||
| + | <br /> | ||
| + | HODDER AND STOUGHTON< | ||
| + | LIMITED | ||
| + | <br /> | ||
| + | <br />< | ||
| + | Made and Printed in Great Britain< | ||
| + | T. and A. <span class=" | ||
| + | </p> | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | The view suggested is historical rather than theological, | ||
| + | deal directly with a religious change which has been the chief event of | ||
| + | my own life; and about which I am already writing a more purely | ||
| + | controversial volume. It is impossible, I hope, for any Catholic to | ||
| + | write any book on any subject, above all this subject, without showing | ||
| + | that he is a Catholic; but this study is not specially concerned with | ||
| + | the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant. Much of it is | ||
| + | devoted to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians; and | ||
| + | its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side by side with | ||
| + | similar myths, and his religion side by side with similar religions, are | ||
| + | only repeating a very stale formula contradicted by a very striking | ||
| + | fact. To suggest this I have not needed to go much beyond matters known | ||
| + | to us all; I make no claim to learning; and have to depend for some | ||
| + | things, as has rather become the fashion, on those who are more learned. | ||
| + | As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of | ||
| + | history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the | ||
| + | courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and | ||
| + | varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted | ||
| + | the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts | ||
| + | which the specialists provide.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | |||
| + | <table border=" | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | ON THE CREATURE CALLED MAN</ | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST</ | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | </ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same | ||
| + | place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. It | ||
| + | is, however, a relief to turn from that topic to another story that I | ||
| + | never wrote. Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I | ||
| + | have ever written. It is only too probable that I shall never write it, | ||
| + | so I will use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same | ||
| + | truth. I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping | ||
| + | sides, like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are | ||
| + | scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose farm | ||
| + | or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find | ||
| + | something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was | ||
| + | far enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and | ||
| + | kitchen-garden, | ||
| + | quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some such gigantic figure, on | ||
| + | which he had always lived, but which was too large and too close to be | ||
| + | seen. That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any real | ||
| + | independent intelligence to-day; and that is the point of this book.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a | ||
| + | particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are | ||
| + | not<span class=" | ||
| + | of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has | ||
| + | taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus | ||
| + | they make current an anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They | ||
| + | will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any | ||
| + | more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were | ||
| + | plain-clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be | ||
| + | interrupted, | ||
| + | call an editor’s office a coward’s castle. It would be unjust both to | ||
| + | journalists and priests; but it would be much truer of journalists. The | ||
| + | clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of | ||
| + | church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick | ||
| + | him. They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press | ||
| + | about why the churches are empty, without even going there to find out | ||
| + | if they are empty, or which of them are empty. Their suggestions are | ||
| + | more vapid and vacant than the most insipid curate in a three-act farce, | ||
| + | and move us to comfort him after the manner of the curate in the Bab | ||
| + | Ballads; ‘Your mind is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.’ So we may | ||
| + | truly say to the very feeblest cleric: ‘Your mind is not so blank as | ||
| + | that of Indignant Layman or Plain Man or Man in the Street, or any of | ||
| + | your critics in the newspapers; for they have not the most shadowy | ||
| + | notion of what they want themselves, let alone of what you ought to give | ||
| + | them.’ They will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not | ||
| + | having prevented the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent; | ||
| + | and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent, except some | ||
| + | of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan sceptics who are the | ||
| + | chief enemies of the Church. It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world | ||
| + | that was always prophesying the<span class=" | ||
| + | world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the | ||
| + | advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was | ||
| + | discredited by the War& | ||
| + | discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather | ||
| + | that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her | ||
| + | children do not sin, but because they do. But that marks their mood | ||
| + | about the whole religious tradition: they are in a state of reaction | ||
| + | against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father’s land; | ||
| + | and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it | ||
| + | and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate | ||
| + | state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see | ||
| + | neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get | ||
| + | out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians | ||
| + | and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere | ||
| + | is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. | ||
| + | They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of | ||
| + | the faith.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the | ||
| + | contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a | ||
| + | Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. | ||
| + | The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the | ||
| + | ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, | ||
| + | entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the | ||
| + | beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not | ||
| + | what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not | ||
| + | judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as | ||
| + | he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the | ||
| + | Catholic< | ||
| + | judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great | ||
| + | St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church | ||
| + | there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his | ||
| + | followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the | ||
| + | Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be | ||
| + | far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, | ||
| + | than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered by | ||
| + | iconoclasts; | ||
| + | cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic | ||
| + | cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head-dresses of | ||
| + | mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like | ||
| + | serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer-book as | ||
| + | fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika. | ||
| + | Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical | ||
| + | critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their | ||
| + | anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and | ||
| + | hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be | ||
| + | better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another | ||
| + | continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare | ||
| + | indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling | ||
| + | at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a | ||
| + | pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go | ||
| + | inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere | ||
| + | reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the | ||
| + | imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In | ||
| + | other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to | ||
| + | Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | in these pages that when we < | ||
| + | whole thing from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is | ||
| + | traditionally said about it inside. It is exactly when the boy gets far | ||
| + | enough off to see the giant that he sees that he really is a giant. It | ||
| + | is exactly when we do at last see the Christian Church afar under those | ||
| + | clear and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church | ||
| + | of Christ. To put it shortly, the moment we are really impartial about | ||
| + | it we know why people are partial to it. But this second proposition | ||
| + | requires more serious discussion; and I shall here set myself to discuss | ||
| + | it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something solid | ||
| + | in the solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck me | ||
| + | that there was exactly the same strange and yet solid character in the | ||
| + | human story that had led up to it; because that human story also had a | ||
| + | root that was divine. I mean that just as the Church seems to grow more | ||
| + | remarkable when it is fairly compared with the common religious life of | ||
| + | mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable when we compare | ||
| + | it with the common life of nature. And I have noticed that most modern | ||
| + | history is driven to something like sophistry, first to soften the sharp | ||
| + | transition from animals to men, and then to soften the sharp transition | ||
| + | from heathens to Christians. Now the more we really read in a realistic | ||
| + | spirit of those two transitions the sharper we shall find them to be. It | ||
| + | is because the critics are < | ||
| + | detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry light | ||
| + | that they cannot see the difference between black and white. It is | ||
| + | because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt that they | ||
| + | have a motive for making out that all the white is dirty grey and the | ||
| + | black not so black as it is painted. I do not say there< | ||
| + | excuses for their revolt; I do not say it is not in some ways | ||
| + | sympathetic; | ||
| + | iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but | ||
| + | an iconoclast is not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend | ||
| + | that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and | ||
| + | professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial. Why | ||
| + | should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world | ||
| + | is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a | ||
| + | divine hope? I do not pretend to be impartial in the sense that the | ||
| + | final act of faith fixes a man’s mind because it satisfies his mind. But | ||
| + | I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than they are; in the | ||
| + | sense that I can tell the story fairly, with some sort of imaginative | ||
| + | justice to all sides; and they cannot. I do profess to be impartial in | ||
| + | the sense that I should be ashamed to talk such nonsense about the Lama | ||
| + | of Thibet as they do about the Pope of Rome, or to have as little | ||
| + | sympathy with Julian the Apostate as they have with the Society of | ||
| + | Jesus. They are not impartial; they never by any chance hold the | ||
| + | historical scales even; and above all they are never impartial upon this | ||
| + | point of evolution and transition. They suggest everywhere the grey | ||
| + | gradations of twilight, because they believe it is the twilight of the | ||
| + | gods. I propose to maintain that whether or no it is the twilight of | ||
| + | gods, it is not the daylight of men.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I maintain that when brought out into the daylight, these two things | ||
| + | look altogether strange and unique; and that it is only in the false | ||
| + | twilight of an imaginary period of transition that they can be made to | ||
| + | look in the least like anything else. The first of these is the creature | ||
| + | called man, and the second is the man called Christ. I have therefore | ||
| + | divided this book into two parts: the former being a sketch of the main | ||
| + | adventure of the human race< | ||
| + | second a summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming | ||
| + | Christian. Both motives necessitate a certain method, a method which is | ||
| + | not very easy to manage, and perhaps even less easy to define or defend.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In order to strike, in the only sane or possible sense, the note of | ||
| + | impartiality, | ||
| + | in one sense we see things fairly when we see them first. That, I may | ||
| + | remark in passing, is why children generally have very little difficulty | ||
| + | about the dogmas of the Church. But the Church, being a highly practical | ||
| + | thing for working and fighting, is necessarily a thing for men and not | ||
| + | merely for children. There must be in it for working purposes a great | ||
| + | deal of tradition, of familiarity, | ||
| + | fundamentals are sincerely felt, this may even be the saner condition. | ||
| + | But when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to | ||
| + | recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and | ||
| + | objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at least | ||
| + | to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only | ||
| + | by seeing it as unnatural. Things that may well be familiar so long as | ||
| + | familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when | ||
| + | familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as | ||
| + | are here considered, whatever our view of them, contempt must be a | ||
| + | mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most | ||
| + | wild and soaring sort of imagination; | ||
| + | is there.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | of almost anything, that has been considered beautiful or wonderful. | ||
| + | George Wyndham once told me that he had seen one of the first aeroplanes | ||
| + | rise for the first time, and it was very wonderful; but not so wonderful | ||
| + | as a horse< | ||
| + | fine man on a fine horse is the noblest bodily object in the world. Now, | ||
| + | so long as people feel this in the right way, all is well. The first and | ||
| + | best way of appreciating it is to come of people with a tradition of | ||
| + | treating animals properly; of men in the right relation to horses. A boy | ||
| + | who remembers his father who rode a horse, who rode it well and treated | ||
| + | it well, will know that the relation can be satisfactory and will be | ||
| + | satisfied. He will be all the more indignant at the ill-treatment of | ||
| + | horses because he knows how they ought to be treated; but he will see | ||
| + | nothing but what is normal in a man riding on a horse. He will not | ||
| + | listen to the great modern philosopher who explains to him that the | ||
| + | horse ought to be riding on the man. He will not pursue the pessimist | ||
| + | fancy of Swift and say that men must be despised as monkeys, and horses | ||
| + | worshipped as gods. And horse and man together making an image that is | ||
| + | to him human and civilised, it will be easy, as it were, to lift horse | ||
| + | and man together into something heroic or symbolical; like a vision of | ||
| + | St. George in the clouds. The fable of the winged horse will not be | ||
| + | wholly unnatural to him: and he will know why Ariosto set many a | ||
| + | Christian hero in such an airy saddle, and made him the rider of the | ||
| + | sky. For the horse has really been lifted up along with the man in the | ||
| + | wildest fashion in the very word we use when we speak of ‘chivalry.’ The | ||
| + | very name of the horse has been given to the highest mood and moment of | ||
| + | the man; so that we might almost say that the handsomest compliment to a | ||
| + | man is to call him a horse.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | sort of wonder, then his cure must begin right at the other end. We must | ||
| + | now suppose that he has drifted into a dull mood, in which somebody | ||
| + | sitting on a horse means no more than somebody sitting on a chair. The | ||
| + | wonder of<span class=" | ||
| + | equestrian statue, the meaning of the more chivalric horseman, may have | ||
| + | become to him merely a convention and a bore. Perhaps they have been | ||
| + | merely a fashion; perhaps they have gone out of fashion; perhaps they | ||
| + | have been talked about too much or talked about in the wrong way; | ||
| + | perhaps it was then difficult to care for horses without the horrible | ||
| + | risk of being horsy. Anyhow, he has got into a condition when he cares | ||
| + | no more for a horse than for a towel-horse. His grandfather’s charge at | ||
| + | Balaclava seems to him as dull and dusty as the album containing such | ||
| + | family portraits. Such a person has not really become enlightened about | ||
| + | the album; on the contrary, he has only become blind with the dust. But | ||
| + | when he has reached < | ||
| + | look at a horse or a horseman at all until he has seen the whole thing | ||
| + | as a thing entirely unfamiliar and almost unearthly.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | us, with lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of the | ||
| + | prehistoric creatures. We must see for the first time the strangely | ||
| + | small head set on a neck not only longer but thicker than itself, as the | ||
| + | face of a gargoyle is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, | ||
| + | disproportionate crest of hair running along the ridge of that heavy | ||
| + | neck like a beard in the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid club | ||
| + | of horn, alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the true fear is | ||
| + | to be found in showing not the cloven but the uncloven hoof. Nor is it | ||
| + | mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster; for in a sense a | ||
| + | monster means what is unique, and he is really unique. But the point is | ||
| + | that when we thus see him as the first man saw him, we begin once more | ||
| + | to have some imaginative sense of what it meant when the first man rode | ||
| + | him. In such a dream he may seem ugly, but he does< | ||
| + | unimpressive; | ||
| + | of him will not seem unimpressive. By a longer and more erratic road we | ||
| + | shall come back to the same marvel of the man and the horse; and the | ||
| + | marvel will be, if possible, even more marvellous. We shall have again a | ||
| + | glimpse of St. George; the more glorious because St. George is not | ||
| + | riding on the horse, but rather riding on the dragon.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In this example, which I have taken merely because it is an example, it | ||
| + | will be noted that I do not say that the nightmare seen by the first man | ||
| + | of the forest is either more true or more wonderful than the normal mare | ||
| + | of the stable seen by the civilised person who can appreciate what is | ||
| + | normal. Of the two extremes, I think on the whole that the traditional | ||
| + | grasp of truth is the better. But I say that the truth is found at one | ||
| + | or other of these two extremes, and is lost in the intermediate | ||
| + | condition of mere fatigue and forgetfulness of tradition. In other | ||
| + | words, I say it is better to see a horse as a monster than to see it | ||
| + | only as a slow substitute for a motor-car. If we have got into < | ||
| + | state of mind about a horse as something stale, it is far better to be | ||
| + | frightened of a horse because it is a good deal too fresh.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | monster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my | ||
| + | opinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my | ||
| + | philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature | ||
| + | will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, and | ||
| + | will be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get | ||
| + | it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a | ||
| + | strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as | ||
| + | seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and | ||
| + | not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the < | ||
| + | detached consideration of the<span class=" | ||
| + | and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In | ||
| + | other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is | ||
| + | that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how | ||
| + | queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In short, it is the purpose of this introduction to maintain this | ||
| + | thesis: that it is exactly when we do regard man as an animal that we | ||
| + | know he is not an animal. It is precisely when we do try to picture him | ||
| + | as a sort of horse on its hind legs that we suddenly realise that he | ||
| + | must be something as miraculous as the winged horse that towered up into | ||
| + | the clouds of heaven. All roads lead to Rome, all ways lead round again | ||
| + | to the central and civilised philosophy, including this road through | ||
| + | elfland and topsyturvydom. But it may be that it is better never to have | ||
| + | left the land of a reasonable tradition, where men ride lightly upon | ||
| + | horses and are mighty hunters before the Lord.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>So also in the specially Christian case we have to react against the | ||
| + | heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, | ||
| + | because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that | ||
| + | familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the | ||
| + | supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call | ||
| + | him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed | ||
| + | nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of | ||
| + | Chinese pottery instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic | ||
| + | paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity | ||
| + | of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of | ||
| + | substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious | ||
| + | exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an | ||
| + | invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the | ||
| + | Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons | ||
| + | and save the wicked from being< | ||
| + | We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which | ||
| + | perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying | ||
| + | imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, | ||
| + | which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know; we | ||
| + | believe every common Indian conjurer who chooses to come to us and talk | ||
| + | in the same style. If Christianity were only a new oriental fashion, it | ||
| + | would never be reproached with being an old and oriental faith. I do not | ||
| + | propose in this book to follow the alleged example of St. Francis Xavier | ||
| + | with the opposite imaginative intention, and turn the Twelve Apostles | ||
| + | into Mandarins; not so much to make them look like natives as to make | ||
| + | them look like foreigners. I do not propose to work what I believe would | ||
| + | be a completely successful practical joke; that of telling the whole | ||
| + | story of the Gospel and the whole history of the Church in a setting of | ||
| + | pagodas and pigtails; and noting with malignant humour how much it was | ||
| + | admired as a heathen story in the very quarters where it is condemned as | ||
| + | a Christian story. But I do propose to strike wherever possible this | ||
| + | note of what is new and strange, and for that reason the style even on | ||
| + | so serious a subject may sometimes be deliberately grotesque and | ||
| + | fanciful. I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the | ||
| + | outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of | ||
| + | other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole | ||
| + | against the background of natural things. And I say that in both cases, | ||
| + | when seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural | ||
| + | things. They do not fade into the rest with the colours of | ||
| + | impressionism; | ||
| + | heraldry; as vivid as a red cross on a white shield or a black lion on a | ||
| + | ground of gold. So stands the Red Clay against the green field of | ||
| + | nature, or the White Christ against the red clay of his race.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | to see how they developed as well as how they began; for the most | ||
| + | incredible part of the story is that things which began thus should have | ||
| + | developed thus. Any one who chooses to indulge in mere imagination can | ||
| + | imagine that other things might have happened or other entities evolved. | ||
| + | Any one thinking of what might have happened may conceive a sort of | ||
| + | evolutionary equality; but any one facing what did happen must face an | ||
| + | exception and a prodigy. If there was ever a moment when man was only an | ||
| + | animal, we can if we choose make a fancy picture of his career | ||
| + | transferred to some other animal. An entertaining fantasia might be made | ||
| + | in which elephants built in elephantine architecture, | ||
| + | turrets like tusks and trunks, cities beyond the scale of any colossus. | ||
| + | A pleasant fable might be conceived in which a cow had developed a | ||
| + | costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers. We could | ||
| + | imagine a Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman, a quadrumanous | ||
| + | creature carving and painting with his hands and cooking and | ||
| + | carpentering with his feet. But if we are considering what did happen, | ||
| + | we shall certainly decide that man has distanced everything else with a | ||
| + | distance like that of the astronomical spaces and a speed like that of | ||
| + | the still thunderbolt of the light. And in the same fashion, while we | ||
| + | can if we choose see the Church amid a mob of Mithraic or Manichean | ||
| + | superstitions squabbling and killing each other at the end of the | ||
| + | Empire, while we can if we choose imagine the Church killed in the | ||
| + | struggle and some other chance cult taking its place, we shall be the | ||
| + | more surprised (and possibly puzzled) if we meet it two thousand years | ||
| + | afterwards rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought | ||
| + | and everlasting enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance; | ||
| + | still as new as it is old.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | ON THE CREATURE CALLED MAN</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE MAN IN THE CAVE</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | is a small star, which astronomers may some day discover. At least I | ||
| + | could never observe in the faces or demeanour of most astronomers or men | ||
| + | of science any evidence that they had discovered it; though as a matter | ||
| + | of fact they were walking about on it all the time. It is a star that | ||
| + | brings forth out of itself very strange plants and very strange animals; | ||
| + | and none stranger than the men of science. That at least is the way in | ||
| + | which I should begin a history of the world if I had to follow the | ||
| + | scientific custom of beginning with an account of the astronomical | ||
| + | universe. I should try to see even this earth from the outside, not by | ||
| + | the hackneyed insistence of its relative position to the sun, but by | ||
| + | some imaginative effort to conceive its remote position for the | ||
| + | dehumanised spectator. Only I do not believe in being dehumanised in | ||
| + | order to study humanity. I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances | ||
| + | that are supposed to dwarf the world; I think there is even something a | ||
| + | trifle vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size. And as | ||
| + | the first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange | ||
| + | planet so as to make it significant, | ||
| + | of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant. I would | ||
| + | rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet at all, in | ||
| + | the sense in which we know that it is a place; and a very extraordinary | ||
| + | place too. That is the note which I wish to strike from the first, if | ||
| + | not<span class=" | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of | ||
| + | the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more | ||
| + | interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant | ||
| + | Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the | ||
| + | ground that it was blasphemous; | ||
| + | For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to | ||
| + | notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; | ||
| + | it was, when translated into English, ‘I will show you how this | ||
| + | nonsensical notion that there is a God grew up among men.’ My remark was | ||
| + | strictly pious and proper; confessing the divine purpose even in its | ||
| + | most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations. In that hour I | ||
| + | learned many things, including the fact that there is something purely | ||
| + | acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not | ||
| + | seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at | ||
| + | the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comment the | ||
| + | short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have | ||
| + | noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a | ||
| + | word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like | ||
| + | pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God | ||
| + | does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of | ||
| + | the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word | ||
| + | like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the | ||
| + | editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long | ||
| + | title and he was rather a busy man.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | parable. Most modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution, | ||
| + | and with a<span class=" | ||
| + | reason that operated in this case. There is something slow and soothing | ||
| + | and gradual about the word and even about the idea. As a matter of fact, | ||
| + | it is not, touching these primary things, a very practical word or a | ||
| + | very profitable idea. Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into | ||
| + | something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how | ||
| + | something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical | ||
| + | to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even | ||
| + | if you only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power began some | ||
| + | unthinkable process.’ For God is by its nature a name of mystery, and | ||
| + | nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any | ||
| + | more than he could create one. But evolution really is mistaken for | ||
| + | explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the | ||
| + | impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many | ||
| + | of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read the < | ||
| + | Species</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | slope, is a great part of the illusion. It is an illogicality as well as | ||
| + | an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with the question. An | ||
| + | event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible | ||
| + | because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in | ||
| + | a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. | ||
| + | The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the | ||
| + | wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little | ||
| + | more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly | ||
| + | tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and | ||
| + | uncanny. The medieval wizard may have flown through the air from the top | ||
| + | of a tower; but to see an old gentleman walking through the air, in a | ||
| + | leisurely and lounging manner, would still seem to call for some | ||
| + | explanation.< | ||
| + | history this curious and confused idea that difficulty is avoided, or | ||
| + | even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere delay or on something | ||
| + | dilatory in the processes of things. There will be something to be said | ||
| + | upon particular examples elsewhere; the question here is the false | ||
| + | atmosphere of facility and ease given by the mere suggestion of going | ||
| + | slow; the sort of comfort that might be given to a nervous old woman | ||
| + | travelling for the first time in a motor-car.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | was a prophet at his own expense. It is curious that his first | ||
| + | fairy-tale was a complete answer to his last book of history. The Time | ||
| + | Machine destroyed in advance all comfortable conclusions founded on the | ||
| + | mere relativity of time. In that sublime nightmare the hero saw trees | ||
| + | shoot up like green rockets, and vegetation spread visibly like a green | ||
| + | conflagration, | ||
| + | the swiftness of a meteor. Yet in his sense these things were quite as | ||
| + | natural when they went swiftly; and in our sense they are quite as | ||
| + | supernatural when they go slowly. The ultimate question is why they go | ||
| + | at all; and anybody who really understands that question will know that | ||
| + | it always has been and always will be a religious question; or at any | ||
| + | rate a philosophical or metaphysical question. And most certainly he | ||
| + | will not think the question answered by some substitution of gradual for | ||
| + | abrupt change; or, in other words, by a merely relative question of the | ||
| + | same story being spun out or rattled rapidly through, as can be done | ||
| + | with any story at a cinema by turning a handle.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | something more like a primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the | ||
| + | first things, I would ask the reader to make with me a sort of | ||
| + | experiment in simplicity. And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but | ||
| + | rather the sort of clarity that sees< | ||
| + | like evolution. For this purpose it would really be better to turn the | ||
| + | handle of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the grass | ||
| + | growing and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment | ||
| + | could contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole | ||
| + | affair. What we know, in a sense in which we know nothing else, is that | ||
| + | the trees and the grass did grow and that a number of other | ||
| + | extraordinary things do in fact happen; that queer creatures support | ||
| + | themselves in the empty air by beating it with fans of various fantastic | ||
| + | shapes; that other queer creatures steer themselves about alive under a | ||
| + | load of mighty waters; that other queer creatures walk about on four | ||
| + | legs, and that the queerest creature of all walks about on two. These | ||
| + | are things and not theories; and compared with them evolution and the | ||
| + | atom and even the solar system are merely theories. The matter here is | ||
| + | one of history and not of philosophy; so that it need only be noted that | ||
| + | no philosopher denies that a mystery still attaches to the two great | ||
| + | transitions: | ||
| + | principle of life itself. Most philosophers have the enlightenment to | ||
| + | add that a third mystery attaches to the origin of man himself. In other | ||
| + | words, a third bridge was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable | ||
| + | when there came into the world what we call reason and what we call | ||
| + | will. Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution. That he | ||
| + | has a backbone or other parts upon a similar pattern to birds and fishes | ||
| + | is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning of the fact. But if we | ||
| + | attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing on his hind | ||
| + | legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic and subversive than | ||
| + | if he were standing on his head.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I will take one example to serve for an introduction to the story of | ||
| + | man. It illustrates what I mean by saying that a certain childish | ||
| + | directness is needed to<span class=" | ||
| + | It illustrates what I mean by saying that a mixture of popular science | ||
| + | and journalistic jargon has confused the facts about the first things, | ||
| + | so that we cannot see which of them really comes first. It illustrates, | ||
| + | though only in one convenient illustration, | ||
| + | necessity of seeing the sharp differences that give its shape to | ||
| + | history, instead of being submerged in all these generalisations about | ||
| + | slowness and sameness. For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells’s phrase, | ||
| + | an outline of history. But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini’s | ||
| + | phrase, that this evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd | ||
| + | outline. But, above all, it illustrates what I mean by saying that the | ||
| + | more we really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems | ||
| + | to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a | ||
| + | private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in | ||
| + | psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can | ||
| + | understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or | ||
| + | treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of | ||
| + | the film as ‘rough stuff.’ I have never happened to come upon the | ||
| + | evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or | ||
| + | prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained | ||
| + | elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even | ||
| + | considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or | ||
| + | authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down | ||
| + | before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an | ||
| + | almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to | ||
| + | insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I | ||
| + | repeat that I can never comprehend why,< | ||
| + | the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been | ||
| + | a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than | ||
| + | the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romances of the | ||
| + | hippopotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or | ||
| + | shindy. The cave-man may have been no better than the cave-bear; but the | ||
| + | child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained with any such | ||
| + | bias for spinsterhood. In short, these details of the domestic life of | ||
| + | the cave puzzle me upon either the evolutionary or the static | ||
| + | hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for | ||
| + | them; but unfortunately I have never been able to find it. But the | ||
| + | curious thing is this: that while ten thousand tongues of more or less | ||
| + | scientific or literary gossip seemed to be talking at once about this | ||
| + | unfortunate fellow, under the title of the cave-man, the one connection | ||
| + | in which it is really relevant and sensible to talk about him as the | ||
| + | cave-man has been comparatively neglected. People have used this loose | ||
| + | term in twenty loose ways; but they have never even looked at their own | ||
| + | term for what could really be learned from it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man | ||
| + | except what he did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real | ||
| + | evidence of what he did in the cave. It is little enough, like all the | ||
| + | prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real cave-man and his | ||
| + | cave and not the literary cave-man and his club. And it will be valuable | ||
| + | to our sense of reality to consider quite simply what that real evidence | ||
| + | is, and not to go beyond it. What was found in the cave was not the | ||
| + | club, the horrible gory club notched with the number of women it had | ||
| + | knocked on the head. The cave was not a Bluebeard’s Chamber filled with | ||
| + | the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls | ||
| + | all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs. It was something< | ||
| + | unconnected, | ||
| + | philosophical implications and literary rumours which confuse the whole | ||
| + | question for us. And if we wish to see as it really is this authentic | ||
| + | glimpse of the morning of the world, it will be far better to conceive | ||
| + | even the story of its discovery as some such legend of the land of | ||
| + | morning. It would be far better to tell the tale of what was really | ||
| + | found as simply as the tale of heroes finding the Golden Fleece or the | ||
| + | Gardens of the Hesperides, if we could so escape from a fog of | ||
| + | controversial theories into the clear colours and clean-cut outlines of | ||
| + | such a dawn. The old epic poets at least knew how to tell a story, | ||
| + | possibly a tall story but never a twisted story, never a story tortured | ||
| + | out of its own shape to fit theories and philosophies invented centuries | ||
| + | afterwards. It would be well if modern investigators could describe | ||
| + | their discoveries in the bald narrative style of the earliest | ||
| + | travellers, and without any of these long allusive words that are full | ||
| + | of irrelevant implication and suggestion. Then we might realise exactly | ||
| + | what we do know about the cave-man, or at any rate about the cave.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>A priest and a boy entered some time ago a hollow in the hills and | ||
| + | passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of | ||
| + | such sealed and secret corridors of rock. They crawled through cracks | ||
| + | that seemed almost impassable, they crept through tunnels that might | ||
| + | have been made for moles, they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells, | ||
| + | they seemed to be burying themselves alive seven times over beyond the | ||
| + | hope of resurrection. This is but the commonplace of all such courageous | ||
| + | exploration; | ||
| + | stories in the primary light, in which they are not commonplace. There | ||
| + | is, for instance, something strangely symbolic in the accident that the | ||
| + | first intruders into that sunken world were a priest and a boy, the | ||
| + | types of the antiquity and of the<span class=" | ||
| + | even more concerned with the symbolism of the boy than with that of the | ||
| + | priest. Nobody who remembers boyhood needs to be told what it might be | ||
| + | to a boy to enter like Peter Pan under a roof of the roots of all the | ||
| + | trees and go deeper and deeper, till he reach what William Morris called | ||
| + | the very roots of the mountains. Suppose somebody, with that simple and | ||
| + | unspoilt realism that is a part of innocence, to pursue that journey to | ||
| + | its end, not for the sake of what he could deduce or demonstrate in some | ||
| + | dusty magazine controversy, | ||
| + | see. What he did see at last was a cavern so far from the light of day | ||
| + | that it might have been the legendary Domdaniel cavern that was under | ||
| + | the floor of the sea. This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated | ||
| + | after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and | ||
| + | sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they | ||
| + | followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of | ||
| + | ages, the movement and the gesture of a man’s hand. They were drawings | ||
| + | or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a | ||
| + | man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, | ||
| + | that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man | ||
| + | who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no | ||
| + | artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They | ||
| + | showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit | ||
| + | that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the | ||
| + | draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his | ||
| + | head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough | ||
| + | in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set | ||
| + | themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty | ||
| + | other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a | ||
| + | certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure.< | ||
| + | would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of | ||
| + | naturalist who is really natural.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and | ||
| + | pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds, that | ||
| + | blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning the | ||
| + | cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces | ||
| + | of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is | ||
| + | certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction | ||
| + | invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and | ||
| + | psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive | ||
| + | him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the | ||
| + | realist of the sex novel writes, ‘Red sparks danced in Dagmar | ||
| + | Doubledick’s brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within | ||
| + | him,’ the novelist’s readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar | ||
| + | only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. | ||
| + | When the psychoanalyst writes to a patient, ‘The submerged instincts of | ||
| + | the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,’ | ||
| + | he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; | ||
| + | conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. | ||
| + | Yet we do know for a fact that the cave-man did these mild and innocent | ||
| + | things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did | ||
| + | any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words, the cave-man as | ||
| + | commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth | ||
| + | has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current | ||
| + | way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, | ||
| + | no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very | ||
| + | modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, | ||
| + | he can<span class=" | ||
| + | cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather | ||
| + | from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | here to be drawn from them. That moral is something much larger and | ||
| + | simpler, so large and simple that when it is first stated it will sound | ||
| + | childish. And indeed it is in the highest sense childish; and that is | ||
| + | why I have in this apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a | ||
| + | child. It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy in the | ||
| + | cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen. If the boy was one of the | ||
| + | flock of the priest, it may be presumed that he had been trained in a | ||
| + | certain quality of common sense; that common sense that often comes to | ||
| + | us in the form of tradition. In that case he would simply recognise the | ||
| + | primitive man’s work as the work of a man, interesting but in no way | ||
| + | incredible in being primitive. He would see what was there to see; and | ||
| + | he would not be tempted into seeing what was not there, by any | ||
| + | evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation. If he had heard of | ||
| + | such things he would admit, of course, that the speculations might be | ||
| + | true and were not incompatible with the facts that were true. The artist | ||
| + | may have had another side to his character besides that which he has | ||
| + | alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have | ||
| + | taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we | ||
| + | can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be | ||
| + | true that when the cave-man’s finished jumping on his mother, or his | ||
| + | wife as the case may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, | ||
| + | and also to watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook. | ||
| + | These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common | ||
| + | sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what | ||
| + | the facts have to teach; and the<span class=" | ||
| + | all the facts there are. So far as that evidence goes, the child would | ||
| + | be justified in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock | ||
| + | and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of | ||
| + | trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had | ||
| + | drawn a stag just as the child had drawn a horse; because it was fun. | ||
| + | The man had drawn a stag with his head turned as the child had drawn a | ||
| + | pig with his eyes shut; because it was difficult. The child and the man, | ||
| + | being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men; and the | ||
| + | brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than | ||
| + | when it bridges only the chasm of class. But anyhow he would see no | ||
| + | evidence of the cave-man of crude evolutionism; | ||
| + | be seen. If somebody told him that the pictures had all been drawn by | ||
| + | St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals, there | ||
| + | would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | was a crèche, in which the babies were put to be specially safe, and | ||
| + | that coloured animals were drawn on the walls to amuse them; very much | ||
| + | as diagrams of elephants and giraffes adorn a modern infant school. And | ||
| + | though this was but a jest, it does draw attention to some of the other | ||
| + | assumptions that we make only too readily. The pictures do not prove | ||
| + | even that the cave-men lived in caves, any more than the discovery of a | ||
| + | wine-cellar in Balham (long after that suburb had been destroyed by | ||
| + | human or divine wrath) would prove that the Victorian middle classes | ||
| + | lived entirely underground. The cave might have had a special purpose | ||
| + | like the cellar; it might have been a religious shrine or a refuge in | ||
| + | war or the meeting-place of a secret society or all sorts of things. But | ||
| + | it is quite true that its artistic decoration has much more of the | ||
| + | atmosphere of a nursery than of any of these night< | ||
| + | fury and fear. I have conceived a child as standing in the cave; and it | ||
| + | is easy to conceive any child, modern or immeasurably remote, as making | ||
| + | a living gesture as if to pat the painted beasts upon the wall. In that | ||
| + | gesture there is a foreshadowing, | ||
| + | cavern and another child.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | by one of the professors who simplify the relation of men and beasts to | ||
| + | a mere evolutionary variation. Suppose the boy saw himself, with the | ||
| + | same simplicity and sincerity, as a mere Mowgli running with the pack of | ||
| + | nature and roughly indistinguishable from the rest save by a relative | ||
| + | and recent variation. What would be for him the simplest lesson of that | ||
| + | strange stone picture-book? | ||
| + | he had dug very deep and found the place where a man had drawn a picture | ||
| + | of a reindeer. But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a | ||
| + | place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man. That sounds like a | ||
| + | truism, but in this connection it is really a very tremendous truth. He | ||
| + | might descend to depths unthinkable, | ||
| + | continents as strange as remote stars, he might find himself in the | ||
| + | inside of the world as far from men as the other side of the moon; he | ||
| + | might see in those cold chasms or colossal terraces of stone, traced in | ||
| + | the faint hieroglyphic of the fossil, the ruins of lost dynasties of | ||
| + | biological life, rather like the ruins of successive creations and | ||
| + | separate universes than the stages in the story of one. He would find | ||
| + | the trail of monsters blindly developing in directions outside all our | ||
| + | common imagery of fish and bird; groping and grasping and touching life | ||
| + | with every extravagant elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle; | ||
| + | growing a forest of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and | ||
| + | the finger. But nowhere would he find one finger that had traced one | ||
| + | significant line upon the<span class=" | ||
| + | scratch the faint suggestion of a form. To all appearance, the thing | ||
| + | would be as unthinkable in all those countless cosmic variations of | ||
| + | forgotten aeons as it would be in the beasts and birds before our eyes. | ||
| + | The child would no more expect to see it than to see the cat scratch on | ||
| + | the wall a vindictive caricature of the dog. The childish common sense | ||
| + | would keep the most evolutionary child from expecting to see anything | ||
| + | like that; yet in the traces of the rude and recently evolved ancestors | ||
| + | of humanity he would have seen exactly that. It must surely strike him | ||
| + | as strange that men so remote from him should be so near, and that | ||
| + | beasts so near to him should be so remote. To his simplicity it must | ||
| + | seem at least odd that he could not find any trace of the beginning of | ||
| + | any arts among any animals. That is the simplest lesson to learn in the | ||
| + | cavern of the coloured pictures; only it is too simple to be learnt. It | ||
| + | is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not | ||
| + | in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to | ||
| + | say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey, and that it | ||
| + | sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a | ||
| + | picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; | ||
| + | and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | ought really to begin. The evolutionist stands staring in the painted | ||
| + | cavern at the things that are too large to be seen and too simple to be | ||
| + | understood. He tries to deduce all sorts of other indirect and doubtful | ||
| + | things from the details of the pictures, because he cannot see the | ||
| + | primary significance of the whole; thin and theoretical deductions about | ||
| + | the absence of religion or the presence of superstition; | ||
| + | government and hunting and human sacrifice and heaven knows what. In the | ||
| + | next chapter I shall try to trace in a little more detail< | ||
| + | disputed question about these prehistoric origins of human ideas and | ||
| + | especially of the religious idea. Here I am only taking this one case of | ||
| + | the cave as a sort of symbol of the simpler sort of truth with which the | ||
| + | story ought to start. When all is said, the main fact that the record of | ||
| + | the reindeer men attests, along with all other records, is that the | ||
| + | reindeer man could draw and the reindeer could not. If the reindeer man | ||
| + | was as much an animal as the reindeer, it was all the more extraordinary | ||
| + | that he could do what all other animals could not. If he was an ordinary | ||
| + | product of biological growth, like any other beast or bird, then it is | ||
| + | all the more extraordinary that he was not in the least like any other | ||
| + | beast or bird. He seems rather more supernatural as a natural product | ||
| + | than as a supernatural one.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | speculations of Plato, because it is a sort of model of the mistake of | ||
| + | merely evolutionary introductions and prefaces. It is useless to begin | ||
| + | by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere matter of | ||
| + | development and degree. For in a plain matter like the pictures there is | ||
| + | in fact not a trace of any such development or degree. Monkeys did not | ||
| + | begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a | ||
| + | reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well. The higher animals did not | ||
| + | draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his | ||
| + | best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was | ||
| + | not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can | ||
| + | say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative | ||
| + | shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we | ||
| + | cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate | ||
| + | from nature. In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with | ||
| + | man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. How he came there, or | ||
| + | indeed how anything else came there,< | ||
| + | philosophers and scientists and not for historians. But an excellent | ||
| + | test case of this isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of | ||
| + | art. This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because | ||
| + | he was a creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be | ||
| + | made in any other image but the image of man. But the truth is so true | ||
| + | that, even in the absence of any religious belief, it must be assumed in | ||
| + | the form of some moral or metaphysical principle. In the next chapter we | ||
| + | shall see how this principle applies to all the historical hypotheses | ||
| + | and evolutionary ethics now in fashion; to the origins of tribal | ||
| + | government or mythological belief. But the clearest and most convenient | ||
| + | example to start with is this popular one of what the cave-man really | ||
| + | did in his cave. It means that somehow or other a new thing had appeared | ||
| + | in the cavernous night of nature; a mind that is like a mirror. It is | ||
| + | like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It is like a | ||
| + | mirror because in it alone all the other shapes can be seen like shining | ||
| + | shadows in a vision. Above all, it is like a mirror because it is the | ||
| + | only thing of its kind. Other things may resemble it or resemble each | ||
| + | other in various ways; other things may excel it or excel each other in | ||
| + | various ways; just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round | ||
| + | like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror. But the mirror | ||
| + | is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is the microcosm; man | ||
| + | is the measure of all things; man is the image of God. These are the | ||
| + | only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it | ||
| + | for the open road.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for all what | ||
| + | is meant by saying that man is at once the exception to everything and | ||
| + | the mirror and the measure of all things. But to see man as he is, it is | ||
| + | necessary once more to keep close to that simplicity that can clear | ||
| + | itself of accumulated clouds< | ||
| + | is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a | ||
| + | stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external | ||
| + | appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere | ||
| + | growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair | ||
| + | disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own | ||
| + | instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers | ||
| + | and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called | ||
| + | clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind | ||
| + | has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone | ||
| + | among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called | ||
| + | laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of | ||
| + | the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he | ||
| + | feels the need of averting his thoughts from the root realities of his | ||
| + | own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher | ||
| + | possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these | ||
| + | things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they | ||
| + | remain in the same sense unique. This is realised by the whole popular | ||
| + | instinct called religion, until disturbed by pedants, especially the | ||
| + | laborious pedants of the Simple Life. The most sophistical of all | ||
| + | sophists are Gymnosophists.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common | ||
| + | sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is | ||
| + | not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins | ||
| + | against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is | ||
| + | the principle of all reality. It is reached by stretching a point, by | ||
| + | making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain light and shade, | ||
| + | by bringing into prominence the lesser or lower things which may happen | ||
| + | to be similar. The solid thing standing in the sunlight, the thing we | ||
| + | can walk round< | ||
| + | quite extraordinary; | ||
| + | extraordinary it seems. It is emphatically not a thing that follows or | ||
| + | flows naturally from anything else. If we imagine that an inhuman or | ||
| + | impersonal intelligence could have felt from the first the general | ||
| + | nature of the non-human world sufficiently to see that things would | ||
| + | evolve in whatever way they did evolve, there would have been nothing | ||
| + | whatever in all that natural world to prepare such a mind for such an | ||
| + | unnatural novelty. To such a mind, man would most certainly not have | ||
| + | seemed something like one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer | ||
| + | pasture; or one swallow out of a hundred swallows making a summer under | ||
| + | a strange sky. It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the | ||
| + | same dimension. We might as truly say that it would not be in the same | ||
| + | universe. It would be more like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows | ||
| + | suddenly jump over the moon or one pig out of a hundred pigs grow wings | ||
| + | in a flash and fly. It would not be a question of the cattle finding | ||
| + | their own grazing-ground but of their building their own cattle-sheds, | ||
| + | not a question of one swallow making a summer but of his making a | ||
| + | summer-house. For the very fact that birds do build nests is one of | ||
| + | those similarities that sharpen the startling difference. The very fact | ||
| + | that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get any | ||
| + | farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind; it proves it | ||
| + | more completely than if he built nothing at all. If he built nothing at | ||
| + | all, he might possibly be a philosopher of the Quietist or Buddhistic | ||
| + | school, indifferent to all but the mind within. But when he builds as he | ||
| + | does build and is satisfied and sings aloud with satisfaction, | ||
| + | know there is really an invisible veil like a pane of glass between him | ||
| + | and us, like the window on which a bird will beat in vain. But suppose | ||
| + | our abstract onlooker saw one of the birds< | ||
| + | Suppose in an incredibly short space of time there were seven styles of | ||
| + | architecture for one style of nest. Suppose the bird carefully selected | ||
| + | forked twigs and pointed leaves to express the piercing piety of Gothic, | ||
| + | but turned to broad foliage and black mud when he sought in a darker | ||
| + | mood to call up the heavy columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest | ||
| + | indeed one of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Suppose the bird made | ||
| + | little clay statues of birds celebrated in letters or politics and stuck | ||
| + | them up in front of the nest. Suppose that one bird out of a thousand | ||
| + | birds began to do one of the thousand things that man had already done | ||
| + | even in the morning of the world; and we can be quite certain that the | ||
| + | onlooker would not regard such a bird as a mere evolutionary variety of | ||
| + | the other birds; he would regard it as a very fearful wild-fowl indeed; | ||
| + | possibly as a bird of ill-omen, certainly as an omen. That bird would | ||
| + | tell the augurs, not of something that would happen, but of something | ||
| + | that had happened. That something would be the appearance of a mind with | ||
| + | a new dimension of depth; a mind like that of man. If there be no God, | ||
| + | no other mind could conceivably have foreseen it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | thing was evolved at all. There is not a particle of proof that < | ||
| + | transition came slowly, or even that it came naturally. In a strictly | ||
| + | scientific sense, we simply know nothing whatever about how it grew, or | ||
| + | whether it grew, or what it is. There may be a broken trail of stones | ||
| + | and bones faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is | ||
| + | nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. | ||
| + | It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity | ||
| + | of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a | ||
| + | transaction outside time. It has therefore nothing to do with history in | ||
| + | the<span class=" | ||
| + | granted; it is not his business as a historian to explain it. But if he | ||
| + | cannot explain it as a historian, he will not explain it as a biologist. | ||
| + | In neither case is there any disgrace to him in accepting it without | ||
| + | explaining it; for it is a reality, and history and biology deal with | ||
| + | realities. He is quite justified in calmly confronting the pig with | ||
| + | wings and the cow that jumped over the moon, merely because they have | ||
| + | happened. He can reasonably accept man as a freak, because he accepts | ||
| + | man as a fact. He can be perfectly comfortable in a crazy and | ||
| + | disconnected world, or in a world that can produce such a crazy and | ||
| + | disconnected thing. For reality is a thing in which we can all repose, | ||
| + | even if it hardly seems related to anything else. The thing is there; | ||
| + | and that is enough for most of us. But if we do indeed want to know how | ||
| + | it can conceivably have come there, if we do indeed wish to see it | ||
| + | related realistically to other things, if we do insist on seeing it | ||
| + | evolved before our very eyes from an environment nearer to its own | ||
| + | nature, then assuredly it is to very different things that we must go. | ||
| + | We must stir very strange memories and return to very simple dreams if | ||
| + | we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster. We shall | ||
| + | have discovered very different causes before he becomes a creature of | ||
| + | causation; and invoked other authority to turn him into something | ||
| + | reasonable, or even into anything probable. That way lies all that is at | ||
| + | once awful and familiar and forgotten, with dreadful faces thronged and | ||
| + | fiery arms. We can accept man as a fact, if we are content with an | ||
| + | unexplained fact. We can accept him as an animal, if we can live with a | ||
| + | fabulous animal. But if we must needs have sequence and necessity, then | ||
| + | indeed we must provide a prelude and crescendo of mounting miracles, | ||
| + | that ushered in with unthinkable thunders in all the seven heavens of | ||
| + | another order, a man may be an ordinary thing.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | PROFESSORS AND PREHISTORIC MEN</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | been noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by | ||
| + | incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most | ||
| + | natural discoveries, | ||
| + | it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the | ||
| + | first men make. An inventor can advance step by step in the construction | ||
| + | of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps | ||
| + | of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link | ||
| + | evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his | ||
| + | calculations, | ||
| + | But if he has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, | ||
| + | he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree. He cannot keep | ||
| + | a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he | ||
| + | does really practise cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles | ||
| + | of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a | ||
| + | pack of hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd | ||
| + | instinct. If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he | ||
| + | can get other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds | ||
| + | a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he cannot | ||
| + | multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones. In dealing with a | ||
| + | past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and | ||
| + | not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence< | ||
| + | evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being | ||
| + | constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space | ||
| + | in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming | ||
| + | conclusions, | ||
| + | fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It | ||
| + | talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were | ||
| + | something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole | ||
| + | scrap-heaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the | ||
| + | prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and | ||
| + | triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of | ||
| + | origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department it | ||
| + | would be truer to talk of the impatience of science. Owing to the | ||
| + | difficulty above described, the theorist is in far too much of a hurry. | ||
| + | We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be called | ||
| + | fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts. The most | ||
| + | empirical anthropologist is here as limited as an antiquary. He can only | ||
| + | cling to a fragment of the past and has no way of increasing it for the | ||
| + | future. He can only clutch his fragment of fact, almost as the primitive | ||
| + | man clutched his fragment of flint. And indeed he does deal with it in | ||
| + | much the same way and for much the same reason. It is his tool and his | ||
| + | only tool. It is his weapon and his only weapon. He often wields it with | ||
| + | a fanaticism far in excess of anything shown by men of science when they | ||
| + | can collect more facts from experience and even add new facts by | ||
| + | experiment. Sometimes the professor with his bone becomes almost as | ||
| + | dangerous as a dog with his bone. And the dog at least does not deduce a | ||
| + | theory from it, proving that mankind is going to the dogs& | ||
| + | came from them.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | watching it evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an | ||
| + | evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most | ||
| + | of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough | ||
| + | anyhow. He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and | ||
| + | deduces the most marvellous things from it. He found in Java a part of a | ||
| + | skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere | ||
| + | near it he found an upright thigh-bone, and in the same scattered | ||
| + | fashion some teeth that were not human. If they all form part of one | ||
| + | creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be | ||
| + | almost equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to | ||
| + | produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last | ||
| + | details of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an | ||
| + | ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of | ||
| + | Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him | ||
| + | like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A | ||
| + | detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very | ||
| + | hairs of his head were all numbered. No uninformed person looking at its | ||
| + | carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that | ||
| + | this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment | ||
| + | of a cranium. In the same way people talked about him as if he were an | ||
| + | individual whose influence and character were familiar to us all. I have | ||
| + | just read a story in a magazine about Java, and how modern white | ||
| + | inhabitants of that island are prevailed on to misbehave themselves by | ||
| + | the personal influence of poor old Pithecanthropus. That the modern | ||
| + | inhabitants of Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe; but | ||
| + | I do not imagine that they need any encouragement from the discovery of | ||
| + | a few highly doubtful bones. Anyhow, those bones are far too few and | ||
| + | fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of the vast void that< | ||
| + | in reason and in reality lie between man and his bestial ancestors, if | ||
| + | they were his ancestors. On the assumption of that evolutionary | ||
| + | connection (a connection which I am not in the least concerned to deny), | ||
| + | the really arresting and remarkable fact is the comparative absence of | ||
| + | any such remains recording that connection at that point. The sincerity | ||
| + | of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a | ||
| + | term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too | ||
| + | strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen | ||
| + | into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They | ||
| + | talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if | ||
| + | one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative | ||
| + | or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a < | ||
| + | dining with an undistributed middle.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In this sketch, therefore, of man in his relation to certain religious | ||
| + | and historical problems, I shall waste no further space on these | ||
| + | speculations on the nature of man before he became man. His body may | ||
| + | have been evolved from the brutes; but we know nothing of any such | ||
| + | transition that throws the smallest light upon his soul as it has shown | ||
| + | itself in history. Unfortunately the same school of writers pursue the | ||
| + | same style of reasoning when they come to the first real evidence about | ||
| + | the first real men. Strictly speaking of course we know nothing about | ||
| + | prehistoric man, for the simple reason that he was prehistoric. The | ||
| + | history of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in terms. It | ||
| + | is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists are allowed to | ||
| + | indulge. If a parson had casually observed that the Flood was | ||
| + | antediluvian, | ||
| + | logic. If a bishop were to say that Adam was Preadamite, we might think | ||
| + | it a little odd. But we are not supposed to notice such verbal trifles | ||
| + | when sceptical historians talk of the part of<span class=" | ||
| + | prehistoric. The truth is that they are using the terms historic and | ||
| + | prehistoric without any clear test or definition in their minds. What | ||
| + | they mean is that there are traces of human lives before the beginning | ||
| + | of human stories; and in that sense we do at least know that humanity | ||
| + | was before history.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | stating our relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples | ||
| + | of its other arts earlier than the art of writing; or at least of any | ||
| + | writing that we can read. But it is certain that the primitive arts were | ||
| + | arts; and it is in every way probable that the primitive civilisations | ||
| + | were civilisations. The man left a picture of the reindeer, but he did | ||
| + | not leave a narrative of how he hunted the reindeer; and therefore what | ||
| + | we say of him is hypothesis and not history. But the art he did practise | ||
| + | was quite artistic; his drawing was quite intelligent, | ||
| + | reason to doubt that his story of the hunt would be quite intelligent, | ||
| + | only if it exists it is not intelligible. In short, the prehistoric | ||
| + | period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric | ||
| + | or bestial period. It does not mean the time before civilisation or the | ||
| + | time before arts and crafts. It simply means the time before any | ||
| + | connected narratives that we can read. This does indeed make all the | ||
| + | practical difference between remembrance and forgetfulness; | ||
| + | perfectly possible that there were all sorts of forgotten forms of | ||
| + | civilisation, | ||
| + | in any case everything indicated that many of these forgotten or | ||
| + | half-forgotten social stages were much more civilised and much less | ||
| + | barbaric than is vulgarly imagined to-day. But even about these | ||
| + | unwritten histories of humanity, when humanity was quite certainly | ||
| + | human, we can only conjecture with the greatest doubt and caution. And | ||
| + | unfortunately doubt and caution are the last things commonly encouraged | ||
| + | by the loose evolutionism of current< | ||
| + | of curiosity; and the one thing that it cannot endure is the agony of | ||
| + | agnosticism. It was in the Darwinian age that the word first became | ||
| + | known and the thing first became impossible.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered | ||
| + | by impudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that men | ||
| + | have hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are | ||
| + | without support. The other day a scientific summary of the state of a | ||
| + | prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words ‘They wore no | ||
| + | clothes.’ Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself | ||
| + | how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people | ||
| + | of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It | ||
| + | was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone | ||
| + | hatchet. It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an | ||
| + | everlasting pair of trousers of the same substance as the everlasting | ||
| + | rock. But to persons of a less sanguine temperament it will be | ||
| + | immediately apparent that people might wear simple garments, or even | ||
| + | highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more traces of them than | ||
| + | these people have left. The plaiting of rushes and grasses, for | ||
| + | instance, might have become more and more elaborate without in the least | ||
| + | becoming more eternal. One civilisation might specialise in things that | ||
| + | happened to be perishable, like weaving and embroidering, | ||
| + | things that happen to be more permanent, like architecture and | ||
| + | sculpture. There have been plenty of examples of such specialist | ||
| + | societies. A man of the future finding the ruins of our factory | ||
| + | machinery might as fairly say that we were acquainted with iron and with | ||
| + | no other substance; and announce the discovery that the proprietor and | ||
| + | manager of the factory undoubtedly walked about naked& | ||
| + | iron hats and trousers.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is not contended here that these primitive men did wear clothes any | ||
| + | more than they did weave rushes; but merely that we have not enough | ||
| + | evidence to know whether they did or not. But it may be worth while to | ||
| + | look back for a moment at some of the very few things that we do know | ||
| + | and that they did do. If we consider them, we shall certainly not find | ||
| + | them inconsistent with such ideas as dress and decoration. We do not | ||
| + | know whether they decorated themselves; but we do know that they | ||
| + | decorated other things. We do not know whether they had embroideries, | ||
| + | and if they had, the embroideries could not be expected to have | ||
| + | remained. But we do know that they did have pictures; and the pictures | ||
| + | have remained. And there remains with them, as already suggested, the | ||
| + | testimony to something that is absolute and unique; that belongs to man | ||
| + | and to nothing else except man; that is a difference of kind and not a | ||
| + | difference of degree. A monkey does not draw clumsily and a man | ||
| + | cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of representation and a man | ||
| + | carry it to perfection. A monkey does not do it at all; he does not | ||
| + | begin to do it at all; he does not begin to begin to do it at all. A | ||
| + | line of some kind is crossed before the first faint line can begin.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | attributed to the neolithic men of the reindeer period, said that none | ||
| + | of their pictures appeared to have any religious purpose; and he seemed | ||
| + | almost to infer that they had no religion. I can hardly imagine a | ||
| + | thinner thread of argument than this which reconstructs the very inmost | ||
| + | moods of the prehistoric mind from the fact that somebody who has | ||
| + | scrawled a few sketches on a rock, from what motive we do not know, for | ||
| + | what purpose we do not know, acting under what customs or conventions we | ||
| + | do not know, may possibly have found it easier to draw reindeers than to | ||
| + | draw religion. He may have drawn it because it was his religious symbol. | ||
| + | He<span class=" | ||
| + | have drawn anything except his religious symbol. He may have drawn his | ||
| + | real religious symbol somewhere else; or it may have been deliberately | ||
| + | destroyed when it was drawn. He may have done or not done half a million | ||
| + | things; but in any case it is an amazing leap of logic to infer that he | ||
| + | had no religious symbol, or even to infer from his having no religious | ||
| + | symbol that he had no religion. Now this particular case happens to | ||
| + | illustrate the insecurity of these guesses very clearly. For a little | ||
| + | while afterwards, people discovered not only paintings but sculptures of | ||
| + | animals in the caves. Some of these were said to be damaged with dints | ||
| + | or holes supposed to be the marks of arrows; and the damaged images were | ||
| + | conjectured to be the remains of some magic rite of killing the beasts | ||
| + | in effigy; while the undamaged images were explained in connection with | ||
| + | another magic rite invoking fertility upon the herds. Here again there | ||
| + | is something faintly humorous about the scientific habit of having it | ||
| + | both ways. If the image is damaged it proves one superstition and if it | ||
| + | is undamaged it proves another. Here again there is a rather reckless | ||
| + | jumping to conclusions; | ||
| + | crowd of hunters imprisoned in winter in a cave might conceivably have | ||
| + | aimed at a mark for fun, as a sort of primitive parlour game. But in any | ||
| + | case, if it was done out of superstition, | ||
| + | that it had nothing to do with religion? The truth is that all this | ||
| + | guesswork has nothing to do with anything. It is not half such a good | ||
| + | parlour game as shooting arrows at a carved reindeer, for it is shooting | ||
| + | them into the air.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | modern world also sometimes make marks in caves. When a crowd of | ||
| + | trippers is conducted through the labyrinth of the Marvellous Grotto or | ||
| + | the Magic Stalactite Cavern, it has been observed< | ||
| + | spring into sight where they have passed; initials and inscriptions | ||
| + | which the learned refuse to refer to any remote date. But the time will | ||
| + | come when these inscriptions will really be of remote date. And if the | ||
| + | professors of the future are anything like the professors of the | ||
| + | present, they will be able to deduce a vast number of very vivid and | ||
| + | interesting things from these cave-writings of the twentieth century. If | ||
| + | I know anything about the breed, and if they have not fallen away from | ||
| + | the full-blooded confidence of their fathers, they will be able to | ||
| + | discover the most fascinating facts about us from the initials left in | ||
| + | the Magic Grotto by ’Arry and ’Arriet, possibly in the form of two | ||
| + | intertwined A’s. From this alone they will know (1) That as the letters | ||
| + | are rudely chipped with a blunt pocket-knife, | ||
| + | possessed no delicate graving-tools and was unacquainted with the art of | ||
| + | sculpture. (2) That as the letters are capital letters, our civilisation | ||
| + | never evolved any small letters or anything like a running hand. (3) | ||
| + | That because initial consonants stand together in an unpronounceable | ||
| + | fashion, our language was possibly akin to Welsh or more probably of the | ||
| + | early Semitic type that ignored vowels. (4) That as the initials of | ||
| + | ’Arry and ’Arriet do not in any special fashion profess to be religious | ||
| + | symbols, our civilisation possessed no religion. Perhaps the last is | ||
| + | about the nearest to the truth; for a civilisation that had religion | ||
| + | would have a little more reason.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is commonly affirmed, again, that religion grew in a very slow and | ||
| + | evolutionary manner; and even that it grew not from one cause, but from | ||
| + | a combination that might be called a coincidence. Generally speaking, | ||
| + | the three chief elements in the combination are, first, the fear of the | ||
| + | chief of the tribe (whom Mr. Wells insists on calling, with regrettable | ||
| + | familiarity, | ||
| + | the sacrificial associations of the harvest< | ||
| + | symbolised in the growing corn. I may remark in passing that it seems to | ||
| + | me very doubtful psychology to refer one living and single spirit to | ||
| + | three dead and disconnected causes, if they were merely dead and | ||
| + | disconnected causes. Suppose Mr. Wells, in one of his fascinating novels | ||
| + | of the future, were to tell us that there would arise among men a new | ||
| + | and as yet nameless passion, of which men will dream as they dream of | ||
| + | first love, for which they will die as they die for a flag and a | ||
| + | fatherland. I think we should be a little puzzled if he told us that | ||
| + | this singular sentiment would be a combination of the habit of smoking | ||
| + | Woodbines, the increase of the income tax and the pleasure of a motorist | ||
| + | in exceeding the speed limit. We could not easily imagine this, because | ||
| + | we could not imagine any connection between the three or any common | ||
| + | feeling that could include them all. Nor could any one imagine any | ||
| + | connection between corn and dreams and an old chief with a spear, unless | ||
| + | there was already a common feeling to include them all. But if there was | ||
| + | such a common feeling it could only be the religious feeling; and these | ||
| + | things could not be the beginnings of a religious feeling that existed | ||
| + | already. I think anybody’s common sense will tell him that it is far | ||
| + | more likely that this sort of mystical sentiment did exist already; and | ||
| + | that in the light of it dreams and kings and cornfields could appear | ||
| + | mystical then, as they can appear mystical now.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | distant and dehumanised, | ||
| + | that we do understand. It is like saying that prehistoric men had an | ||
| + | ugly and uncouth habit of opening their mouths wide at intervals and | ||
| + | stuffing strange substances into them, as if we had never heard of | ||
| + | eating. It is like saying that the terrible Troglodytes of the Stone Age | ||
| + | lifted alternate legs in rotation, as if we had never heard of walking. | ||
| + | If it were meant to<span class=" | ||
| + | wonder of walking and eating, it might be a legitimate fancy. As it is | ||
| + | here intended to kill the mystical nerve and deaden us to the wonder of | ||
| + | religion, it is irrational rubbish. It pretends to find something | ||
| + | incomprehensible in the feelings that we all comprehend. Who does < | ||
| + | find dreams mysterious, and feel that they lie on the dark borderland of | ||
| + | being? Who does < | ||
| + | things of the earth as something near to the secret of the universe? Who | ||
| + | does < | ||
| + | sacred about authority and the solidarity that is the soul of the tribe? | ||
| + | If there be any anthropologist who really finds these things remote and | ||
| + | impossible to realise, we can say nothing of that scientific gentleman | ||
| + | except that he has not got so large and enlightened a mind as a | ||
| + | primitive man. To me it seems obvious that nothing but a spiritual | ||
| + | sentiment already active could have clothed these separate and diverse | ||
| + | things with sanctity. To say that religion came < | ||
| + | chief or sacrificing at a harvest is to put a highly elaborate cart | ||
| + | before a really primitive horse. It is like saying that the impulse to | ||
| + | draw pictures came from the contemplation of the pictures of reindeers | ||
| + | in the cave. In other words, it is explaining painting by saying that it | ||
| + | arose out of the work of painters; or accounting for art by saying that | ||
| + | it arose out of art. It is even more like saying that the thing we call | ||
| + | poetry arose as the result of certain customs; such as that of an ode | ||
| + | being officially composed to celebrate the advent of spring; or that of | ||
| + | a young man rising at a regular hour to listen to the skylark and then | ||
| + | writing his report on a piece of paper. It is quite true that young men | ||
| + | often become poets in the spring; and it is quite true that when once | ||
| + | there are poets, no mortal power can restrain them from writing about | ||
| + | the skylark. But the poems did not exist< | ||
| + | did not arise out of the poetic forms. In other words, it is hardly an | ||
| + | adequate explanation of how a thing appeared for the first time to say | ||
| + | it existed already. Similarly, we cannot say that religion arose out of | ||
| + | the religious forms, because that is only another way of saying that it | ||
| + | only arose when it existed already. It needed a certain sort of mind to | ||
| + | see that there was anything mystical about the dreams or the dead, as it | ||
| + | needed a particular sort of mind to see that there was anything poetical | ||
| + | about the skylark or the spring. That mind was presumably what we call | ||
| + | the human mind, very much as it exists to this day; for mystics still | ||
| + | meditate upon death and dreams as poets still write about spring and | ||
| + | skylarks. But there is not the faintest hint to suggest that anything | ||
| + | short of the human mind we know feels any of these mystical associations | ||
| + | at all. A cow in a field seems to derive no lyrical impulse or | ||
| + | instruction from her unrivalled opportunities for listening to the | ||
| + | skylark. And similarly there is no reason to suppose that live sheep | ||
| + | will ever begin to use dead sheep as the basis of a system of elaborate | ||
| + | ancestor-worship. It is true that in the spring a young quadruped’s | ||
| + | fancy may lightly turn to thoughts of love, but no succession of springs | ||
| + | has ever led it to turn however lightly to thoughts of literature. And | ||
| + | in the same way, while it is true that a dog has dreams, while most | ||
| + | other quadrupeds do not seem even to have that, we have waited a long | ||
| + | time for the dog to develop his dreams into an elaborate system of | ||
| + | religious ceremonial. We have waited so long that we have really ceased | ||
| + | to expect it; and we no more look to see a dog apply his dreams to | ||
| + | ecclesiastical construction than to see him examine his dreams by the | ||
| + | rules of psycho-analysis. It is obvious, in short, that for some reason | ||
| + | or other these natural experiences, | ||
| + | do pass the line that separates them from creative expression like art | ||
| + | and religion, in any<span class=" | ||
| + | have, and it is now to all appearance very improbable that they ever | ||
| + | will. It is not impossible, in the sense of self-contradictory, | ||
| + | should see cows fasting from grass every Friday or going on their knees | ||
| + | as in the old legend about Christmas Eve. It is not in that sense | ||
| + | impossible that cows should contemplate death until they can lift up a | ||
| + | sublime psalm of lamentation to the tune the old cow died of. It is not | ||
| + | in that sense impossible that they should express their hopes of a | ||
| + | heavenly career in a symbolical dance, in honour of the cow that jumped | ||
| + | over the moon. It may be that the dog will at last have laid in a | ||
| + | sufficient store of dreams to enable him to build a temple to Cerberus | ||
| + | as a sort of canine trinity. It may be that his dreams have already | ||
| + | begun to turn into visions capable of verbal expression, in some | ||
| + | revelation about the Dog Star as the spiritual home for lost dogs. These | ||
| + | things are logically possible, in the sense that it is logically | ||
| + | difficult to prove the universal negative which we call an | ||
| + | impossibility. But all that instinct for the probable, which we call | ||
| + | common sense, must long ago have told us that the animals are not to all | ||
| + | appearance evolving in that sense; and that, to say the least, we are | ||
| + | not likely to have any personal evidence of their passing from the | ||
| + | animal experience to the human experiments. But spring and death and | ||
| + | even dreams, considered merely as experiences, | ||
| + | much as ours. The only possible conclusion is that these experiences, | ||
| + | considered as experiences, | ||
| + | sense in any mind except a mind like ours. We come back to the fact of a | ||
| + | certain kind of mind as already alive and alone. It was unique and it | ||
| + | could make creeds as it could make cave-drawings. The materials for | ||
| + | religion had lain there for countless ages like the materials for | ||
| + | everything else; but the power of religion was in the mind. Man could | ||
| + | already see in these things the<span class=" | ||
| + | still sees in them. He could not only dream but dream about dreams. He | ||
| + | could not only see the dead but see the shadow of death; and was | ||
| + | possessed with that mysterious mystification that for ever finds death | ||
| + | incredible.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is quite true that we have even these hints chiefly about man when he | ||
| + | unmistakably appears as man. We cannot affirm this or anything else | ||
| + | about the alleged animal originally connecting man and the brutes. But | ||
| + | that is only because he is not an animal but an allegation. We cannot be | ||
| + | certain that Pithecanthropus ever worshipped, because we cannot be | ||
| + | certain that he ever lived. He is only a vision called up to fill the | ||
| + | void that does in fact yawn between the first creatures who were | ||
| + | certainly men and any other creatures that are certainly apes or other | ||
| + | animals. A few very doubtful fragments are scraped together to suggest | ||
| + | such an intermediate creature because it is required by a certain | ||
| + | philosophy; but nobody supposes that these are sufficient to establish | ||
| + | anything philosophical even in support of that philosophy. A scrap of | ||
| + | skull found in Java cannot establish anything about religion or about | ||
| + | the absence of religion. If there ever was any such ape-man, he may have | ||
| + | exhibited as much ritual in religion as a man or as much simplicity in | ||
| + | religion as an ape. He may have been a mythologist or he may have been a | ||
| + | myth. It might be interesting to inquire whether this mystical quality | ||
| + | appeared in a transition from the ape to the man, if there were really | ||
| + | any types of the transition to inquire about. In other words, the | ||
| + | missing link might or might not be mystical if he were not missing. But | ||
| + | compared with the evidence we have of real human beings, we have no | ||
| + | evidence that he was a human being or a half-human being or a being at | ||
| + | all. Even the most extreme evolutionists do not attempt to deduce any | ||
| + | evolutionary views about the origin of religion from < | ||
| + | trying to prove that religion grew slowly from< | ||
| + | sources, they begin their proof with the first men who were men. But | ||
| + | their own proof only proves that the men who were already men were | ||
| + | already mystics. They used the rude and irrational elements as only men | ||
| + | and mystics can use them. We come back once more to the simple truth; | ||
| + | that at some time too early for these critics to trace, a transition had | ||
| + | occurred to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness; | ||
| + | and man became a living soul.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | who are thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away. | ||
| + | Subconsciously they feel that it looks less formidable when thus | ||
| + | lengthened out into a gradual and almost invisible process. But in fact | ||
| + | this perspective entirely falsifies the reality of experience. They | ||
| + | bring together two things that are totally different, the stray hints of | ||
| + | evolutionary origins and the solid and self-evident block of humanity, | ||
| + | and try to shift their standpoint till they see them in a single | ||
| + | foreshortened line. But it is an optical illusion. Men do not in fact | ||
| + | stand related to monkeys or missing links in any such chain as that in | ||
| + | which men stand related to men. There may have been intermediate | ||
| + | creatures whose faint traces can be found here and there in the huge | ||
| + | gap. Of these beings, if they ever existed, it may be true that they | ||
| + | were things very unlike men or men very unlike ourselves. But of | ||
| + | prehistoric men, such as those called the cave-men or the reindeer men, | ||
| + | it is not true in any sense whatever. Prehistoric men of that sort were | ||
| + | things exactly like men and men exceedingly like ourselves. They only | ||
| + | happened to be men about whom we do not know much, for the simple reason | ||
| + | that they have left no records or chronicles; but all that we do know | ||
| + | about them makes them just as human and ordinary as men in a medieval | ||
| + | manor or a Greek city.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | we simply recognise this thing as human. If we had to recognise it as | ||
| + | animal, we should have had to recognise it as abnormal. If we chose to | ||
| + | look through the other end of the telescope, as I have done more than | ||
| + | once in these speculations, | ||
| + | forward out of an unhuman world, we could only say that one of the | ||
| + | animals had obviously gone mad. But seeing the thing from the right end, | ||
| + | or rather from the inside, we know it is sanity; and we know that these | ||
| + | primitive men were sane. We hail a certain human freemasonry wherever we | ||
| + | see it, in savages, in foreigners or in historical characters. For | ||
| + | instance, all we can infer from primitive legend, and all we know of | ||
| + | barbaric life, supports a certain moral and even mystical idea of which | ||
| + | the commonest symbol is clothes. For clothes are very literally | ||
| + | vestments, and man wears them because he is a priest. It is true that | ||
| + | even as an animal he is here different from the animals. Nakedness is | ||
| + | not nature to him; it is not his life but rather his death; even in the | ||
| + | vulgar sense of his death of cold. But clothes are worn for dignity or | ||
| + | decency or decoration where they are not in any way wanted for warmth. | ||
| + | It would sometimes appear that they are valued for ornament before they | ||
| + | are valued for use. It would almost always appear that they are felt to | ||
| + | have some connection with decorum. Conventions of this sort vary a great | ||
| + | deal with various times and places; and there are some who cannot get | ||
| + | over this reflection, and for whom it seems a sufficient argument for | ||
| + | letting all conventions slide. They never tire of repeating, with simple | ||
| + | wonder, that dress is different in the Cannibal Islands and in Camden | ||
| + | Town; they cannot get any further and throw up the whole idea of decency | ||
| + | in despair. They might as well say that because there have been hats of | ||
| + | a good many different shapes, and some rather eccentric shapes, | ||
| + | therefore hats do not matter or do not exist. They would< | ||
| + | that there is no such thing as sunstroke or going bald. Men have felt | ||
| + | everywhere that certain forms were necessary to fence off and protect | ||
| + | certain private things from contempt or coarse misunderstanding; | ||
| + | keeping of those forms, whatever they were, made for dignity and mutual | ||
| + | respect. The fact that they mostly refer, more or less remotely, to the | ||
| + | relations of the sexes illustrates the two facts that must be put at the | ||
| + | very beginning of the record of the race. The first is the fact that | ||
| + | original sin is really original. Not merely in theology but in history | ||
| + | it is a thing rooted in the origins. Whatever else men have believed, | ||
| + | they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind. | ||
| + | This sense of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no | ||
| + | clothes, just as it has made it impossible to be natural and have no | ||
| + | laws. But above all it is to be found in that other fact, which is the | ||
| + | father and mother of all laws as it is itself founded on a father and | ||
| + | mother: the thing that is before all thrones and even all commonwealths.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | proportions of a normal thing clear of various modifications and degrees | ||
| + | and doubts more or less reasonable, like clouds clinging about a | ||
| + | mountain. It may be that what we call the family had to fight its way | ||
| + | from or through various anarchies and aberrations; | ||
| + | survived them and is quite as likely as not to have also preceded them. | ||
| + | As we shall see in the case of communism and nomadism, more formless | ||
| + | things could and did lie on the flank of societies that had taken a | ||
| + | fixed form; but there is nothing to show that the form did not exist | ||
| + | before the formlessness. What is vital is that form is more important | ||
| + | than formlessness; | ||
| + | form. For instance, of the rules revolving round sex, which were | ||
| + | recently mentioned, none is more curious than the savage custom commonly | ||
| + | called the < | ||
| + | which the father is treated as if he were the mother. In any case it | ||
| + | clearly involves the mystical sense of sex; but many have maintained | ||
| + | that it is really a symbolic act by which the father accepts the | ||
| + | responsibility of fatherhood. In that case that grotesque antic is | ||
| + | really a very solemn act; for it is the foundation of all we call the | ||
| + | family and all we know as human society. Some groping in these dark | ||
| + | beginnings have said that mankind was once under a matriarchy; I suppose | ||
| + | that under a matriarchy it would not be called mankind but womankind. | ||
| + | But others have conjectured that what is called matriarchy was simply | ||
| + | moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remained fixed because all the | ||
| + | fathers were fugitive and irresponsible. Then came the moment when the | ||
| + | man decided to guard and guide what he had created. So he became the | ||
| + | head of the family, not as a bully with a big club to beat women with, | ||
| + | but rather as a respectable person trying to be a responsible person. | ||
| + | Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even have been the first | ||
| + | family act, and it would still be true that man then for the first time | ||
| + | acted like a man, and therefore for the first time became fully a man. | ||
| + | But it might quite as well be true that the matriarchy or moral anarchy, | ||
| + | or whatever we call it, was only one of the hundred social dissolutions | ||
| + | or barbaric backslidings which may have occurred at intervals in | ||
| + | prehistoric as they certainly did in historic times. A symbol like the | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | suppression of a heresy rather than the first rise of a religion. We | ||
| + | cannot conclude with any certainty about these things, except in their | ||
| + | big results in the building of mankind, but we can say in what style the | ||
| + | bulk of it and the best of it is built. We can say that the family is | ||
| + | the unit of the state; that it is the cell that makes up the formation. | ||
| + | Round the family do indeed gather the sanctities that separate men from< | ||
| + | ants and bees. Decency is the curtain of that tent; liberty is the wall | ||
| + | of that city; property is but the family farm; honour is but the family | ||
| + | flag. In the practical proportions of human history, we come back to | ||
| + | that fundamental of the father and the mother and the child. It has been | ||
| + | said already that if this story cannot start with religious assumptions, | ||
| + | it must none the less start with some moral or metaphysical assumptions, | ||
| + | or no sense can be made of the story of man. And this is a very good | ||
| + | instance of that alternative necessity. If we are not of those who begin | ||
| + | by invoking a divine Trinity, we must none the less invoke a human | ||
| + | Trinity; and see that triangle repeated everywhere in the pattern of the | ||
| + | world. For the highest event in history to which all history looks | ||
| + | forward and leads up, is only something that is at once the reversal and | ||
| + | the renewal of that triangle. Or rather it is the one triangle | ||
| + | superimposed so as to intersect the other, making a sacred pentacle of | ||
| + | which, in a mightier sense than that of the magicians, the fiends are | ||
| + | afraid. The old Trinity was of father and mother and child, and is | ||
| + | called the human family. The new is of child and mother and father, and | ||
| + | has the name of the Holy Family. It is in no way altered except in being | ||
| + | entirely reversed; just as the world which it transformed was not in the | ||
| + | least different, except in being turned upside-down.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE ANTIQUITY OF CIVILISATION</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting to see that dawn | ||
| + | breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks. But that dawn is | ||
| + | breaking behind the black bulk of great cities long builded and lost for | ||
| + | us in the original night; colossal cities like the houses of giants, in | ||
| + | which even the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees; | ||
| + | in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size of the man; | ||
| + | with tombs like mountains of man set four-square and pointing to the | ||
| + | stars; with winged and bearded bulls standing and staring enormous at | ||
| + | the gates of temples; standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake | ||
| + | the world. The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilised. | ||
| + | Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old. And among other more | ||
| + | important things, it reveals the folly of most of the generalisations | ||
| + | about the previous and unknown period when it was really young. The two | ||
| + | first human societies of which we have any reliable and detailed record | ||
| + | are Babylon and Egypt. It so happens that these two vast and splendid | ||
| + | achievements of the genius of the ancients bear witness against two of | ||
| + | the commonest and crudest assumptions of the culture of the moderns. If | ||
| + | we want to get rid of half the nonsense about nomads and cave-men and | ||
| + | the old man of the forest, we need only look steadily at the two solid | ||
| + | and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>Of course most of these speculators who are talking< | ||
| + | are thinking about modern savages. They prove their progressive | ||
| + | evolution by assuming that a great part of the human race has not | ||
| + | progressed or evolved; or even changed in any way at all. I do not agree | ||
| + | with their theory of change; nor do I agree with their dogma of things | ||
| + | unchangeable. I may not believe that civilised man has had so rapid and | ||
| + | recent a progress; but I cannot quite understand why uncivilised man | ||
| + | should be so mystically immortal and immutable. A somewhat simpler mode | ||
| + | of thought and speech seems to me to be needed throughout this inquiry. | ||
| + | Modern savages cannot be exactly like primitive man, because they are | ||
| + | not primitive. Modern savages are not ancient because they are modern. | ||
| + | Something has happened to their race as much as to ours, during the | ||
| + | thousands of years of our existence and endurance on the earth. They | ||
| + | have had some experiences, | ||
| + | profited by them, like the rest of us. They have had some environment, | ||
| + | and even some change of environment, | ||
| + | themselves to it in a proper and decorous evolutionary manner. This | ||
| + | would be true even if the experiences were mild or the environment | ||
| + | dreary; for there is an effect in mere time when it takes the moral form | ||
| + | of monotony. But it has appeared to a good many intelligent and | ||
| + | well-informed people quite as probable that the experience of the | ||
| + | savages has been that of a decline from civilisation. Most of those who | ||
| + | criticise this view do not seem to have any very clear notion of what a | ||
| + | decline from civilisation would be like. Heaven help them, it is likely | ||
| + | enough that they will soon find out. They seem to be content if cave-men | ||
| + | and cannibal islanders have some things in common, such as certain | ||
| + | particular implements. But it is obvious on the face of it that any | ||
| + | peoples reduced for any reason to a ruder life would have some things in | ||
| + | common. If we lost all our firearms we should< | ||
| + | we should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men who made | ||
| + | bows and arrows. It is said that the Russians in their great retreat | ||
| + | were so short of armament that they fought with clubs cut in the wood. | ||
| + | But a professor of the future would err in supposing that the Russian | ||
| + | Army of 1916 was a naked Scythian tribe that had never been out of the | ||
| + | wood. It is like saying that a man in his second childhood must exactly | ||
| + | copy his first. A baby is bald like an old man; but it would be an error | ||
| + | for one ignorant of infancy to infer that the baby had a long white | ||
| + | beard. Both a baby and an old man walk with difficulty; but he who shall | ||
| + | expect the old gentleman to lie on his back, and kick joyfully instead, | ||
| + | will be disappointed.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must | ||
| + | have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of | ||
| + | it. There were almost certainly some things, there were probably many | ||
| + | things, in which the two were widely different or flatly contrary. An | ||
| + | example of the way in which this distinction works, and an example | ||
| + | essential to our argument here, is that of the nature and origin of | ||
| + | government. I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells and the Old Man, | ||
| + | with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms. If we considered the | ||
| + | cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this portrait of the prehistoric | ||
| + | chief of the tribe, we could only excuse it by saying that its brilliant | ||
| + | and versatile author simply forgot for a moment that he was supposed to | ||
| + | be writing a history, and dreamed he was writing one of his own very | ||
| + | wonderful and imaginative romances. At least I cannot imagine how he can | ||
| + | possibly know that the prehistoric ruler was called the Old Man or that | ||
| + | court etiquette requires it to be spelt with capital letters. He says of | ||
| + | the same potentate, ‘No one was allowed to touch his spear or to sit in | ||
| + | his seat.’ I have difficulty in believing that anybody< | ||
| + | prehistoric spear with a prehistoric label, ‘Visitors are Requested not | ||
| + | to Touch,’ or a complete throne with the inscription, | ||
| + | Old Man.’ But it may be presumed that the writer, who can hardly be | ||
| + | supposed to be merely making up things out of his own head, was merely | ||
| + | taking for granted this very dubious parallel between the prehistoric | ||
| + | and the decivilised man. It may be that in certain savage tribes the | ||
| + | chief is called the Old Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or | ||
| + | sit on his seat. It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with | ||
| + | superstitious and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those | ||
| + | cases, for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical. But there is not a | ||
| + | grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic and tyrannical. | ||
| + | It may have been, of course, for it may have been anything or even | ||
| + | nothing; it may not have existed at all. But the despotism in certain | ||
| + | dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does not prove that | ||
| + | the first men were ruled despotically. It does not even suggest it; it | ||
| + | does not even begin to hint at it. If there is one fact we really can | ||
| + | prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can | ||
| + | be a development, | ||
| + | of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be | ||
| + | defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the | ||
| + | citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly | ||
| + | been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single | ||
| + | sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is also true that they | ||
| + | sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is | ||
| + | equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed | ||
| + | to be a tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East. But I cannot see | ||
| + | why the Sultan should have appeared any earlier in history than many | ||
| + | other human figures. On the contrary, the strong man armed obviously< | ||
| + | depends upon the superiority of his armour; and armament of that sort | ||
| + | comes with more complex civilisation. One man may kill twenty with a | ||
| + | machine-gun; | ||
| + | piece of flint. As for the current cant about the strongest man ruling | ||
| + | by force and fear, it is simply a nursery fairy-tale about a giant with | ||
| + | a hundred hands. Twenty men could hold down the strongest strong man in | ||
| + | any society, ancient or modern. Undoubtedly they might < | ||
| + | romantic and poetical sense, the man who was really the strongest; but | ||
| + | that is quite a different thing, and is as purely moral and even | ||
| + | mystical as the admiration for the purest or the wisest. But the spirit | ||
| + | that endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is | ||
| + | the spirit of an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not | ||
| + | the spirit of a new one. As his name implies, the Old Man is the ruler | ||
| + | of an old humanity.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is far more probable that a primitive society was something like a | ||
| + | pure democracy. To this day the comparatively simple agricultural | ||
| + | communities are by far the purest democracies. Democracy is a thing | ||
| + | which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilisation. | ||
| + | Any one who likes may state it by saying that democracy is the foe of | ||
| + | civilisation. But he must remember that some of us really prefer | ||
| + | democracy to civilisation, | ||
| + | complexity. Anyhow, peasants tilling patches of their own land in a | ||
| + | rough equality, and meeting to vote directly under a village tree, are | ||
| + | the most truly self-governing of men. It is surely as likely as not that | ||
| + | such a simple idea was found in the first condition of even simpler men. | ||
| + | Indeed the despotic vision is exaggerated, | ||
| + | men as men. Even on an evolutionary assumption of the most materialistic | ||
| + | sort, there is really no reason why men should not have had at least as | ||
| + | much camaraderie as rats or rooks. Leader< | ||
| + | doubtless had, as have the gregarious animals; but leadership implies no | ||
| + | such irrational servility as that attributed to the superstitious | ||
| + | subjects of the Old Man. There was doubtless somebody corresponding, | ||
| + | use Tennyson’s expression, to the many-wintered crow that leads the | ||
| + | clanging rookery home. But I fancy that if that venerable fowl began to | ||
| + | act after the fashion of some Sultans in ancient and decayed Asia, it | ||
| + | would become a very clanging rookery and the many-wintered crow would | ||
| + | not see many more winters. It may be remarked, in this connection, but | ||
| + | even among animals it would seem that something else is respected more | ||
| + | than bestial violence, if it be only the familiarity which in men is | ||
| + | called tradition or the experience which in men is called wisdom. I do | ||
| + | not know if crows really follow the oldest crow, but if they do they are | ||
| + | certainly not following the strongest crow. And I do know, in the human | ||
| + | case, that if some ritual of seniority keeps savages reverencing | ||
| + | somebody called the Old Man, then at least they have not our own servile | ||
| + | sentimental weakness for worshipping the Strong Man.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It may be said then that primitive government, like primitive art and | ||
| + | religion and everything else, is very imperfectly known or rather | ||
| + | guessed at; but that it is at least as good a guess to suggest that it | ||
| + | was as popular as a Balkan or Pyrenean village as that it was as | ||
| + | capricious and secret as a Turkish divan. Both the mountain democracy | ||
| + | and the oriental palace are modern in the sense that they are still | ||
| + | there, or are some sort of growth of history; but of the two the palace | ||
| + | has much more the look of being an accumulation and a corruption, the | ||
| + | village much more the look of being a really unchanged and primitive | ||
| + | thing. But my suggestions at this point do not go beyond expressing a | ||
| + | wholesome doubt about the current assumption. I think it interesting, | ||
| + | for instance, that liberal institutions have< | ||
| + | moderns back to barbarian or undeveloped states, when it happened to be | ||
| + | convenient for the support of some race or nation or philosophy. So the | ||
| + | Socialists profess that their ideal of communal property existed in very | ||
| + | early times. So the Jews are proud of the Jubilees or juster | ||
| + | redistributions under their ancient law. So the Teutonists boasted of | ||
| + | tracing parliaments and juries and various popular things among the | ||
| + | Germanic tribes of the North. So the Celtophiles and those testifying to | ||
| + | the wrongs of Ireland have pleaded the more equal justice of the clan | ||
| + | system, to which the Irish chiefs bore witness before Strongbow. The | ||
| + | strength of the case varies in the different cases; but as there is some | ||
| + | case for all of them, I suspect there is some case for the general | ||
| + | proposition that popular institutions of some sort were by no means | ||
| + | uncommon in early and simple societies. Each of these separate schools | ||
| + | were making the admission to prove a particular modern thesis; but taken | ||
| + | together they suggest a more ancient and general truth, that there was | ||
| + | something more in prehistoric councils than ferocity and fear. Each of | ||
| + | these separate theorists had his own axe to grind, but he was willing to | ||
| + | use a stone axe; and he manages to suggest that the stone axe might have | ||
| + | been as republican as the guillotine.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | progress. In one sense it is a true paradox that there was history | ||
| + | before history. But it is not the irrational paradox implied in | ||
| + | prehistoric history; for it is a history we do not know. Very probably | ||
| + | it was exceedingly like the history we do know, except in the one detail | ||
| + | that we do not know it. It is thus the very opposite of the pretentious | ||
| + | prehistoric history, which professes to trace everything in a consistent | ||
| + | course from the amoeba to the anthropoid and from the anthropoid to the | ||
| + | agnostic. So far from being a question of our knowing all about queer | ||
| + | creatures very different from ourselves,< | ||
| + | very like ourselves, except that we know nothing about them. In other | ||
| + | words, our most ancient records only reach back to a time when humanity | ||
| + | had long been human, and even long been civilised. The most ancient | ||
| + | records we have not only mention but take for granted things like kings | ||
| + | and priests and princes and assemblies of the people; they describe | ||
| + | communities that are roughly recognisable as communities in our own | ||
| + | sense. Some of them are despotic; but we cannot tell that they have | ||
| + | always been despotic. Some of them may be already decadent, and nearly | ||
| + | all are mentioned as if they were old. We do not know what really | ||
| + | happened in the world before those records; but the little we do know | ||
| + | would leave us anything but astonished if we learnt that it was very | ||
| + | much like what happens in this world now. There would be nothing | ||
| + | inconsistent or confounding about the discovery that those unknown ages | ||
| + | were full of republics collapsing under monarchies and rising again as | ||
| + | republics, empires expanding and finding colonies and then losing | ||
| + | colonies, kingdoms combining again into world-states and breaking up | ||
| + | again into small nationalities, | ||
| + | and marching out once more into liberty; all that procession of humanity | ||
| + | which may or may not be a progress but is most assuredly a romance. But | ||
| + | the first chapters of the romance have been torn out of the book; and we | ||
| + | shall never read them.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is so also with the more special fancy about evolution and social | ||
| + | stability. According to the real records available, barbarism and | ||
| + | civilisation were not successive stages in the progress of the world. | ||
| + | They were conditions that existed side by side, as they still exist side | ||
| + | by side. There were civilisations then as there are civilisations now; | ||
| + | there are savages now as there were savages then. It is suggested that | ||
| + | all men passed through a nomadic stage; but it is certain that there are | ||
| + | some who have never passed< | ||
| + | there were some who never passed into it. It is probable that from very | ||
| + | primitive times the static tiller of the soil and the wandering shepherd | ||
| + | were two distinct types of men; and the chronological rearrangement of | ||
| + | them is but a mark of that mania for progressive stages that has largely | ||
| + | falsified history. It is suggested that there was a communist stage, in | ||
| + | which private property was everywhere unknown, a whole humanity living | ||
| + | on the negation of property; but the evidences of this negation are | ||
| + | themselves rather negative. Redistributions of property, jubilees, and | ||
| + | agrarian laws occur at various intervals and in various forms; but that | ||
| + | humanity inevitably passed through a communist stage seems as doubtful | ||
| + | as the parallel proposition that humanity will inevitably return to it. | ||
| + | It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the boldest plans for the | ||
| + | future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary | ||
| + | seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary. There is an | ||
| + | amusing parallel example in the case of what is called feminism. In | ||
| + | spite of all the pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage by capture and | ||
| + | the cave-man beating the cave-woman with a club, it may be noted that as | ||
| + | soon as feminism became a fashionable cry, it was insisted that human | ||
| + | civilisation in its first stage had been a matriarchy. Apparently it was | ||
| + | the cave-woman who carried the club. Anyhow all these ideas are little | ||
| + | better than guesses; and they have a curious way of following the | ||
| + | fortune of modern theories and fads. In any case they are not history in | ||
| + | the sense of record; and we may repeat that when it comes to record, the | ||
| + | broad truth is that barbarism and civilisation have always dwelt side by | ||
| + | side in the world, the civilisation sometimes spreading to absorb the | ||
| + | barbarians, sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost | ||
| + | all cases possessing in a more finished form certain ideas and | ||
| + | institutions which the barbarians possess in a ruder< | ||
| + | government or social authority, the arts and especially the decorative | ||
| + | arts, mysteries and taboos of various kinds especially surrounding the | ||
| + | matter of sex, and some form of that fundamental thing which is the | ||
| + | chief concern of this inquiry: the thing that we call religion.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | have been specially provided as models. They might almost be called | ||
| + | working models to show how these modern theories do not work. The two | ||
| + | great truths we know about these two great cultures happen to contradict | ||
| + | flatly the two current fallacies which have just been considered. The | ||
| + | story of Egypt might have been invented to point the moral that man does | ||
| + | not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very | ||
| + | often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it | ||
| + | because he is experienced; | ||
| + | because he is exhausted. And the story of Babylon might have been | ||
| + | invented to point the moral that man need not be a nomad or a communist | ||
| + | before he becomes a peasant or a citizen; and that such cultures are not | ||
| + | always in successive stages but often in contemporary states. Even | ||
| + | touching these great civilisations with which our written history | ||
| + | begins, there is a temptation of course to be too ingenious or too | ||
| + | cocksure. We can read the bricks of Babylon in a very different sense | ||
| + | from that in which we guess about the Cup and Ring stones; and we do | ||
| + | definitely know what is meant by the animals in the Egyptian | ||
| + | hieroglyphic as we know nothing of the animals in the neolithic cave. | ||
| + | But even here the admirable archeologists who have deciphered line after | ||
| + | line of miles of hieroglyphics may be tempted to read too much between | ||
| + | the lines; even the real authority on Babylon may forget how fragmentary | ||
| + | is his hard-won knowledge; may forget that Babylon has only heaved half | ||
| + | a brick at him, though half a brick is<span class=" | ||
| + | some truths, historic and not prehistoric, | ||
| + | evolutionary, | ||
| + | Babylon; and these two truths are among them.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | of the desert. It is a proverb, and one of vast antiquity, that it is | ||
| + | created by the mysterious bounty and almost sinister benevolence of the | ||
| + | Nile. When we first hear of Egyptians they are living as in a string of | ||
| + | river-side villages, in small and separate but co-operative communities | ||
| + | along the bank of the Nile. Where the river branched into the broad | ||
| + | Delta there was traditionally the beginning of a somewhat different | ||
| + | district or people; but this need not complicate the main truth. These | ||
| + | more or less independent though interdependent peoples were considerably | ||
| + | civilised already. They had a sort of heraldry; that is, decorative art | ||
| + | used for symbolic and social purposes; each sailing the Nile under its | ||
| + | own ensign representing some bird or animal. Heraldry involves two | ||
| + | things of enormous importance to normal humanity; the combination of the | ||
| + | two making that noble thing called co-operation; | ||
| + | peasantries and peoples that are free. The art of heraldry means | ||
| + | independence; | ||
| + | individuality. The science of heraldry means interdependence; | ||
| + | agreement between different bodies to recognise different images; a | ||
| + | science of imagery. We have here therefore exactly that compromise of | ||
| + | co-operation between free families or groups which is the most normal | ||
| + | mode of life for humanity and is particularly apparent wherever men own | ||
| + | their own land and live on it. With the very mention of the images of | ||
| + | bird and beast the student of mythology will murmur the word ‘totem’ | ||
| + | almost in his sleep. But to my mind much of the trouble arises from his | ||
| + | habit of saying such words as if in his sleep. Throughout this rough | ||
| + | outline I have made a necessarily inadequate< | ||
| + | inside rather than the outside of such things; to consider them where | ||
| + | possible in terms of thought and not merely in terms of terminology. | ||
| + | There is very little value in talking about totems unless we have some | ||
| + | feeling of what it really felt like to have a totem. Granted that they | ||
| + | had totems and we have no totems; was it because they had more fear of | ||
| + | animals or more familiarity with animals? Did a man whose totem was a | ||
| + | wolf feel like a were-wolf or like a man running away from a were-wolf? | ||
| + | Did he feel like Uncle Remus about Brer Wolf or like St. Francis about | ||
| + | his brother the wolf, or like Mowgli about his brothers the wolves? Was | ||
| + | a totem a thing like the British lion or a thing like the British | ||
| + | bulldog? Was the worship of a totem like the feeling of niggers about | ||
| + | Mumbo Jumbo, or of children about Jumbo? I have never read any book of | ||
| + | folk-lore, however learned, that gave me any light upon this question, | ||
| + | which I think by far the most important one. I will confine myself to | ||
| + | repeating that the earliest Egyptian communities had a common | ||
| + | understanding about the images that stood for their individual states; | ||
| + | and that this amount of communication is prehistoric in the sense that | ||
| + | it is already there at the beginning of history. But as history unfolds | ||
| + | itself, this question of communication is clearly the main question of | ||
| + | these riverside communities. With the need of communication comes the | ||
| + | need of a common government and the growing greatness and spreading | ||
| + | shadow of the king. The other binding force besides the king, and | ||
| + | perhaps older than the king, is the priesthood; and the priesthood has | ||
| + | presumably even more to do with these ritual symbols and signals by | ||
| + | which men can communicate. And here in Egypt arose probably the primary | ||
| + | and certainly the typical invention to which we owe all history, and the | ||
| + | whole difference between the historic and the prehistoric: | ||
| + | archetypal script, the art of writing.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | as they might be. There is shed over them the shadow of an exaggerated | ||
| + | gloom, more than the normal and even healthy sadness of heathen men. It | ||
| + | is part of the same sort of secret pessimism that loves to make | ||
| + | primitive man a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is | ||
| + | fear. It comes of course from the fact that men are moved most by their | ||
| + | religion; especially when it is irreligion. For them anything primary | ||
| + | and elemental must be evil. But it is the curious consequence that while | ||
| + | we have been deluged with the wildest experiments in primitive romance, | ||
| + | they have all missed the real romance of being primitive. They have | ||
| + | described scenes that are wholly imaginary, in which the men of the | ||
| + | Stone Age are men of stone like walking statues; in which the Assyrians | ||
| + | or Egyptians are as stiff or as painted as their own most archaic art. | ||
| + | But none of these makers of imaginary scenes have tried to imagine what | ||
| + | it must really have been like to see those things as fresh which we see | ||
| + | as familiar. They have not seen a man discovering fire like a child | ||
| + | discovering fireworks. They have not seen a man playing with the | ||
| + | wonderful invention called the wheel, like a boy playing at putting up a | ||
| + | wireless station. They have never put the spirit of youth into their | ||
| + | descriptions of the youth of the world. It follows that amid all their | ||
| + | primitive or prehistoric fancies there are no jokes. There are not even | ||
| + | practical jokes, in connection with the practical inventions. And this | ||
| + | is very sharply defined in the particular case of hieroglyphics; | ||
| + | there seems to be serious indication that the whole high human art of | ||
| + | scripture or writing began with a joke.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | with a pun. The king or the priests or some responsible persons, wishing | ||
| + | to send a message up the river in that inconveniently long and narrow | ||
| + | territory, hit on the idea of sending it in<span class=" | ||
| + | of the Red Indian. Like most people who have written picture-writing for | ||
| + | fun, he found the words did not always fit. But when the word for taxes | ||
| + | sounded rather like the word for pig, he boldly put down a pig as a bad | ||
| + | pun and chanced it. So a modern hieroglyphist might represent ‘at once’ | ||
| + | by unscrupulously drawing a hat followed by a series of upright | ||
| + | numerals. It was good enough for the Pharaohs and ought to be good | ||
| + | enough for him. But it must have been great fun to write or even to read | ||
| + | these messages, when writing and reading were really a new thing. And if | ||
| + | people must write romances about ancient Egypt (and it seems that | ||
| + | neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold them from the habit), | ||
| + | I suggest that scenes like this would really remind us that the ancient | ||
| + | Egyptians were human beings. I suggest that somebody should describe the | ||
| + | scene of the great monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them | ||
| + | roaring with laughter and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal | ||
| + | puns grew more and more wild and indefensible. There might be another | ||
| + | scene of almost equal excitement about the decoding of this cipher; the | ||
| + | guesses and clues and discoveries having all the popular thrill of a | ||
| + | detective story. That is how primitive romance and primitive history | ||
| + | really ought to be written. For whatever was the quality of the | ||
| + | religious or moral life of remote times, and it was probably much more | ||
| + | human than is conventionally supposed, the scientific interest of such a | ||
| + | time must have been intense. Words must have been more wonderful than | ||
| + | wireless telegraphy; and experiments with common things a series of | ||
| + | electric shocks. We are still waiting for somebody to write a lively | ||
| + | story of primitive life. The point is in some sense a parenthesis here; | ||
| + | but it is connected with the general matter of political development, | ||
| + | the institution which is most active in these first and most fascinating | ||
| + | of all the fairy-tales of science.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is admitted that we owe most of this science to the priests. Modern | ||
| + | writers like Mr. Wells cannot be accused of any weakness of sympathy | ||
| + | with a pontifical hierarchy; but they agree at least in recognising what | ||
| + | pagan priesthoods did for the arts and sciences. Among the more ignorant | ||
| + | of the enlightened there was indeed a convention of saying that priests | ||
| + | had obstructed progress in all ages; and a politician once told me in a | ||
| + | debate that I was resisting modern reforms exactly as some ancient | ||
| + | priest probably resisted the discovery of wheels. I pointed out, in | ||
| + | reply, that it was far more likely that the ancient priest made the | ||
| + | discovery of the wheels. It is overwhelmingly probable that the ancient | ||
| + | priest had a great deal to do with the discovery of the art of writing. | ||
| + | It is obvious enough in the fact that the very word hieroglyphic is akin | ||
| + | to the word hierarchy. The religion of these priests was apparently a | ||
| + | more or less tangled polytheism of a type that is more particularly | ||
| + | described elsewhere. It passed through a period when it co-operated with | ||
| + | the king, another period when it was temporarily destroyed by the king, | ||
| + | who happened to be a prince with a private theism of his own, and a | ||
| + | third period when it practically destroyed the king and ruled in his | ||
| + | stead. But the world has to thank it for many things which it considers | ||
| + | common and necessary; and the creators of those common things ought | ||
| + | really to have a place among the heroes of humanity. If we were at rest | ||
| + | in a real paganism, instead of being restless in a rather irrational | ||
| + | reaction from Christianity, | ||
| + | these nameless makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of the | ||
| + | man who first found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who | ||
| + | first tamed a horse. And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices, | ||
| + | there would be more sense in it than in disfiguring our cities with | ||
| + | cockney statues of stale politicians and philanthropists. But one of | ||
| + | the<span class=" | ||
| + | came, no pagan in our civilisation has been able to be really human.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | pontifical or royal, found it more and more necessary to establish | ||
| + | communication; | ||
| + | element of coercion. It is not necessarily an indefensible thing that | ||
| + | the State grew more despotic as it grew more civilised; it is arguable | ||
| + | that it had to grow more despotic in order to grow more civilised. That | ||
| + | is the argument for autocracy in every age; and the interest lies in | ||
| + | seeing it illustrated in the earliest age. But it is emphatically not | ||
| + | true that it was most despotic in the earliest age and grew more liberal | ||
| + | in a later age; the practical process of history is exactly the reverse. | ||
| + | It is not true that the tribe began in the extreme of terror of the Old | ||
| + | Man and his seat and spear; it is probable, at least in Egypt, that the | ||
| + | Old Man was rather a New Man armed to attack new conditions. His spear | ||
| + | grew longer and longer and his throne rose higher and higher, as Egypt | ||
| + | rose into a complex and complete civilisation. That is what I mean by | ||
| + | saying that the history of the Egyptian territory is in this the history | ||
| + | of the earth; and directly denies the vulgar assumption that terrorism | ||
| + | can only come at the beginning and cannot come at the end. We do not | ||
| + | know what was the very first condition of the more or less feudal | ||
| + | amalgam of landowners, peasants, and slaves in the little commonwealths | ||
| + | beside the Nile; but it may have been a peasantry of an even more | ||
| + | popular sort. What we do know is that it was by experience and education | ||
| + | that little commonwealths lose their liberty; that absolute sovereignty | ||
| + | is something not merely ancient but rather relatively modern; and it is | ||
| + | at the end of the path called progress that men return to the king.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | primary problem of liberty and civilisation. It is the fact that men | ||
| + | actually lose variety by complexity. We have not solved the problem | ||
| + | properly any more than they did; but it vulgarises the human dignity of | ||
| + | the problem itself to suggest that even tyranny has no motive save in | ||
| + | tribal terror. And just as the Egyptian example refutes the fallacy | ||
| + | about despotism and civilisation, | ||
| + | the fallacy about civilisation and barbarism. Babylon also we first hear | ||
| + | of when it is already civilised; for the simple reason that we cannot | ||
| + | hear of anything until it is educated enough to talk. It talks to us in | ||
| + | what is called cuneiform; that strange and stiff triangular symbolism | ||
| + | that contrasts with the picturesque alphabet of Egypt. However | ||
| + | relatively rigid Egyptian art may be, there is always something | ||
| + | different from the Babylonian spirit which was too rigid to have any | ||
| + | art. There is always a living grace in the lines of the lotus and | ||
| + | something of rapidity as well as rigidity in the movement of the arrows | ||
| + | and the birds. Perhaps there is something of the restrained but living | ||
| + | curve of the river, which makes us in talking of the serpent of old Nile | ||
| + | almost think of the Nile as a serpent. Babylon was a civilisation of | ||
| + | diagrams rather than of drawings. Mr. W. B. Yeats, who has a historical | ||
| + | imagination to match his mythological imagination (and indeed the former | ||
| + | is impossible without the latter), wrote truly of the men who watched | ||
| + | the stars ‘from their pedantic Babylon.’ The cuneiform was cut upon | ||
| + | bricks, of which all their architecture was built up; the bricks were of | ||
| + | baked mud, and perhaps the material had something in it forbidding the | ||
| + | sense of form to develop in sculpture or relief. Theirs was a static but | ||
| + | a scientific civilisation, | ||
| + | some ways highly modern. It is said that they had much of the modern | ||
| + | cult of the higher spinsterhood and recognised an official class of | ||
| + | independent working< | ||
| + | stronghold of hardened mud that suggests the utilitarian activity of a | ||
| + | huge hive. But though it was huge it was human; we see many of the same | ||
| + | social problems as in ancient Egypt or modern England; and whatever its | ||
| + | evils this also was one of the earliest masterpieces of man. It stood, | ||
| + | of course, in the triangle formed by the almost legendary rivers of | ||
| + | Tigris and Euphrates, and the vast agriculture of its empire, on which | ||
| + | its towns depended, was perfected by a highly scientific system of | ||
| + | canals. It had by tradition a high intellectual life, though rather | ||
| + | philosophic than artistic; and there preside over its primal foundation | ||
| + | those figures who have come to stand for the star-gazing wisdom of | ||
| + | antiquity; the teachers of Abraham; the Chaldees.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | there surged age after age the nameless armies of the Nomads. They came | ||
| + | out of the deserts where the nomadic life had been lived from the | ||
| + | beginning and where it is still lived to-day. It is needless to dwell on | ||
| + | the nature of that life; it was obvious enough and even easy enough to | ||
| + | follow a herd or a flock which generally found its own grazing-ground | ||
| + | and to live on the milk or meat it provided. Nor is there any reason to | ||
| + | doubt that this habit of life could give almost every human thing except | ||
| + | a home. Many such shepherds or herdsmen may have talked in the earliest | ||
| + | times of all the truths and enigmas of the Book of Job; and of these | ||
| + | were Abraham and his children, who have given to the modern world for an | ||
| + | endless enigma the almost monomaniac monotheism of the Jews. But they | ||
| + | were a wild people without comprehension of complex social organisation; | ||
| + | and a spirit like the wind within them made them wage war on it again | ||
| + | and again. The history of Babylonia is largely the history of its | ||
| + | defence against the desert hordes; who came on at intervals of a century | ||
| + | or two and generally retreated< | ||
| + | of nomad invasion built at Nineveh the arrogant kingdom of the | ||
| + | Assyrians, who carved great monsters upon their temples, bearded bulls | ||
| + | with wings like cherubim, and who sent forth many military conquerors | ||
| + | who stamped the world as if with such colossal hooves. Assyria was an | ||
| + | imperial interlude; but it was an interlude. The main story of all that | ||
| + | land is the war between the wandering peoples and the state that was | ||
| + | truly static. Presumably in prehistoric times, and certainly in historic | ||
| + | times, those wanderers went westward to waste whatever they could find. | ||
| + | The last time they came they found Babylon vanished; but that was in | ||
| + | historic times and the name of their leader was Mahomet.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | suggested, it directly contradicts the impression still current that | ||
| + | nomadism is merely a prehistoric thing and social settlement a | ||
| + | comparatively recent thing. There is nothing to show that the | ||
| + | Babylonians had ever wandered; there is very little to show that the | ||
| + | tribes of the desert ever settled down. Indeed it is probable that this | ||
| + | notion of a nomadic stage followed by a static stage has already been | ||
| + | abandoned by the sincere and genuine scholars to whose researches we all | ||
| + | owe so much. But I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine | ||
| + | scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been | ||
| + | prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations, | ||
| + | made fashionable a false notion of the whole history of humanity. It is | ||
| + | the whole vague notion that a monkey evolved into a man and in the same | ||
| + | way a barbarian evolved into a civilised man, and therefore at every | ||
| + | stage we have to look back to barbarism and forward to civilisation. | ||
| + | Unfortunately this notion is in a double sense entirely in the air. It | ||
| + | is an atmosphere in which men live rather than a thesis which they | ||
| + | defend. Men in that mood are more easily answered by objects< | ||
| + | theories; and it will be well if any one tempted to make that | ||
| + | assumption, in some trivial turn of talk or writing, can be checked for | ||
| + | a moment by shutting his eyes and seeing for an instant, vast and | ||
| + | vaguely crowded, like a populous precipice, the wonder of the Babylonian | ||
| + | wall.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | both these early empires show that the first domestic relation had been | ||
| + | complicated by something which was less human, but was often regarded as | ||
| + | equally domestic. The dark giant called Slavery had been called up like | ||
| + | a genii and was labouring on gigantic works of brick and stone. Here | ||
| + | again we must not too easily assume that what was backward was barbaric; | ||
| + | in the matter of manumission the earlier servitude seems in some ways | ||
| + | more liberal than the later; perhaps more liberal than the servitude of | ||
| + | the future. To insure food for humanity by forcing part of it to work | ||
| + | was after all a very human expedient; which is why it will probably be | ||
| + | tried again. But in one sense there is a significance in the old | ||
| + | slavery. It stands for one fundamental fact about all antiquity before | ||
| + | Christ; something to be assumed from first to last. It is the | ||
| + | insignificance of the individual before the State. It was as true of the | ||
| + | most democratic City State in Hellas as of any despotism in Babylon. It | ||
| + | is one of the signs of this spirit that a whole class of individuals | ||
| + | could be insignificant or even invisible. It must be normal because it | ||
| + | was needed for what would now be called ‘social service.’ Somebody said, | ||
| + | ‘The Man is nothing and the Work is all,’ meaning it for a breezy | ||
| + | Carlylean commonplace. It was the sinister motto of the heathen Servile | ||
| + | State. In that sense there is truth in the traditional vision of vast | ||
| + | pillars and pyramids going up under those everlasting skies for ever, by | ||
| + | the labour of numberless and nameless men, toiling like ants and dying | ||
| + | like flies, wiped out by the work of their own hands.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | of Egypt and Babylon. For one thing they are fixed in tradition as the | ||
| + | types of antiquity; and history without tradition is dead. Babylon is | ||
| + | still the burden of a nursery rhyme, and Egypt (with its enormous | ||
| + | population of princesses awaiting reincarnation) is still the topic of | ||
| + | an unnecessary number of novels. But a tradition is generally a truth; | ||
| + | so long as the tradition is sufficiently popular; even if it is almost | ||
| + | vulgar. And there is a significance in this Babylonian and Egyptian | ||
| + | element in nursery rhymes and novels; even the newspapers, normally so | ||
| + | much behind the times, have already got as far as the reign of | ||
| + | Tutankhamen. The first reason is full of the common sense of popular | ||
| + | legend; it is the simple fact that we do know more of these traditional | ||
| + | things than of other contemporary things; and that we always did. All | ||
| + | travellers from Herodotus to Lord Carnarvon follow this route. | ||
| + | Scientific speculations of to-day do indeed spread out a map of the | ||
| + | whole primitive world, with streams of racial emigration or admixture | ||
| + | marked in dotted lines everywhere; over spaces which the unscientific | ||
| + | medieval map-maker would have been content to call ‘terra incognita, | ||
| + | he did not fill the inviting blank with a picture of a dragon, to | ||
| + | indicate the probable reception given to pilgrims. But these | ||
| + | speculations are only speculations at the best; and at the worst the | ||
| + | dotted lines can be far more fabulous than the dragon.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | men to fall, even those who are most intelligent and perhaps especially | ||
| + | those who are most imaginative. It is the fallacy of supposing that | ||
| + | because an idea is greater in the sense of larger, therefore it is | ||
| + | greater in the sense of more fundamental and fixed and certain. If a man | ||
| + | lives alone in a straw hut in the middle of Thibet, he may be told that | ||
| + | he is living in the Chinese Empire; and the<span class=" | ||
| + | a splendid and spacious and impressive thing. Or alternatively he may be | ||
| + | told that he is living in the British Empire, and be duly impressed. But | ||
| + | the curious thing is that in certain mental states he can feel much more | ||
| + | certain about the Chinese Empire that he cannot see than about the straw | ||
| + | hut that he can see. He has some strange magical juggle in his mind, by | ||
| + | which his argument begins with the empire though his experience begins | ||
| + | with the hut. Sometimes he goes mad and appears to be proving that a | ||
| + | straw hut cannot exist in the domains of the Dragon Throne; that it is | ||
| + | impossible for such a civilisation as he enjoys to contain such a hovel | ||
| + | as he inhabits. But his insanity arises from the intellectual slip of | ||
| + | supposing that because China is a large and all-embracing hypothesis, | ||
| + | therefore it is something more than a hypothesis. Now modern people are | ||
| + | perpetually arguing in this way; and they extend it to things much less | ||
| + | real and certain than the Chinese Empire. They seem to forget, for | ||
| + | instance, that a man is not even certain of the Solar System as he is | ||
| + | certain of the South Downs. The Solar System is a deduction, and | ||
| + | doubtless a true deduction; but the point is that it is a very vast and | ||
| + | far-reaching deduction, and therefore he forgets that it is a deduction | ||
| + | at all and treats it as a first principle. He < | ||
| + | whole calculation is a miscalculation; | ||
| + | lamps would look exactly the same. But he has forgotten that it is a | ||
| + | calculation, | ||
| + | fit into the Solar System. If this is a fallacy even in the case of | ||
| + | facts pretty well ascertained, | ||
| + | Empire, it is an even more devastating fallacy in connection with | ||
| + | theories and other things that are not really ascertained at all. Thus | ||
| + | history, especially prehistoric history, has a horrible habit of | ||
| + | beginning with certain generalisations about races. I will not describe | ||
| + | the disorder< | ||
| + | Because the race is vaguely supposed to have produced the nation, men | ||
| + | talk as if the nation were something vaguer than the race. Because they | ||
| + | have themselves invented a reason to explain a result, they almost deny | ||
| + | the result in order to justify the reason. They first treat a Celt as an | ||
| + | axiom and then treat an Irishman as an inference. And then they are | ||
| + | surprised that a great fighting, roaring Irishman is angry at being | ||
| + | treated as an inference. They cannot see that the Irish are Irish | ||
| + | whether or no they are Celtic, whether or no there ever were any Celts. | ||
| + | And what misleads them once more is the < | ||
| + | that the fancy is bigger than the fact. A great scattered Celtic race is | ||
| + | supposed to contain the Irish, so of course the Irish must depend for | ||
| + | their very existence upon it. The same confusion, of course, has | ||
| + | eliminated the English and the Germans by swamping them in the Teutonic | ||
| + | race; and some tried to prove from the races being at one that the | ||
| + | nations could not be at war. But I only give these vulgar and hackneyed | ||
| + | examples in passing, as more familiar examples of the fallacy; the | ||
| + | matter at issue here is not its application to these modern things but | ||
| + | rather to the most ancient things. But the more remote and unrecorded | ||
| + | was the racial problem, the more fixed was this curious inverted | ||
| + | certainty in the Victorian man of science. To this day it gives a man of | ||
| + | those scientific traditions the same sort of shock to question these | ||
| + | things, which were only the last inferences when he turned them into | ||
| + | first principles. He is still more certain that he is an Aryan even than | ||
| + | that he is an Anglo-Saxon, | ||
| + | Anglo-Saxon than that he is an Englishman. He has never really | ||
| + | discovered that he is a European. But he has never doubted that he is an | ||
| + | Indo-European. These Victorian theories have shifted a great deal in | ||
| + | their shape and scope; but this habit of a rapid hardening of a<span class=" | ||
| + | hypothesis into a theory, and of a theory into an assumption, has hardly | ||
| + | yet gone out of fashion. People cannot easily get rid of the mental | ||
| + | confusion of feeling that the foundations of history must surely be | ||
| + | secure; that the first steps must be safe; that the biggest | ||
| + | generalisation must be obvious. But though the contradiction may seem to | ||
| + | them a paradox, this is the very contrary of the truth. It is the large | ||
| + | thing that is secret and invisible; it is the small thing that is | ||
| + | evident and enormous.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | speculations, | ||
| + | subject. But if we take the European race alone, its history, or rather | ||
| + | its prehistory, has undergone many retrospective revolutions in the | ||
| + | short period of my own lifetime. It used to be called the Caucasian | ||
| + | race; and I read in childhood an account of its collision with the | ||
| + | Mongolian race; it was written by Bret Harte and opened with the query, | ||
| + | ‘Or is the Caucasian played out?’ Apparently the Caucasian was played | ||
| + | out, for in a very short time he had been turned into the Indo-European | ||
| + | man; sometimes, I regret to say, proudly presented as the Indo-Germanic | ||
| + | man. It seems that the Hindu and the German have similar words for | ||
| + | mother or father; there were other similarities between Sanskrit and | ||
| + | various Western tongues; and with that all superficial differences | ||
| + | between a Hindu and a German seemed suddenly to disappear. Generally | ||
| + | this composite person was more conveniently described as the Aryan, and | ||
| + | the really important point was that he had marched westward out of those | ||
| + | high lands of India where fragments of his language could still be | ||
| + | found. When I read this as a child, I had the fancy that after all the | ||
| + | Aryan need not have marched westward and left his language behind him; | ||
| + | he might also have marched eastward and taken his language with him. If | ||
| + | I were to read it now, I should content myself with confessing my<span class=" | ||
| + | ignorance of the whole matter. But as a matter of fact I have great | ||
| + | difficulty in reading it now, because it is not being written now. It | ||
| + | looks as if the Aryan is also played out. Anyhow he has not merely | ||
| + | changed his name but changed his address; his starting-place and his | ||
| + | route of travel. One new theory maintains that our race did not come to | ||
| + | its present home from the East but from the South. Some say the | ||
| + | Europeans did not come from Asia but from Africa. Some have even had the | ||
| + | wild idea that the Europeans came from Europe; or rather that they never | ||
| + | left it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | pressure from the North, such as that which seems to have brought the | ||
| + | Greeks to inherit the Cretan culture and so often brought the Gauls over | ||
| + | the hills into the fields of Italy. But I merely mention this example of | ||
| + | European ethnology to point out that the learned have pretty well boxed | ||
| + | the compass by this time; and that I, who am not one of the learned, | ||
| + | cannot pretend for a moment to decide where such doctors disagree. But I | ||
| + | can use my own common sense, and I sometimes fancy that theirs is a | ||
| + | little rusty from want of use. The first act of common sense is to | ||
| + | recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain. And I will | ||
| + | affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense that we all | ||
| + | know of the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | from what we may reasonably guess, in this earliest phase of history is | ||
| + | darkness covering the earth and great darkness the peoples, with a light | ||
| + | or two gleaming here and there on chance patches of humanity; and that | ||
| + | two of these flames do burn upon two of these tall primeval towns; upon | ||
| + | the high terraces of Babylon and the huge pyramids of the Nile. There | ||
| + | are indeed other ancient lights, or lights that may be conjectured to be | ||
| + | very ancient,< | ||
| + | Far away to the East there is a high civilisation of vast antiquity in | ||
| + | China; there are the remains of civilisations in Mexico and South | ||
| + | America and other places, some of them apparently so high in | ||
| + | civilisation as to have reached the most refined forms of devil-worship. | ||
| + | But the difference lies in the element of tradition; the tradition of | ||
| + | these lost cultures has been broken off, and though the tradition of | ||
| + | China still lives, it is doubtful whether we know anything about it. | ||
| + | Moreover, a man trying to measure the Chinese antiquity has to use | ||
| + | Chinese traditions of measurement; | ||
| + | having passed into another world under other laws of time and space. | ||
| + | Time is telescoped outwards, and centuries assume the slow and stiff | ||
| + | movement of aeons; the white man trying to see it as the yellow man | ||
| + | sees, feels as if his head were turning round and wonders wildly whether | ||
| + | it is growing a pigtail. Anyhow he cannot take in a scientific sense | ||
| + | that queer perspective that leads up to the primeval pagoda of the first | ||
| + | of the Sons of Heaven. He is in the real antipodes; the only true | ||
| + | alternative world to Christendom; | ||
| + | upside down. I have spoken of the medieval map-maker and his dragon; but | ||
| + | what medieval traveller, however much interested in monsters, would | ||
| + | expect to find a country where a dragon is a benevolent and amiable | ||
| + | being? Of the more serious side of Chinese tradition something will be | ||
| + | said in another connection; but here I am only talking of tradition and | ||
| + | the test of antiquity. And I only mention China as an antiquity that is | ||
| + | not for us reached by a bridge of tradition; and Babylon and Egypt as | ||
| + | antiquities that are. Herodotus is a human being, in a sense in which a | ||
| + | Chinaman in a billycock hat, sitting opposite to us in a London | ||
| + | tea-shop, is hardly human. We feel as if we knew what David and Isaiah | ||
| + | felt like, in a way in which we never were quite certain what< | ||
| + | Chang felt like. The very sins that snatched away Helen or Bathsheba | ||
| + | have passed into a proverb of private human weakness, of pathos and even | ||
| + | of pardon. The very virtues of the Chinaman have about them something | ||
| + | terrifying. This is the difference made by the destruction or | ||
| + | preservation of a continuous historical inheritance; | ||
| + | Egypt to modern Europe. But when we ask what was that world that we | ||
| + | inherit, and why those particular people and places seem to belong to | ||
| + | it, we are led to the central fact of civilised history.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | water as a world. But it was a world with something of the character of | ||
| + | such a water; for it became more and more a place of unification in | ||
| + | which the streams of strange and very diverse cultures met. The Nile and | ||
| + | the Tiber alike flow into the Mediterranean; | ||
| + | Etrurian alike contribute to a Mediterranean civilisation. The glamour | ||
| + | of the great sea spread indeed very far inland, and the unity was felt | ||
| + | among the Arabs alone in the deserts and the Gauls beyond the northern | ||
| + | hills. But the gradual building up of a common culture running round all | ||
| + | the coasts of this inner sea is the main business of antiquity. As will | ||
| + | be seen, it was sometimes a bad business as well as a good business. In | ||
| + | that < | ||
| + | and of piety, there were contrasted races and still more contrasted | ||
| + | religions. It was the scene of an endless struggle between Asia and | ||
| + | Europe from the flight of the Persian ships at Salamis to the flight of | ||
| + | the Turkish ships at Lepanto. It was the scene, as will be more | ||
| + | especially suggested later, of a supreme spiritual struggle between the | ||
| + | two types of paganism, confronting each other in the Latin and the | ||
| + | Phoenician cities; in the Roman forum and the Punic mart. It was the | ||
| + | world of war and peace, the world of good and evil, the world of all | ||
| + | that matters most; with all<span class=" | ||
| + | the Far East, they did not matter as the Mediterranean tradition | ||
| + | mattered and still matters. Between it and the Far East there were, of | ||
| + | course, interesting cults and conquests of various kinds, more or less | ||
| + | in touch with it, and in proportion as they were so intelligible also to | ||
| + | us. The Persians came riding in to make an end of Babylon; and we are | ||
| + | told in a Greek story how these barbarians learned to draw the bow and | ||
| + | tell the truth. Alexander the great Greek marched with his Macedonians | ||
| + | into the sunrise, and brought back strange birds coloured like the | ||
| + | sunrise clouds and strange flowers and jewels from the gardens and | ||
| + | treasuries of nameless kings. Islam went eastward into that world and | ||
| + | made it partly imaginable to us; precisely because Islam itself was born | ||
| + | in that circle of lands that fringed our own ancient and ancestral sea. | ||
| + | In the Middle Ages the empire of the Moguls increased its majesty | ||
| + | without losing its mystery; the Tartars conquered China and the Chinese | ||
| + | apparently took very little notice of them. All these things are | ||
| + | interesting in themselves; but it is impossible to shift the centre of | ||
| + | gravity to the inland spaces of Asia from the inland sea of Europe. When | ||
| + | all is said, if there were nothing in the world but what was said and | ||
| + | done and written and built in the lands lying round the Mediterranean, | ||
| + | it would still be in all the most vital and valuable things the world in | ||
| + | which we live. When that southern culture spread to the north-west it | ||
| + | produced many very wonderful things; of which doubtless we ourselves are | ||
| + | the most wonderful. When it spread thence to colonies and new countries, | ||
| + | it was still the same culture so long as it was culture at all. But | ||
| + | round that little sea like a lake were the things themselves, apart from | ||
| + | all extensions and echoes and commentaries on the things; the Republic | ||
| + | and the Church; the Bible and the heroic epics; Islam and Israel and the | ||
| + | memories of the lost empires; Aristotle and the<span class=" | ||
| + | It is because the first light upon < | ||
| + | daylight in which we are still walking to-day, and not merely the | ||
| + | doubtful visitation of strange stars, that I have begun here with noting | ||
| + | where that light first falls on the towered cities of the eastern | ||
| + | Mediterranean.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | very fact of being familiar and traditional, | ||
| + | but also fascinating riddles to our fathers, we must not imagine that | ||
| + | they were the only old civilisations on the southern sea; or that all | ||
| + | the civilisation was merely Sumerian or Semitic or Coptic, still less | ||
| + | merely Asiatic or African. Real research is more and more exalting the | ||
| + | ancient civilisation of Europe and especially of what we may still | ||
| + | vaguely call the Greeks. It must be understood in the sense that there | ||
| + | were Greeks before the Greeks, as in so many of their mythologies there | ||
| + | were gods before the gods. The island of Crete was the centre of the | ||
| + | civilisation now called Minoan, after the Minos who lingered in ancient | ||
| + | legend and whose labyrinth was actually discovered by modern archeology. | ||
| + | This elaborate European society, with its harbours and its drainage and | ||
| + | its domestic machinery, seems to have gone down before some invasion of | ||
| + | its northern neighbours, who made or inherited the Hellas we know in | ||
| + | history. But that earlier period did not pass till it had given to the | ||
| + | world gifts so great that the world has ever since been striving in vain | ||
| + | to repay them, if only by plagiarism.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or | ||
| + | hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, | ||
| + | and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been | ||
| + | a beggar and a balladmonger, | ||
| + | and was described by tradition as blind, com<span class=" | ||
| + | Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman | ||
| + | in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that | ||
| + | one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in | ||
| + | the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such | ||
| + | little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the | ||
| + | end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its | ||
| + | decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its | ||
| + | prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might | ||
| + | very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well | ||
| + | as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely | ||
| + | mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man | ||
| + | left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | element of great historical importance; which has hardly I think been | ||
| + | given its proper place in history. The poet has so conceived the poem | ||
| + | that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader certainly, are | ||
| + | on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor. And this is a | ||
| + | sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even as the poetical | ||
| + | origin itself recedes. Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in | ||
| + | pagan times; but he disappears altogether in later times. But Hector | ||
| + | grows greater as the ages pass; and it is his name that is the name of a | ||
| + | Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand | ||
| + | of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in | ||
| + | the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all | ||
| + | the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that | ||
| + | survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | for ever into living echoes, immortal as our hopelessness and our hope. | ||
| + | Troy standing< | ||
| + | But Troy falling has been caught up in a flame and suspended in an | ||
| + | immortal instant of annihilation; | ||
| + | the fire shall never be destroyed. And as with the city so with the | ||
| + | hero; traced in archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the | ||
| + | first figure of the Knight. There is a prophetic coincidence in his | ||
| + | title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle | ||
| + | the horseman with the horse. It is almost anticipated ages before in the | ||
| + | thunder of the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which | ||
| + | the Iliad ends. It is that very unity for which we can find no name but | ||
| + | the holy centaur of chivalry. But there are other reasons for giving in | ||
| + | this glimpse of antiquity the flame upon the sacred town. The sanctity | ||
| + | of such towns ran like a fire round the coasts and islands of the | ||
| + | northern Mediterranean; | ||
| + | From the smallness of the city came the greatness of the citizen. Hellas | ||
| + | with her hundred statues produced nothing statelier than that walking | ||
| + | statue; the ideal of the self-commanding man. Hellas of the hundred | ||
| + | statues was one legend and literature; and all that labyrinth of little | ||
| + | walled nations resounded with the lament of Troy.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>A later legend, an afterthought but not an accident, said that | ||
| + | stragglers from Troy founded a republic on the Italian shore. It was | ||
| + | true in spirit that republican virtue had such a root. A mystery of | ||
| + | honour, that was not born of Babylon or the Egyptian pride, there shone | ||
| + | like the shield of Hector, defying Asia and Africa; till the light of a | ||
| + | new day was loosened, with the rushing of the eagles and the coming of | ||
| + | the name; the name that came like a thunderclap, | ||
| + | Rome.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | GOD AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | city by a professor, who said something that seems to me a satire on a | ||
| + | good many other professors. Possibly the professor saw the joke, though | ||
| + | he maintained an iron gravity, and may or may not have realised that it | ||
| + | was a joke against a great deal of what is called comparative religion. | ||
| + | I pointed out a sculpture of the head of the sun with the usual halo of | ||
| + | rays, but with the difference that the face in the disc, instead of | ||
| + | being boyish like Apollo, was bearded like Neptune or Jupiter. ‘Yes,’ he | ||
| + | said with a certain delicate exactitude, ‘that is supposed to represent | ||
| + | the local god Sul. The best authorities identify Sul with Minerva; but | ||
| + | this has been held to show that the identification is not complete.’</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | madder than any satires on it; long ago Mr. Belloc made his burlesque | ||
| + | don say that a bust of Ariadne had been proved by modern research to be | ||
| + | a Silenus. But that is not better than the real appearance of Minerva as | ||
| + | the Bearded Woman of Mr. Barnum. Only both of them are very like many | ||
| + | identifications by ‘the best authorities’ on comparative religion; and | ||
| + | when Catholic creeds are identified with various wild myths, I do not | ||
| + | laugh or curse or misbehave myself; I confine myself decorously to | ||
| + | saying that the identification is not complete.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly | ||
| + | applied to Comtism, the theory< | ||
| + | corporate mankind as a Supreme Being. Even in the days of my youth I | ||
| + | remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising and | ||
| + | dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal | ||
| + | contradiction; | ||
| + | million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing | ||
| + | the substance.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | imaginable than the many-headed and monstrous idol of mankind. And it | ||
| + | has a much better right to be called, in a reasonable sense, the | ||
| + | religion of humanity. Man is not indeed the idol; but man is almost | ||
| + | everywhere the idolator. And these multitudinous idolatries of mankind | ||
| + | have something about them in many ways more human and sympathetic than | ||
| + | modern metaphysical abstractions. If an Asiatic god has three heads and | ||
| + | seven arms, there is at least in it an idea of material incarnation | ||
| + | bringing an unknown power nearer to us and not farther away. But if our | ||
| + | friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson, when out for a Sunday walk, were | ||
| + | transformed and amalgamated into an Asiatic idol before our eyes, they | ||
| + | would surely seem farther away. If the arms of Brown and the legs of | ||
| + | Robinson waved from the same composite body, they would seem to be | ||
| + | waving something of a sad farewell. If the heads of all three gentlemen | ||
| + | appeared smiling on the same neck, we should hesitate even by what name | ||
| + | to address our new and somewhat abnormal friend. In the many-headed and | ||
| + | many-handed Oriental idol there is a certain sense of mysteries becoming | ||
| + | at least partly intelligible; | ||
| + | dark but material form, but though this may be true of the multiform god | ||
| + | it is not so of the multiform man. The human beings become less human by | ||
| + | becoming less separate; we might say less human in being less lonely. | ||
| + | The human beings become less< | ||
| + | we might say with strict truth that the closer they are to us the | ||
| + | farther they are away. An Ethical Hymn-book of this humanitarian sort of | ||
| + | religion was carefully selected and expurgated on the principle of | ||
| + | preserving anything human and eliminating anything divine. One | ||
| + | consequence was that a hymn appeared in the amended form of ‘Nearer | ||
| + | Mankind to Thee, Nearer to Thee.’ It always suggested to me the | ||
| + | sensations of a strap-hanger during a crush on the Tube. But it is | ||
| + | strange and wonderful how far away the souls of men can seem, when their | ||
| + | bodies are so near as all that.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | modern industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a congestion | ||
| + | than a communion. It is a thing to which human groups left to | ||
| + | themselves, and even human individuals left to themselves, have | ||
| + | everywhere tended by an instinct that may truly be called human. Like | ||
| + | all healthy human things, it has varied very much within the limits of a | ||
| + | general character; for that is characteristic of everything belonging to | ||
| + | that ancient land of liberty that lies before and around the servile | ||
| + | industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that its products are all | ||
| + | of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the same seal and | ||
| + | drink the same bad whisky, that a man at the North Pole and another at | ||
| + | the South might recognise the same optimistic label on the same dubious | ||
| + | tinned salmon. But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with every | ||
| + | valley and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any | ||
| + | wine once reminding us of whisky; and cheeses can change from county to | ||
| + | county without forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese. When | ||
| + | I am speaking of this thing, therefore, I am speaking of something that | ||
| + | doubtless includes very wide differences; | ||
| + | maintain that it is one thing. I will maintain< | ||
| + | botheration comes from not realising that it is really one thing. I will | ||
| + | advance the thesis that before all talk about comparative religion and | ||
| + | the separate religious founders of the world, the first essential is to | ||
| + | recognise this thing as a whole, as a thing almost native and normal to | ||
| + | the great fellowship that we call mankind. This thing is Paganism; and I | ||
| + | propose to show in these pages that it is the one real rival to the | ||
| + | Church of Christ.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | a matter of degree and distance and difference that it is only | ||
| + | comparatively successful when it tries to compare. When we come to look | ||
| + | at it closely we find it comparing things that are really quite | ||
| + | incomparable. We are accustomed to see a table or catalogue of the | ||
| + | world’s great religions in parallel columns, until we fancy they are | ||
| + | really parallel. We are accustomed to see the names of the great | ||
| + | religious founders all in a row: Christ; Mahomet; Buddha; Confucius. But | ||
| + | in truth this is only a trick; another of these optical illusions by | ||
| + | which any objects may be put into a particular relation by shifting to a | ||
| + | particular point of sight. Those religions and religious founders, or | ||
| + | rather those whom we choose to lump together as religions and religious | ||
| + | founders, do not really show any common character. The illusion is | ||
| + | partly produced by Islam coming immediately after Christianity in the | ||
| + | list; as Islam did come after Christianity and was largely an imitation | ||
| + | of Christianity. But the other eastern religions, or what we call | ||
| + | religions, not only do not resemble the Church but do not resemble each | ||
| + | other. When we come to Confucianism at the end of the list, we come to | ||
| + | something in a totally different world of thought. To compare the | ||
| + | Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an | ||
| + | English squire or asking whether a man is a believer in immortality or a | ||
| + | hundred-per-cent American.< | ||
| + | not a religion.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most | ||
| + | popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel. It | ||
| + | is not easy, therefore, to expose the fallacy by which a false | ||
| + | classification is created to swamp a unique thing, when it really is a | ||
| + | unique thing. As there is nowhere else exactly the same fact, so there | ||
| + | is nowhere else exactly the same fallacy. But I will take the nearest | ||
| + | thing I can find to such a solitary social phenomenon, in order to show | ||
| + | how it is thus swamped and assimilated. I imagine most of us would agree | ||
| + | that there is something unusual and unique about the position of the | ||
| + | Jews. There is nothing that is quite in the same sense an international | ||
| + | nation; an ancient culture scattered in different countries but still | ||
| + | distinct and indestructible. Now this business is like an attempt to | ||
| + | make a list of nomadic nations in order to soften the strange solitude | ||
| + | of the Jew. It would be easy enough to do it, by the same process of | ||
| + | putting a plausible approximation first, and then tailing off into | ||
| + | totally different things thrown in somehow to make up the list. Thus in | ||
| + | the new list of nomadic nations the Jews would be followed by the | ||
| + | Gypsies; who at least are really nomadic if they are not really | ||
| + | national. Then the professor of the new science of Comparative Nomadics | ||
| + | could pass easily on to something different; even if it was very | ||
| + | different. He could remark on the wandering adventure of the English who | ||
| + | had scattered their colonies over so many seas; and call < | ||
| + | It is quite true that a great many Englishmen seem to be strangely | ||
| + | restless in England. It is quite true that not all of them have left | ||
| + | their country for their country’s good. The moment we mention the | ||
| + | wandering empire of the English, we must add the strange exiled empire | ||
| + | of the Irish. For it is a curious fact, to be noted in our imperial | ||
| + | literature, that the same ubiquity and unrest which is a<span class=" | ||
| + | English enterprise and triumph is a proof of Irish futility and failure. | ||
| + | Then the professor of Nomadism would look round thoughtfully and | ||
| + | remember that there was great talk recently of German waiters, German | ||
| + | barbers, German clerks, Germans naturalising themselves in England and | ||
| + | the United States and the South American republics. The Germans would go | ||
| + | down as the fifth nomadic race; the words Wanderlust and Folk-Wandering | ||
| + | would come in very useful here. For there really have been historians | ||
| + | who explained the Crusades by suggesting that the Germans were found | ||
| + | wandering (as the police say) in what happened to be the neighbourhood | ||
| + | of Palestine. Then the professor, feeling he was now near the end, would | ||
| + | make a last leap in desperation. He would recall the fact that the | ||
| + | French Army has captured nearly every capital in Europe, that it marched | ||
| + | across countless conquered lands under Charlemagne or Napoleon; and | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | race. Thus he would have his six nomadic nations all compact and | ||
| + | complete, and would feel that the Jew was no longer a sort of mysterious | ||
| + | and even mystical exception. But people with more common sense would | ||
| + | probably realise that he had only extended nomadism by extending the | ||
| + | meaning of nomadism; and that he had extended that until it really had | ||
| + | no meaning at all. It is quite true that the French soldier has made | ||
| + | some of the finest marches in all military history. But it is equally | ||
| + | true, and far more self-evident, | ||
| + | rooted reality there is no such thing as a rooted reality in the world; | ||
| + | or in other words, if he is a nomad there is nobody who is not a nomad.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | comparative religion and the world’s religious founders all standing | ||
| + | respectably in a row. It seeks to classify Jesus as the other would | ||
| + | classify Jews, by inventing a new class for the purpose and<span class=" | ||
| + | the rest of it with stop-gaps and second-rate copies. I do not mean that | ||
| + | these other things are not often great things in their own real | ||
| + | character and class. Confucianism and Buddhism are great things, but it | ||
| + | is not true to call them Churches; just as the French and English are | ||
| + | great peoples, but it is nonsense to call them nomads. There are some | ||
| + | points of resemblance between Christendom and its imitation in Islam; | ||
| + | for that matter there are some points of resemblance between Jews and | ||
| + | Gypsies. But after that the lists are made up of anything that comes to | ||
| + | hand; of anything that can be put in the same catalogue without being in | ||
| + | the same category.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In this sketch of religious history, with all decent deference to men | ||
| + | much more learned than myself, I propose to cut across and disregard | ||
| + | this modern method of classification, | ||
| + | the facts of history. I shall here submit an alternative classification | ||
| + | of religion or religions, which I believe would be found to cover all | ||
| + | the facts and, what is quite as important here, all the fancies. Instead | ||
| + | of dividing religion geographically, | ||
| + | Christian, Moslem, Brahmin, Buddhist, and so on, I would divide it | ||
| + | psychologically and in some sense horizontally; | ||
| + | spiritual elements and influences that could sometimes exist in the same | ||
| + | country, or even in the same man. Putting the Church apart for the | ||
| + | moment, I should be disposed to divide the natural religion of the mass | ||
| + | of mankind under such headings as these: God; the Gods; the Demons; the | ||
| + | Philosophers. I believe some such classification will help us to sort | ||
| + | out the spiritual experiences of men much more successfully than the | ||
| + | conventional business of comparing religions; and that many famous | ||
| + | figures will naturally fall into their place in this way who are only | ||
| + | forced into their place in the other. As I shall make use of these | ||
| + | titles or terms more than once in narrative and allusion, it will be | ||
| + | well to define at<span class=" | ||
| + | begin with the first, the simplest and the most sublime, in this | ||
| + | chapter.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In considering the elements of pagan humanity, we must begin by an | ||
| + | attempt to describe the indescribable. Many get over the difficulty of | ||
| + | describing it by the expedient of denying it, or at least ignoring it; | ||
| + | but the whole point of it is that it was something that was never quite | ||
| + | eliminated even when it was ignored. They are obsessed by their | ||
| + | evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or | ||
| + | something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes | ||
| + | from a tree, or from something larger than itself. Now there is very | ||
| + | good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some | ||
| + | detail that was forgotten because it was too small to be traced. Much | ||
| + | more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large | ||
| + | to be managed. There is very good reason to suppose that many people did | ||
| + | begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all; | ||
| + | and afterwards fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a | ||
| + | sort of secret dissipation. Even the test of savage beliefs, of which | ||
| + | the folk-lore students are so fond, is admittedly often found to support | ||
| + | such a view. Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense | ||
| + | in which anthropologists use the word, the Australian aborigines for | ||
| + | instance, are found to have a pure monotheism with a high moral tone. A | ||
| + | missionary was preaching to a very wild tribe of polytheists, | ||
| + | told him all their polytheistic tales, and telling them in return of the | ||
| + | existence of the one good God who is a spirit and judges men by | ||
| + | spiritual standards. And there was a sudden buzz of excitement among | ||
| + | these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was letting out a secret, | ||
| + | and they cried to each other, ‘Atahocan! He is speaking of Atahocan!’</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | polytheists not to speak of Atahocan. The name is not perhaps so much | ||
| + | adapted as some of our own to direct and solemn religious exhortation; | ||
| + | but many other social forces are always covering up and confusing such | ||
| + | simple ideas. Possibly the old god stood for an old morality found | ||
| + | irksome in more expansive moments; possibly intercourse with demons was | ||
| + | more fashionable among the best people, as in the modern fashion of | ||
| + | Spiritualism. Anyhow, there are any number of similar examples. They all | ||
| + | testify to the unmistakable psychology of a thing taken for granted, as | ||
| + | distinct from a thing talked about. There is a striking example in a | ||
| + | tale taken down word for word from a Red Indian in California, which | ||
| + | starts out with hearty legendary and literary relish: ‘The sun is the | ||
| + | father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his | ||
| + | wife and the stars are their children’; | ||
| + | ingenious and complicated story, in the middle of which is a sudden | ||
| + | parenthesis saying that sun and moon have to do something because ‘It is | ||
| + | ordered that way by the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.’ | ||
| + | That is exactly the attitude of most paganism towards God. He is | ||
| + | something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident; a habit | ||
| + | possibly not peculiar to pagans. Sometimes the higher deity is | ||
| + | remembered in the higher moral grades and is a sort of mystery. But | ||
| + | always, it has been truly said, the savage is talkative about his | ||
| + | mythology and taciturn about his religion. The Australian savages, | ||
| + | indeed, exhibit a topsyturvydom such as the ancients might have thought | ||
| + | truly worthy of the antipodes. The savage who thinks nothing of tossing | ||
| + | off such a trifle as a tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a | ||
| + | baby chopped in two, or dropping into small-talk about a colossal cosmic | ||
| + | cow milked to make the rain, merely in order to be sociable, will then | ||
| + | retire to secret caverns sealed against women and white men, temples of | ||
| + | terrible initiation where< | ||
| + | dripping of sacrificial blood, the priest whispers the final secrets | ||
| + | known only to the initiate: that honesty is the best policy, that a | ||
| + | little kindness does nobody any harm, that all men are brothers and that | ||
| + | there is but one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible | ||
| + | and invisible.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In other words, we have here the curiosity of religious history that the | ||
| + | savage seems to be parading all the most repulsive and impossible parts | ||
| + | of his belief and concealing all the most sensible and creditable parts. | ||
| + | But the explanation is that they are not in that sense parts of his | ||
| + | belief; or at least not parts of the same sort of belief. The myths are | ||
| + | merely tall stories, though as tall as the sky, the waterspout, or the | ||
| + | tropic rain. The mysteries are true stories, and are taken secretly that | ||
| + | they may be taken seriously. Indeed it is only too easy to forget that | ||
| + | there is a thrill in theism. A novel in which a number of separate | ||
| + | characters all turned out to be the same character would certainly be a | ||
| + | sensational novel. It is so with the idea that sun and tree and river | ||
| + | are the disguises of one god and not of many. Alas, we also find it only | ||
| + | too easy to take Atahocan for granted. But whether he is allowed to fade | ||
| + | into a truism or preserved as a sensation by being preserved as a | ||
| + | secret, it is clear that he is always either an old truism or an old | ||
| + | tradition. There is nothing to show that he is an improved product of | ||
| + | the mere mythology and everything to show that he preceded it. He is | ||
| + | worshipped by the simplest tribes with no trace of ghosts or | ||
| + | grave-offerings, | ||
| + | and Grant Allen sought the origin of the simplest of all ideas. Whatever | ||
| + | else there was, there was never any such thing as the Evolution of the | ||
| + | Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, | ||
| + | was even explained away; but it was never evolved. There are not a few | ||
| + | indications of this change in other< | ||
| + | instance, in the fact that even polytheism seems often the combination | ||
| + | of several monotheisms. A god will gain only a minor seat on Mount | ||
| + | Olympus, when he had owned earth and heaven and all the stars while he | ||
| + | lived in his own little valley. Like many a small nation melting in a | ||
| + | great empire, he gives up local universality only to come under | ||
| + | universal limitation. The very name of Pan suggests that he became a god | ||
| + | of the wood when he had been a god of the world. The very name of | ||
| + | Jupiter is almost a pagan translation of the words ‘Our Father which art | ||
| + | in heaven.’ As with the Great Father symbolised by the sky, so with the | ||
| + | Great Mother whom we still call Mother Earth. Demeter and Ceres and | ||
| + | Cybele often seem to be almost incapable of taking over the whole | ||
| + | business of godhood, so that men should need no other gods. It seems | ||
| + | reasonably probable that a good many men did have no other gods but one | ||
| + | of these, worshipped as the author of all.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | China, it would seem that the simpler idea of the Great Father has never | ||
| + | been very much complicated with rival cults, though it may have in some | ||
| + | sense ceased to be a cult itself. The best authorities seem to think | ||
| + | that though Confucianism is in one sense agnosticism, | ||
| + | directly contradict the old theism, precisely because it has become a | ||
| + | rather vague theism. It is one in which God is called Heaven, as in the | ||
| + | case of polite persons tempted to swear in drawing-rooms. But Heaven is | ||
| + | still overhead, even if it is very far overhead. We have all the | ||
| + | impression of a simple truth that has receded, until it was remote | ||
| + | without ceasing to be true. And this phrase alone would bring us back to | ||
| + | the same idea even in the pagan mythology of the West. There is surely | ||
| + | something of this very notion of the withdrawal of some higher power in | ||
| + | all those mysterious and very imaginative myths< | ||
| + | earth and sky. In a hundred forms we are told that heaven and earth were | ||
| + | once lovers, or were once at one, when some upstart thing, often some | ||
| + | undutiful child, thrust them apart; and the world was built on an abyss; | ||
| + | upon a division and a parting. One of its grossest versions was given by | ||
| + | Greek civilisation in the myth of Uranus and Saturn. One of its most | ||
| + | charming versions was that of some savage people, who say that a little | ||
| + | pepper-plant grew taller and taller and lifted the whole sky like a lid; | ||
| + | a beautiful barbaric vision of daybreak for some of our painters who | ||
| + | love that tropical twilight. Of myths, and the highly mythical | ||
| + | explanations which the moderns offer of myths, something will be said in | ||
| + | another section; for I cannot but think that most mythology is on | ||
| + | another and more superficial plane. But in this primeval vision of the | ||
| + | rending of one world into two there is surely something more of ultimate | ||
| + | ideas. As to what it means, a man will learn far more about it by lying | ||
| + | on his back in a field, and merely looking at the sky, than by reading | ||
| + | all the libraries even of the most learned and valuable folk-lore. He | ||
| + | will know what is meant by saying that the sky ought to be nearer to us | ||
| + | than it is, that perhaps it was once nearer than it is, that it is not a | ||
| + | thing merely alien and abysmal but in some fashion sundered from us and | ||
| + | saying farewell. There will creep across his mind the curious suggestion | ||
| + | that after all, perhaps, the myth-maker was not merely a moon-calf or | ||
| + | village idiot thinking he could cut up the clouds like a cake, but had | ||
| + | in him something more than it is fashionable to attribute to the | ||
| + | Troglodyte; that it is just possible that Thomas Hood was not talking | ||
| + | like a Troglodyte when he said that, as time went on, the tree-tops only | ||
| + | told him he was further off from heaven than when he was a boy. But | ||
| + | anyhow the legend of Uranus the Lord of Heaven dethroned by Saturn the | ||
| + | Time Spirit would mean something to the author of that poem. And it | ||
| + | would< | ||
| + | fatherhood. There is the idea of God in the very notion that there were | ||
| + | gods before the gods. There is an idea of greater simplicity in all the | ||
| + | allusions to that more ancient order. The suggestion is supported by the | ||
| + | process of propagation we see in historic times. Gods and demigods and | ||
| + | heroes breed like herrings before our very eyes, and suggest of | ||
| + | themselves that the family may have had one founder; mythology grows | ||
| + | more and more complicated, | ||
| + | the beginning it was more simple. Even on the external evidence, of the | ||
| + | sort called scientific, there is therefore a very good case for the | ||
| + | suggestion that man began with monotheism before it developed or | ||
| + | degenerated into polytheism. But I am concerned rather with an internal | ||
| + | than an external truth; and, as I have already said, the internal truth | ||
| + | is almost indescribable. We have to speak of something of which it is | ||
| + | the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not merely to | ||
| + | translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I suspect an immense implication behind all polytheism and paganism. I | ||
| + | suspect we have only a hint of it here and there in these savage creeds | ||
| + | or Greek origins. It is not exactly what we mean by the presence of God; | ||
| + | in a sense it might more truly be called the absence of God. But absence | ||
| + | does not mean non-existence; | ||
| + | friends does not mean that from his life all friendship is absent. It is | ||
| + | a void but it is not a negation; it is something as positive as an empty | ||
| + | chair. It would be an exaggeration to say that the pagan saw higher than | ||
| + | Olympus an empty throne. It would be nearer the truth to take the | ||
| + | gigantic imagery of the Old Testament, in which the prophet saw God from | ||
| + | behind; it was as if some immeasurable presence had turned its back on | ||
| + | the world. Yet<span class=" | ||
| + | anything so conscious and vivid as the monotheism of Moses and his | ||
| + | people. I do not mean that the pagan peoples were in the least | ||
| + | overpowered by this idea merely because it is overpowering. On the | ||
| + | contrary, it was so large that they all carried it lightly, as we all | ||
| + | carry the load of the sky. Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud, | ||
| + | we can all ignore its awful blue background; we can neglect the sky; and | ||
| + | precisely because it bears down upon us with an annihilating force, it | ||
| + | is felt as nothing. A thing of this kind can only be an impression and a | ||
| + | rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made | ||
| + | by pagan literature and religion. I repeat that in our special | ||
| + | sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence of | ||
| + | God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of | ||
| + | God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt | ||
| + | if there was ever in all the marvellous manhood of antiquity a man who | ||
| + | was happy as St. Francis was happy. We feel it in the legend of a Golden | ||
| + | Age and again in the vague implication that the gods themselves are | ||
| + | ultimately related to something else, even when that Unknown God has | ||
| + | faded into a Fate. Above all we feel it in those immortal moments when | ||
| + | the pagan literature seems to return to a more innocent antiquity and | ||
| + | speak with a more direct voice, so that no word is worthy of it except | ||
| + | our own monotheistic monosyllable. We cannot say anything but ‘God’ in a | ||
| + | sentence like that of Socrates bidding farewell to his judges: ‘I go to | ||
| + | die and you remain to live; and God alone knows which of us goes the | ||
| + | better way.’ We can use no other word even for the best moments of | ||
| + | Marcus Aurelius: ‘Can they say dear city of Cecrops, and canst thou not | ||
| + | say dear city of God?’ We can use no other word in that mighty line in | ||
| + | which Virgil spoke to all who suffer with the veritable cry of a | ||
| + | Christian before Christ, in the<span class=" | ||
| + | deus his quoque finem.’</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher than the | ||
| + | gods; but because it is higher it is also further away. Not yet could | ||
| + | even Virgil have read the riddle and the paradox of that other divinity, | ||
| + | who is both higher and nearer. For them what was truly divine was very | ||
| + | distant, so distant that they dismissed it more and more from their | ||
| + | minds. It had less and less to do with the mere mythology of which I | ||
| + | shall write later. Yet even in this there was a sort of tacit admission | ||
| + | of its intangible purity, when we consider what most of the mythology is | ||
| + | like. As the Jews would not degrade it by images, so the Greeks did not | ||
| + | degrade it even by imaginations. When the gods were more and more | ||
| + | remembered only by pranks and profligacies, | ||
| + | of reverence. It was an act of piety to forget God. In other words, | ||
| + | there is something in the whole tone of the time suggesting that men had | ||
| + | accepted a lower level, and still were half conscious that it was a | ||
| + | lower level. It is hard to find words for these things; yet the one | ||
| + | really just word stands ready. These men were conscious of the Fall, if | ||
| + | they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of all heathen | ||
| + | humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they | ||
| + | forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at | ||
| + | the back of all pagan sentiment. There is such a thing as the momentary | ||
| + | power to remember that we forget. And the most ignorant of humanity know | ||
| + | by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven. But it | ||
| + | remains true that even for these men there were moments, like the | ||
| + | memories of childhood, when they heard themselves talking with a simpler | ||
| + | language; there were moments when the Roman, like Virgil in the line | ||
| + | already quoted, cut his way with a sword-stroke of song out of the | ||
| + | tangle of the mythologies; | ||
| + | suddenly out of sight and the Sky-Father was alone in the sky.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | white light as of a lost morning still lingers on the figure of Jupiter, | ||
| + | of Pan, or of the elder Apollo; and it may well be, as already noted, | ||
| + | that each was once a divinity as solitary as Jehovah or Allah. They lost | ||
| + | this lonely universality by a process it is here very necessary to note; | ||
| + | a process of amalgamation very like what was afterwards called | ||
| + | syncretism. The whole pagan world set itself to build a Pantheon. They | ||
| + | admitted more and more gods, gods not only of the Greeks but of the | ||
| + | barbarians; gods not only of Europe but of Asia and Africa. The more the | ||
| + | merrier, though some of the Asian and African ones were not very merry. | ||
| + | They admitted them to equal thrones with their own; sometimes they | ||
| + | identified them with their own. They may have regarded it as an | ||
| + | enrichment of their religious life; but it meant the final loss of all | ||
| + | that we now call religion. It meant that ancient light of simplicity, | ||
| + | that had a single source like the sun, finally fades away in a dazzle of | ||
| + | conflicting lights and colours. God is really sacrificed to the gods; in | ||
| + | a very literal sense of the flippant phrase, they have been too many for | ||
| + | him.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | pagans having consented to the pooling of their pagan religions. And | ||
| + | this point is very important in many controversies ancient and modern. | ||
| + | It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing to say that the god of | ||
| + | the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought | ||
| + | themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the | ||
| + | gods of the city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming | ||
| + | down from the mountains or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of | ||
| + | the woods. But exactly what it lost by these larger ideas is the largest | ||
| + | idea of all. It is the idea< | ||
| + | world one. And the converse is also true. Doubtless those more | ||
| + | antiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and | ||
| + | their single sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages | ||
| + | benighted and left behind. But these superstitious savages were | ||
| + | preserving something that is much more like the cosmic power as | ||
| + | conceived by philosophy, or even as conceived by science. This paradox | ||
| + | by which the rude reactionary was a sort of prophetic progressive has | ||
| + | one consequence very much to the point. In a purely historical sense, | ||
| + | and apart from any other controversies in the same connection, it throws | ||
| + | a light, a single and a steady light, that shines from the beginning on | ||
| + | a little and lonely people. In this paradox, as in some riddle of | ||
| + | religion of which the answer was sealed up for centuries, lies the | ||
| + | mission and the meaning of the Jews.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is true in this sense, humanly speaking, that the world owes God to | ||
| + | the Jews. It owes that truth to much that is blamed in the Jews, | ||
| + | possibly to much that is blameable in the Jews. We have already noted | ||
| + | the nomadic position of the Jews amid the other pastoral peoples upon | ||
| + | the fringe of the Babylonian Empire, and something of that strange | ||
| + | erratic course of theirs blazed across the dark territory of extreme | ||
| + | antiquity, as they passed from the seat of Abraham and the shepherd | ||
| + | princes into Egypt and doubled back into the Palestinian hills and held | ||
| + | them against the Philistines from Crete and fell into captivity in | ||
| + | Babylon; and yet again returned to their mountain city by the Zionist | ||
| + | policy of the Persian conquerors; and so continued that amazing romance | ||
| + | of restlessness of which we have not yet seen the end. But through all | ||
| + | their wanderings, and especially through all their early wanderings, | ||
| + | they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle, | ||
| + | that held perhaps a featureless symbol and certainly an invisible god. | ||
| + | We may say that one<span class=" | ||
| + | Much as we may prefer that creative liberty which the Christian culture | ||
| + | has declared and by which it has eclipsed even the arts of antiquity, we | ||
| + | must not underrate the determining importance at the time of the Hebrew | ||
| + | inhibition of images. It is a typical example of one of those | ||
| + | limitations that did in fact preserve and perpetuate enlargement, | ||
| + | wall built round a wide open space. The God who could not have a statue | ||
| + | remained a spirit. Nor would his statue in any case have had the | ||
| + | disarming dignity and grace of the Greek statues then or the Christian | ||
| + | statues afterwards. He was living in a land of monsters. We shall have | ||
| + | occasion to consider more fully what those monsters were, Moloch and | ||
| + | Dagon and Tanit the terrible goddess. If the deity of Israel had ever | ||
| + | had an image, he would have had a phallic image. By merely giving him a | ||
| + | body they would have brought in all the worst elements of mythology; all | ||
| + | the polygamy of polytheism; the vision of the harem in heaven. This | ||
| + | point about the refusal of art is the first example of the limitations | ||
| + | which are often adversely criticised, only because the critics | ||
| + | themselves are limited. But an even stronger case can be found in the | ||
| + | other criticism offered by the same critics. It is often said with a | ||
| + | sneer that the God of Israel was only a God of Battles, ‘a mere barbaric | ||
| + | Lord of Hosts’ pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their | ||
| + | envious foe. Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles. Well | ||
| + | it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the | ||
| + | ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved | ||
| + | the desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend. It would have been | ||
| + | only too easy for them to have seen him stretching out his hands in love | ||
| + | and reconciliation, | ||
| + | Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods; the last god to sell his | ||
| + | crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian pantheon< | ||
| + | Olympus or the mead of Valhalla. It would have been easy enough for his | ||
| + | worshippers to follow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the | ||
| + | pooling of all the pagan traditions. It is obvious indeed that his | ||
| + | followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the | ||
| + | almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to | ||
| + | the divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and | ||
| + | ruin. The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that | ||
| + | contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a | ||
| + | real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of | ||
| + | Israel. As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of | ||
| + | confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, | ||
| + | precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the | ||
| + | primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. | ||
| + | He was as narrow as the universe.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In a word, there was a popular pagan god called Jupiter-Ammon. There was | ||
| + | never a god called Jehovah-Ammon. There was never a god called | ||
| + | Jehovah-Jupiter. If there had been, there would certainly have been | ||
| + | another called Jehovah-Moloch. Long before the liberal and enlightened | ||
| + | amalgamators had got so far afield as Jupiter, the image of the Lord of | ||
| + | Hosts would have been deformed out of all suggestion of a monotheistic | ||
| + | maker and ruler and would have become an idol far worse than any savage | ||
| + | fetish; for he might have been as civilised as the gods of Tyre and | ||
| + | Carthage. What that civilisation meant we shall consider more fully in | ||
| + | the chapter that follows; when we note how the power of demons nearly | ||
| + | destroyed Europe and even the heathen health of the world. But the | ||
| + | world’s destiny would have been distorted still more fatally if | ||
| + | monotheism had failed in the Mosaic tradition. I hope in a subsequent | ||
| + | section to show that I am not without sympathy with all that health in | ||
| + | the heathen world that made< | ||
| + | of religion. But I hope also to show that these were bound to fail in | ||
| + | the long run; and the world would have been lost if it had been unable | ||
| + | to return to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all | ||
| + | things. That we do preserve something of that primary simplicity, that | ||
| + | poets and philosophers can still indeed in some sense say an Universal | ||
| + | Prayer, that we live in a large and serene world under a sky that | ||
| + | stretches paternally over all the peoples of the earth, that philosophy | ||
| + | and philanthropy are truisms in a religion of reasonable men, all that | ||
| + | we do most truly owe, under heaven, to a secretive and restless nomadic | ||
| + | people; who bestowed on men the supreme and serene blessing of a jealous | ||
| + | God.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | world, because it was also the possession of a jealous people. The Jews | ||
| + | were unpopular, partly because of this narrowness already noted in the | ||
| + | Roman world, partly perhaps because they had already fallen into that | ||
| + | habit of merely handling things for exchange instead of working to make | ||
| + | them with their hands. It was partly also because polytheism had become | ||
| + | a sort of jungle in which solitary monotheism could be lost; but it is | ||
| + | strange to realise how completely it really was lost. Apart from more | ||
| + | disputed matters, there were things in the tradition of Israel which | ||
| + | belong to all humanity now, and might have belonged to all humanity | ||
| + | then. They had one of the colossal corner-stones of the world: the Book | ||
| + | of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greek | ||
| + | tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting | ||
| + | of poetry and philosophy in the morning of the world. It is a solemn and | ||
| + | uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the | ||
| + | pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really | ||
| + | perfects the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more | ||
| + | monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job | ||
| + | avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with | ||
| + | riddles; but<span class=" | ||
| + | a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts | ||
| + | can only say, ‘I do not understand, | ||
| + | only reply or repeat, ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke | ||
| + | there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something | ||
| + | that would be worth understanding. But this mighty monotheistic poem | ||
| + | remained unremarked by the whole world of antiquity, which was thronged | ||
| + | with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way in which the Jews | ||
| + | stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they | ||
| + | should have kept a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole | ||
| + | intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestly | ||
| + | concealed the Great Pyramid. But there were other reasons for a | ||
| + | cross-purpose and an impasse, characteristic of the whole of the end of | ||
| + | paganism. After all, the tradition of Israel had only got hold of one | ||
| + | half of the truth, even if we use the popular paradox and call it the | ||
| + | bigger half. I shall try to sketch in the next chapter that love of | ||
| + | locality and of personality that ran through mythology; here it need | ||
| + | only be said that there was a truth in it that could not be left out, | ||
| + | though it were a lighter and less essential truth. The sorrow of Job had | ||
| + | to be joined with the sorrow of Hector; and while the former was the | ||
| + | sorrow of the universe the latter was the sorrow of the city; for Hector | ||
| + | could only stand pointing to heaven as the pillar of holy Troy. When God | ||
| + | speaks out of the whirlwind He may well speak in the wilderness. But the | ||
| + | monotheism of the nomad was not enough for all that varied civilisation | ||
| + | of fields and fences and walled cities and temples and towns; and the | ||
| + | turn of these things also was to come, when the two could be combined in | ||
| + | a more definite and domestic religion. Here and there in all that pagan | ||
| + | crowd could be found a philosopher whose thoughts ran on pure theism; | ||
| + | but he never had, or supposed that he<span class=" | ||
| + | customs of the whole populace. Nor is it easy even in such philosophies | ||
| + | to find a true definition of this deep business of the relation of | ||
| + | polytheism and theism. Perhaps the nearest we can come to striking the | ||
| + | note, or giving the thing a name, is in something far away from all that | ||
| + | civilisation and more remote from Rome than the isolation of Israel. It | ||
| + | is in a saying I once heard from some Hindu tradition; that gods as well | ||
| + | as men are only the dreams of Brahma; and will perish when Brahma wakes. | ||
| + | There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia which is | ||
| + | less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it despair, even | ||
| + | if they would call it peace. This note of nihilism can be considered | ||
| + | later in a fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. It is enough to | ||
| + | say here that there is more of disillusion in that idea of a divine | ||
| + | awakening than is implied for us in the passage from mythology to | ||
| + | religion. But the symbol is very subtle and exact in one respect; that | ||
| + | it does suggest the disproportion and even disruption between the very | ||
| + | ideas of mythology and religion; the chasm between the two categories. | ||
| + | It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no | ||
| + | comparison between God and the gods. There is no more comparison than | ||
| + | there is between a man and the men who walk about in his dreams. Under | ||
| + | the next heading some attempt will be made to indicate the twilight of | ||
| + | that dream in which the gods walk about like men. But if any one fancies | ||
| + | the contrast of monotheism and polytheism is only a matter of some | ||
| + | people having one god and others a few more, for him it will be far | ||
| + | nearer the truth to plunge into the elephantine extravagance of Brahmin | ||
| + | cosmology; that he may feel a shudder going through the veil of things, | ||
| + | the many-handed creators, and the throned and haloed animals and all the | ||
| + | network of entangled stars and rulers of the night, as the awful eyes of | ||
| + | Brahma open like dawn upon the death of all.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | MAN AND MYTHOLOGIES</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | Day-Dreams. To compare them to dreams is not to deny that dreams can | ||
| + | come true. To compare them to travellers’ tales is not to deny that they | ||
| + | may be true tales, or at least truthful tales. In truth they are the | ||
| + | sort of tales the traveller tells to himself. All this mythological | ||
| + | business belongs to the poetical part of men. It seems strangely | ||
| + | forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a | ||
| + | work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticise | ||
| + | it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by | ||
| + | the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never | ||
| + | heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are | ||
| + | allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not | ||
| + | submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but | ||
| + | we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated | ||
| + | as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are | ||
| + | not appreciated at all. When the professor is told by the barbarian that | ||
| + | once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the | ||
| + | learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish it were true, | ||
| + | he is no judge of such things at all. When he is assured, on the best | ||
| + | Red Indian authority, that a primitive hero carried the sun and moon and | ||
| + | stars in a box, unless he claps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a | ||
| + | child would at such a charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter. | ||
| + | This test is not<span class=" | ||
| + | do laugh and kick like other children; and we must have a certain | ||
| + | simplicity to repicture the childhood of the world. When Hiawatha was | ||
| + | told by his nurse that a warrior threw his grandmother up to the moon, | ||
| + | he laughed like any English child told by his nurse that a cow jumped | ||
| + | over the moon. The child sees the joke as well as most men, and better | ||
| + | than some scientific men. But the ultimate test even of the fantastic is | ||
| + | the appropriateness of the inappropriate. And the test must appear | ||
| + | merely arbitrary because it is merely artistic. If any student tells me | ||
| + | that the infant Hiawatha only laughed out of respect for the tribal | ||
| + | custom of sacrificing the aged to economical housekeeping, | ||
| + | not. If any scholar tells me that the cow jumped over the moon only | ||
| + | because a heifer was sacrificed to Diana, I answer that it did not. It | ||
| + | happened because it is obviously the right thing for a cow to jump over | ||
| + | the moon. Mythology is a lost art, one of the few arts that really are | ||
| + | lost; but it is an art. The horned moon and the horned mooncalf make a | ||
| + | harmonious and almost a quiet pattern. And throwing your grandmother | ||
| + | into the sky is not good behaviour; but it is perfectly good taste.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | branch of the beautiful is the ugly. They seldom allow for the | ||
| + | legitimate liberty of the grotesque. And they will dismiss a savage myth | ||
| + | as merely coarse and clumsy and an evidence of degradation, | ||
| + | has not all the beauty of the herald Mercury new lighted on a | ||
| + | heaven-kissing hill; when it really has the beauty of the Mock Turtle of | ||
| + | the Mad Hatter. It is the supreme proof of a man being prosaic that he | ||
| + | always insists on poetry being poetical. Sometimes the humour is in the | ||
| + | very subject as well as the style of the fable. The Australian | ||
| + | aborigines, regarded as the rudest of savages, have a story about a | ||
| + | giant frog who had swallowed the sea and all the<span class=" | ||
| + | and who was only forced to spill them by being made to laugh. All the | ||
| + | animals with all their antics passed before him and, like Queen | ||
| + | Victoria, he was not amused. He collapsed at last before an eel who | ||
| + | stood delicately balanced on the tip of its tail, doubtless with a | ||
| + | rather desperate dignity. Any amount of fine fantastic literature might | ||
| + | be made out of that fable. There is philosophy in that vision of the dry | ||
| + | world before the beatific Deluge of laughter. There is imagination in | ||
| + | the mountainous monster erupting like an aqueous volcano; there is | ||
| + | plenty of fun in the thought of his goggling visage as the pelican or | ||
| + | the penguin passed by. Anyhow the frog laughed; but the folk-lore | ||
| + | student remains grave.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | properly judged by science; still less properly judged as science. Some | ||
| + | myths are very crude and queer like the early drawings of children; but | ||
| + | the child is trying to draw. It is none the less an error to treat his | ||
| + | drawing as if it were a diagram, or intended to be a diagram. The | ||
| + | student cannot make a scientific statement about the savage, because the | ||
| + | savage is not making a scientific statement about the world. He is | ||
| + | saying something quite different; what might be called the gossip of the | ||
| + | gods. We may say, if we like, that it is believed before there is time | ||
| + | to examine it. It would be truer to say it is accepted before there is | ||
| + | time to believe it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I confess I doubt the whole theory of the dissemination of myths or (as | ||
| + | it commonly is) of one myth. It is true that something in our nature and | ||
| + | conditions makes many stories similar; but each of them may be original. | ||
| + | One man does not borrow the story from the other man, though he may tell | ||
| + | it from the same motive as the other man. It would be easy to apply the | ||
| + | whole argument about legend to literature; and turn it into a vulgar | ||
| + | monomania of plagiarism. I would undertake to trace a notion like that | ||
| + | of the<span class=" | ||
| + | through communal and antiquated myths. I would undertake to find | ||
| + | something like a bunch of flowers figuring again and again from the | ||
| + | fatal bouquet of Becky Sharpe to the spray of roses sent by the Princess | ||
| + | of Ruritania. But though these flowers may spring from the same soil, it | ||
| + | is not the same faded flower that is flung from hand to hand. Those | ||
| + | flowers are always fresh.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | There are too many keys to mythology, as there are too many cryptograms | ||
| + | in Shakespeare. Everything is phallic; everything is totemistic; | ||
| + | everything is seed-time and harvest; everything is ghosts and | ||
| + | grave-offerings; | ||
| + | is the sun and moon; everything is everything. Every folk-lore student | ||
| + | who knew a little more than his own monomania, every man of wider | ||
| + | reading and critical culture like Andrew Lang, has practically confessed | ||
| + | that the bewilderment of these things left his brain spinning. Yet the | ||
| + | whole trouble comes from a man trying to look at these stories from the | ||
| + | outside, as if they were scientific objects. He has only to look at them | ||
| + | from the inside, and ask himself how he would begin a story. A story may | ||
| + | start with anything and go anywhere. It may start with a bird without | ||
| + | the bird being a totem; it may start with the sun without being a solar | ||
| + | myth. It is said there are only ten plots in the world; and there will | ||
| + | certainly be common and recurrent elements. Set ten thousand children | ||
| + | talking at once, and telling tarradiddles about what they did in the | ||
| + | wood; and it will not be hard to find parallels suggesting sun-worship | ||
| + | or animal-worship. Some of the stories may be pretty and some silly and | ||
| + | some perhaps dirty; but they can only be judged as stories. In the | ||
| + | modern dialect, they can only be judged aesthetically. It is strange | ||
| + | that aesthetics, or mere feeling, which is now allowed< | ||
| + | it has no rights at all, to wreck reason with pragmatism and morals with | ||
| + | anarchy, is apparently not allowed to give a purely aesthetic judgment | ||
| + | on what is obviously a purely aesthetic question. We may be fanciful | ||
| + | about everything except fairy-tales.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | ideas. Everybody ought to know that, for everybody has been a child. | ||
| + | Ignorant as a child is, he knows more than he can say and feels not only | ||
| + | atmospheres but fine shades. And in this matter there are several fine | ||
| + | shades. Nobody understands it who has not had what can only be called | ||
| + | the ache of the artist to find some sense and some story in the | ||
| + | beautiful things he sees; his hunger for secrets and his anger at any | ||
| + | tower or tree escaping with its tale untold. He feels that nothing is | ||
| + | perfect unless it is personal. Without that the blind unconscious beauty | ||
| + | of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue. One need only | ||
| + | be a very minor poet to have wrestled with the tower or the tree until | ||
| + | it spoke like a titan or a dryad. It is often said that pagan mythology | ||
| + | was a personification of the powers of nature. The phrase is true in a | ||
| + | sense, but it is very unsatisfactory; | ||
| + | are abstractions and the personification is artificial. Myths are not | ||
| + | allegories. Natural powers are not in this case abstractions. It is not | ||
| + | as if there were a God of Gravitation. There may be a genius of the | ||
| + | waterfall; but not of mere falling, even less than of mere water. The | ||
| + | impersonation is not of something impersonal. The point is that the | ||
| + | personality perfects the water with significance. Father Christmas is | ||
| + | not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called | ||
| + | snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is | ||
| + | something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the | ||
| + | evergreens; so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The | ||
| + | test therefore is purely imaginative. But imaginative does not mean | ||
| + | imaginary. It<span class=" | ||
| + | subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, | ||
| + | consciously or unconsciously, | ||
| + | that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other | ||
| + | words, the natural mystic does know that there is something < | ||
| + | something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that | ||
| + | the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort | ||
| + | of incantation that can call it up.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | remote fellow-creatures. And the danger of these things being classified | ||
| + | is that they may seem to be comprehended. A really fine work of | ||
| + | folk-lore, like < | ||
| + | idea, for instance, that this or that story of a giant’s or wizard’s | ||
| + | heart in a casket or a cave only ‘means’ some stupid and static | ||
| + | superstition called ‘the external soul.’ But we do not know what these | ||
| + | things mean, simply because we do not know what we ourselves mean when | ||
| + | we are moved by them. Suppose somebody in a story says ‘Pluck this | ||
| + | flower and a princess will die in a castle beyond the sea,’ we do not | ||
| + | know why something stirs in the subconsciousness, | ||
| + | impossible seems also inevitable. Suppose we read ‘And in the hour when | ||
| + | the king extinguished the candle his ships were wrecked far away on the | ||
| + | coast of the Hebrides.’ We do not know why the imagination has accepted | ||
| + | that image before the reason can reject it; or why such correspondences | ||
| + | seem really to correspond to something in the soul. Very deep things in | ||
| + | our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small, | ||
| + | some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond | ||
| + | our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in material substances, | ||
| + | and many more emotions past finding out, are in an idea like that of the | ||
| + | external soul. The power even in the myths of savages is like the<span class=" | ||
| + | in the metaphors of poets. The soul of such a metaphor is often very | ||
| + | emphatically an external soul. The best critics have remarked that in | ||
| + | the best poets the simile is often a picture that seems quite separate | ||
| + | from the text. It is as irrelevant as the remote castle to the flower or | ||
| + | the Hebridean coast to the candle. Shelley compares the skylark to a | ||
| + | young woman in a turret, to a rose embedded in thick foliage, to a | ||
| + | series of things that seem to be about as unlike a skylark in the sky as | ||
| + | anything we can imagine. I suppose the most potent piece of pure magic | ||
| + | in English literature is the much-quoted passage in Keats’s | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | nobody notices that the image seems to come from nowhere; that it | ||
| + | appears abruptly after some almost equally irrelevant remarks about | ||
| + | Ruth; and that it has nothing in the world to do with the subject of the | ||
| + | poem. If there is one place in the world where nobody could reasonably | ||
| + | expect to find a nightingale, | ||
| + | it is only in the same sense that nobody would expect to find a giant’s | ||
| + | heart in a casket under the sea. Now, it would be very dangerous to | ||
| + | classify the metaphors of the poets. When Shelley says that the cloud | ||
| + | will rise ‘like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,’ it | ||
| + | would be quite possible to call the first a case of the coarse primitive | ||
| + | birth-myth and the second a survival of the ghost-worship which became | ||
| + | ancestor-worship. But it is the wrong way of dealing with a cloud; and | ||
| + | is liable to leave the learned in the condition of Polonius, only too | ||
| + | ready to think it like a weasel, or very like a whale.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | in mind throughout their development in mythologies and even religions. | ||
| + | First, these imaginative impressions are often strictly local. So far | ||
| + | from being abstractions turned into allegories, they are often images | ||
| + | almost concentrated< | ||
| + | particular forest; not of the science of afforestation or the department | ||
| + | of woods and forests. He worships the peak of a particular mountain, not | ||
| + | the abstract idea of altitude. So we find the god is not merely water | ||
| + | but often one special river; he may be the sea because the sea is single | ||
| + | like a stream; the river that runs round the world. Ultimately doubtless | ||
| + | many deities are enlarged into elements; but they are something more | ||
| + | than omnipresent. Apollo does not merely dwell wherever the sun shines; | ||
| + | his home is on the rock of Delphi. Diana is great enough to be in three | ||
| + | places at once, earth and heaven and hell, but greater is Diana of the | ||
| + | Ephesians. This localised feeling has its lowest form in the mere fetish | ||
| + | or talisman, such as millionaires put on their motor-cars. But it can | ||
| + | also harden into something like a high and serious religion, where it is | ||
| + | connected with high and serious duties; into the gods of the city or | ||
| + | even the gods of the hearth.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | shade of sincerity& | ||
| + | Athenian really think he had to sacrifice to Pallas Athene? What scholar | ||
| + | is really certain of the answer? In what sense did Dr. Johnson really | ||
| + | think that he had to touch all the posts in the street or that he had to | ||
| + | collect orange-peel? | ||
| + | ought to step on every alternate paving-stone? | ||
| + | fairly clear. First, in simpler and less self-conscious times these | ||
| + | forms could become more solid without really becoming more serious. | ||
| + | Day-dreams could be acted in broad daylight, with more liberty of | ||
| + | artistic expression; but still perhaps with something of the light step | ||
| + | of the somnambulist. Wrap Dr. Johnson in an antique mantle, crown him | ||
| + | (by his kind permission) with a garland, and he will move in state under | ||
| + | those ancient skies of morning; touching a series of sacred posts< | ||
| + | carved with the heads of the strange terminal gods, that stand at the | ||
| + | limits of the land and of the life of man. Make the child free of the | ||
| + | marbles and mosaics of some classic temple, to play on a whole floor | ||
| + | inlaid with squares of black and white; and he will willingly make this | ||
| + | fulfilment of his idle and drifting day-dream the clear field for a | ||
| + | grave and graceful dance. But the posts and the paving-stones are little | ||
| + | more and little less real than they are under modern limits. They are | ||
| + | not really much more serious for being taken seriously. They have the | ||
| + | sort of sincerity that they always had; the sincerity of art as a symbol | ||
| + | that expresses very real spiritualities under the surface of life. But | ||
| + | they are only sincere in the same sense as art; not sincere in the same | ||
| + | sense as morality. The eccentric’s collection of orange-peel may turn to | ||
| + | oranges in a Mediterranean festival or to golden apples in a | ||
| + | Mediterranean myth. But they are never on the same plane with the | ||
| + | difference between giving the orange to a blind beggar and carefully | ||
| + | placing the orange-peel so that the beggar may fall and break his leg. | ||
| + | Between these two things there is a difference of kind and not of | ||
| + | degree. The child does not think it wrong to step on the paving-stone as | ||
| + | he thinks it wrong to step on the dog’s tail. And it is very certain | ||
| + | that whatever jest or sentiment or fancy first set Johnson touching the | ||
| + | wooden posts, he never touched wood with any of the feeling with which | ||
| + | he stretched out his hands to the timber of that terrible tree, which | ||
| + | was the death of God and the life of man.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>As already noted, this does not mean that there was no reality or even | ||
| + | no religious sentiment in such a mood. As a matter of fact the Catholic | ||
| + | Church has taken over with uproarious success the whole of this popular | ||
| + | business of giving people local legends and lighter ceremonial | ||
| + | movements. In so far as all this sort of paganism was innocent and in | ||
| + | touch with nature, there is no reason why it should not be patronised by | ||
| + | patron saints as much as by pagan< | ||
| + | degrees of seriousness in the most natural make-believe. There is all | ||
| + | the difference between fancying there are fairies in the wood, which | ||
| + | often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really | ||
| + | frightening ourselves until we will walk a mile rather than pass a house | ||
| + | we have told ourselves is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact | ||
| + | that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real | ||
| + | spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to | ||
| + | stir the deep things of the soul. We all understand that and the pagans | ||
| + | understood it. The point is that paganism did not really stir the soul | ||
| + | except with these doubts and fancies; with the consequence that we | ||
| + | to-day can have little beyond doubts and fancies about paganism. All the | ||
| + | best critics agree that all the greatest poets, in pagan Hellas for | ||
| + | example, had an attitude towards their gods which is quite queer and | ||
| + | puzzling to men in the Christian era. There seems to be an admitted | ||
| + | conflict between the god and the man; but everybody seems to be doubtful | ||
| + | about which is the hero and which is the villain. This doubt does not | ||
| + | merely apply to a doubter like Euripides in the Bacchae; it applies to a | ||
| + | moderate conservative like Sophocles in the Antigone; or even to a | ||
| + | regular Tory and reactionary like Aristophanes in the Frogs. Sometimes | ||
| + | it would seem that the Greeks believed above all things in reverence, | ||
| + | only they had nobody to revere. But the point of the puzzle is this: | ||
| + | that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole | ||
| + | thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of | ||
| + | architecture for a castle in the clouds.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | round the whole world, whose remote branches under separate skies bear | ||
| + | like coloured birds the costly idols of Asia and the half-baked fetishes | ||
| + | of Africa and the fairy kings and princesses of the folk-tales of the | ||
| + | forests, and buried< | ||
| + | carried on the clouds of Olympus the buoyant supremacy of the gods of | ||
| + | Greece. These are the myths: and he who has no sympathy with myths has | ||
| + | no sympathy with men. But he who has most sympathy with myths will most | ||
| + | fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense | ||
| + | that Christianity or even Islam is a religion. They satisfy some of the | ||
| + | needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain | ||
| + | things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and | ||
| + | formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar, they do not | ||
| + | provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say ‘I believe in | ||
| + | Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,’ etc., as he stands up and says ‘I believe | ||
| + | in God the Father Almighty’ and the rest of the Apostles’ Creed. Many | ||
| + | believed in some and not in others, or more in some and less in others, | ||
| + | or only in a very vague poetical sense in any. There was no moment when | ||
| + | they were all collected into an orthodox order which men would fight and | ||
| + | be tortured to keep intact. Still less did anybody ever say in that | ||
| + | fashion: ‘I believe in Odin and Thor and Freya,’ for outside Olympus | ||
| + | even the Olympian order grows cloudy and chaotic. It seems clear to me | ||
| + | that Thor was not a god at all but a hero. Nothing resembling a religion | ||
| + | would picture anybody resembling a god as groping like a pigmy in a | ||
| + | great cavern, that turned out to be the glove of a giant. That is the | ||
| + | glorious ignorance called adventure. Thor may have been a great | ||
| + | adventurer; but to call him a god is like trying to compare Jehovah with | ||
| + | Jack and the Beanstalk. Odin seems to have been a real barbarian chief, | ||
| + | possibly of the Dark Ages after Christianity. Polytheism fades away at | ||
| + | its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a thing | ||
| + | like monotheism as held by serious monotheists. Again it does satisfy | ||
| + | the need to cry out on some uplifted name or some noble memory in | ||
| + | moments that are themselves noble< | ||
| + | child or the saving of a city. But the name was so used by many to whom | ||
| + | it was only a name. Finally it did satisfy, or rather it partially | ||
| + | satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of | ||
| + | surrendering something as the portion of the unknown powers; of pouring | ||
| + | out wine upon the ground, of throwing a ring into the sea; in a word, of | ||
| + | sacrifice. It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our advantage to | ||
| + | the full; of putting something in the other balance to ballast our | ||
| + | dubious pride, of paying tithes to nature for our land. This deep truth | ||
| + | of the danger of insolence, or being too big for our boots, runs through | ||
| + | all the great Greek tragedies and makes them great. But it runs side by | ||
| + | side with an almost cryptic agnosticism about the real nature of the | ||
| + | gods to be propitiated. Where that gesture of surrender is most | ||
| + | magnificent, | ||
| + | that the man will be the better for losing the ox than that the god will | ||
| + | be the better for getting it. It is said that in its grosser forms there | ||
| + | are often actions grotesquely suggestive of the god really eating the | ||
| + | sacrifice. But this fact is falsified by the error that I put first in | ||
| + | this note on mythology. It is misunderstanding the psychology of | ||
| + | day-dreams. A child pretending there is a goblin in a hollow tree will | ||
| + | do a crude and material thing, like leaving a piece of cake for him. A | ||
| + | poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like bringing to the | ||
| + | god fruits as well as flowers. But the degree of < | ||
| + | acts may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree. The crude | ||
| + | fancy is no more a creed than the ideal fancy is a creed. Certainly the | ||
| + | pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes | ||
| + | like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses | ||
| + | and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown | ||
| + | god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break | ||
| + | in history< | ||
| + | ignorantly worshipped.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in | ||
| + | its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to the | ||
| + | view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even | ||
| + | in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an | ||
| + | afterthought, | ||
| + | few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise | ||
| + | them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality | ||
| + | the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle | ||
| + | till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk | ||
| + | as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and | ||
| + | religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that | ||
| + | ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been | ||
| + | any such union of the priests and the philosophers. Mythology, then, | ||
| + | sought God through the imagination; | ||
| + | in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque | ||
| + | ugliness. But the imagination has its own laws and therefore its own | ||
| + | triumphs, which neither logicians nor men of science can understand. It | ||
| + | remained true to that imaginative instinct through a thousand | ||
| + | extravagances, | ||
| + | moon or the world being cut out of a cow, through all the dizzy | ||
| + | convolutions and mystic malformations of Asiatic art, through all the | ||
| + | stark and staring rigidity of Egyptian and Assyrian portraiture, | ||
| + | every kind of cracked mirror of mad art that seemed to deform the world | ||
| + | and displace the sky, it remained true to something about which there | ||
| + | can be no argument; something that makes it possible for some artist of | ||
| + | some school to stand suddenly still before that particular deformity and | ||
| + | say, ‘My dream< | ||
| + | pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are | ||
| + | wise enough not to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what | ||
| + | is meant by Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, until some prig of a | ||
| + | pessimist or progressive person explains what it means. Therefore we all | ||
| + | know the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In this | ||
| + | sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only | ||
| + | because it is the ignorant who appreciate poems. Imagination has its own | ||
| + | laws and triumphs; and a tremendous power began to clothe its images, | ||
| + | whether images in the mind or in the mud, whether in the bamboo of the | ||
| + | South Sea Islands or the marble of the mountains of Hellas. But there | ||
| + | was always a trouble in the triumph, which in these pages I have tried | ||
| + | to analyse in vain; but perhaps I might in conclusion state it thus.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be | ||
| + | stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and | ||
| + | beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller | ||
| + | when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship | ||
| + | would stunt and even maim him for ever. Henceforth being merely secular | ||
| + | would be a servitude and an inhibition. If man cannot pray he is gagged; | ||
| + | if he cannot kneel he is in irons. We therefore feel throughout the | ||
| + | whole of paganism a curious double feeling of trust and distrust. When | ||
| + | the man makes the gesture of salutation and of sacrifice, when he pours | ||
| + | out the libation or lifts up the sword, he knows he is doing a worthy | ||
| + | and a virile thing. He knows he is doing one of the things for which a | ||
| + | man was made. His imaginative experiment is therefore justified. But | ||
| + | precisely because it began with imagination, | ||
| + | something of mockery in it, and especially in the object of it. This | ||
| + | mockery, in the more< | ||
| + | almost intolerable irony of Greek tragedy. There seems a disproportion | ||
| + | between the priest and the altar or between the altar and the god. The | ||
| + | priest seems more solemn and almost more sacred than the god. All the | ||
| + | order of the temple is solid and sane and satisfactory to certain parts | ||
| + | of our nature; except the very centre of it, which seems strangely | ||
| + | mutable and dubious, like a dancing flame. It is the first thought round | ||
| + | which the whole has been built; and the first thought is still a fancy | ||
| + | and almost a frivolity. In that strange place of meeting, the man seems | ||
| + | more statuesque than the statue. He himself can stand for ever in the | ||
| + | noble and natural attitude of the statue of the Praying Boy. But | ||
| + | whatever name be written on the pedestal, whether Zeus or Ammon or | ||
| + | Apollo, the god whom he worships is Proteus.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | need. It is by a normal and necessary action that his hands are lifted; | ||
| + | but it is no less a parable that his hands are empty. About the nature | ||
| + | of that need there will be more to say; but at this point it may be said | ||
| + | that perhaps after all this true instinct, that prayer and sacrifice are | ||
| + | a liberty and an enlargement, | ||
| + | half-forgotten conception of universal fatherhood, which we have already | ||
| + | seen everywhere fading from the morning sky. This is true; and yet it is | ||
| + | not all the truth. There remains an indestructible instinct, in the poet | ||
| + | as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in localising | ||
| + | his god. It is something in the soul of poetry if not of piety. And the | ||
| + | greatest of poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us | ||
| + | the universe or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger | ||
| + | language, a local habitation and a name. No poet is merely a pantheist; | ||
| + | those who are counted most pantheistic, | ||
| + | local and particular image as the pagans did. After all, Shelley< | ||
| + | of the skylark because it was a skylark. You could not issue an imperial | ||
| + | or international translation of it for use in South Africa, in which it | ||
| + | was changed to an ostrich. So the mythological imagination moves as it | ||
| + | were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In | ||
| + | a word, mythology is a < | ||
| + | recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity | ||
| + | in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and | ||
| + | mysterious levity about all the places found. So far could the lonely | ||
| + | imagination lead, and we must turn later to the lonely reason. Nowhere | ||
| + | along this road did the two ever travel together.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | which these different dimensions met or a sort of solid. They differed | ||
| + | from the reality not in what they looked like but in what they were. A | ||
| + | picture may look like a landscape; it may look in every detail exactly | ||
| + | like a landscape. The only detail in which it differs is that it is not | ||
| + | a landscape. The difference is only that which divides a portrait of | ||
| + | Queen Elizabeth from Queen Elizabeth. Only in this mythical and mystical | ||
| + | world the portrait could exist before the person; and the portrait was | ||
| + | therefore more vague and doubtful. But anybody who has felt and fed on | ||
| + | the atmosphere of these myths will know what I mean when I say that in | ||
| + | one sense they did not really profess to be realities. The pagans had | ||
| + | dreams about realities; and they would have been the first to admit, in | ||
| + | their own words, that some came through the gate of ivory and others | ||
| + | through the gate of horn. The dreams do indeed tend to be very vivid | ||
| + | dreams when they touch on those tender or tragic things, which can | ||
| + | really make a sleeper awaken with the sense that his heart has been | ||
| + | broken in his sleep. They tend continually to hover over certain | ||
| + | passionate themes of meeting and parting, of a life that ends in death | ||
| + | or a death that is the begin< | ||
| + | stricken world looking for a stolen child; Isis stretches out her arms | ||
| + | over the earth in vain to gather the limbs of Osiris; and there is | ||
| + | lamentation upon the hills for Atys and through the woods for Adonis. | ||
| + | There mingles with all such mourning the mystical and profound sense | ||
| + | that death can be a deliverer and an appeasement; | ||
| + | us a divine blood for a renovating river and that all good is found in | ||
| + | gathering the broken body of the god. We may truly call these | ||
| + | foreshadowings; | ||
| + | And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that | ||
| + | is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces | ||
| + | shape but not texture. These things were something < | ||
| + | thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were | ||
| + | different. Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is | ||
| + | not a dog; and it is in this sense of identity that a myth is not a man. | ||
| + | Nobody really thought of Isis as a human being; nobody really thought of | ||
| + | Demeter as a historical character; nobody thought of Adonis as the | ||
| + | founder of a Church. There was no idea that any one of them had changed | ||
| + | the world; but rather that their recurrent death and life bore the sad | ||
| + | and beautiful burden of the changelessness of the world. Not one of them | ||
| + | was a revolution, save in the sense of the revolution of the sun and | ||
| + | moon. Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they mean the | ||
| + | shadows that we are and the shadows that we pursue. In certain | ||
| + | sacrificial and communal aspects they naturally suggest what sort of a | ||
| + | god might satisfy men; but they do not profess to be satisfied. Any one | ||
| + | who says they do is a bad judge of poetry.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | with Christianity. Those who call these cults ‘religions, | ||
| + | them with the certitude and challenge of the Church< | ||
| + | appreciation than we have of what made heathenism human, or of why | ||
| + | classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song. | ||
| + | It is no very human tenderness for the hungry to prove that hunger is | ||
| + | the same as food. It is no very genial understanding of youth to argue | ||
| + | that hope destroys the need for happiness. And it is utterly unreal to | ||
| + | argue that these images in the mind, admired entirely in the abstract, | ||
| + | were even in the same world with a living man and a living polity that | ||
| + | were worshipped because they were concrete. We might as well say that a | ||
| + | boy playing at robbers is the same as a man in his first day in the | ||
| + | trenches; or that a boy’s first fancies about ‘the not impossible she’ | ||
| + | are the same as the sacrament of marriage. They are fundamentally | ||
| + | different exactly where they are superficially similar; we might almost | ||
| + | say they are not the same even when they are the same. They are only | ||
| + | different because one is real and the other is not. I do not mean merely | ||
| + | that I myself believe that one is true and the other is not. I mean that | ||
| + | one was never meant to be true in the same sense as the other. The sense | ||
| + | in which it was meant to be true I have tried to suggest vaguely here, | ||
| + | but it is undoubtedly very subtle and almost indescribable. It is so | ||
| + | subtle that the students who profess to put it up as a rival to our | ||
| + | religion miss the whole meaning and purport of their own study. We know | ||
| + | better than the scholars, even those of us who are no scholars, what was | ||
| + | in that hollow cry that went forth over the dead Adonis and why the | ||
| + | Great Mother had a daughter wedded to death. We have entered more deeply | ||
| + | than they into the Eleusinian Mysteries and have passed a higher grade, | ||
| + | where gate within gate guarded the wisdom of Orpheus. We know the | ||
| + | meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the | ||
| + | perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet | ||
| + | saying, ‘These things are.’ It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist | ||
| + | crying, ‘Why cannot these things be?<span class=" | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE DEMONS AND THE PHILOSOPHERS</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | which has crowded the world with temples and is everywhere the parent of | ||
| + | popular festivity. For the central history of civilisation, | ||
| + | consists of two further stages before the final stage of Christendom. | ||
| + | The first was the struggle between this paganism and something less | ||
| + | worthy than itself, and the second the process by which it grew in | ||
| + | itself less worthy. In this very varied and often very vague polytheism | ||
| + | there was a weakness of original sin. Pagan gods were depicted as | ||
| + | tossing men like dice; and indeed they are loaded dice. About sex | ||
| + | especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born | ||
| + | mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity. This | ||
| + | disproportion dragged down the winged fancies; and filled the end of | ||
| + | paganism with a mere filth and litter of spawning gods. But the first | ||
| + | point to realise is that this sort of paganism had an early collision | ||
| + | with another sort of paganism; and that the issue of that essentially | ||
| + | spiritual struggle really determined the history of the world. In order | ||
| + | to understand it we must pass to a review of the other kind of paganism. | ||
| + | It can be considered much more briefly; indeed, there is a very real | ||
| + | sense in which the less that is said about it the better. If we have | ||
| + | called the first sort of mythology the day-dream, we might very well | ||
| + | call the second sort of mythology the nightmare.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | remember defending the religious< | ||
| + | luncheon-table of distinguished agnostics; and before the end of our | ||
| + | conversation every one of them had procured from his pocket, or | ||
| + | exhibited on his watch-chain, | ||
| + | admitted that he was never separated. I was the only person present who | ||
| + | had neglected to provide himself with a fetish. Superstition recurs in a | ||
| + | rationalist age because it rests on something which, if not identical | ||
| + | with rationalism, | ||
| + | very closely connected with agnosticism. It rests on something that is | ||
| + | really a very human and intelligible sentiment, like the local | ||
| + | invocations of the < | ||
| + | sentiment, for it rests on two feelings: first that we do not really | ||
| + | know the laws of the universe; and second that they may be very | ||
| + | different from all that we call reason. Such men realise the real truth | ||
| + | that enormous things do often turn upon tiny things. When a whisper | ||
| + | comes, from tradition or what not, that one particular tiny thing is the | ||
| + | key or clue, something deep and not altogether senseless in human nature | ||
| + | tells them that it is not unlikely. This feeling exists in both the | ||
| + | forms of paganism here under consideration. But when we come to the | ||
| + | second form of it, we find it transformed and filled with another and | ||
| + | more terrible spirit.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In dealing with the lighter thing called mythology, I have said little | ||
| + | about the most disputable aspect of it; the extent to which such | ||
| + | invocation of the spirits of the sea or the elements can indeed call | ||
| + | spirits from the vasty deep; or rather (as the Shakespearean scoffer put | ||
| + | it) whether the spirits come when they are called. I believe that I am | ||
| + | right in thinking that this problem, practical as it sounds, did not | ||
| + | play a dominant part in the poetical business of mythology. But I think | ||
| + | it even more obvious, on the evidence, that things of that sort have | ||
| + | sometimes appeared, even if they were only appearances. But when we<span class=" | ||
| + | come to the world of superstition, | ||
| + | shade of difference; a deepening and a darkening shade. Doubtless most | ||
| + | popular superstition is as frivolous as any popular mythology. Men do | ||
| + | not believe as a dogma that God would throw a thunderbolt at them for | ||
| + | walking under a ladder; more often they amuse themselves with the not | ||
| + | very laborious exercise of walking round it. There is no more in it than | ||
| + | what I have already adumbrated; a sort of airy agnosticism about the | ||
| + | possibilities of so strange a world. But there is another sort of | ||
| + | superstition that does definitely look for results; what might be called | ||
| + | a realistic superstition. And with that the question of whether spirits | ||
| + | do answer or do appear becomes much more serious. As I have said, it | ||
| + | seems to me pretty certain that they sometimes do; but about that there | ||
| + | is a distinction that has been the beginning of much evil in the world.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely | ||
| + | that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I | ||
| + | believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical | ||
| + | and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the | ||
| + | garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland | ||
| + | of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than | ||
| + | the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate | ||
| + | impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical | ||
| + | problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the | ||
| + | darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about | ||
| + | them. And indeed that popular phrase exactly expresses the point. The | ||
| + | gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had | ||
| + | a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious | ||
| + | sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where | ||
| + | the<span class=" | ||
| + | has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective: that | ||
| + | it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not | ||
| + | exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope | ||
| + | of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But | ||
| + | the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his | ||
| + | promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that | ||
| + | he had broken them.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In the accounts given us of many rude or savage races we gather that the | ||
| + | cult of demons often came after the cult of deities, and even after the | ||
| + | cult of one single and supreme deity. It may be suspected that in almost | ||
| + | all such places the higher deity is felt to be too far off for appeal in | ||
| + | certain petty matters, and men invoke the spirits because they are in a | ||
| + | more literal sense familiar spirits. But with the idea of employing the | ||
| + | demons who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the | ||
| + | demons. It may indeed be truly described as the idea of being worthy of | ||
| + | the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting | ||
| + | society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some | ||
| + | trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the | ||
| + | hidden spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And | ||
| + | there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But | ||
| + | with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the | ||
| + | gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a | ||
| + | monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man | ||
| + | deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think | ||
| + | of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention | ||
| + | or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world. This is | ||
| + | the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world. For most | ||
| + | cannibalism is not a primitive or even a<span class=" | ||
| + | artificial and even artistic; a sort of art for art’s sake. Men do not | ||
| + | do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary, | ||
| + | because they do think it horrible. They wish, in the most literal sense, | ||
| + | to sup on horrors. That is why it is often found that rude races like | ||
| + | the Australian natives are not cannibals; while much more refined and | ||
| + | intelligent races, like the New Zealand Maories, occasionally are. They | ||
| + | are refined and intelligent enough to indulge sometimes in a | ||
| + | self-conscious diabolism. But if we could understand their minds, or | ||
| + | even really understand their language, we should probably find that they | ||
| + | were not acting as ignorant, that is as innocent cannibals. They are not | ||
| + | doing it because they do not think it wrong, but precisely because they | ||
| + | do think it wrong. They are acting like a Parisian decadent at a Black | ||
| + | Mass. But the Black Mass has to hide underground from the presence of | ||
| + | the real Mass. In other words, the demons have really been in hiding | ||
| + | since the coming of Christ on earth. The cannibalism of the higher | ||
| + | barbarians is in hiding from the civilisation of the white man. But | ||
| + | before Christendom, | ||
| + | so. In the ancient world the demons often wandered abroad like dragons. | ||
| + | They could be positively and publicly enthroned as gods. Their enormous | ||
| + | images could be set up in public temples in the centre of populous | ||
| + | cities. And all over the world the traces can be found of this striking | ||
| + | and solid fact, so curiously overlooked by the moderns who speak of all | ||
| + | such evil as primitive and early in evolution, that as a matter of fact | ||
| + | some of the very highest civilisations of the world were the very places | ||
| + | where the horns of Satan were exalted, not only to the stars but in the | ||
| + | face of the sun.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | of Mexico and Peru. They were at least as elaborate as Egypt or China | ||
| + | and only less lively than that central civilisation which is our<span class=" | ||
| + | But those who criticise that central civilisation (which is always their | ||
| + | own civilisation) have a curious habit of not merely doing their | ||
| + | legitimate duty in condemning its crimes, but of going out of their way | ||
| + | to idealise its victims. They always assume that before the advent of | ||
| + | Europe there was nothing anywhere but Eden. And Swinburne, in that | ||
| + | spirited chorus of the nations in ‘Songs before Sunrise,’ used an | ||
| + | expression about Spain in her South American conquests which always | ||
| + | struck me as very strange. He said something about ‘her sins and sons | ||
| + | through sinless lands dispersed, | ||
| + | of man and thrice accursed the name of God.’ It may be reasonable enough | ||
| + | that he should say the Spaniards were sinful, but why in the world | ||
| + | should he say that the South Americans were sinless? Why should he have | ||
| + | supposed that continent to be exclusively populated by archangels or | ||
| + | saints perfect in heaven? It would be a strong thing to say of the most | ||
| + | respectable neighbourhood; | ||
| + | do know of that society the remark is rather funny. We know that the | ||
| + | sinless priests of this sinless people worshipped sinless gods, who | ||
| + | accepted as the nectar and ambrosia of their sunny paradise nothing but | ||
| + | incessant human sacrifice accompanied by horrible torments. We may note | ||
| + | also in the mythology of this American civilisation that element of | ||
| + | reversal or violence against instinct of which Dante wrote; which runs | ||
| + | backwards everywhere through the unnatural religion of the demons. It is | ||
| + | notable not only in ethics but in aesthetics. A South American idol was | ||
| + | made as ugly as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as | ||
| + | possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by working backwards | ||
| + | against their own nature and the nature of things. There was always a | ||
| + | sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark red | ||
| + | timber of the forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a | ||
| + | cracked mirror.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In any case it is clear enough that the painted and gilded civilisation | ||
| + | of tropical America systematically indulged in human sacrifice. It is by | ||
| + | no means clear, so far as I know, that the Eskimos ever indulged in | ||
| + | human sacrifice. They were not civilised enough. They were too closely | ||
| + | imprisoned by the white winter and the endless dark. Chill penury | ||
| + | repressed their noble rage and froze the genial current of the soul. It | ||
| + | was in brighter days and broader daylight that the noble rage is found | ||
| + | unmistakably raging. It was in richer and more instructed lands that the | ||
| + | genial current flowed on the altars, to be drunk by great gods wearing | ||
| + | goggling and grinning masks and called on in terror or torment by long | ||
| + | cacophonous names that sound like laughter in hell. A warmer climate and | ||
| + | a more scientific cultivation were needed to bring forth these blooms; | ||
| + | to draw up towards the sun the large leaves and flamboyant blossoms that | ||
| + | gave their gold and crimson and purple to that garden, which Swinburne | ||
| + | compares to the Hesperides. There was at least no doubt about the | ||
| + | dragon.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I do not raise in this connection the special controversy about Spain | ||
| + | and Mexico; but I may remark in passing that it resembles exactly the | ||
| + | question that must in some sense be raised afterwards about Rome and | ||
| + | Carthage. In both cases there has been a queer habit among the English | ||
| + | of always siding against the Europeans, and representing the rival | ||
| + | civilisation, | ||
| + | obviously crying or rather screaming to heaven. For Carthage also was a | ||
| + | high civilisation, | ||
| + | Carthage also founded that civilisation on a religion of fear, sending | ||
| + | up everywhere the smoke of human sacrifice. Now it is very right to | ||
| + | rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards | ||
| + | and ideals. But it is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the | ||
| + | other races and religions that professed the very opposite standards and | ||
| + | ideals. There is a very real< | ||
| + | the heathen, the Spaniard worse than the Red Indian, or even the Roman | ||
| + | potentially worse than the Carthaginian. But there is only one sense in | ||
| + | which he is worse; and that is not in being positively worse. The | ||
| + | Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | speak. Some of them indeed might almost be named without being known; | ||
| + | for they are of that extreme evil which seems innocent to the innocent. | ||
| + | They are too inhuman even to be indecent. But without dwelling much | ||
| + | longer in these dark corners, it may be noted as not irrelevant here | ||
| + | that certain anti-human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of | ||
| + | black magic. There may be suspected as running through it everywhere, | ||
| + | for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would | ||
| + | understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they | ||
| + | remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was | ||
| + | preventing the birth of children. The Hebrew prophets were perpetually | ||
| + | protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that | ||
| + | involved such a war upon children; and it is probable enough that this | ||
| + | abominable apostasy from the God of Israel has occasionally appeared in | ||
| + | Israel since, in the form of what is called ritual murder; not of course | ||
| + | by any representative of the religion of Judaism, but by individual and | ||
| + | irresponsible diabolists who did happen to be Jews. This sense that the | ||
| + | forces of evil especially threaten childhood is found again in the | ||
| + | enormous popularity of the Child Martyr of the Middle Ages. Chaucer did | ||
| + | but give another version of a very national English legend, when he | ||
| + | conceived the wickedest of all possible witches as the dark alien woman | ||
| + | watching behind her high lattice and hearing, like the babble of a brook | ||
| + | down the stony street, the singing of little St. Hugh.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | especially round that eastern< | ||
| + | had turned gradually into traders and had begun to trade with the whole | ||
| + | world. Indeed in the sense of trade and travel and colonial extension, | ||
| + | it already had something like an empire of the whole world. Its purple | ||
| + | dye, the emblem of its rich pomp and luxury, had steeped the wares which | ||
| + | were sold far away amid the last crags of Cornwall and the sails that | ||
| + | entered the silence of tropic seas amid all the mystery of Africa. It | ||
| + | might be said truly to have painted the map purple. It was already a | ||
| + | world-wide success, when the princes of Tyre would hardly have troubled | ||
| + | to notice that one of their princesses had condescended to marry the | ||
| + | chief of some tribe called Judah; when the merchants of its African | ||
| + | outpost would only have curled their bearded and Semitic lips with a | ||
| + | slight smile at the mention of a village called Rome. And indeed no two | ||
| + | things could have seemed more distant from each other, not only in space | ||
| + | but in spirit, than the monotheism of the Palestinian tribe and the very | ||
| + | virtues of the small Italian republic. There was but one thing between | ||
| + | them; and the thing which divided them has united them. Very various and | ||
| + | incompatible were the things that could be loved by the consuls of Rome | ||
| + | and the prophets of Israel; but they were at one in what they hated. It | ||
| + | is very easy in both cases to represent that hatred as something merely | ||
| + | hateful. It is easy enough to make a merely harsh and inhuman figure | ||
| + | either of Elijah raving above the slaughter of Carmel or Cato thundering | ||
| + | against the amnesty of Africa. These men had their limitations and their | ||
| + | local passions; but this criticism of them is unimaginative and | ||
| + | therefore unreal. It leaves out something, something immense and | ||
| + | intermediate, | ||
| + | eastern and western enemies; and that something is the first subject of | ||
| + | this chapter.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | practical. It has left little in the<span class=" | ||
| + | of poetry. But it prided itself upon being very efficient; and it | ||
| + | followed in its philosophy and religion that strange and sometimes | ||
| + | secret train of thought which we have already noted in those who look | ||
| + | for immediate effects. There is always in such a mentality an idea that | ||
| + | there is a short cut to the secret of all success; something that would | ||
| + | shock the world by this sort of shameless thoroughness. They believed, | ||
| + | in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who delivered the goods. In | ||
| + | their dealings with their god Moloch, they themselves were always | ||
| + | careful to deliver the goods. It was an interesting transaction, | ||
| + | which we shall have to touch more than once in the rest of the | ||
| + | narrative; it is enough to say here that it involved the theory I have | ||
| + | suggested about a certain attitude towards children. This was what | ||
| + | called up against it in simultaneous fury the servant of one God in | ||
| + | Palestine and the guardians of all the household gods in Rome. This is | ||
| + | what challenged two things naturally so much divided by every sort of | ||
| + | distance and disunion, whose union was to save the world.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I have called the fourth and final division of the spiritual elements | ||
| + | into which I should divide heathen humanity by the name of The | ||
| + | Philosophers. I confess that it covers in my mind much that would | ||
| + | generally be classified otherwise; and that what are here called | ||
| + | philosophies are very often called religions. I believe however that my | ||
| + | own description will be found to be much the more realistic and not the | ||
| + | less respectful. But we must first take philosophy in its purest and | ||
| + | clearest form that we may trace its normal outline; and that is to be | ||
| + | found in the world of the purest and clearest outlines, that culture of | ||
| + | the Mediterranean of which we have been considering the mythologies and | ||
| + | idolatries in the last two chapters.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | Catholicism is to the Catholic. It was never a view of the universe | ||
| + | satisfying all sides< | ||
| + | something to say about everything. It was only a satisfaction of one | ||
| + | side of the soul of man, even if we call it the religious side; and I | ||
| + | think it is truer to call it the imaginative side. But this it did | ||
| + | satisfy; in the end it satisfied it to satiety. All that world was a | ||
| + | tissue of interwoven tales and cults, and there ran in and out of it, as | ||
| + | we have already seen, that black thread among its more blameless | ||
| + | colours: the darker paganism that was really diabolism. But we all know | ||
| + | that this did not mean that all pagan men thought of nothing but pagan | ||
| + | gods. Precisely because mythology only satisfied one mood, they turned | ||
| + | in other moods to something totally different. But it is very important | ||
| + | to realise that it was totally different. It was too different to be | ||
| + | inconsistent. It was so alien that it did not clash. While a mob of | ||
| + | people were pouring on a public holiday to the feast of Adonis or the | ||
| + | games in honour of Apollo, this or that man would prefer to stop at home | ||
| + | and think out a little theory about the nature of things. Sometimes his | ||
| + | hobby would even take the form of thinking about the nature of God; or | ||
| + | even in that sense about the nature of the gods. But he very seldom | ||
| + | thought of pitting his nature of the gods against the gods of nature.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is necessary to insist on this abstraction in the first student of | ||
| + | abstractions. He was not so much antagonistic as absent-minded. His | ||
| + | hobby might be the universe; but at first the hobby was as private as if | ||
| + | it had been numismatics or playing draughts. And even when his wisdom | ||
| + | came to be a public possession, and almost a political institution, | ||
| + | was very seldom on the same plane as the popular and religious | ||
| + | institutions. Aristotle, with his colossal common sense, was perhaps the | ||
| + | greatest of all philosophers; | ||
| + | philosophers. But Aristotle would no more have set up the Absolute side | ||
| + | by side with the Apollo of Delphi,< | ||
| + | Archimedes would have thought of setting up the Lever as a sort of idol | ||
| + | or fetish to be substituted for the Palladium of the city. Or we might | ||
| + | as well imagine Euclid building an altar to an isosceles triangle, or | ||
| + | offering sacrifices to the square on the hypotenuse. The one man | ||
| + | meditated on metaphysics as the other man did on mathematics; | ||
| + | love of truth or for curiosity or for the fun of the thing. But that | ||
| + | sort of fun never seems to have interfered very much with the other sort | ||
| + | of fun; the fun of dancing or singing to celebrate some rascally romance | ||
| + | about Zeus becoming a bull or a swan. It is perhaps the proof of a | ||
| + | certain superficiality and even insincerity about the popular | ||
| + | polytheism, that men could be philosophers and even sceptics without | ||
| + | disturbing it. These thinkers could move the foundations of the world | ||
| + | without altering even the outline of that coloured cloud that hung above | ||
| + | it in the air.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | curious compromise seemed to prevent them from moving the foundations of | ||
| + | the city. The two great philosophers of antiquity do indeed appear to us | ||
| + | as defenders of sane and even of sacred ideas; their maxims often read | ||
| + | like the answers to sceptical questions too completely answered to be | ||
| + | always recorded. Aristotle annihilated a hundred anarchists and | ||
| + | nature-worshipping cranks by the fundamental statement that man is a | ||
| + | political animal. Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism, | ||
| + | as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally | ||
| + | fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men | ||
| + | exist. Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist | ||
| + | as men do not exist; or that the men need hardly be considered where | ||
| + | they conflict with the ideas. He had something of the social sentiment | ||
| + | that we call Fabian in his ideal of fitting the citizen to the city, | ||
| + | like an imaginary head to an ideal hat;< | ||
| + | remains, he has been the father of all faddists. Aristotle anticipated | ||
| + | more fully the sacramental sanity that was to combine the body and the | ||
| + | soul of things; for he considered the nature of men as well as the | ||
| + | nature of morals, and looked to the eyes as well as to the light. But | ||
| + | though these great men were in that sense constructive and conservative, | ||
| + | they belonged to a world where thought was free to the point of being | ||
| + | fanciful. Many other great intellects did indeed follow them, some | ||
| + | exalting an abstract vision of virtue, others following more | ||
| + | rationalistically the necessity of the human pursuit of happiness. The | ||
| + | former had the name of Stoics; and their name has passed into a proverb | ||
| + | for what is indeed one of the main moral ideals of mankind: that of | ||
| + | strengthening the mind itself until it is of a texture to resist | ||
| + | calamity or even pain. But it is admitted that a great number of the | ||
| + | philosophers degenerated into what we still call sophists. They became a | ||
| + | sort of professional sceptics who went about asking uncomfortable | ||
| + | questions, and were handsomely paid for making themselves a nuisance to | ||
| + | normal people. It was perhaps an accidental resemblance to such | ||
| + | questioning quacks that was responsible for the unpopularity of the | ||
| + | great Socrates; whose death might seem to contradict the suggestion of | ||
| + | the permanent truce between the philosophers and the gods. But Socrates | ||
| + | did not die as a monotheist who denounced polytheism; certainly not as a | ||
| + | prophet who denounced idols. It is clear to any one reading between the | ||
| + | lines that there was some notion, right or wrong, of a purely personal | ||
| + | influence affecting morals and perhaps politics. The general compromise | ||
| + | remained; whether it was that the Greeks thought their myths a joke or | ||
| + | that they thought their theories a joke. There was never any collision | ||
| + | in which one really destroyed the other, and there was never any | ||
| + | combination in which one was really reconciled with the other. They | ||
| + | certainly did not work together; if anything the<span class=" | ||
| + | rival of the priest. But both seemed to have accepted a sort of | ||
| + | separation of functions and remained parts of the same social system. | ||
| + | Another important tradition descends from Pythagoras; who is significant | ||
| + | because he stands nearest to the Oriental mystics who must be considered | ||
| + | in their turn. He taught a sort of mysticism of mathematics, | ||
| + | is the ultimate reality; but he also seems to have taught the | ||
| + | transmigration of souls like the Brahmins; and to have left to his | ||
| + | followers certain traditional tricks of vegetarianism and water-drinking | ||
| + | very common among the eastern sages, especially those who figure in | ||
| + | fashionable drawing-rooms, | ||
| + | passing to eastern sages, and the somewhat different atmosphere of the | ||
| + | East, we may approach a rather important truth by another path.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | were kings, or kings were philosophers. He spoke as of something too | ||
| + | good to be true; but, as a matter of fact, it not unfrequently was true. | ||
| + | A certain type, perhaps too little noticed in history, may really be | ||
| + | called the royal philosopher. To begin with, apart from actual royalty, | ||
| + | it did occasionally become possible for the sage, though he was not what | ||
| + | we call a religious founder, to be something like a political founder. | ||
| + | And the great example of this, one of the very greatest in the world, | ||
| + | will with the very thought of it carry us thousands of miles across the | ||
| + | vast spaces of Asia to that very wonderful and in some ways that very | ||
| + | wise world of ideas and institutions, | ||
| + | when we talk of China. Men have served many very strange gods; and | ||
| + | trusted themselves loyally to many ideals and even idols. China is a | ||
| + | society that has really chosen to believe in intellect. It has taken | ||
| + | intellect seriously; and it may be that it stands alone in the world. | ||
| + | From a very early age it faced the dilemma of the king and the | ||
| + | philosopher by actually< | ||
| + | made a public institution out of a private individual, who had nothing | ||
| + | in the world to do but to be intellectual. It had and has, of course, | ||
| + | many other things on the same pattern. It creates all ranks and | ||
| + | privileges by public examination; | ||
| + | aristocracy; | ||
| + | point here is that it had philosophers to advise kings; and one of those | ||
| + | philosophers must have been a great philosopher and a great statesman.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | possibly not even a religious man. He was not an atheist; he was | ||
| + | apparently what we call an agnostic. But the really vital point is that | ||
| + | it is utterly irrelevant to talk about his religion at all. It is like | ||
| + | talking of theology as the first thing in the story of how Rowland Hill | ||
| + | established the postal system or Baden Powell organised the Boy Scouts. | ||
| + | Confucius was not there to bring a message from heaven to humanity, but | ||
| + | to organise China; and he must have organised it exceedingly well. It | ||
| + | follows that he dealt much with morals; but he bound them up strictly | ||
| + | with manners. The peculiarity of his scheme, and of his country, in | ||
| + | which it contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom, | ||
| + | that he insisted on perpetuating an external life with all its forms, | ||
| + | that outward continuity might preserve internal peace. Any one who knows | ||
| + | how much habit has to do with health, of mind as well as body, will see | ||
| + | the truth in his idea. But he will also see that the ancestor-worship | ||
| + | and the reverence for the Sacred Emperor were habits and not creeds. It | ||
| + | is unfair to the great Confucius to say he was a religious founder. It | ||
| + | is even unfair to him to say he was not a religious founder. It is as | ||
| + | unfair as going out of one’s way to say that Jeremy Bentham was not a | ||
| + | Christian martyr.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | were kings, and not merely the friends of kings. The combination is not | ||
| + | accidental. It has a great deal to do with this rather elusive question | ||
| + | of the function of the philosopher. It contains in it some hint of why | ||
| + | philosophy and mythology seldom came to an open rupture. It was not only | ||
| + | because there was something a little frivolous about the mythology. It | ||
| + | was also because there was something a little supercilious about the | ||
| + | philosopher. He despised the myths, but he also despised the mob; and | ||
| + | thought they suited each other. The pagan philosopher was seldom a man | ||
| + | of the people, at any rate in spirit; he was seldom a democrat and often | ||
| + | a bitter critic of democracy. He had about him an air of aristocratic | ||
| + | and humane leisure; and his part was most easily played by men who | ||
| + | happened to be in such a position. It was very easy and natural for a | ||
| + | prince or a prominent person to play at being as philosophical as | ||
| + | Hamlet, or Theseus in the < | ||
| + | ages we find ourselves in the presence of these princely intellectuals. | ||
| + | In fact, we find one of them in the very first recorded ages of the | ||
| + | world; sitting on that primeval throne that looked over ancient Egypt.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | the Heretic Pharaoh, lies in the fact that he was the one example, at | ||
| + | any rate before Christian times, of one of these royal philosophers who | ||
| + | set himself to fight popular mythology in the name of private | ||
| + | philosophy. Most of them assumed the attitude of Marcus Aurelius, who is | ||
| + | in many ways the model of this sort of monarch and sage. Marcus Aurelius | ||
| + | has been blamed for tolerating the pagan amphitheatre or the Christian | ||
| + | martyrdoms. But it was characteristic; | ||
| + | thought of popular religion just as he thought of popular circuses. Of | ||
| + | him Professor Phillimore has profoundly said ‘a great and good man& | ||
| + | he knew it.’ The Heretic Pharaoh had a philosophy more< | ||
| + | perhaps more humble. For there is a corollary to the conception of being | ||
| + | too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the | ||
| + | fighting. Anyhow, the Egyptian prince was simple enough to take his own | ||
| + | philosophy seriously, and alone among such intellectual princes he | ||
| + | affected a sort of < | ||
| + | with one imperial gesture and lifting up for all men, like a blazing | ||
| + | mirror of monotheistic truth, the disc of the universal sun. He had | ||
| + | other interesting ideas often to be found in such idealists. In the | ||
| + | sense in which we speak of a Little Englander he was a Little Egypter. | ||
| + | In art he was a realist because he was an idealist; for realism is more | ||
| + | impossible than any other ideal. But after all there falls on him | ||
| + | something of the shadow of Marcus Aurelius; stalked by the shadow of | ||
| + | Professor Phillimore. What is the matter with this noble sort of prince | ||
| + | is that he has nowhere quite escaped being something of a prig. | ||
| + | Priggishness is so pungent a smell that it clings amid the faded spices | ||
| + | even to an Egyptian mummy. What was the matter with the Heretic Pharaoh, | ||
| + | as with a good many other heretics, was that he probably never paused to | ||
| + | ask himself whether there was < | ||
| + | tales of people less educated than himself. And, as already suggested, | ||
| + | there was something in them. There was a real human hunger in all that | ||
| + | element of feature and locality, that procession of deities like | ||
| + | enormous pet animals, in that unwearied watching at certain haunted | ||
| + | spots, in all the mazy wandering of mythology. Nature may not have the | ||
| + | name of Isis; Isis may not be really looking for Osiris. But it is true | ||
| + | that Nature is really looking for something. Nature is always looking | ||
| + | for the supernatural. Something much more definite was to satisfy that | ||
| + | need; but a dignified monarch with a disc of the sun did not satisfy it. | ||
| + | The royal experiment failed amid a roaring reaction of popular | ||
| + | superstitions, | ||
| + | and ascended the throne of the kings.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | great Lord Buddha. I know he is not generally classed merely with the | ||
| + | philosophers; | ||
| + | that reaches me, that this is the real interpretation of his immense | ||
| + | importance. He was by far the greatest and the best of these | ||
| + | intellectuals born in the purple. His reaction was perhaps the noblest | ||
| + | and most sincere of all the resultant actions of that combination of | ||
| + | thinkers and of thrones. For his reaction was renunciation. Marcus | ||
| + | Aurelius was content to say, with a refined irony, that even in a palace | ||
| + | life could be lived well. The fierier Egyptian king concluded that it | ||
| + | could be lived even better after a palace revolution. But the great | ||
| + | Gautama was the only one of them who proved he could really do without | ||
| + | his palace. One fell back on toleration and the other on revolution. But | ||
| + | after all there is something more absolute about abdication. Abdication | ||
| + | is perhaps the one really absolute action of an absolute monarch. The | ||
| + | Indian prince, reared in Oriental luxury and pomp, deliberately went out | ||
| + | and lived the life of a beggar. That is magnificent, | ||
| + | that is, it is not necessarily a Crusade in the Christian sense. It does | ||
| + | not decide the question of whether the life of a beggar was the life of | ||
| + | a saint or the life of a philosopher. It does not decide whether this | ||
| + | great man is really to go into the tub of Diogenes or the cave of St. | ||
| + | Jerome. Now those who seem to be nearest to the study of Buddha, and | ||
| + | certainly those who write most clearly and intelligently about him, | ||
| + | convince me for one that he was simply a philosopher who founded a | ||
| + | successful school of philosophy, and was turned into a sort of < | ||
| + | or sacred being merely by the more mysterious and unscientific | ||
| + | atmosphere of all such traditions in Asia. So that it is necessary to | ||
| + | say at this point a word about that< | ||
| + | that we cross in passing from the Mediterranean into the mystery of the | ||
| + | East.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | as the truisms; especially when they are really true. We are all in the | ||
| + | habit of saying certain things about Asia, which are true enough but | ||
| + | which hardly help us because we do not understand their truth; as that | ||
| + | Asia is old or looks to the past or is not progressive. Now it is true | ||
| + | that Christendom is more progressive, | ||
| + | do with the rather provincial notion of an endless fuss of political | ||
| + | improvement. Christendom does believe, for Christianity does believe, | ||
| + | that man can eventually get somewhere, here or hereafter, or in various | ||
| + | ways according to various doctrines. The world’s desire can somehow be | ||
| + | satisfied as desires are satisfied, whether by a new life or an old love | ||
| + | or some form of positive possession and fulfilment. For the rest, we all | ||
| + | know there is a rhythm and not a mere progress in things, that things | ||
| + | rise and fall; only with us the rhythm is a fairly free and incalculable | ||
| + | rhythm. For most of Asia the rhythm has hardened into a recurrence. It | ||
| + | is no longer merely a rather topsy-turvy sort of world; it is a wheel. | ||
| + | What has happened to all those highly intelligent and highly civilised | ||
| + | peoples is that they have been caught up in a sort of cosmic rotation, | ||
| + | of which the hollow hub is really nothing. In that sense the worst part | ||
| + | of existence is that it may just as well go on like that for ever. That | ||
| + | is what we really mean when we say that Asia is old or unprogressive or | ||
| + | looking backwards. That is why we see even her curved swords as arcs | ||
| + | broken from that blinding wheel; why we see her serpentine ornament as | ||
| + | returning everywhere, like a snake that is never slain. It has very | ||
| + | little to do with the political varnish of progress; all Asiatics might | ||
| + | have tophats on their heads, but if they had this spirit still in their | ||
| + | hearts they would only think the hats would< | ||
| + | like the planets; not that running after a hat could lead them to heaven | ||
| + | or even to home.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | of cosmic sentiment was already common to almost everything in the East. | ||
| + | There was indeed the jungle of an extraordinarily extravagant and almost | ||
| + | asphyxiating mythology. Nevertheless it is possible to have more | ||
| + | sympathy with this popular fruitfulness in folk-lore than with some of | ||
| + | the higher pessimism that might have withered it. It must always be | ||
| + | remembered, however, when all fair allowances are made, that a great | ||
| + | deal of spontaneous eastern imagery really is idolatry; the local and | ||
| + | literal worship of an idol. This is probably not true of the ancient | ||
| + | Brahminical system, at least as seen by Brahmins. But that phrase alone | ||
| + | will remind us of a reality of much greater moment. This great reality | ||
| + | is the Caste System of ancient India. It may have had some of the | ||
| + | practical advantages of the Guild System of Medieval Europe. But it | ||
| + | contrasts not only with that Christian democracy, but with every extreme | ||
| + | type of Christian aristocracy, | ||
| + | the social superiority as a spiritual superiority. This not only divides | ||
| + | it fundamentally from the fraternity of Christendom, | ||
| + | standing like a mighty and terraced mountain of pride between the | ||
| + | relatively egalitarian levels both of Islam and of China. But the fixity | ||
| + | of this formation through thousands of years is another illustration of | ||
| + | that spirit of repetition that has marked time from time immemorial. Now | ||
| + | we may also presume the prevalence of another idea which we associate | ||
| + | with the Buddhists as interpreted by the Theosophists. As a fact, some | ||
| + | of the strictest Buddhists repudiate the idea and still more scornfully | ||
| + | repudiate the Theosophists. But whether the idea is in Buddhism, or only | ||
| + | in the birthplace of Buddhism, or only in a tradition or a travesty of | ||
| + | Buddhism, it is<span class=" | ||
| + | recurrence. I mean of course the idea of Reincarnation.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | transcendental idea, or in that sense a religious idea. Mysticism | ||
| + | conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of | ||
| + | a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation | ||
| + | need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them. It is no | ||
| + | more transcendental for a man to remember what he did in Babylon before | ||
| + | he was born than to remember what he did in Brixton before he had a | ||
| + | knock on the head. His successive lives < | ||
| + | human lives, under whatever limitations burden human life. It has | ||
| + | nothing to do with seeing God or even conjuring up the devil. In other | ||
| + | words, reincarnation as such does not necessarily escape from the wheel | ||
| + | of destiny; in some sense it is the wheel of destiny. And whether it was | ||
| + | something that Buddha founded, or something that Buddha found, or | ||
| + | something that Buddha entirely renounced when he found, it is certainly | ||
| + | something having the general character of that Asiatic atmosphere in | ||
| + | which he had to play his part. And the part he played was that of an | ||
| + | intellectual philosopher, | ||
| + | intellectual attitude towards it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I can understand that Buddhists might resent the view that Buddhism is | ||
| + | merely a philosophy, if we understand by a philosophy merely an | ||
| + | intellectual game such as Greek sophists played, tossing up worlds and | ||
| + | catching them like balls. Perhaps a more exact statement would be that | ||
| + | Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline; which might even be | ||
| + | called a psychological discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from | ||
| + | all this recurrent sorrow; and that was simply by getting rid of the | ||
| + | delusion that is called desire. It was emphatically < | ||
| + | get what we want better by restraining our impatience for part of it, or | ||
| + | that we should get it in a<span class=" | ||
| + | emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. If once a man realised | ||
| + | that there is really no reality, that everything, including his soul, is | ||
| + | in dissolution at every instant, he would anticipate disappointment and | ||
| + | be intangible to change, existing (in so far as he could be said to | ||
| + | exist) in a sort of ecstasy of indifference. The Buddhists call this | ||
| + | beatitude, and we will not stop our story to argue the point; certainly | ||
| + | to us it is indistinguishable from despair. I do not see, for instance, | ||
| + | why the disappointment of desire should not apply as much to the most | ||
| + | benevolent desires as to the most selfish ones. Indeed the Lord of | ||
| + | Compassion seems to pity people for living rather than for dying. For | ||
| + | the rest, an intelligent Buddhist wrote, ‘The explanation of popular | ||
| + | Chinese and Japanese Buddhism is that it is not Buddhism.’ < | ||
| + | doubtless ceased to be a mere philosophy, but only by becoming a mere | ||
| + | mythology. One thing is certain: it has never become anything remotely | ||
| + | resembling what we call a Church.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It will appear only a jest to say that all religious history has really | ||
| + | been a pattern of noughts and crosses. But I do not by noughts mean | ||
| + | nothings, but only things that are negative compared with the positive | ||
| + | shape or pattern of the other. And though the symbol is of course only a | ||
| + | coincidence, | ||
| + | Asia can really be represented by a round O, if not in the sense of a | ||
| + | cypher at least of a circle. The great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with | ||
| + | its tail in its mouth is really a very perfect image of a certain idea | ||
| + | of unity and recurrence that does indeed belong to the Eastern | ||
| + | philosophies and religions. It really is a curve that in one sense | ||
| + | includes everything, and in another sense comes to nothing. In that | ||
| + | sense it does confess, or rather boast, that all argument is an argument | ||
| + | in a circle. And though the figure is but a symbol, we can see how sound | ||
| + | is the symbolic< | ||
| + | Wheel of Buddha generally called the Swastika. The cross is a thing at | ||
| + | right angles pointing boldly in opposite directions; but the Swastika is | ||
| + | the same thing in the very act of returning to the recurrent curve. That | ||
| + | crooked cross is in fact a cross turning into a wheel. Before we dismiss | ||
| + | even these symbols as if they were arbitrary symbols, we must remember | ||
| + | how intense was the imaginative instinct that produced them or selected | ||
| + | them both in the East and the West. The cross has become something more | ||
| + | than a historical memory; it does convey, almost as by a mathematical | ||
| + | diagram, the truth about the real point at issue; the idea of a conflict | ||
| + | stretching outwards into eternity. It is true, and even tautological, | ||
| + | say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In other words, the cross, in fact as well as figure, does really stand | ||
| + | for the idea of breaking out of the circle that is everything and | ||
| + | nothing. It does escape from the circular argument by which everything | ||
| + | begins and ends in the mind. Since we are still dealing in symbols, it | ||
| + | might be put in a parable in the form of that story about St. Francis, | ||
| + | which says that the birds departing with his benediction could wing | ||
| + | their way into the infinities of the four winds of heaven, their tracks | ||
| + | making a vast cross upon the sky; for compared with the freedom of that | ||
| + | flight of birds, the very shape of the Swastika is like a kitten chasing | ||
| + | its tail. In a more popular allegory, we might say that when St. George | ||
| + | thrust his spear into the monster’s jaws, he broke in upon the solitude | ||
| + | of the self-devouring serpent and gave it something to bite besides its | ||
| + | own tail. But while many fancies might be used as figures of the truth, | ||
| + | the truth itself is abstract and absolute; though it is not very easy to | ||
| + | sum up except by such figures. Christianity does appeal to a solid truth | ||
| + | outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as | ||
| + | eternal. It<span class=" | ||
| + | words that things are really things. In this Christianity is at one with | ||
| + | common sense; but all religious history shows that this common sense | ||
| + | perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It cannot otherwise exist, or at least endure, because mere thought does | ||
| + | not remain sane. In a sense it becomes too simple to be sane. The | ||
| + | temptation of the philosophers is simplicity rather than subtlety. They | ||
| + | are always attracted by insane simplifications, | ||
| + | abysses are fascinated by death and nothingness and the empty air. It | ||
| + | needed another kind of philosopher to stand poised upon the pinnacle of | ||
| + | the Temple and keep his balance without casting himself down. One of | ||
| + | these obvious, these too obvious explanations is that everything is a | ||
| + | dream and a delusion and there is nothing outside the ego. Another is | ||
| + | that all things recur; another, which is said to be Buddhist and is | ||
| + | certainly Oriental, is the idea that what is the matter with us is our | ||
| + | creation, in the sense of our coloured differentiation and personality, | ||
| + | and that nothing will be well till we are again melted into one unity. | ||
| + | By this theory, in short, the Creation was the Fall. It is important | ||
| + | historically because it was stored up in the dark heart of Asia and went | ||
| + | forth at various times in various forms over the dim borders of Europe. | ||
| + | Here we can place the mysterious figure of Manes or Manichaeus, the | ||
| + | mystic of inversion, whom we should call a pessimist, parent of many | ||
| + | sects and heresies; here, in a higher place, the figure of Zoroaster. He | ||
| + | has been popularly identified with another of these too simple | ||
| + | explanations: | ||
| + | every atom. He also is of the school of sages that may be called | ||
| + | mystics; and from the same mysterious Persian garden came upon ponderous | ||
| + | wings Mithras, the unknown god, to trouble the last twilight of Rome.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | the remote Egyptian has been a mirror and a model for all the | ||
| + | philosophers. They have made many things out of it, and sometimes gone | ||
| + | mad about it, especially when as in these eastern sages the circle | ||
| + | became a wheel going round and round in their heads. But the point about | ||
| + | them is that they all think that existence can be represented by a | ||
| + | diagram instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of the childish | ||
| + | myth-makers are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view. | ||
| + | They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture. | ||
| + | Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that | ||
| + | really exists outside our minds. Sometimes the philosopher paints the | ||
| + | disc all black and calls himself a pessimist; sometimes he paints it all | ||
| + | white and calls himself an optimist; sometimes he divides it exactly | ||
| + | into halves of black and white and calls himself a dualist, like those | ||
| + | Persian mystics to whom I wish there were space to do justice. None of | ||
| + | them could understand a thing that began to draw the proportions just as | ||
| + | if they were real proportions, | ||
| + | mathematical draughtsman would call disproportionate. Like the first | ||
| + | artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the suggestion of a | ||
| + | new purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern; he seemed only | ||
| + | to be distorting his diagram, when he began for the first time in all | ||
| + | the ages to trace the lines of a form& | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE WAR OF THE GODS AND DEMONS</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists | ||
| + | simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal | ||
| + | preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like | ||
| + | saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he | ||
| + | never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings. Man cannot live | ||
| + | without the two props of food and drink, which support him like two | ||
| + | legs; but to suggest that they have been the motives of all his | ||
| + | movements in history is like saying that the goal of all his military | ||
| + | marches or religious pilgrimages must have been the Golden Leg of Miss | ||
| + | Kilmansegg or the ideal and perfect leg of Sir Willoughby Patterne. But | ||
| + | it is such movements that make up the story of mankind, and without them | ||
| + | there would practically be no story at all. Cows may be purely economic, | ||
| + | in the sense that we cannot see that they do much beyond grazing and | ||
| + | seeking better grazing-grounds; | ||
| + | twelve volumes would not be very lively reading. Sheep and goats may be | ||
| + | pure economists in their external action at least; but that is why the | ||
| + | sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires thought worthy of | ||
| + | detailed narration; and even the more active quadruped has not inspired | ||
| + | a book for boys called Golden Deeds of Gallant Goats or any similar | ||
| + | title. But so far from the movements that make up the story of man being | ||
| + | economic, we may say that the story only begins where the motive< | ||
| + | cows and sheep leaves off. It will be hard to maintain that the | ||
| + | Crusaders went from their homes into a howling wilderness because cows | ||
| + | go from a wilderness to a more comfortable grazing-ground. It will be | ||
| + | hard to maintain that the Arctic explorers went north with the same | ||
| + | material motive that made the swallows go south. And if you leave things | ||
| + | like all the religious wars and all the merely adventurous explorations | ||
| + | out of the human story, it will not only cease to be human at all but | ||
| + | cease to be a story at all. The outline of history is made of these | ||
| + | decisive curves and angles determined by the will of man. Economic | ||
| + | history would not even be history.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | not live for food merely because they cannot live without food. The | ||
| + | truth is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the | ||
| + | economic machinery necessary to his existence, but rather that existence | ||
| + | itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the | ||
| + | nature of his general position in it. There is something that is nearer | ||
| + | to him than livelihood, and that is life. For once that he remembers | ||
| + | exactly what work produces his wages and exactly what wages produce his | ||
| + | meals, he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it is a queer | ||
| + | world, or wonders whether life is worth living, or wonders whether | ||
| + | marriage is a failure, or is pleased and puzzled with his own children, | ||
| + | or remembers his own youth, or in any such fashion vaguely reviews the | ||
| + | mysterious lot of man. This is true of the majority even of the | ||
| + | wage-slaves of our morbid modern industrialism, | ||
| + | and inhumanity has really forced the economic issue to the front. It is | ||
| + | immeasurably more true of the multitude of peasants or hunters or | ||
| + | fishers who make up the real mass of mankind. Even those dry pedants who | ||
| + | think that ethics depend on economics must admit that economics depend | ||
| + | on existence. And any number of normal doubts and day-dreams are<span class=" | ||
| + | existence; not about how we can live, but about why we do. And the proof | ||
| + | of it is simple; as simple as suicide. Turn the universe upside down in | ||
| + | the mind and you turn all the political economists upside down with it. | ||
| + | Suppose that a man wishes to die, and the professor of political economy | ||
| + | becomes rather a bore with his elaborate explanations of how he is to | ||
| + | live. And all the departures and decisions that make our human past into | ||
| + | a story have this character of diverting the direct course of pure | ||
| + | economics. As the economist may be excused from calculating the future | ||
| + | salary of a suicide, so he may be excused from providing an old-age | ||
| + | pension for a martyr. As he need not provide for the future of a martyr, | ||
| + | so he need not provide for the family of a monk. His plan is modified in | ||
| + | lesser and varying degrees by a man being a soldier and dying for his | ||
| + | own country, by a man being a peasant and specially loving his own land, | ||
| + | by a man being more or less affected by any religion that forbids or | ||
| + | allows him to do this or that. But all these come back not to an | ||
| + | economic calculation about livelihood but to an elemental outlook upon | ||
| + | life. They all come back to what a man fundamentally feels, when he | ||
| + | looks forth from those strange windows which we call the eyes, upon that | ||
| + | strange vision that we call the world.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world. But it | ||
| + | may be allowable to say that we need a new thing; which may be called | ||
| + | psychological history. I mean the consideration of what things meant in | ||
| + | the mind of a man, especially an ordinary man; as distinct from what is | ||
| + | defined or deduced merely from official forms or political | ||
| + | pronouncements. I have already touched on it in such a case as the totem | ||
| + | or indeed any other popular myth. It is not enough to be told that a | ||
| + | tom-cat was called a totem; especially when it was not called a totem. | ||
| + | We want to know what it felt like. Was it like Whittington’s cat or like | ||
| + | a witch’s cat? Was<span class=" | ||
| + | sort of thing we need touching the nature of political and social | ||
| + | relations. We want to know the real sentiment that was the social bond | ||
| + | of many common men, as sane and as selfish as we are. What did soldiers | ||
| + | feel when they saw splendid in the sky that strange totem that we call | ||
| + | the Golden Eagle of the Legions? What did vassals feel about those other | ||
| + | totems, the lions or the leopards upon the shield of their lord? So long | ||
| + | as we neglect this subjective side of history, which may more simply be | ||
| + | called the inside of history, there will always be a certain limitation | ||
| + | on that science which can be better transcended by art. So long as the | ||
| + | historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact. There will be | ||
| + | more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology of | ||
| + | war. Our history is stiff with official documents, public or private, | ||
| + | which tell us nothing of the thing itself. At the worst we only have the | ||
| + | official posters, which could not have been spontaneous precisely | ||
| + | because they were official. At the best we have only the secret | ||
| + | diplomacy, which could not have been popular precisely because it was | ||
| + | secret. Upon one or other of these is based the historical judgment | ||
| + | about the real reasons that sustained the struggle. Governments fight | ||
| + | for colonies or commercial rights; governments fight about harbours or | ||
| + | high tariffs; governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery. It | ||
| + | seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do | ||
| + | the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible | ||
| + | and wonderful thing called a war? Nobody who knows anything of soldiers | ||
| + | believes the silly notion of the dons, that millions of men can be ruled | ||
| + | by force. If they were all to slack, it would be impossible to punish | ||
| + | all the slackers. And the least little touch of slacking would lose a | ||
| + | whole campaign in half a day. What did men really feel< | ||
| + | policy? If it be said that they accepted the policy from the politician, | ||
| + | what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred blindly | ||
| + | for their prince, what did those blind men see in their prince?</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | appropriate language, as < | ||
| + | almost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly | ||
| + | repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a | ||
| + | moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who | ||
| + | fight. In any case, no man will die for practical politics, just as no | ||
| + | man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be | ||
| + | eaten by lions at a shilling an hour; for men will not be martyred for | ||
| + | money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics, | ||
| + | is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world | ||
| + | believe that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall | ||
| + | go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of | ||
| + | my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland.’ Can | ||
| + | anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed I | ||
| + | shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that | ||
| + | should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that | ||
| + | career is now open to me and my countrymen.’ Materialist history is the | ||
| + | most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances. | ||
| + | Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the | ||
| + | soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life | ||
| + | and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an | ||
| + | absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and | ||
| + | remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained | ||
| + | by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They | ||
| + | are generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The first | ||
| + | is the love of some< | ||
| + | known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thing | ||
| + | that threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it sounds, | ||
| + | though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his national | ||
| + | home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the | ||
| + | good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt | ||
| + | down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. | ||
| + | Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, | ||
| + | really a house. But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well as | ||
| + | quite as strong. Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is at | ||
| + | once an old enemy and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alien | ||
| + | and antagonistic; | ||
| + | Christians about the Turk. If we say it is a difference of religion, | ||
| + | people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We will | ||
| + | pity them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; a | ||
| + | difference that does really come like a dark shadow between our eyes and | ||
| + | the day. Men can think of this difference even at the point of death; | ||
| + | for it is a difference about the meaning of life.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | policy: by hatred. When men hung on in the darkest days of the Great | ||
| + | War, suffering either in their bodies or in their souls for those they | ||
| + | loved, they were long past caring about details of diplomatic objects as | ||
| + | motives for their refusal to surrender. Of myself and those I knew best | ||
| + | I can answer for the vision that made surrender impossible. It was the | ||
| + | vision of the German Emperor’s face as he rode into Paris. This is not | ||
| + | the sentiment which some of my idealistic friends describe as Love. I am | ||
| + | quite content to call it hatred; the hatred of hell and all its works, | ||
| + | and to agree that as they do not believe in hell they need not believe | ||
| + | in hatred. But in the face of this prevalent prejudice, this long< | ||
| + | introduction has been unfortunately necessary, to ensure an | ||
| + | understanding of what is meant by a religious war. There is a religious | ||
| + | war when two worlds meet; that is, when two visions of the world meet; | ||
| + | or in more modern language, when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the | ||
| + | one man’s breath is the other man’s poison; and it is vain to talk of | ||
| + | giving a pestilence a place in the sun. And this is what we must | ||
| + | understand, even at the expense of digression, if we would see what | ||
| + | really happened in the Mediterranean; | ||
| + | the Republic on the Tiber, a thing overtopping and disdaining it, dark | ||
| + | with all the riddles of Asia and trailing all the tribes and | ||
| + | dependencies of imperialism, | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | have considered under the head of mythology; save that where the Greeks | ||
| + | had a natural turn for the mythology, the Latins seem to have had a real | ||
| + | turn for religion. Both multiplied gods, yet they sometimes seem to have | ||
| + | multiplied them for almost opposite reasons. It would seem sometimes as | ||
| + | if the Greek polytheism branched and blossomed upwards like the boughs | ||
| + | of a tree, while the Italian polytheism ramified downward like the | ||
| + | roots. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the former branches lifted | ||
| + | themselves lightly, bearing flowers; while the latter hung down, being | ||
| + | heavy with fruit. I mean that the Latins seem to multiply gods to bring | ||
| + | them nearer to men, while the Greek gods rose and radiated outwards into | ||
| + | the morning sky. What strikes us in the Italian cults is their local and | ||
| + | especially their domestic character. We gain the impression of | ||
| + | divinities swarming about the house like flies; of deities clustering | ||
| + | and clinging like bats about the pillars or building like birds under | ||
| + | the eaves. We have a vision of a god of roofs and a god of gateposts, of | ||
| + | a god of doors and even a god of drains. It has been suggested that all | ||
| + | mythology was a sort of<span class=" | ||
| + | fairy-tale which may truly be called a fireside tale, or a nursery-tale; | ||
| + | because it was a tale of the interior of the home; like those which make | ||
| + | chairs and tables talk like elves. The old household gods of the Italian | ||
| + | peasants seem to have been great, clumsy, wooden images, more | ||
| + | featureless than the figure-head which Quilp battered with the poker. | ||
| + | This religion of the home was very homely. Of course there were other | ||
| + | less human elements in the tangle of Italian mythology. There were Greek | ||
| + | deities superimposed on the Roman; there were here and there uglier | ||
| + | things underneath, experiments in the cruel kind of paganism, like the | ||
| + | Arician rite of the priest slaying the slayer. But these things were | ||
| + | always potential in paganism; they are certainly not the peculiar | ||
| + | character of Latin paganism. The peculiarity of that may be roughly | ||
| + | covered by saying that if mythology personified the forces of nature, | ||
| + | this mythology personified nature as transformed by the forces of man. | ||
| + | It was the god of the corn and not of the grass, of the cattle and not | ||
| + | the wild things of the forest; in short, the cult was literally a | ||
| + | culture; as when we speak of it as agriculture.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | riddle of the Latins. With religion running through every domestic | ||
| + | detail like a climbing plant, there went what seems to many the very | ||
| + | opposite spirit: the spirit of revolt. Imperialists and reactionaries | ||
| + | often invoke Rome as the very model of order and obedience; but Rome was | ||
| + | the very reverse. The real history of ancient Rome is much more like the | ||
| + | history of modern Paris. It might be called in modern language a city | ||
| + | built out of barricades. It is said that the gate of Janus was never | ||
| + | closed because there was an eternal war without; it is almost as true | ||
| + | that there was an eternal revolution within. From the first Plebeian | ||
| + | riots to the last Servile Wars, the state that imposed peace on the<span class=" | ||
| + | world was never really at peace. The rulers were themselves rebels.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | revolution in public life. Stories none the less heroic for being | ||
| + | hackneyed remind us that the Republic was founded on a tyrannicide that | ||
| + | avenged an insult to a wife; that the Tribunes of the people were | ||
| + | re-established after another which avenged an insult to a daughter. The | ||
| + | truth is that only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a | ||
| + | standard or a status by which to criticise the state. They alone can | ||
| + | appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city; the gods of the | ||
| + | hearth. That is why men are mystified in seeing that the same nations | ||
| + | that are thought rigid in domesticity are also thought restless in | ||
| + | politics; for instance, the Irish and the French. It is worth while to | ||
| + | dwell on this domestic point because it is an exact example of what is | ||
| + | meant here by the inside of history, like the inside of houses. Merely | ||
| + | political histories of Rome may be right enough in saying that this or | ||
| + | that was a cynical or cruel act of the Roman politicians; | ||
| + | that lifted Rome from beneath was the spirit of all the Romans; and it | ||
| + | is not a cant to call it the ideal of Cincinnatus passing from the | ||
| + | senate to the plough. Men of that sort had strengthened their village on | ||
| + | every side, had extended its victories already over Italians and even | ||
| + | over Greeks, when they found themselves confronted with a war that | ||
| + | changed the world. I have called it here the war of the gods and demons.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | that bore the name of the New Town. It was already much older, more | ||
| + | powerful, and more prosperous than the Italian town; but there still | ||
| + | remained about it an atmosphere that made the name not inappropriate. It | ||
| + | had been called new because it was a colony like New York or New | ||
| + | Zealand. It was an outpost or settlement of the<span class=" | ||
| + | the great commercial cities of Tyre and Sidon. There was a note of the | ||
| + | new countries and colonies about it; a confident and commercial outlook. | ||
| + | It was fond of saying things that rang with a certain metallic | ||
| + | assurance; as that nobody could wash his hands in the sea without the | ||
| + | leave of the New Town. For it depended almost entirely on the greatness | ||
| + | of its ships, as did the two great ports and markets from which its | ||
| + | people came. It brought from Tyre and Sidon a prodigious talent for | ||
| + | trade and considerable experience of travel. It brought other things as | ||
| + | well.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In a previous chapter I have hinted at something of the psychology that | ||
| + | lies behind a certain type of religion. There was a tendency in those | ||
| + | hungry for practical results, apart from poetical results, to call upon | ||
| + | spirits of terror and compulsion; to move Acheron in despair of bending | ||
| + | the gods. There is always a sort of dim idea that these darker powers | ||
| + | will really do things, with no nonsense about it. In the interior | ||
| + | psychology of the Punic peoples this strange sort of pessimistic | ||
| + | practicality had grown to great proportions. In the New Town, which the | ||
| + | Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia, the god | ||
| + | who got things done bore the name of Moloch, who was perhaps identical | ||
| + | with the other deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord. The Romans did not | ||
| + | at first quite know what to call him or what to make of him; they had to | ||
| + | go back to the grossest myth of Greek or Roman origins and compare him | ||
| + | to Saturn devouring his children. But the worshippers of Moloch were not | ||
| + | gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished | ||
| + | civilisation, | ||
| + | far more civilised than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any | ||
| + | rate his meal was not a myth. These highly civilised people really met | ||
| + | together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing | ||
| + | hundreds of their infants into a<span class=" | ||
| + | combination by imagining a number of Manchester merchants with | ||
| + | chimney-pot hats and mutton-chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday | ||
| + | at eleven o’clock to see a baby roasted.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | in far too much detail, precisely because it is merely political or | ||
| + | commercial. The Punic Wars looked at one time as if they would never | ||
| + | end; and it is not easy to say when they ever began. The Greeks and the | ||
| + | Sicilians had already been fighting vaguely on the European side against | ||
| + | the African city. Carthage had defeated Greece and conquered Sicily. | ||
| + | Carthage had also planted herself firmly in Spain; and between Spain and | ||
| + | Sicily the Latin city was contained and would have been crushed; if the | ||
| + | Romans had been of the sort to be easily crushed. Yet the interest of | ||
| + | the story really consists in the fact that Rome was crushed. If there | ||
| + | had not been certain moral elements as well as the material elements, | ||
| + | the story would have ended where Carthage certainly thought it had | ||
| + | ended. It is common enough to blame Rome for not making peace. But it | ||
| + | was a true popular instinct that there could be no peace with that sort | ||
| + | of people. It is common enough to blame the Roman for his < | ||
| + | Carthago</ | ||
| + | all appearance, Rome itself was destroyed. The sacred savour that hung | ||
| + | round Rome for ever, it is too often forgotten, clung to her partly | ||
| + | because she had risen suddenly from the dead.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | pressure of the rich on the poor was impersonal as well as irresistible. | ||
| + | For such aristocracies never permit personal government, which is | ||
| + | perhaps why this one was jealous of personal talent. But genius can turn | ||
| + | up anywhere, even in a governing class. As if to make the world’s | ||
| + | supreme test as terrible as possible, it was ordained that one of the<span class=" | ||
| + | great houses of Carthage should produce a man who came out of those | ||
| + | gilded palaces with all the energy and originality of Napoleon coming | ||
| + | from nowhere. At the worst crisis of the war, Rome learned that Italy | ||
| + | itself, by a military miracle, was invaded from the north. Hannibal, the | ||
| + | Grace of Baal as his name ran in his own tongue, had dragged a ponderous | ||
| + | chain of armaments over the starry solitudes of the Alps; and pointed | ||
| + | southward to the city which he had been pledged by all his dreadful gods | ||
| + | to destroy.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | with him felt as if they were fighting with a magician. Two great armies | ||
| + | sank to right and left of him into the swamps of the Trebia; more and | ||
| + | more were sucked into the horrible whirlpool of Cannae; more and more | ||
| + | went forth only to fall in ruin at his touch. The supreme sign of all | ||
| + | disasters, which is treason, turned tribe after tribe against the | ||
| + | falling cause of Rome, and still the unconquerable enemy rolled nearer | ||
| + | and nearer to the city; and following their great leader the swelling | ||
| + | cosmopolitan army of Carthage passed like a pageant of the whole world; | ||
| + | the elephants shaking the earth like marching mountains and the gigantic | ||
| + | Gauls with their barbaric panoply and the dark Spaniards girt in gold | ||
| + | and the brown Numidians on their unbridled desert horses wheeling and | ||
| + | darting like hawks, and whole mobs of deserters and mercenaries and | ||
| + | miscellaneous peoples; and the Grace of Baal went before them.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | unearthly prodigies, that a child was born with the head of an elephant | ||
| + | or that stars fell down like hailstones, had a far more philosophical | ||
| + | grasp of what had really happened than the modern historian who can see | ||
| + | nothing in it but a success of strategy concluding a rivalry in | ||
| + | commerce. Something far different was felt at the time and on the spot, | ||
| + | as it is always felt by those who experience a foreign atmosphere | ||
| + | entering their own like a fog or<span class=" | ||
| + | defeat, it was certainly no mere mercantile rivalry, that filled the | ||
| + | Roman imagination with such hideous omens of nature herself becoming | ||
| + | unnatural. It was Moloch upon the mountain of the Latins, looking with | ||
| + | his appalling face across the plain; it was Baal who trampled the | ||
| + | vineyards with his feet of stone; it was the voice of Tanit the | ||
| + | invisible, behind her trailing veils, whispering of the love that is | ||
| + | more horrible than hate. The burning of the Italian cornfields, the ruin | ||
| + | of the Italian vines, were something more than actual; they were | ||
| + | allegorical. They were the destruction of domestic and fruitful things, | ||
| + | the withering of what was human before that inhumanity that is far | ||
| + | beyond the human thing called cruelty. The household gods bowed low in | ||
| + | darkness under their lowly roofs; and above them went the demons upon a | ||
| + | wind from beyond all walls, blowing the trumpet of the Tramontane. The | ||
| + | door of the Alps was broken down; and in no vulgar but a very solemn | ||
| + | sense, it was Hell let loose. The war of the gods and demons seemed | ||
| + | already to have ended; and the gods were dead. The eagles were lost, the | ||
| + | legions were broken; and in Rome nothing remained but honour and the | ||
| + | cold courage of despair.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In the whole world one thing still threatened Carthage, and that was | ||
| + | Carthage. There still remained the inner working of an element strong in | ||
| + | all successful commercial states, and the presence of a spirit that we | ||
| + | know. There was still the solid sense and shrewdness of the men who | ||
| + | manage big enterprises; | ||
| + | experts; there was still business government; there was still the broad | ||
| + | and sane outlook of practical men of affairs; and in these things could | ||
| + | the Romans hope. As the war trailed on to what seemed its tragic end, | ||
| + | there grew gradually a faint and strange possibility that even now they | ||
| + | might not hope in vain. The plain business men of Carthage, thinking as | ||
| + | such men do<span class=" | ||
| + | was not only dying but dead. The war was over; it was obviously hopeless | ||
| + | for the Italian city to resist any longer, and inconceivable that | ||
| + | anybody should resist when it was hopeless. Under these circumstances, | ||
| + | another set of broad, sound business principles remained to be | ||
| + | considered. Wars were waged with money, and consequently cost money; | ||
| + | perhaps they felt in their hearts, as do so many of their kind, that | ||
| + | after all war must be a little wicked because it costs money. The time | ||
| + | had now come for peace; and still more for economy. The messages sent by | ||
| + | Hannibal from time to time asking for reinforcements were a ridiculous | ||
| + | anachronism; | ||
| + | might be true that some consul or other had made a last dash to the | ||
| + | Metaurus, had killed Hannibal’s brother and flung his head, with Latin | ||
| + | fury, into Hannibal’s camp; and mad actions of that sort showed how | ||
| + | utterly hopeless the Latins felt about their cause. But even excitable | ||
| + | Latins could not be so mad as to cling to a lost cause for ever. So | ||
| + | argued the best financial experts; and tossed aside more and more | ||
| + | letters, full of rather queer alarmist reports. So argued and acted the | ||
| + | great Carthaginian Empire. That meaningless prejudice, the curse of | ||
| + | commercial states, that stupidity is in some way practical and that | ||
| + | genius is in some way futile, led them to starve and abandon that great | ||
| + | artist in the school of arms, whom the gods had given them in vain.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | overthrow what is magnanimous; | ||
| + | brains and brutality, or that it does not matter if a man is dull so | ||
| + | long as he is also mean? Why do they vaguely think of all chivalry as | ||
| + | sentiment and all sentiment as weakness? They do it because they are, | ||
| + | like all men, primarily inspired by religion. For them, as for all men, | ||
| + | the first fact is their notion of the nature of<span class=" | ||
| + | about what world they are living in. And it is their faith that the only | ||
| + | ultimate thing is fear and therefore that the very heart of the world is | ||
| + | evil. They believe that death is stronger than life, and therefore dead | ||
| + | things must be stronger than living things; whether those dead things | ||
| + | are gold and iron and machinery or rocks and rivers and forces of | ||
| + | nature. It may sound fanciful to say that men we meet at tea-tables or | ||
| + | talk to at garden-parties are secretly worshippers of Baal or Moloch. | ||
| + | But this sort of commercial mind has its own cosmic vision and it is the | ||
| + | vision of Carthage. It has in it the brutal blunder that was the ruin of | ||
| + | Carthage. The Punic power fell, because there is in this materialism a | ||
| + | mad indifference to real thought. By disbelieving in the soul, it comes | ||
| + | to disbelieving in the mind. Being too practical to be moral, it denies | ||
| + | what every practical soldier calls the moral of an army. It fancies that | ||
| + | money will fight when men will no longer fight. So it was with the Punic | ||
| + | merchant princes. Their religion was a religion of despair, even when | ||
| + | their practical fortunes were hopeful. How could they understand that | ||
| + | the Romans could hope even when their fortunes were hopeless? Their | ||
| + | religion was a religion of force and fear; how could they understand | ||
| + | that men can still despise fear even when they submit to force? Their | ||
| + | philosophy of the world had weariness in its very heart; above all they | ||
| + | were weary of warfare; how should they understand those who still wage | ||
| + | war even when they are weary of it? In a word, how should they | ||
| + | understand the mind of Man, who had so long bowed down before mindless | ||
| + | things, money and brute force and gods who had the hearts of beasts? | ||
| + | They awoke suddenly to the news that the embers they had disdained too | ||
| + | much even to tread out were again breaking everywhere into flame; that | ||
| + | Hasdrubal was defeated, that Hannibal was outnumbered, | ||
| + | carried the war into Spain; that he had carried it into Africa. Before< | ||
| + | the very gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last fight for it | ||
| + | and lost; and Carthage fell as nothing has fallen since Satan. The name | ||
| + | of the New City remains only as a name. There is no stone of it left | ||
| + | upon the sand. Another war was indeed waged before the final | ||
| + | destruction: | ||
| + | foundations centuries after found a heap of hundreds of little | ||
| + | skeletons, the holy relics of that religion. For Carthage fell because | ||
| + | she was faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its | ||
| + | logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his | ||
| + | children.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | But they had been defeated by the defeated, and almost defeated by the | ||
| + | dead. Nobody understands the romance of Rome, and why she rose | ||
| + | afterwards to a representative leadership that seemed almost fated and | ||
| + | fundamentally natural, who does not keep in mind the agony of horror and | ||
| + | humiliation through which she had continued to testify to the sanity | ||
| + | that is the soul of Europe. She came to stand alone in the midst of an | ||
| + | empire because she had once stood alone in the midst of a ruin and a | ||
| + | waste. After that all men knew in their hearts that she had been | ||
| + | representative of mankind, even when she was rejected of men. And there | ||
| + | fell on her the shadow from a shining and as yet invisible light and the | ||
| + | burden of things to be. It is not for us to guess in what manner or | ||
| + | moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it | ||
| + | is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have | ||
| + | been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of | ||
| + | an empire of Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic wars if, | ||
| + | in after ages, divine things descended at least upon human things and | ||
| + | not inhuman. Europe evolved into its own vices and its own impotence, as | ||
| + | will be suggested on another page; but the worst into which it evolved | ||
| + | was not like what it had escaped. Can<span class=" | ||
| + | great wooden doll, whom the children expected to eat a little bit of the | ||
| + | dinner, with the great idol who would have been expected to eat the | ||
| + | children? That is the measure of how far the world went astray, compared | ||
| + | with how far it might have gone astray. If the Romans were ruthless, it | ||
| + | was in a true sense to an enemy, and certainly not merely a rival. They | ||
| + | remembered not trade routes and regulations, | ||
| + | men; and hated the hateful soul of Carthage. And we owe them something | ||
| + | if we never needed to cut down the groves of Venus exactly as men cut | ||
| + | down the groves of Baal. We owe it partly to their harshness that our | ||
| + | thoughts of our human past are not wholly harsh. If the passage from | ||
| + | heathenry to Christianity was a bridge as well as a breach, we owe it to | ||
| + | those who kept that heathenry human. If, after all these ages, we are in | ||
| + | some sense at peace with paganism, and can think more kindly of our | ||
| + | fathers, it is well to remember the things that were and the things that | ||
| + | might have been. For this reason alone we can take lightly the load of | ||
| + | antiquity and need not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or a cupid on a | ||
| + | valentine. Laughter and sadness link us with things long past away and | ||
| + | remembered without dishonour; and we can see not altogether without | ||
| + | tenderness the twilight sinking around the Sabine farm and hear the | ||
| + | household gods rejoice when Catullus comes home to Sirmio. < | ||
| + | Carthago.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE END OF THE WORLD</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | of a little village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I | ||
| + | had just been walking through the woods. He was one of a group of | ||
| + | eccentrics I had come across in my wanderings who had a new religion | ||
| + | called Higher Thought; in which I had been so far initiated as to | ||
| + | realise a general atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at | ||
| + | some later and more esoteric stage to discover the beginnings of | ||
| + | thought. My companion was the most amusing of them, for however he may | ||
| + | have stood towards thought, he was at least very much their superior in | ||
| + | experience, having travelled beyond the tropics while they were | ||
| + | meditating in the suburbs; though he had been charged with excess in | ||
| + | telling travellers’ tales. In spite of anything said against him, I | ||
| + | preferred him to his companions and willingly went with him through the | ||
| + | wood; where I could not but feel that his sunburnt face and fierce | ||
| + | tufted eyebrows and pointed beard gave him something of the look of Pan. | ||
| + | Then we sat down in the meadow and gazed idly at the tree-tops and the | ||
| + | spire of the village church; while the warm afternoon began to mellow | ||
| + | into early evening and the song of a speck of a bird was faint far up in | ||
| + | the sky and no more than a whisper of breeze soothed rather than stirred | ||
| + | the ancient orchards of the garden of England. Then my companion said to | ||
| + | me: ‘Do you know why the spire of that church goes up like that?’ I | ||
| + | expressed a respectable agnosticism, | ||
| + | way, ‘Oh, the same as the obelisks; the phallic worship of antiquity.’ | ||
| + | Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering above his | ||
| + | goatlike beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan but the | ||
| + | Devil. No mortal words can express the immense, the insane incongruity | ||
| + | and unnatural perversion of thought involved in saying such a thing at | ||
| + | such a moment and in such a place. For one moment I was in the mood in | ||
| + | which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous | ||
| + | seemed to open about me like a dawn. ‘Why, of course,’ I said after a | ||
| + | moment’s reflection, ‘if it hadn’t been for phallic worship, they would | ||
| + | have built the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex.’ I | ||
| + | could have sat in that field and laughed for an hour. My friend did not | ||
| + | seem offended, for indeed he was never thin-skinned about his scientific | ||
| + | discoveries. I had only met him by chance and I never met him again, and | ||
| + | I believe he is now dead; but though it has nothing to do with the | ||
| + | argument, it may be worth while to mention the name of this adherent of | ||
| + | Higher Thought and interpreter of primitive religious origins; or at any | ||
| + | rate the name by which he was known. It was Louis de Rougemont.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | spire, as in some old rustic topsy-turvy tale, always comes back into my | ||
| + | imagination when I hear these things said about pagan origins; and calls | ||
| + | to my aid the laughter of the giants. Then I feel as genially and | ||
| + | charitably to all other scientific investigators, | ||
| + | authorities on ancient and modern religion, as I do to poor Louis de | ||
| + | Rougemont. But the memory of that immense absurdity remains as a sort of | ||
| + | measure and check by which to keep sane, not only on the subject of | ||
| + | Christian churches, but also on the subject of heathen temples. Now a | ||
| + | great many people have talked about heathen origins as the distinguished | ||
| + | traveller talked about Christian origins. Indeed a great many modern< | ||
| + | heathens have been very hard on heathenism. A great many modern | ||
| + | humanitarians have been very hard on the real religion of humanity. They | ||
| + | have represented it as being everywhere and from the first rooted only | ||
| + | in these repulsive arcana; and carrying the character of something | ||
| + | utterly shameless and anarchical. Now I do not believe this for a | ||
| + | moment. I should never dream of thinking about the whole worship of | ||
| + | Apollo what De Rougemont could think about the worship of Christ. I | ||
| + | would never admit that there was such an atmosphere in a Greek city as | ||
| + | that madman was able to smell in a Kentish village. On the contrary, it | ||
| + | is the whole point, even of this final chapter upon the final decay of | ||
| + | paganism, to insist once more that the worst sort of paganism had | ||
| + | already been defeated by the best sort. It was the best sort of paganism | ||
| + | that conquered the gold of Carthage. It was the best sort of paganism | ||
| + | that wore the laurels of Rome. It was the best thing the world had yet | ||
| + | seen, all things considered and on any large scale, that ruled from the | ||
| + | wall of the Grampians to the garden of the Euphrates. It was the best | ||
| + | that conquered; it was the best that ruled; and it was the best that | ||
| + | began to decay.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. | ||
| + | Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of | ||
| + | joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no | ||
| + | longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not | ||
| + | feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We | ||
| + | might almost say that in a society without such good things we should | ||
| + | hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why some of | ||
| + | the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an air in | ||
| + | history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed | ||
| + | and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old. But Carthage | ||
| + | at<span class=" | ||
| + | mortal society had been defeated. But how much would it matter that the | ||
| + | worst was dead if the best was dying?</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>To begin with, it must be noted that the relation of Rome to Carthage | ||
| + | was partially repeated and extended in her relation to nations more | ||
| + | normal and more nearly akin to her than Carthage. I am not here | ||
| + | concerned to controvert the merely political view that Roman statesmen | ||
| + | acted unscrupulously towards Corinth or the Greek cities. But I am | ||
| + | concerned to contradict the notion that there was nothing but a | ||
| + | hypocritical excuse in the ordinary Roman dislike of Greek vices. I am | ||
| + | not presenting these pagans as paladins of chivalry, with a sentiment | ||
| + | about nationalism never known until Christian times. But I am presenting | ||
| + | them as men with the feelings of men; and those feelings were not a | ||
| + | pretence. The truth is that one of the weaknesses in nature-worship and | ||
| + | mere mythology had already produced a perversion among the Greeks, due | ||
| + | to the worst sophistry; the sophistry of simplicity. Just as they became | ||
| + | unnatural by worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by | ||
| + | worshipping man. If Greece led her conqueror, she might have misled her | ||
| + | conqueror; but these were things he did originally wish to conquer& | ||
| + | in himself. It is true that in one sense there was less inhumanity even | ||
| + | in Sodom and Gomorrah than in Tyre and Sidon. When we consider the war | ||
| + | of the demons on the children, we cannot compare even Greek decadence to | ||
| + | Punic devil-worship. But it is not true that the sincere revulsion from | ||
| + | either need be merely pharisaical. It is not true to human nature or to | ||
| + | common sense. Let any lad who has had the luck to grow up sane and | ||
| + | simple in his day-dreams of love hear for the first time of the cult of | ||
| + | Ganymede; he will not be merely shocked but sickened. And that first | ||
| + | impression, as has been said here so often about first impressions, | ||
| + | be right.< | ||
| + | of all illusions: the illusion of familiarity. It is right to conceive | ||
| + | the more or less rustic virtues of the ruck of the original Romans as | ||
| + | reacting against the very rumour of it, with complete spontaneity and | ||
| + | sincerity. It is right to regard them as reacting, if in a lesser | ||
| + | degree, exactly as they did against the cruelty of Carthage. Because it | ||
| + | was in a less degree they did not destroy Corinth as they destroyed | ||
| + | Carthage. But if their attitude and action was rather destructive, | ||
| + | neither case need their indignation have been mere self-righteousness | ||
| + | covering mere selfishness. And if anybody insists that nothing could | ||
| + | have operated in either case but reasons of state and commercial | ||
| + | conspiracies, | ||
| + | not understand; something which possibly he will never understand; | ||
| + | something which, until he does understand, he will never understand the | ||
| + | Latins. That something is called democracy. He has probably heard the | ||
| + | word a good many times and even used it himself; but he has no notion of | ||
| + | what it means. All through the revolutionary history of Rome there was | ||
| + | an incessant drive towards democracy; the state and the statesman could | ||
| + | do nothing without a considerable backing of democracy; the sort of | ||
| + | democracy that never has anything to do with diplomacy. It is precisely | ||
| + | because of the presence of Roman democracy that we hear so much about | ||
| + | Roman oligarchy. For instance, recent historians have tried to explain | ||
| + | the valour and victory of Rome in terms of that detestable and detested | ||
| + | usury which was practised by some of the Patricians; as if Curius had | ||
| + | conquered the men of the Macedonian phalanx by lending them money; or | ||
| + | the Consul Nero had negotiated the victory of Metaurus at five per cent. | ||
| + | But we realise the usury of the Patricians because of the perpetual | ||
| + | revolt of the Plebeians. The rule of the Punic merchant princes had the | ||
| + | very soul of usury. But<span class=" | ||
| + | them usurers.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | rise of Rome had really been the rise of normal and especially of | ||
| + | popular things; and in nothing more than in the thoroughly normal and | ||
| + | profoundly popular hatred of perversion. Now among the Greeks a | ||
| + | perversion had become a convention. It is true that it had become so | ||
| + | much of a convention, especially a literary convention, that it was | ||
| + | sometimes conventionally copied by Roman literary men. But this is one | ||
| + | of those complications that always arise out of conventions. It must not | ||
| + | obscure our sense of the difference of tone in the two societies as a | ||
| + | whole. It is true that Virgil would once in a way take over a theme of | ||
| + | Theocritus; but nobody can get the impression that Virgil was | ||
| + | particularly fond of that theme. The themes of Virgil were specially and | ||
| + | notably the normal themes, and nowhere more than in morals; piety and | ||
| + | patriotism and the honour of the countryside. And we may well pause upon | ||
| + | the name of the poet as we pass into the autumn of antiquity: upon his | ||
| + | name who was in so supreme a sense the very voice of autumn, of its | ||
| + | maturity and its melancholy; of its fruits of fulfilment and its | ||
| + | prospect of decay. Nobody who reads even a few lines of Virgil can doubt | ||
| + | that he understood what moral sanity means to mankind. Nobody can doubt | ||
| + | his feelings when the demons were driven in flight before the household | ||
| + | gods. But there are two particular points about him and his work which | ||
| + | are particularly important to the main thesis here. The first is that | ||
| + | the whole of his great patriotic epic is in a very peculiar sense | ||
| + | founded upon the fall of Troy; that is, upon an avowed pride in Troy | ||
| + | although she had fallen. In tracing to Trojans the foundation of his | ||
| + | beloved race and republic, he began what may be called the great Trojan | ||
| + | tradition which runs through medieval and modern history. We have< | ||
| + | already seen the first hint of it in the pathos of Homer about Hector. | ||
| + | But Virgil turned it not merely into a literature but into a legend. And | ||
| + | it was a legend of the almost divine dignity that belongs to the | ||
| + | defeated. This was one of the traditions that did truly prepare the | ||
| + | world for the coming of Christianity and especially of Christian | ||
| + | chivalry. This is what did help to sustain civilisation through the | ||
| + | incessant defeats of the Dark Ages and the barbarian wars; out of which | ||
| + | what we call chivalry was born. It is the moral attitude of the man with | ||
| + | his back to the wall; and it was the wall of Troy. All through medieval | ||
| + | and modern times this version of the virtues in the Homeric conflict can | ||
| + | be traced in a hundred ways co-operating with all that was akin to it in | ||
| + | Christian sentiment. Our own countrymen, and the men of other countries, | ||
| + | loved to claim like Virgil that their own nation was descended from the | ||
| + | heroic Trojans. All sorts of people thought it the most superb sort of | ||
| + | heraldry to claim to be descended from Hector. Nobody seems to have | ||
| + | wanted to be descended from Achilles. The very fact that the Trojan name | ||
| + | has become a Christian name, and been scattered to the last limits of | ||
| + | Christendom, | ||
| + | has remained relatively rare and pedantic, is a tribute to the same | ||
| + | truth. Indeed it involves a curiosity of language almost in the nature | ||
| + | of a joke. The name has been turned into a verb; and the very phrase | ||
| + | about hectoring, in the sense of swaggering, suggests the myriads of | ||
| + | soldiers who have taken the fallen Trojan for a model. As a matter of | ||
| + | fact, nobody in antiquity was less given to hectoring than Hector. But | ||
| + | even the bully pretending to be a conqueror took his title from the | ||
| + | conquered. That is why the popularisation of the Trojan origin by Virgil | ||
| + | has a vital relation to all those elements that have made men say that | ||
| + | Virgil was almost a Christian. It is almost as if two great tools or | ||
| + | toys of the same timber, the<span class=" | ||
| + | hands of Providence; and the only thing comparable to the Wooden Cross | ||
| + | of Calvary was the Wooden Horse of Troy. So, in some wild allegory, | ||
| + | pious in purpose if almost profane in form, the Holy Child might have | ||
| + | fought the Dragon with a wooden sword and a wooden horse.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | particular nature of his relation to mythology; or what may here in a | ||
| + | special sense be called folklore, the faiths and fancies of the | ||
| + | populace. Everybody knows that his poetry at its most perfect is less | ||
| + | concerned with the pomposity of Olympus than with the < | ||
| + | natural and agricultural life. Every one knows where Virgil looked for | ||
| + | the causes of things. He speaks of finding them not so much in cosmic | ||
| + | allegories of Uranus and Chronos; but rather in Pan and the sisterhood | ||
| + | of the nymphs and the shaggy old man of the forest. He is perhaps most | ||
| + | himself in some passages of the Eclogues, in which he has perpetuated | ||
| + | for ever the great legend of Arcadia and the shepherds. Here again it is | ||
| + | easy enough to miss the point with petty criticism about all the things | ||
| + | that happen to separate his literary convention from ours. There is | ||
| + | nothing more artificial than the cry of artificiality, | ||
| + | against the old pastoral poetry. We have entirely missed all that our | ||
| + | fathers meant by looking at the externals of what they wrote. People | ||
| + | have been so much amused with the mere fact that the china shepherdess | ||
| + | was made of china that they have not even asked why she was made at all. | ||
| + | They have been so content to consider the Merry Peasant as a figure in | ||
| + | an opera that they have not asked even how he came to go to the opera, | ||
| + | or how he strayed on to the stage.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In short, we have only to ask why there is a china shepherdess and not a | ||
| + | china shopkeeper. Why were not mantelpieces adorned with figures of city | ||
| + | merchants in elegant attitudes; of ironmasters wrought< | ||
| + | speculators in gold? Why did the opera exhibit a Merry Peasant and not a | ||
| + | Merry Politician? Why was there not a ballet of bankers, pirouetting | ||
| + | upon pointed toes? Because the ancient instinct and humour of humanity | ||
| + | have always told them, under whatever conventions, | ||
| + | of complex cities were less really healthy and happy than the customs of | ||
| + | the countryside. So it is with the eternity of the Eclogues. A modern | ||
| + | poet did indeed write things called Fleet Street Eclogues, in which | ||
| + | poets took the place of the shepherds. But nobody has yet written | ||
| + | anything called Wall Street Eclogues, in which millionaires should take | ||
| + | the place of the poets. And the reason is that there is a real if only a | ||
| + | recurrent yearning for that sort of simplicity; and there is never that | ||
| + | sort of yearning for that sort of complexity. The key to the mystery of | ||
| + | the Merry Peasant is that the peasant often is merry. Those who do not | ||
| + | believe it are simply those who do not know anything about him, and | ||
| + | therefore do not know which are his times for merriment. Those who do | ||
| + | not believe in the shepherd’s feast or song are merely ignorant of the | ||
| + | shepherd’s calendar. The real shepherd is indeed very different from the | ||
| + | ideal shepherd, but that is no reason for forgetting the reality at the | ||
| + | root of the ideal. It needs a truth to make a tradition. It needs a | ||
| + | tradition to make a convention. Pastoral poetry is certainly often a | ||
| + | convention, especially in a social decline. It was in a social decline | ||
| + | that Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses lounged about the gardens of | ||
| + | Versailles. It was also in a social decline that shepherds and | ||
| + | shepherdesses continued to pipe and dance through the most faded | ||
| + | imitations of Virgil. But that is no reason for dismissing the dying | ||
| + | paganism without ever understanding its life. It is no reason for | ||
| + | forgetting that the very word Pagan is the same as the word Peasant. We | ||
| + | may say that this art is only artificiality; | ||
| + | artificial. On the contrary, it is in its very< | ||
| + | of nature-worship, | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | lived upon poetry; that poetry already considered under the name of | ||
| + | mythology. But everywhere, and especially in Italy, it had been a | ||
| + | mythology and a poetry rooted in the countryside; | ||
| + | religion had been largely responsible for the rustic happiness. Only as | ||
| + | the whole society grew in age and experience, there began to appear that | ||
| + | weakness in all mythology already noted in the chapter under that name. | ||
| + | This religion was not quite a religion. In other words, this religion | ||
| + | was not quite a reality. It was the young world’s riot with images and | ||
| + | ideas like a young man’s riot with wine or love-making; | ||
| + | much immoral as irresponsible; | ||
| + | time. Because it was creative to any extent it was credulous to any | ||
| + | extent. It belonged to the artistic side of man, yet even considered | ||
| + | artistically it had long become overloaded and entangled. The family | ||
| + | trees sprung from the seed of Jupiter were a jungle rather than a | ||
| + | forest; the claims of the gods and demigods seemed like things to be | ||
| + | settled rather by a lawyer or a professional herald than by a poet. But | ||
| + | it is needless to say that it was not only in the artistic sense that | ||
| + | these things had grown more anarchic. There had appeared in more and | ||
| + | more flagrant fashion that flower of evil that is really implicit in the | ||
| + | very seed of nature-worship, | ||
| + | that I do not believe that natural worship necessarily begins with this | ||
| + | particular passion; I am not of the De Rougemont school of scientific | ||
| + | folklore. I do not believe that mythology must begin in eroticism. But I | ||
| + | do believe that mythology must end in it. I am quite certain that | ||
| + | mythology did end in it. Moreover, not only did the poetry grow more | ||
| + | immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible. Greek< | ||
| + | oriental vices, hints of the old horrors of the Semitic demons, began to | ||
| + | fill the fancies of decaying Rome, swarming like flies on a dung-heap. | ||
| + | The psychology of it is really human enough, to any one who will try | ||
| + | that experiment of seeing history from the inside. There comes an hour | ||
| + | in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; | ||
| + | weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the | ||
| + | cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when | ||
| + | the man is tired of playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a | ||
| + | maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness | ||
| + | is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking | ||
| + | and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger | ||
| + | sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. | ||
| + | They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to | ||
| + | stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of | ||
| + | Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with | ||
| + | nightmares.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>At that stage even of paganism therefore the peasant songs and dances | ||
| + | sound fainter and fainter in the forest. For one thing, the peasant | ||
| + | civilisation was fading, or had already faded, from the whole | ||
| + | countryside. The Empire at the end was organised more and more on that | ||
| + | servile system which generally goes with the boast of organisation; | ||
| + | indeed it was almost as servile as the modern schemes for the | ||
| + | organisation of industry. It is proverbial that what would once have | ||
| + | been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent for bread | ||
| + | and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles | ||
| + | and cinemas. In this as in many other respects, the modern return to | ||
| + | heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to | ||
| + | the heathen old age. But the causes of it were spiritual in both cases; | ||
| + | and especially the spirit of paganism< | ||
| + | spirits. The heart had gone out of it with its household gods, who went | ||
| + | along with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest. The Old | ||
| + | Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in | ||
| + | a sense that Pan died because Christ was born. It is almost as true in | ||
| + | another sense that men knew that Christ was born because Pan was already | ||
| + | dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of | ||
| + | mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been | ||
| + | filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the mythology | ||
| + | could not have lasted like a theology in any case. Theology is thought, | ||
| + | whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody | ||
| + | could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of | ||
| + | glamour, and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only | ||
| + | ceased to believe in the gods, but they realised that they had never | ||
| + | believed in them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round | ||
| + | their altars. They had played the flute; they had played the fool.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>So came the twilight upon Arcady, and the last notes of the pipe sound | ||
| + | sadly from the beechen grove. In the great Virgilian poems there is | ||
| + | already something of the sadness; but the loves and the household gods | ||
| + | linger in lovely lines like that which Mr. Belloc took for a test of | ||
| + | understanding; | ||
| + | them as with us, the human family itself began to break down under | ||
| + | servile organisation and the herding of the towns. The urban mob became | ||
| + | enlightened; | ||
| + | All round the circle of the Mediterranean cities the people mourned for | ||
| + | the loss of gods and were consoled with gladiators. And meanwhile | ||
| + | something similar was happening to that intellectual aristocracy of | ||
| + | antiquity that had been walking about and talking at large ever since | ||
| + | Socrates and Pythagoras. They< | ||
| + | that they were walking in a circle and saying the same thing over and | ||
| + | over again. Philosophy began to be a joke; it also began to be a bore. | ||
| + | That unnatural simplification of everything into one system or another, | ||
| + | which we have noted as the fault of the philosopher, | ||
| + | its finality and its futility. Everything was virtue or everything was | ||
| + | happiness or everything was fate or everything was good or everything | ||
| + | was bad; anyhow, everything was everything and there was no more to be | ||
| + | said; so they said it. Everywhere the sages had degenerated into | ||
| + | sophists; that is, into hired rhetoricians or askers of riddles. It is | ||
| + | one of the symptoms of this that the sage begins to turn not only into a | ||
| + | sophist but into a magician. A touch of oriental occultism is very much | ||
| + | appreciated in the best houses. As the philosopher is already a society | ||
| + | entertainer, | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | and the wider horizons that might have awaited it with the discovery of | ||
| + | the other continents. But this is an illusion; one of the many illusions | ||
| + | of materialism. The limits that paganism had reached in Europe were the | ||
| + | limits of human existence; at its best it had only reached the same | ||
| + | limits anywhere else. The Roman stoics did not need any Chinamen to | ||
| + | teach them stoicism. The Pythagoreans did not need any Hindus to teach | ||
| + | them about recurrence or the simple life or the beauty of being a | ||
| + | vegetarian. In so far as they could get these things from the East, they | ||
| + | had already got rather too much of them from the East. The Syncretists | ||
| + | were as convinced as Theosophists that all religions are really the | ||
| + | same. And how else could they have extended philosophy merely by | ||
| + | extending geography? It can hardly be proposed that they should learn a | ||
| + | purer religion from the Aztecs or sit at the feet of the Incas of Peru. | ||
| + | All the rest of the world was a welter of<span class=" | ||
| + | recognise that the Roman Empire was recognised as the highest | ||
| + | achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful | ||
| + | secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those | ||
| + | mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheatres and | ||
| + | aqueducts. Man could do no more.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | was found wanting or his one kingdom given to a stranger. It was no such | ||
| + | good news as the news of invasion and conquest. There was nothing left | ||
| + | that could conquer Rome; but there was also nothing left that could | ||
| + | improve it. It was the strongest thing that was growing weak. It was the | ||
| + | best thing that was going to the bad. It is necessary to insist again | ||
| + | and again that many civilisations had met in one civilisation of the | ||
| + | Mediterranean sea; that it was already universal with a stale and | ||
| + | sterile universality. The peoples had pooled their resources and still | ||
| + | there was not enough. The empires had gone into partnership and they | ||
| + | were still bankrupt. No philosopher who was really philosophical could | ||
| + | think anything except that, in that central sea, the wave of the world | ||
| + | had risen to its highest, seeming to touch the stars. But the wave was | ||
| + | already stooping; for it was only the wave of the world.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | analysed had thus both of them been drained most literally to the dregs. | ||
| + | If with the multiplication of magic the third department, which we have | ||
| + | called the demons, was even increasingly active, it was never anything | ||
| + | but destructive. There remains only the fourth element, or rather the | ||
| + | first; that which had been in a sense forgotten because it was the | ||
| + | first. I mean the primary and overpowering yet impalpable impression | ||
| + | that the universe after all has one origin and one aim; and because it | ||
| + | has an aim must have an author. What< | ||
| + | background of men’s minds, at this time, it is perhaps more difficult to | ||
| + | determine. Some of the Stoics undoubtedly saw it more and more clearly | ||
| + | as the clouds of mythology cleared and thinned away; and great men among | ||
| + | them did much even to the last to lay the foundations of a concept of | ||
| + | the moral unity of the world. The Jews still held their secret certainty | ||
| + | of it jealously behind high fences of exclusiveness; | ||
| + | characteristic of the society and the situation that some fashionable | ||
| + | figures, especially fashionable ladies, actually embraced Judaism. But | ||
| + | in the case of many others I fancy there entered at this point a new | ||
| + | negation. Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for | ||
| + | atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is | ||
| + | the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that | ||
| + | there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees. Lucretius, the | ||
| + | first evolutionist who endeavoured to substitute Evolution for God, had | ||
| + | already dangled before men’s eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by | ||
| + | which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos. But it was not his strong | ||
| + | poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men | ||
| + | to entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of impotence | ||
| + | and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as | ||
| + | they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly | ||
| + | into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was | ||
| + | not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest | ||
| + | and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. They | ||
| + | could fancy that all the stars were falling stars; and that the very | ||
| + | pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed under a sort of gradual | ||
| + | Deluge. To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism that is in | ||
| + | some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and philosophy might | ||
| + | stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely< | ||
| + | reality might have sustained things as they sank. There was no God; if | ||
| + | there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have | ||
| + | moved and saved the world.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | with dreary festivity. It was the end of the world, and the worst of it | ||
| + | was that it need never end. A convenient compromise had been made | ||
| + | between all the multitudinous myths and religions of the Empire; that | ||
| + | each group should worship freely and merely give a sort of official | ||
| + | flourish of thanks to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense | ||
| + | to him under his official title of Divus. Naturally there was no | ||
| + | difficulty about that; or rather it was a long time before the world | ||
| + | realised that there ever had been even a trivial difficulty anywhere. | ||
| + | The members of some eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to | ||
| + | have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The incident | ||
| + | occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of | ||
| + | proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these | ||
| + | provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed | ||
| + | to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him | ||
| + | die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the | ||
| + | age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seem quite | ||
| + | unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God | ||
| + | had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. According to other | ||
| + | accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the | ||
| + | bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral | ||
| + | of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead | ||
| + | omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun. But | ||
| + | it was not the strange story to which anybody paid any particular | ||
| + | attention; people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill | ||
| + | a madhouse. It was something in the tone of<span class=" | ||
| + | of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and | ||
| + | poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they | ||
| + | moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a | ||
| + | part of their little system; and about what they said, however mildly, | ||
| + | there was a ring like iron. Men used to many mythologies and moralities | ||
| + | could make no analysis of the mystery, except the curious conjecture | ||
| + | that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them see reason in | ||
| + | the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor’s statue seemed to be spoken | ||
| + | to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth; | ||
| + | it was a difference of substance to the touch. Those who touched their | ||
| + | foundation fancied they had struck a rock.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | things seemed to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had | ||
| + | happened, these few men were palpably present. They were important | ||
| + | enough to be ignored. People became suddenly silent about them and | ||
| + | walked stiffly past them. We see a new scene, in which the world has | ||
| + | drawn its skirts away from these men and women and they stand in the | ||
| + | centre of a great space like lepers. The scene changes again and the | ||
| + | great space where they stand is overhung on every side with a cloud of | ||
| + | witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down towards them | ||
| + | intently; for strange things are happening to them. New tortures have | ||
| + | been invented for the madmen who have brought good news. That sad and | ||
| + | weary society seems almost to find a new energy in establishing its | ||
| + | first religious persecution. Nobody yet knows very clearly why that | ||
| + | level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but | ||
| + | they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to | ||
| + | revolve round them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light | ||
| + | that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging< | ||
| + | an unearthly phosphorescence, | ||
| + | history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of | ||
| + | mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the | ||
| + | world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own | ||
| + | enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it | ||
| + | more inexplicable; | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST< | ||
| + | </h2> | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE GOD IN THE CAVE</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery | ||
| + | has really found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human | ||
| + | history, which was like a new creation of the world, also begins in a | ||
| + | cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals | ||
| + | were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the | ||
| + | mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; who still drive their | ||
| + | cattle into such holes and caverns at night. It was here that a homeless | ||
| + | couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the | ||
| + | crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here | ||
| + | beneath the very feet of the passersby, in a cellar under the very floor | ||
| + | of the world, that Jesus Christ was born. But in that second creation | ||
| + | there was indeed something symbolical in the roots of the primeval rock | ||
| + | or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God also was a Cave-Man, and had | ||
| + | also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously coloured, upon the | ||
| + | wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has | ||
| + | repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands | ||
| + | that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads | ||
| + | of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, | ||
| + | all the literature of our faith is founded. It is at least like a jest | ||
| + | in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot< | ||
| + | He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly | ||
| + | and almost derisively exaggerated; | ||
| + | something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible; as something | ||
| + | that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true. When | ||
| + | that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little local infancy | ||
| + | has been repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasised, exulted in, sung, | ||
| + | shouted, roared, not to say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns, carols, | ||
| + | rhymes, rituals, pictures, poems, and popular sermons, it may be | ||
| + | suggested that we hardly need a higher critic to draw our attention to | ||
| + | something a little odd about it; especially one of the sort that seems | ||
| + | to take a long time to see a joke, even his own joke. But about this | ||
| + | contrast and combination of ideas one thing may be said here, because it | ||
| + | is relevant to the whole thesis of this book. The sort of modern critic | ||
| + | of whom I speak is generally much impressed with the importance of | ||
| + | education in life and the importance of psychology in education. That | ||
| + | sort of man is never tired of telling us that first impressions fix | ||
| + | character by the law of causation; and he will become quite nervous if a | ||
| + | child’s visual sense is poisoned by the wrong colours on a golliwog or | ||
| + | his nervous system prematurely shaken by a cacophonous rattle. Yet he | ||
| + | will think us very narrow-minded if we say that this is exactly why | ||
| + | there really is a difference between being brought up as a Christian and | ||
| + | being brought up as a Jew or a Moslem or an atheist. The difference is | ||
| + | that every Catholic child has learned from pictures, and even every | ||
| + | Protestant child from stories, this incredible combination of contrasted | ||
| + | ideas as one of the very first impressions on his mind. It is not merely | ||
| + | a theological difference. It is a psychological difference which can | ||
| + | outlast any theologies. It really is, as that sort of scientist loves to | ||
| + | say about anything, incurable. Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood | ||
| + | has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards,< | ||
| + | not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind | ||
| + | must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea | ||
| + | of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and | ||
| + | imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see | ||
| + | the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of | ||
| + | religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of | ||
| + | mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God. | ||
| + | But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They would | ||
| + | not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for | ||
| + | Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an | ||
| + | infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in | ||
| + | our minds by Christmas because we are Christians; because we are | ||
| + | psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other | ||
| + | words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, | ||
| + | phrase, altered human nature. There is really a difference between the | ||
| + | man who knows it and the man who does not. It may not be a difference of | ||
| + | moral worth, for the Moslem or the Jew might be worthier according to | ||
| + | his lights; but it is a plain fact about the crossing of two particular | ||
| + | lights, the conjunction of two stars in our particular horoscope. | ||
| + | Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely make a | ||
| + | sort of epigram which a million repetitions cannot turn into a | ||
| + | platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique. Bethlehem is | ||
| + | emphatically a place where extremes meet.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | humanisation of Christendom. If the world wanted what is called a | ||
| + | non-controversial aspect of Christianity, | ||
| + | Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up with what is supposed to be a | ||
| + | controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my opinions imagine | ||
| + | why); the<span class=" | ||
| + | Puritan generation objected to a statue upon a parish church | ||
| + | representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, | ||
| + | compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even | ||
| + | more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less | ||
| + | dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical | ||
| + | difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a | ||
| + | mother from all round that of a new-born child. You cannot suspend the | ||
| + | new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a | ||
| + | new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a | ||
| + | new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his | ||
| + | mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you | ||
| + | cannot in common human life approach the child except through the | ||
| + | mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other | ||
| + | idea follows as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ | ||
| + | out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only | ||
| + | as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near | ||
| + | together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing had | ||
| + | happened in that fold or crack in the great grey hills except that the | ||
| + | whole universe had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of | ||
| + | wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing | ||
| + | were now turned inward to the smallest. The very image will suggest all | ||
| + | that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of the | ||
| + | coloured Catholic imagery like a peacock’s tail. But it is true in a | ||
| + | sense that God who had been only a circumference was seen as a centre; | ||
| + | and a centre is infinitely small. It is true that the spiritual spiral | ||
| + | henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is | ||
| + | centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in more< | ||
| + | one, a religion of little things. But its traditions in art and | ||
| + | literature and popular fable have quite sufficiently attested, as has | ||
| + | been said, this particular paradox of the divine being in the cradle. | ||
| + | Perhaps they have not so clearly emphasised the significance of the | ||
| + | divine being in the cave. Curiously enough, indeed, tradition has not | ||
| + | very clearly emphasised the cave. It is a familiar fact that the | ||
| + | Bethlehem scene has been represented in every possible setting of time | ||
| + | and country, of landscape and architecture; | ||
| + | admirable fact that men have conceived it as quite different according | ||
| + | to their different individual traditions and tastes. But while all have | ||
| + | realised that it was a stable, not so many have realised that it was a | ||
| + | cave. Some critics have even been so silly as to suppose that there was | ||
| + | some contradiction between the stable and the cave; in which case they | ||
| + | cannot know much about caves or stables in Palestine. As they see | ||
| + | differences that are not there, it is needless to add that they do not | ||
| + | see differences that are there. When a well-known critic says, for | ||
| + | instance, that Christ being born in a rocky cavern is like Mithras | ||
| + | having sprung alive out of a rock, it sounds like a parody upon | ||
| + | comparative religion. There is such a thing as the point of a story, | ||
| + | even if it is a story in the sense of a lie. And the notion of a hero | ||
| + | appearing, like Pallas from the brain of Zeus, mature and without a | ||
| + | mother, is obviously the very opposite of the idea of a god being born | ||
| + | like an ordinary baby and entirely dependent on a mother. Whichever | ||
| + | ideal we might prefer, we should surely see that they are contrary | ||
| + | ideals. It is as stupid to connect them because they both contain a | ||
| + | substance called stone as to identify the punishment of the Deluge with | ||
| + | the baptism in the Jordan because they both contain a substance called | ||
| + | water. Whether as a myth or a mystery, Christ was obviously conceived as | ||
| + | born in a hole in the rocks primarily because it marked the position of | ||
| + | one<span class=" | ||
| + | the cave has not been so commonly or so clearly used as a symbol as the | ||
| + | other realities that surrounded the first Christmas.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | world. It was in a sense the difficulty of a new dimension. Christ was | ||
| + | not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. | ||
| + | The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set | ||
| + | up above the sightseer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of | ||
| + | sight; and that is an idea very difficult to express in most modes of | ||
| + | artistic expression. It is the idea of simultaneous happenings on | ||
| + | different levels of life. Something like it might have been attempted in | ||
| + | the more archaic and decorative medieval art. But the more the artists | ||
| + | learned of realism and perspective, | ||
| + | the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills, and the glory | ||
| + | in the darkness that was under the hills. Perhaps it could have been | ||
| + | best conveyed by the characteristic expedient of some of the medieval | ||
| + | guilds, when they wheeled about the streets a theatre with three stages | ||
| + | one above the other, with heaven above the earth and hell under the | ||
| + | earth. But in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the | ||
| + | earth.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | upside down. It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or | ||
| + | anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity born | ||
| + | like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception of law | ||
| + | and its duties to the poor and outcast. It is profoundly true to say | ||
| + | that after that moment there could be no slaves. There could be and were | ||
| + | people bearing that legal title until the Church was strong enough to | ||
| + | weed them out, but there could be no more of the pagan repose in the | ||
| + | mere advantage to the state of keeping it a servile state. Individuals | ||
| + | became important, in<span class=" | ||
| + | A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man’s | ||
| + | end. All this popular and fraternal element in the story has been | ||
| + | rightly attached by tradition to the episode of the Shepherds; the hinds | ||
| + | who found themselves talking face to face with the princes of heaven. | ||
| + | But there is another aspect of the popular element as represented by the | ||
| + | shepherds which has not perhaps been so fully developed; and which is | ||
| + | more directly relevant here.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | everywhere been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who had felt | ||
| + | most directly, with least check or chill from philosophy or the corrupt | ||
| + | cults of civilisation, | ||
| + | that were adventures of the imagination; | ||
| + | of search; the tempting and tantalising hints of something half-human in | ||
| + | nature; the dumb significance of seasons and special places. They had | ||
| + | best understood that the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of | ||
| + | a story is a personality. But rationalism had already begun to rot away | ||
| + | these really irrational though imaginative treasures of the peasant; | ||
| + | even as systematic slavery had eaten the peasant out of house and home. | ||
| + | Upon all such peasantries everywhere there was descending a dusk and | ||
| + | twilight of disappointment, | ||
| + | what they sought. Everywhere else Arcadia was fading from the forest. | ||
| + | Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep. And though no | ||
| + | man knew it, the hour was near which was to end and to fulfil all | ||
| + | things; and though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an | ||
| + | unknown tongue upon the heaving wilderness of the mountains. The | ||
| + | shepherds had found their Shepherd.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in<span class=" | ||
| + | believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity | ||
| + | need not disdain the limits of time and space. And the barbarian who | ||
| + | conceived the crudest fancy about the sun being stolen and hidden in a | ||
| + | box, or the wildest myth about the god being rescued and his enemy | ||
| + | deceived with a stone, was nearer to the secret of the cave and knew | ||
| + | more about the crisis of the world than all those in the circle of | ||
| + | cities round the Mediterranean who had become content with cold | ||
| + | abstractions or cosmopolitan generalisations; | ||
| + | spinning thinner and thinner threads of thought out of the | ||
| + | transcendentalism of Plato or the orientalism of Pythagoras. The place | ||
| + | that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic; it | ||
| + | was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or | ||
| + | explained away. It was a place of dreams come true. Since that hour no | ||
| + | mythologies have been made in the world. Mythology is a search.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story, in so | ||
| + | many miracle plays and carols, has given to the shepherds the costume, | ||
| + | the language, and the landscape of the separate English and European | ||
| + | countrysides. We all know that one shepherd will talk in a Somerset | ||
| + | dialect or another talk of driving his sheep from Conway towards the | ||
| + | Clyde. Most of us know by this time how true is that error, how wise, | ||
| + | how artistic, how intensely Christian and Catholic is that anachronism. | ||
| + | But some who have seen it in these scenes of medieval rusticity have | ||
| + | perhaps not seen it in another sort of poetry, which it is sometimes the | ||
| + | fashion to call artificial rather than artistic. I fear that many modern | ||
| + | critics will see only a faded classicism in the fact that men like | ||
| + | Crashaw and Herrick conceived the shepherds of Bethlehem under the form | ||
| + | of the shepherds of Virgil. Yet they were profoundly right; and in | ||
| + | turning their Bethlehem play into a Latin Eclogue they took up one of | ||
| + | the most important links in human history.< | ||
| + | seen, does stand for all that saner heathenism that had overthrown the | ||
| + | insane heathenism of human sacrifice; but the very fact that even the | ||
| + | Virgilian virtues and the sane heathenism were in incurable decay is the | ||
| + | whole problem to which the revelation to the shepherds is the solution. | ||
| + | If the world had ever had the chance to grow weary of being demoniac, it | ||
| + | might have been healed merely by becoming sane. But if it had grown | ||
| + | weary even of being sane, what was to happen except what did happen? Nor | ||
| + | is it false to conceive the Arcadian shepherd of the Eclogues as | ||
| + | rejoicing in what did happen. One of the Eclogues has even been claimed | ||
| + | as a prophecy of what did happen. But it is quite as much in the tone | ||
| + | and incidental diction of the great poet that we feel the potential | ||
| + | sympathy with the great event; and even in their own human phrases the | ||
| + | voices of the Virgilian shepherds might more than once have broken upon | ||
| + | more than the tenderness of Italy.... < | ||
| + | cognoscere matrem.</ | ||
| + | that was best in the last traditions of the Latins; and something better | ||
| + | than a wooden idol standing up for ever for the pillar of the human | ||
| + | family; a Household God. But they and all the other mythologists would | ||
| + | be justified in rejoicing that the event had fulfilled not merely the | ||
| + | mysticism but the materialism of mythology. Mythology had many sins; but | ||
| + | it had not been wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation. With | ||
| + | something of the ancient voice that was supposed to have rung through | ||
| + | the groves, it could cry again, ‘We have seen, he hath seen us, a | ||
| + | visible god.’ So the ancient shepherds might have danced, and their feet | ||
| + | have been beautiful upon the mountains, rejoicing over the philosophers. | ||
| + | But the philosophers had also heard.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out of | ||
| + | orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with | ||
| + | something of the<span class=" | ||
| + | wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as | ||
| + | their mysterious and melodious names: Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But | ||
| + | there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars | ||
| + | in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in | ||
| + | them the same curiosity that moves all the sages. They would stand for | ||
| + | the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or | ||
| + | Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth | ||
| + | of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, | ||
| + | they also have had their reward. But even in order to understand that | ||
| + | reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, | ||
| + | that reward was the completion of the incomplete.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | come, to find themselves confirmed in much that was true in their own | ||
| + | traditions and right in their own reasoning. Confucius would have found | ||
| + | a new foundation for the family in the very reversal of the Holy Family; | ||
| + | Buddha would have looked upon a new renunciation, | ||
| + | jewels and divinity than royalty. These learned men would still have the | ||
| + | right to say, or rather a new right to say, that there was truth in | ||
| + | their old teaching. But, after all, these learned men would have come to | ||
| + | learn. They would have come to complete their conceptions with something | ||
| + | they had not yet conceived; even to balance their imperfect universe | ||
| + | with something they might once have contradicted. Buddha would have come | ||
| + | from his impersonal paradise to worship a person. Confucius would have | ||
| + | come from his temples of ancestor-worship to worship a child.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos: that it | ||
| + | was larger than the old cosmos. In that sense Christendom is larger than | ||
| + | creation; as creation had been before Christ. It included things that | ||
| + | had not been there; it also included the things< | ||
| + | The point happens to be well illustrated in this example of Chinese | ||
| + | piety, but it would be true of other pagan virtues or pagan beliefs. | ||
| + | Nobody can doubt that a reasonable respect for parents is part of a | ||
| + | gospel in which God himself was subject in childhood to earthly parents. | ||
| + | But the other sense in which the parents were subject to him does | ||
| + | introduce an idea that is not Confucian. The infant Christ is not like | ||
| + | the infant Confucius; our mysticism conceives him in an immortal | ||
| + | infancy. I do not know what Confucius would have done with the Bambino, | ||
| + | had it come to life in his arms as it did in the arms of St. Francis. | ||
| + | But this is true in relation to all the other religions and | ||
| + | philosophies; | ||
| + | what the world does not contain. Life itself does not provide as she | ||
| + | does for all sides of life. That every other single system is narrow and | ||
| + | insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is | ||
| + | a real fact and a real dilemma. Where is the Holy Child amid the Stoics | ||
| + | and the ancestor-worshippers? | ||
| + | made for no man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the | ||
| + | monks of Buddha, rider and master of the trumpets, guarding for every | ||
| + | soldier the honour of the sword? What could St. Thomas Aquinas do with | ||
| + | the mythology of Brahminism, he who set forth all the science and | ||
| + | rationality and even rationalism of Christianity? | ||
| + | Aquinas with Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find | ||
| + | the same sense of something added. Aquinas could understand the most | ||
| + | logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have | ||
| + | understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where we can hardly | ||
| + | call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is | ||
| + | so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. How | ||
| + | would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for | ||
| + | that matter< | ||
| + | like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist | ||
| + | or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war | ||
| + | with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the | ||
| + | Tolstoyan sect of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have | ||
| + | spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same | ||
| + | with all the modern attempts at Syncretism. They are never able to make | ||
| + | something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not | ||
| + | mean leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the | ||
| + | inn or the boy’s tale of battle or the hedge at the end of the field. | ||
| + | The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon for | ||
| + | pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all the | ||
| + | peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a | ||
| + | pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the | ||
| + | Mediterranean; | ||
| + | side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, | ||
| + | or of Ammon. It was the refusal of the Christians that was the | ||
| + | turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the | ||
| + | whole world would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, | ||
| + | gone to pot. They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid | ||
| + | in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other | ||
| + | myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and an | ||
| + | appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the | ||
| + | ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not | ||
| + | realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness | ||
| + | and the brotherhood of all religions.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | and philosophy, are truly conceived as seeking something new and even as | ||
| + | finding something unexpected. That tense sense of crisis< | ||
| + | tingles in the Christmas story, and even in every Christmas celebration, | ||
| + | accentuates the idea of a search and a discovery. The discovery is, in | ||
| + | this case, truly a scientific discovery. For the other mystical figures | ||
| + | in the miracle play, for the angel and the mother, the shepherds and the | ||
| + | soldiers of Herod, there may be aspects both simpler and more | ||
| + | supernatural, | ||
| + | seeking wisdom; and for them there must be a light also in the | ||
| + | intellect. And this is the light: that the Catholic creed is catholic | ||
| + | and that nothing else is catholic. The philosophy of the Church is | ||
| + | universal. The philosophy of the philosophers was not universal. Had | ||
| + | Plato and Pythagoras and Aristotle stood for an instant in the light | ||
| + | that came out of that little cave, they would have known that their own | ||
| + | light was not universal. It is far from certain, indeed, that they did | ||
| + | not know it already. Philosophy also, like mythology, had very much the | ||
| + | air of a search. It is the realisation of this truth that gives its | ||
| + | traditional majesty and mystery to the figures of the Three Kings; the | ||
| + | discovery that religion is broader than philosophy and that this is the | ||
| + | broadest of religions, contained within this narrow space. The Magicians | ||
| + | were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human triangle reversed; | ||
| + | and they have never come to the end of their calculations about it. For | ||
| + | it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions | ||
| + | about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch | ||
| + | with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of | ||
| + | our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a | ||
| + | child.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>We might well be content to say that mythology had come with the | ||
| + | shepherds and philosophy with the philosophers; | ||
| + | remained for them to combine in the recognisation of religion. But there | ||
| + | was a third element that must not be ignored and one which that religion | ||
| + | for ever refuses to ignore,< | ||
| + | present in the primary scenes of the drama that Enemy that had rotted | ||
| + | the legends with lust and frozen the theories into atheism, but which | ||
| + | answered the direct challenge with something of that more direct method | ||
| + | which we have seen in the conscious cult of the demons. In the | ||
| + | description of that demon-worship, | ||
| + | innocence shown in the works of its witchcraft and the most inhuman of | ||
| + | its human sacrifice, I have said less of its indirect and secret | ||
| + | penetration of the saner paganism; the soaking of mythological | ||
| + | imagination with sex; the rise of imperial pride into insanity. But both | ||
| + | the indirect and the direct influence make themselves felt in the drama | ||
| + | of Bethlehem. A ruler under the Roman suzerainty, probably equipped and | ||
| + | surrounded with the Roman ornament and order though himself of eastern | ||
| + | blood, seems in that hour to have felt stirring within him the spirit of | ||
| + | strange things. We all know the story of how Herod, alarmed at some | ||
| + | rumour of a mysterious rival, remembered the wild gesture of the | ||
| + | capricious despots of Asia and ordered a massacre of suspects of the new | ||
| + | generation of the populace. Every one knows the story; but not every one | ||
| + | has perhaps noted its place in the story of the strange religions of | ||
| + | men. Not everybody has seen the significance even of its very contrast | ||
| + | with the Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered and | ||
| + | superficially civilised world. Only, as the purpose in his dark spirit | ||
| + | began to show and shine in the eyes of the Idumean, a seer might perhaps | ||
| + | have seen something like a great grey ghost that looked over his | ||
| + | shoulder; have seen behind him, filling the dome of night and hovering | ||
| + | for the last time over history, that vast and fearful face that was | ||
| + | Moloch of the Carthaginians; | ||
| + | the races of Shem. The demons also, in that first festival of Christmas, | ||
| + | feasted after their own fashion.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | the point of Christianity, | ||
| + | Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense | ||
| + | even a simple thing. But, like all the truths of that tradition, it is | ||
| + | in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the | ||
| + | simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of | ||
| + | gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. It is | ||
| + | not only an occasion for the peacemakers any more than for the | ||
| + | merrymakers; | ||
| + | only a Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it also; | ||
| + | something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great | ||
| + | guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing | ||
| + | that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something | ||
| + | like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion | ||
| + | of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But | ||
| + | the savour is still unmistakable, | ||
| + | solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature | ||
| + | of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress | ||
| + | or an outlaw’s den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say | ||
| + | they were rejoicings in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a | ||
| + | subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the | ||
| + | enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a | ||
| + | sky. It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that | ||
| + | sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is | ||
| + | also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a | ||
| + | piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There | ||
| + | is in this buried divinity an idea of < | ||
| + | shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king | ||
| + | felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | already apparent that though men are said to have looked for hell under | ||
| + | the earth, in this case it is rather heaven that is under the earth. And | ||
| + | there follows in this strange story the idea of an upheaval of heaven. | ||
| + | That is the paradox of the whole position; that henceforth the highest | ||
| + | thing can only work from below. Royalty can only return to its own by a | ||
| + | sort of rebellion. Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps | ||
| + | especially in its beginnings, was not so much a principality as a | ||
| + | revolution against the prince of the world. This sense that the world | ||
| + | had been conquered by the great usurper, and was in his possession, has | ||
| + | been much deplored or derided by those optimists who identify | ||
| + | enlightenment with ease. But it was responsible for all that thrill of | ||
| + | defiance and a beautiful danger that made the good news seem to be | ||
| + | really both good and new. It was in truth against a huge unconscious | ||
| + | usurpation that it raised a revolt, and originally so obscure a revolt. | ||
| + | Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud moulded into many | ||
| + | mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high places and even on the | ||
| + | thrones of the kings, when Christ was born in the cave and Christianity | ||
| + | in the catacombs.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In both cases we may remark the same paradox of revolution; the sense of | ||
| + | something despised and of something feared. The cave in one aspect is | ||
| + | only a hole or corner into which the outcasts are swept like rubbish; | ||
| + | yet in the other aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable which | ||
| + | the tyrants are seeking like treasure. In one sense they are there | ||
| + | because the innkeeper would not even remember them, and in another | ||
| + | because the king can never forget them. We have already noted that this | ||
| + | paradox appeared also in the treatment of the early Church. It was | ||
| + | important while it was still insignificant, | ||
| + | still impotent. It was important solely because it was intolerable; | ||
| + | in that sense it is true to say that it was intolerable because it was<span class=" | ||
| + | intolerant. It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret | ||
| + | way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the | ||
| + | heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that | ||
| + | creation of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It | ||
| + | dared to look right through it as though the gold and marble had been | ||
| + | glass. Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with | ||
| + | firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the | ||
| + | nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the | ||
| + | Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid | ||
| + | fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbours, and only | ||
| + | mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | he is the menace to the Church Militant and shows it from the first as | ||
| + | under persecution and fighting for its life. For those who think this a | ||
| + | discord, it is a discord that sounds simultaneously with the Christmas | ||
| + | bells. For those who think the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils | ||
| + | the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea of the | ||
| + | Cross is spoiled; the idea of the Cross is spoiled quite literally in | ||
| + | the Cradle. It is not here to the purpose to argue with them on the | ||
| + | abstract ethics of fighting; the purpose in this place is merely to sum | ||
| + | up the combination of ideas that make up the Christian and Catholic | ||
| + | idea, and to note that all of them are already crystallised in the first | ||
| + | Christmas story. They are three distinct and commonly contrasted things | ||
| + | which are nevertheless one thing; but this is the only thing which can | ||
| + | make them one. The first is the human instinct for a heaven that shall | ||
| + | be as literal and almost as local as a home. It is the idea pursued by | ||
| + | all poets and pagans making myths; that a particular place must be the | ||
| + | shrine of the god or the abode of the blest; that fairyland is a land; | ||
| + | or that the return of the ghost must be the resurrection< | ||
| + | do not here reason about the refusal of rationalism to satisfy this | ||
| + | need. I only say that if the rationalists refuse to satisfy it, the | ||
| + | pagans will not be satisfied. This is present in the story of Bethlehem | ||
| + | and Jerusalem as it is present in the story of Delos and Delphi; and as | ||
| + | it is < | ||
| + | universe of Herbert Spencer. The second element is a philosophy < | ||
| + | than other philosophies; | ||
| + | larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a | ||
| + | hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modern agnostic only | ||
| + | looks through one. It sees life with thousands of eyes belonging to | ||
| + | thousands of different sorts of people, where the other is only the | ||
| + | individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for | ||
| + | all moods of man, it finds work for all kinds of men, it understands | ||
| + | secrets of psychology, it is aware of depths of evil, it is able to | ||
| + | distinguish between real and unreal marvels and miraculous exceptions, | ||
| + | it trains itself in tact about hard cases, all with a multiplicity and | ||
| + | subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond | ||
| + | the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modern moral | ||
| + | philosophy. In a word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence | ||
| + | to think about; it gets more out of life. Masses of this material about | ||
| + | our many-sided life have been added since the time of St. Thomas | ||
| + | Aquinas. But St. Thomas Aquinas alone would have found himself limited | ||
| + | in the world of Confucius or of Comte. And the third point is this: that | ||
| + | while it is local enough for poetry and larger than any other | ||
| + | philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight. While it is deliberately | ||
| + | broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still stiffly | ||
| + | embattled against every mode of error. It gets every kind of man to | ||
| + | fight for it, it gets every kind of weapon to fight with, it widens its | ||
| + | knowledge of the things that are fought for and against with every art | ||
| + | of curiosity< | ||
| + | proclaims peace on earth and never forgets why there was war in heaven.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | old Christmas story: the shepherds and the kings and that other king who | ||
| + | warred upon the children. It is simply not true to say that other | ||
| + | religions and philosophies are in this respect its rivals. It is not | ||
| + | true to say that any one of them combines these characters; it is not | ||
| + | true to say that any one of them pretends to combine them. Buddhism may | ||
| + | profess to be equally mystical; it does not even profess to be equally | ||
| + | military. Islam may profess to be equally military; it does not even | ||
| + | profess to be equally metaphysical and subtle. Confucianism may profess | ||
| + | to satisfy the need of the philosophers for order and reason; it does | ||
| + | not even profess to satisfy the need of the mystics for miracle and | ||
| + | sacrament and the consecration of concrete things. There are many | ||
| + | evidences of this presence of a spirit at once universal and unique. One | ||
| + | will serve here which is the symbol of the subject of this chapter; that | ||
| + | no other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical | ||
| + | event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even | ||
| + | poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth | ||
| + | of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything | ||
| + | like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal | ||
| + | and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated. | ||
| + | Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with | ||
| + | the sense that he was going home. He might admire it because it was | ||
| + | poetical, or because it was philosophical, | ||
| + | in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is that there is | ||
| + | a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story | ||
| + | on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a | ||
| + | mere legend or the life of a great man. It does< | ||
| + | ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and | ||
| + | exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by | ||
| + | the healthiest sort of hero-worship. It does not exactly work outwards, | ||
| + | adventurously, | ||
| + | is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and | ||
| + | personal part of our being; like that which can sometimes take us off | ||
| + | our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the | ||
| + | poor. It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart | ||
| + | of his own house which he had never suspected; and seen a light from | ||
| + | within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that | ||
| + | betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call | ||
| + | strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in | ||
| + | that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. It is all that is | ||
| + | in us but a brief tenderness that is there made eternal; all that means | ||
| + | no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion | ||
| + | become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the | ||
| + | lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange | ||
| + | kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the | ||
| + | feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold | ||
| + | upon fold over something more human than humanity.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE RIDDLES OF THE GOSPEL</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | the nature of this book. The argument which is meant to be the backbone | ||
| + | of the book is of the kind called the < | ||
| + | suggests that the results of assuming the rationalist thesis are more | ||
| + | irrational than ours; but to prove it we must assume that thesis. Thus | ||
| + | in the first section I often treated man as merely an animal, to show | ||
| + | that the effect was more impossible than if he were treated as an angel. | ||
| + | In the sense in which it was necessary to treat man merely as an animal, | ||
| + | it is necessary to treat Christ merely as a man. I have to suspend my | ||
| + | own beliefs, which are much more positive; and assume this limitation | ||
| + | even in order to remove it. I must try to imagine what would happen to a | ||
| + | man who did really read the story of Christ as the story of a man; and | ||
| + | even of a man of whom he had never heard before. And I wish to point out | ||
| + | that a really impartial reading of that kind would lead, if not | ||
| + | immediately to belief, at least to a bewilderment of which there is | ||
| + | really no solution except in belief. In this chapter, for this reason, I | ||
| + | shall bring in nothing of the spirit of my own creed; I shall exclude | ||
| + | the very style of diction, and even of lettering, which I should think | ||
| + | fitting in speaking in my own person. I am speaking as an imaginary | ||
| + | heathen human being, honestly staring at the Gospel story for the first | ||
| + | time.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | Testament. It is not at all easy to<span class=" | ||
| + | for good and evil familiarity fills us with assumptions and | ||
| + | associations; | ||
| + | religion, can really read the thing as if he had never heard of it | ||
| + | before. Of course it is in any case utterly unhistorical to talk as if | ||
| + | the New Testament were a neatly bound book that had fallen from heaven. | ||
| + | It is simply the selection made by the authority of the Church from a | ||
| + | mass of early Christian literature. But apart from any such question, | ||
| + | there is a psychological difficulty in feeling the New Testament as new. | ||
| + | There is a psychological difficulty in seeing those well-known words | ||
| + | simply as they stand and without going beyond what they intrinsically | ||
| + | stand for. And this difficulty must indeed be very great; for the result | ||
| + | of it is very curious. The result of it is that most modern critics and | ||
| + | most current criticism, even popular criticism, makes a comment that is | ||
| + | the exact reverse of the truth. It is so completely the reverse of the | ||
| + | truth that one could almost suspect that they had never read the New | ||
| + | Testament at all.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never | ||
| + | to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a | ||
| + | most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has | ||
| + | hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with | ||
| + | ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This | ||
| + | is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth | ||
| + | is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost | ||
| + | entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels | ||
| + | that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the Gospels does | ||
| + | indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our | ||
| + | broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words | ||
| + | that he utters. Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that | ||
| + | the Church in its popular imagery ever repre< | ||
| + | popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct. The | ||
| + | mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor, and | ||
| + | for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the | ||
| + | incredible compassion of God. But nobody with his eyes open can doubt | ||
| + | that it is chiefly this idea of compassion that the popular machinery of | ||
| + | the Church does seek to carry. The popular imagery carries a great deal | ||
| + | to excess the sentiment of ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.’ It is the | ||
| + | first thing that the outsider feels and criticises in a Pietà or a | ||
| + | shrine of the Sacred Heart. As I say, while the art may be insufficient, | ||
| + | I am not sure that the instinct is unsound. In any case there is | ||
| + | something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the | ||
| + | idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something | ||
| + | insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner | ||
| + | of a street or coming out into the spaces of a market-place to meet the | ||
| + | petrifying petrifaction of < | ||
| + | of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite. The | ||
| + | Church can reasonably be justified therefore if she turns the most | ||
| + | merciful face or aspect towards men; but it is certainly the most | ||
| + | merciful aspect that she does turn. And the point is here that it is | ||
| + | very much more specially and exclusively merciful than any impression | ||
| + | that could be formed by a man merely reading the New Testament for the | ||
| + | first time. A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand | ||
| + | would form quite another impression; an impression full of mystery and | ||
| + | possibly of inconsistency; | ||
| + | mildness. It would be intensely interesting; | ||
| + | would consist in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained. | ||
| + | It is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we | ||
| + | hardly know what they signify; of enigmatic silences; of ironical | ||
| + | replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above< | ||
| + | not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to follow | ||
| + | some higher weather-chart of their own. The Peter whom popular Church | ||
| + | teaching presents is very rightly the Peter to whom Christ said in | ||
| + | forgiveness, | ||
| + | turned as if he were the devil, crying in that obscure wrath, ‘Get thee | ||
| + | behind me, Satan.’ Christ lamented with nothing but love and pity over | ||
| + | Jerusalem which was to murder him. We do not know what strange spiritual | ||
| + | atmosphere or spiritual insight led him to sink Bethsaida lower in the | ||
| + | pit than Sodom. I am putting aside for the moment all questions of | ||
| + | doctrinal inferences or expositions, | ||
| + | imagining the effect on a man’s mind if he did really do what these | ||
| + | critics are always talking about doing; if he did really read the New | ||
| + | Testament without reference to orthodoxy and even without reference to | ||
| + | doctrine. He would find a number of things which fit in far less with | ||
| + | the current unorthodoxy than they do with the current orthodoxy. He | ||
| + | would find, for instance, that if there are any descriptions that | ||
| + | deserved to be called realistic, they are precisely the descriptions of | ||
| + | the supernatural. If there is one aspect of the New Testament Jesus in | ||
| + | which he may be said to present himself eminently as a practical person, | ||
| + | it is in the aspect of an exorcist. There is nothing meek and mild, | ||
| + | there is nothing even in the ordinary sense mystical, about the tone of | ||
| + | the voice that says ‘Hold thy peace and come out of him.’ It is much | ||
| + | more like the tone of a very business-like lion-tamer or a strong-minded | ||
| + | doctor dealing with a homicidal maniac. But this is only a side issue | ||
| + | for the sake of illustration; | ||
| + | but considering the case of the imaginary man from the moon to whom the | ||
| + | New Testament is new.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | story, it is in some ways a very< | ||
| + | its tremendous and tragic culmination or to any implications involving | ||
| + | triumph in that tragedy. I do not refer to what is commonly called the | ||
| + | miraculous element; for on that point philosophies vary and modern | ||
| + | philosophies very decidedly waver. Indeed the educated Englishman of | ||
| + | to-day may be said to have passed from an old fashion, in which he would | ||
| + | not believe in any miracles unless they were ancient, and adopted a new | ||
| + | fashion in which he will not believe in any miracles unless they are | ||
| + | modern. He used to hold that miraculous cures stopped with the first | ||
| + | Christians and is now inclined to suspect that they began with the first | ||
| + | Christian Scientists. But I refer here rather specially to unmiraculous | ||
| + | and even to unnoticed and inconspicuous parts of the story. There are a | ||
| + | great many things about it which nobody would have invented, for they | ||
| + | are things that nobody has ever made any particular use of; things which | ||
| + | if they were remarked at all have remained rather as puzzles. For | ||
| + | instance, there is that long stretch of silence in the life of Christ up | ||
| + | to the age of thirty. It is of all silences the most immense and | ||
| + | imaginatively impressive. But it is not the sort of thing that anybody | ||
| + | is particularly likely to invent in order to prove something; and nobody | ||
| + | so far as I know has ever tried to prove anything in particular from it. | ||
| + | It is impressive, but it is only impressive as a fact; there is nothing | ||
| + | particularly popular or obvious about it as a fable. The ordinary trend | ||
| + | of hero-worship and myth-making is much more likely to say the precise | ||
| + | opposite. It is much more likely to say (as I believe some of the | ||
| + | gospels rejected by the Church do say) that Jesus displayed a divine | ||
| + | precocity and began his mission at a miraculously early age. And there | ||
| + | is indeed something strange in the thought that he who of all humanity | ||
| + | needed least preparation seems to have had most. Whether it was some | ||
| + | mode of the divine humility, or some truth of which we<span class=" | ||
| + | in the longer domestic tutelage of the higher creatures of the earth, I | ||
| + | do not propose to speculate; I mention it simply as an example of the | ||
| + | sort of thing that does in any case give rise to speculations, | ||
| + | apart from recognised religious speculations. Now the whole story is | ||
| + | full of these things. It is not by any means, as baldly presented in | ||
| + | print, a story that it is easy to get to the bottom of. It is anything | ||
| + | but what these people talk of as a simple Gospel. Relatively speaking, | ||
| + | it is the Gospel that has the mysticism and the Church that has the | ||
| + | rationalism. As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that is the | ||
| + | riddle and the Church that is the answer. But whatever be the answer, | ||
| + | the Gospel as it stands is almost a book of riddles.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | had read even in the most respectful spirit the majority of ancient | ||
| + | philosophers and of modern moralists, he would appreciate the unique | ||
| + | importance of saying that he did not find platitudes. It is more than | ||
| + | can be said even of Plato. It is much more than can be said of Epictetus | ||
| + | or Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or Apollonius of Tyana. And it is | ||
| + | immeasurably more than can be said of most of the agnostic moralists and | ||
| + | the preachers of the ethical societies; with their songs of service and | ||
| + | their religion of brotherhood. The morality of most moralists, ancient | ||
| + | and modern, has been one solid and polished cataract of platitudes | ||
| + | flowing for ever and ever. That would certainly not be the impression of | ||
| + | the imaginary independent outsider studying the New Testament. He would | ||
| + | be conscious of nothing so commonplace and in a sense of nothing so | ||
| + | continuous as that stream. He would find a number of strange claims that | ||
| + | might sound like the claim to be the brother of the sun and moon; a | ||
| + | number of very startling pieces of advice; a number of stunning rebukes; | ||
| + | a number of strangely beautiful stories. He would see some very | ||
| + | gigantesque figures of speech< | ||
| + | needle with a camel or the possibility of throwing a mountain into the | ||
| + | sea. He would see a number of very daring simplifications of the | ||
| + | difficulties of life; like the advice to shine upon everybody | ||
| + | indifferently as does the sunshine or not to worry about the future any | ||
| + | more than the birds. He would find on the other hand some passages of | ||
| + | almost impenetrable darkness, so far as he is concerned, such as the | ||
| + | moral of the parable of the Unjust Steward. Some of these things might | ||
| + | strike him as fables and some as truths; but none as truisms. For | ||
| + | instance, he would not find the ordinary platitudes in favour of peace. | ||
| + | He would find several paradoxes in favour of peace. He would find | ||
| + | several ideals of non-resistance, | ||
| + | rather too pacific for any pacifist. He would be told in one passage to | ||
| + | treat a robber < | ||
| + | and enthusiastic encouragement, | ||
| + | up gifts upon the man who had stolen goods. But he would not find a word | ||
| + | of all that obvious rhetoric against war which has filled countless | ||
| + | books and odes and orations; not a word about the wickedness of war, the | ||
| + | wastefulness of war, the appalling scale of the slaughter in war and all | ||
| + | the rest of the familiar frenzy; indeed not a word about war at all. | ||
| + | There is nothing that throws any particular light on Christ’s attitude | ||
| + | towards organised warfare, except that he seems to have been rather fond | ||
| + | of Roman soldiers. Indeed it is another perplexity, speaking from the | ||
| + | same external and human standpoint, that he seems to have got on much | ||
| + | better with Romans than he did with Jews. But the question here is a | ||
| + | certain tone to be appreciated by merely reading a certain text; and we | ||
| + | might give any number of instances of it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | being a meek statement. I mean it is not meek in the ordinary sense of | ||
| + | mild and moderate< | ||
| + | to go very deep into history and anticipate things undreamed of then and | ||
| + | by many unrealised even now; such as the way in which the mystical monks | ||
| + | reclaimed the lands which the practical kings had lost. If it was a | ||
| + | truth at all, it was because it was a prophecy. But certainly it was not | ||
| + | a truth in the sense of a truism. The blessing upon the meek would seem | ||
| + | to be a very violent statement; in the sense of doing violence to reason | ||
| + | and probability. And with this we come to another important stage in the | ||
| + | speculation. As a prophecy it really was fulfilled; but it was only | ||
| + | fulfilled long afterwards. The monasteries were the most practical and | ||
| + | prosperous estates and experiments in reconstruction after the barbaric | ||
| + | deluge; the meek did really inherit the earth. But nobody could have | ||
| + | known anything of the sort at the time& | ||
| + | knew. Something of the same thing may be said about the incident of | ||
| + | Martha and Mary; which has been interpreted in retrospect and from the | ||
| + | inside by the mystics of the Christian contemplative life. But it was | ||
| + | not at all an obvious view of it; and most moralists, ancient and | ||
| + | modern, could be trusted to make a rush for the obvious. What torrents | ||
| + | of effortless eloquence would have flowed from them to swell any slight | ||
| + | superiority on the part of Martha; what splendid sermons about the Joy | ||
| + | of Service and the Gospel of Work and the World Left Better Than We | ||
| + | Found It, and generally all the ten thousand platitudes that can be | ||
| + | uttered in favour of taking trouble& | ||
| + | to utter them. If in Mary the mystic and child of love Christ was | ||
| + | guarding the seed of something more subtle, who was likely to understand | ||
| + | it at the time? Nobody else could have seen Clare and Catherine and | ||
| + | Teresa shining above the little roof at Bethany. It is so in another way | ||
| + | with that magnificent menace about bringing into the world a sword to | ||
| + | sunder and divide.< | ||
| + | be fulfilled or how it could be justified. Indeed some freethinkers are | ||
| + | still so simple as to fall into the trap and be shocked at a phrase so | ||
| + | deliberately defiant. They actually complain of the paradox for not | ||
| + | being a platitude.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | things as new as newspaper reports, they would puzzle us and perhaps | ||
| + | terrify us much < | ||
| + | Christianity. For instance; Christ after a clear allusion to the eunuchs | ||
| + | of eastern courts, said there would be eunuchs of the kingdom of heaven. | ||
| + | If this does not mean the voluntary enthusiasm of virginity, it could | ||
| + | only be made to mean something much more unnatural or uncouth. It is the | ||
| + | historical religion that humanises it for us by experience of | ||
| + | Franciscans or of Sisters of Mercy. The mere statement standing by | ||
| + | itself might very well suggest a rather dehumanised atmosphere; the | ||
| + | sinister and inhuman silence of the Asiatic harem and divan. This is but | ||
| + | one instance out of scores; but the moral is that the Christ of the | ||
| + | Gospel might actually seem more strange and terrible than the Christ of | ||
| + | the Church.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I am dwelling on the dark or dazzling or defiant or mysterious side of | ||
| + | the Gospel words, not because they had not obviously a more obvious and | ||
| + | popular side, but because this is the answer to a common criticism on a | ||
| + | vital point. The freethinker frequently says that Jesus of Nazareth was | ||
| + | a man of his time, even if he was in advance of his time; and that we | ||
| + | cannot accept his ethics as final for humanity. The freethinker then | ||
| + | goes on to criticise his ethics, saying plausibly enough that men cannot | ||
| + | turn the other cheek, or that they must take thought for the morrow, or | ||
| + | that the self-denial is too ascetic or the monogamy too severe. But the | ||
| + | Zealots and the Legionaries did not turn the other cheek any more than | ||
| + | we do, if so much. The Jewish traders and Roman tax-gatherers< | ||
| + | thought for the morrow as much as we, if not more. We cannot pretend to | ||
| + | be abandoning the morality of the past for one more suited to the | ||
| + | present. It is certainly not the morality of another age, but it might | ||
| + | be of another world.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In short, we can say that these ideals are impossible in themselves. | ||
| + | Exactly what we cannot say is that they are impossible for us. They are | ||
| + | rather notably marked by a mysticism which, if it be a sort of madness, | ||
| + | would always have struck the same sort of people as mad. Take, for | ||
| + | instance, the case of marriage and the relations of the sexes. It might | ||
| + | very well have been true that a Galilean teacher taught things natural | ||
| + | to a Galilean environment; | ||
| + | expected that a man in the time of Tiberius would have advanced a view | ||
| + | conditioned by the time of Tiberius; but he did not. What he advanced | ||
| + | was something quite different; something very difficult; but something | ||
| + | no more difficult now than it was then. When, for instance, Mahomet made | ||
| + | his polygamous compromise we may reasonably say that it was conditioned | ||
| + | by a polygamous society. When he allowed a man four wives he was really | ||
| + | doing something suited to the circumstances, | ||
| + | suited to other circumstances. Nobody will pretend that the four wives | ||
| + | were like the four winds, something seemingly a part of the order of | ||
| + | nature; nobody will say that the figure four was written for ever in | ||
| + | stars upon the sky. But neither will any one say that the figure four is | ||
| + | an inconceivable ideal; that it is beyond the power of the mind of man | ||
| + | to count up to four; or to count the number of his wives and see whether | ||
| + | it amounts to four. It is a practical compromise carrying with it the | ||
| + | character of a particular society. If Mahomet had been born in Acton in | ||
| + | the nineteenth century, we may well doubt whether he would instantly | ||
| + | have filled that suburb with harems of four wives apiece. As he was born | ||
| + | in Arabia in the sixth< | ||
| + | suggest the conditions of Arabia in the sixth century. But Christ in his | ||
| + | view of marriage does not in the least suggest the conditions of | ||
| + | Palestine in the first century. He does not suggest anything at all, | ||
| + | except the sacramental view of marriage as developed long afterwards by | ||
| + | the Catholic Church. It was quite as difficult for people then as for | ||
| + | people now. It was much more puzzling to people then than to people now. | ||
| + | Jews and Romans and Greeks did not believe, and did not even understand | ||
| + | enough to disbelieve, the mystical idea that the man and the woman had | ||
| + | become one sacramental substance. We may think it an incredible or | ||
| + | impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any more incredible or | ||
| + | impossible than they would have thought it. In other words, whatever | ||
| + | else is true, it is not true that the controversy has been altered by | ||
| + | time. Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas | ||
| + | of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time, but are no longer | ||
| + | suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they were to his time is | ||
| + | perhaps suggested in the end of his story.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | story be regarded as merely human and historical, it is extraordinary | ||
| + | how very little there is in the recorded words of Christ that ties him | ||
| + | at all to his own time. I do not mean the details of a period, which | ||
| + | even a man of the period knows to be passing. I mean the fundamentals | ||
| + | which even the wisest man often vaguely assumes to be eternal. For | ||
| + | instance, Aristotle was perhaps the wisest and most wide-minded man who | ||
| + | ever lived. He founded himself entirely upon fundamentals, | ||
| + | been generally found to remain rational and solid through all social and | ||
| + | historical changes. Still, he lived in a world in which it was thought | ||
| + | as natural to have slaves as to have children. And therefore he did | ||
| + | permit himself a serious recognition of a difference< | ||
| + | free men. Christ as much as Aristotle lived in a world that took slavery | ||
| + | for granted. He did not particularly denounce slavery. He started a | ||
| + | movement that could exist in a world with slavery. But he started a | ||
| + | movement that could exist in a world without slavery. He never used a | ||
| + | phrase that made his philosophy depend even upon the very existence of | ||
| + | the social order in which he lived. He spoke as one conscious that | ||
| + | everything was ephemeral, including the things that Aristotle thought | ||
| + | eternal. By that time the Roman Empire had come to be merely the < | ||
| + | terrarum</ | ||
| + | dependent on the existence of the Roman Empire or even on the existence | ||
| + | of the world. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not | ||
| + | pass away.’</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | the Galilean, it has always been a case of the local limitations of the | ||
| + | critics. He did undoubtedly believe in certain things that one | ||
| + | particular modern sect of materialists do not believe. But they were not | ||
| + | things particularly peculiar to his time. It would be nearer the truth | ||
| + | to say that the denial of them is quite peculiar to our time. Doubtless | ||
| + | it would be nearer still to the truth to say merely that a certain | ||
| + | solemn social importance, in the minority disbelieving them, is peculiar | ||
| + | to our time. He believed, for instance, in evil spirits or in the | ||
| + | psychic healing of bodily ills; but not because he was a Galilean born | ||
| + | under Augustus. It is absurd to say that a man believed things because | ||
| + | he was a Galilean under Augustus when he might have believed the same | ||
| + | things if he had been an Egyptian under Tuten-kamen or an Indian under | ||
| + | Gengis Khan. But with this general question of the philosophy of | ||
| + | diabolism or of divine miracles I deal elsewhere. It is enough to say | ||
| + | that the materialists have to prove the impossibility of miracles | ||
| + | against the testimony of all<span class=" | ||
| + | provincials in North Palestine under the first Roman Emperors. What they | ||
| + | have to prove, for the present argument, is the presence in the Gospels | ||
| + | of those particular prejudices of those particular provincials. And, | ||
| + | humanly speaking, it is astonishing how little they can produce even to | ||
| + | make a beginning of proving it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>So it is in this case of the sacrament of marriage. We may not believe | ||
| + | in sacraments, as we may not believe in spirits, but it is quite clear | ||
| + | that Christ believed in this sacrament in his own way and not in any | ||
| + | current or contemporary way. He certainly did not get his argument | ||
| + | against divorce from the Mosaic law or the Roman law or the habits of | ||
| + | the Palestinian people. It would appear to his critics then exactly what | ||
| + | it appears to his critics now; an arbitrary and transcendental dogma | ||
| + | coming from nowhere save in the sense that it came from him. I am not at | ||
| + | all concerned here to defend that dogma; the point here is that it is | ||
| + | just as easy to defend it now as it was to defend it then. It is an | ||
| + | ideal altogether outside time; difficult at any period; impossible at no | ||
| + | period. In other words, if any one says it is what might be expected of | ||
| + | a man walking about in that place at that period, we can quite fairly | ||
| + | answer that it is much < | ||
| + | utterance of a being beyond man, if he walked alive among men.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I maintain therefore that a man reading the New Testament frankly and | ||
| + | freshly would < | ||
| + | human Christ. The merely human Christ is a made-up figure, a piece of | ||
| + | artificial selection, like the merely evolutionary man. Moreover there | ||
| + | have been too many of these human Christs found in the same story, just | ||
| + | as there have been too many keys to mythology found in the same stories. | ||
| + | Three or four separate schools of rationalism have worked over the<span class=" | ||
| + | ground and produced three or four equally rational explanations of his | ||
| + | life. The first rational explanation of his life was that he never | ||
| + | lived. And this in turn gave an opportunity for three or four different | ||
| + | explanations; | ||
| + | kind of myth that is also a monomania. Then the idea that he was a | ||
| + | divine being who did not exist gave place to the idea that he was a | ||
| + | human being who did exist. In my youth it was the fashion to say that he | ||
| + | was merely an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes, who had | ||
| + | apparently nothing very much to say that Hillel or a hundred other Jews | ||
| + | might not have said; as that it is a kindly thing to be kind and an | ||
| + | assistance to purification to be pure. Then somebody said he was a | ||
| + | madman with a Messianic delusion. Then others said he was indeed an | ||
| + | original teacher because he cared about nothing but Socialism; or (as | ||
| + | others said) about nothing but Pacifism. Then a more grimly scientific | ||
| + | character appeared who said that Jesus would never have been heard of at | ||
| + | all except for his prophecies of the end of the world. He was important | ||
| + | merely as a Millennarian like Dr. Cumming; and created a provincial | ||
| + | scare by announcing the exact date of the crack of doom. Among other | ||
| + | variants on the same theme was the theory that he was a spiritual healer | ||
| + | and nothing else; a view implied by Christian Science, which has really | ||
| + | to expound a Christianity without the Crucifixion in order to explain | ||
| + | the curing of Peter’s wife’s mother or the daughter of a centurion. | ||
| + | There is another theory that concentrates entirely on the business of | ||
| + | diabolism and what it would call the contemporary superstition about | ||
| + | demoniacs; as if Christ, like a young deacon taking his first orders, | ||
| + | had got as far as exorcism and never got any further. Now each of these | ||
| + | explanations in itself seems to me singularly inadequate; but taken | ||
| + | together they do suggest something of the very mystery which they miss.< | ||
| + | There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided | ||
| + | about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him. If the | ||
| + | Christian Scientist is satisfied with him as a spiritual healer and the | ||
| + | Christian Socialist is satisfied with him as a social reformer, so | ||
| + | satisfied that they do not even expect him to be anything else, it looks | ||
| + | as if he really covered rather more ground than they could be expected | ||
| + | to expect. And it does seem to suggest that there might be more than | ||
| + | they fancy in these other mysterious attributes of casting out devils or | ||
| + | prophesying doom.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | something that would startle him much more than it startles us? I have | ||
| + | here more than once attempted the rather impossible task of reversing | ||
| + | time and the historic method; and in fancy looking forward to the facts, | ||
| + | instead of backward through the memories. So I have imagined the monster | ||
| + | that man might have seemed at first to the mere nature around him. We | ||
| + | should have a worse shock if we really imagined the nature of Christ | ||
| + | named for the first time. What should we feel at the first whisper of a | ||
| + | certain suggestion about a certain man? Certainly it is not for us to | ||
| + | blame anybody who should find that first wild whisper merely impious and | ||
| + | insane. On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first | ||
| + | step. Stark staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that | ||
| + | truth than a modernist metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter | ||
| + | of degree. It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against | ||
| + | blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgment, or to lay hold of the man as a | ||
| + | maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than | ||
| + | to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of | ||
| + | so catastrophic a claim. There is more of the wisdom that is one with | ||
| + | surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity, | ||
| + | who<span class=" | ||
| + | the air, when a strolling carpenter’s apprentice said calmly and almost | ||
| + | carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: ‘Before Abraham was, I | ||
| + | am.<span class=" | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE STRANGEST STORY IN THE WORLD</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | nowadays a neglected side of the New Testament story, but nobody will | ||
| + | suppose, I imagine, that it is meant to obscure that side that may truly | ||
| + | be called human. That Christ was and is the most merciful of judges and | ||
| + | the most sympathetic of friends is a fact of considerably more | ||
| + | importance in our own private lives than in anybody’s historical | ||
| + | speculations. But the purpose of this book is to point out that | ||
| + | something unique has been swamped in cheap generalisations; | ||
| + | purpose it is relevant to insist that even what was most universal was | ||
| + | also most original. For instance, we might take a topic which really is | ||
| + | sympathetic to the modern mood, as the ascetic vocations recently | ||
| + | referred to are not. The exaltation of childhood is something which we | ||
| + | do really understand; but it was by no means a thing that was then in | ||
| + | that sense understood. If we wanted an example of the originality of the | ||
| + | Gospel, we could hardly take a stronger or more startling one. Nearly | ||
| + | two thousand years afterwards we happen to find ourselves in a mood that | ||
| + | does really feel the mystical charm of the child; we express it in | ||
| + | romances and regrets about childhood, in < | ||
| + | Garden of Verses</ | ||
| + | an anti-Christian as Swinburne:& | ||
| + | |||
| + | <div class=" | ||
| + | <div class=" | ||
| + | <span class=" | ||
| + | <span class=" | ||
| + | <span class=" | ||
| + | <span class=" | ||
| + | </ | ||
| + | <span class=" | ||
| + | <span class=" | ||
| + | <span class=" | ||
| + | <span class=" | ||
| + | </ | ||
| + | </ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | it. The pagan world, as such, would not have understood any such thing | ||
| + | as a serious suggestion that a child is higher or holier than a man. It | ||
| + | would have seemed like the suggestion that a tadpole is higher or holier | ||
| + | than a frog. To the merely rationalistic mind, it would sound like | ||
| + | saying that a bud must be more beautiful than a flower or that an unripe | ||
| + | apple must be better than a ripe one. In other words, this modern | ||
| + | feeling is an entirely mystical feeling. It is quite as mystical as the | ||
| + | cult of virginity; in fact it is the cult of virginity. But pagan | ||
| + | antiquity had much more idea of the holiness of the virgin than of the | ||
| + | holiness of the child. For various reasons we have come nowadays to | ||
| + | venerate children; perhaps partly because we envy children for still | ||
| + | doing what men used to do; such as play simple games and enjoy | ||
| + | fairy-tales. Over and above this, however, there is a great deal of real | ||
| + | and subtle psychology in our appreciation of childhood; but if we turn | ||
| + | it into a modern discovery, we must once more admit that the historical | ||
| + | Jesus of Nazareth had already discovered it two thousand years too soon. | ||
| + | There was certainly nothing in the world around him to help him to the | ||
| + | discovery. Here Christ was indeed human; but more human than a human | ||
| + | being was then likely to be. Peter Pan does not belong to the world of | ||
| + | Pan but the world of Peter.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | sufficiently detached to look at it in that light, there is a curious | ||
| + | quality to which no critic seems to have done justice. It had among | ||
| + | other things a singular air of piling tower upon tower by the use of the | ||
| + | <i>a fortiori</ | ||
| + | already noted< | ||
| + | the impossible penance of the Cities of the Plain. There is perhaps | ||
| + | nothing so perfect in all language or literature as the use of these | ||
| + | three degrees in the parable of the lilies of the field; in which he | ||
| + | seems first to take one small flower in his hand and note its simplicity | ||
| + | and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in flamboyant colours | ||
| + | into all the palaces and pavilions full of a great name in national | ||
| + | legend and national glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels | ||
| + | it to nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away ’... and | ||
| + | if God so clothes the grass that to-day is and to-morrow is cast into | ||
| + | the oven& | ||
| + | tower by white magic in a moment and in the movement of a hand; a tower | ||
| + | heaved suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can be seen afar off, | ||
| + | higher than we had fancied possible, the figure of man; lifted by three | ||
| + | infinities above all other things, on a starry ladder of light logic and | ||
| + | swift imagination. Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a | ||
| + | masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems | ||
| + | to have been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower. | ||
| + | But merely in a literary sense also, this use of the comparative in | ||
| + | several degrees has about it a quality which seems to me to hint of much | ||
| + | higher things than the modern suggestion of the simple teaching of | ||
| + | pastoral or communal ethics. There is nothing that really indicates a | ||
| + | subtle and in the true sense a superior mind so much as this power of | ||
| + | comparing a lower thing with a higher and yet that higher with a higher | ||
| + | still; of thinking on three planes at once. There is nothing that wants | ||
| + | the rarest sort of wisdom so much as to see, let us say, that the | ||
| + | citizen is higher than the slave and yet that the soul is infinitely | ||
| + | higher than the citizen or the city. It is not by any means a faculty | ||
| + | that commonly belongs to these simplifiers of the Gospel;< | ||
| + | insist on what they call a simple morality and others call a sentimental | ||
| + | morality. It is not at all covered by those who are content to tell | ||
| + | everybody to remain at peace. On the contrary, there is a very striking | ||
| + | example of it in the apparent inconsistency between Christ’s sayings | ||
| + | about peace and about a sword. It is precisely this power which | ||
| + | perceives that while a good peace is better than a good war, even a good | ||
| + | war is better than a bad peace. These far-flung comparisons are nowhere | ||
| + | so common as in the Gospels; and to me they suggest something very vast. | ||
| + | So a thing solitary and solid, with the added dimension of depth or | ||
| + | height, might tower over the flat creatures living only on a plane.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | something that is capable of long views and even of double meanings, is | ||
| + | not noted here merely as a counterblast to the commonplace exaggerations | ||
| + | of amiability and mild idealism. It is also to be noted in connection | ||
| + | with the more tremendous truth touched upon at the end of the last | ||
| + | chapter. For this is the very last character that commonly goes with | ||
| + | mere megalomania; | ||
| + | might be involved in that claim. This quality that can only be called | ||
| + | intellectual distinction is not, of course, an evidence of divinity. But | ||
| + | it is an evidence of a probable distaste for vulgar and vainglorious | ||
| + | claims to divinity. A man of that sort, if he were only a man, would be | ||
| + | the last man in the world to suffer from that intoxication by one notion | ||
| + | from nowhere in particular, which is the mark of the self-deluding | ||
| + | sensationalist in religion. Nor is it even avoided by denying that | ||
| + | Christ did make this claim. Of no such man as that, of no other prophet | ||
| + | or philosopher of the same intellectual order, would it be even possible | ||
| + | to pretend that he had made it. Even if the Church had mistaken his | ||
| + | meaning, it would still be true that no<span class=" | ||
| + | except the Church had ever even made the same mistake. Mahomedans did | ||
| + | not misunderstand Mahomet and suppose he was Allah. Jews did not | ||
| + | misinterpret Moses and identify him with Jehovah. Why was this claim | ||
| + | alone exaggerated unless this alone was made? Even if Christianity was | ||
| + | one vast universal blunder, it is still a blunder as solitary as the | ||
| + | Incarnation.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | vulgar assumptions; | ||
| + | sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal | ||
| + | because all the religious founders were rivals; that they are all | ||
| + | fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim to that | ||
| + | crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique. | ||
| + | Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did | ||
| + | not make it any more than Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he | ||
| + | was Bramah. Zoroaster no more claimed to be Ormuz than to be Ahriman. | ||
| + | The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should | ||
| + | expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy. | ||
| + | It is exactly the other way. Normally speaking, the greater a man is, | ||
| + | the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim. Outside the | ||
| + | unique case we are considering, | ||
| + | that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or self-centred | ||
| + | monomaniac. Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of | ||
| + | gods and men, come down from the sky; though we might imagine some | ||
| + | insane Roman Emperor like Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably | ||
| + | for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were | ||
| + | literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank | ||
| + | finding it as a cryptogram in Shakespeare’s works, or preferably in his | ||
| + | own works. It is possible to find here and there human beings who make | ||
| + | this supremely< | ||
| + | asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats. But what is | ||
| + | much more important than their mere materialistic fate in our very | ||
| + | materialistic society, under very crude and clumsy laws about lunacy, | ||
| + | the type we know as tinged with this, or tending towards it, is a | ||
| + | diseased and disproportionate type; narrow yet swollen and morbid to | ||
| + | monstrosity. It is by rather an unlucky metaphor that we talk of a | ||
| + | madman as cracked; for in a sense he is not cracked enough. He is | ||
| + | cramped rather than cracked; there are not enough holes in his head to | ||
| + | ventilate it. This impossibility of letting in daylight on a delusion | ||
| + | does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity. It can be | ||
| + | found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only | ||
| + | among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument | ||
| + | becomes intensely interesting; | ||
| + | nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was < | ||
| + | modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on | ||
| + | the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling | ||
| + | stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the | ||
| + | author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad | ||
| + | idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism | ||
| + | he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all | ||
| + | analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of | ||
| + | all.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In fact, those who can really take it (as I here hypothetically take it) | ||
| + | in a quite dry and detached spirit, have here a most curious and | ||
| + | interesting human problem. It is so intensely interesting, | ||
| + | a human problem, that it is in a spirit quite disinterested, | ||
| + | speak, that I wish some of them had turned that intricate human problem | ||
| + | into something like an intelligible human portrait. If Christ was simply | ||
| + | a human character, he really was a highly< | ||
| + | human character. For he combined exactly the two things that lie at the | ||
| + | two extremes of human variation. He was exactly what the man with a | ||
| + | delusion never is: he was wise; he was a good judge. What he said was | ||
| + | always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often | ||
| + | unexpectedly moderate. Take a thing like the point of the parable of the | ||
| + | tares and the wheat. It has the quality that unites sanity and subtlety. | ||
| + | It has not the simplicity of a madman. It has not even the simplicity of | ||
| + | a fanatic. It might be uttered by a philosopher a hundred years old, at | ||
| + | the end of a century of Utopias. Nothing could be less like this quality | ||
| + | of seeing beyond and all round obvious things, than the condition of the | ||
| + | egomaniac with the one sensitive spot on his brain. I really do not see | ||
| + | how these two characters could be convincingly combined, except in the | ||
| + | astonishing way in which the creed combines them. For until we reach the | ||
| + | full acceptance of the fact as a fact, however marvellous, all mere | ||
| + | approximations to it are actually further and further away from it. | ||
| + | Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself | ||
| + | divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to | ||
| + | do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not | ||
| + | God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; | ||
| + | everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding | ||
| + | from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A | ||
| + | lunatic may think he is omniscience, | ||
| + | omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only | ||
| + | knows, but knows that he knows.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | the New Testament seems to me to have in a great many ways the note of | ||
| + | something superhuman; that is, of something human and more than human. | ||
| + | But there is another quality< | ||
| + | seems to me neglected in most modern talk about them as teachings; and | ||
| + | that is the persistent suggestion that he has not really come to teach. | ||
| + | If there is one incident in the record which affects me personally as | ||
| + | grandly and gloriously human, it is the incident of giving wine for the | ||
| + | wedding-feast. That is really human in the sense in which a whole crowd | ||
| + | of prigs, having the appearance of human beings, can hardly be described | ||
| + | as human. It rises superior to all superior persons. It is as human as | ||
| + | Herrick and as democratic as Dickens. But even in that story there is | ||
| + | something else that has that note of things not fully explained; and in | ||
| + | a way here very relevant. I mean the first hesitation, not on any ground | ||
| + | touching the nature of the miracle, but on that of the propriety of | ||
| + | working any miracles at all, at least at that stage; ‘My time is not yet | ||
| + | come.’ What did that mean? At least it certainly meant a general plan or | ||
| + | purpose in the mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in. | ||
| + | And if we leave out that solitary strategic plan, we not only leave out | ||
| + | the point of the story, but the story.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>We often hear of Jesus of Nazareth as a wandering teacher; and there is | ||
| + | a vital truth in that view in so far as it emphasises an attitude | ||
| + | towards luxury and convention which most respectable people would still | ||
| + | regard as that of a vagabond. It is expressed in his own great saying | ||
| + | about the holes of the foxes and the nests of the birds, and, like many | ||
| + | of his great sayings, it is felt as less powerful than it is, through | ||
| + | lack of appreciation of that great paradox by which he spoke of his own | ||
| + | humanity as in some way collectively and representatively human; calling | ||
| + | himself simply the Son of Man; that is, in effect, calling himself | ||
| + | simply Man. It is fitting that the New Man or the Second Adam should | ||
| + | repeat in so ringing a voice and with so arresting a gesture the great | ||
| + | fact which came first in the original story: that man<span class=" | ||
| + | brutes by everything, even by deficiency; that he is in a sense less | ||
| + | normal and even less native; a stranger upon the earth. It is well to | ||
| + | speak of his wanderings in this sense and in the sense that he shared | ||
| + | the drifting life of the most homeless and hopeless of the poor. It is | ||
| + | assuredly well to remember that he would quite certainly have been moved | ||
| + | on by the police, and almost certainly arrested by the police, for | ||
| + | having no visible means of subsistence. For our law has in it a turn of | ||
| + | humour or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod never happened to think | ||
| + | of; that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | little misleading. As a matter of fact, a great many of the pagan sages | ||
| + | and not a few of the pagan sophists might truly be described as | ||
| + | wandering teachers. In some of them their rambling journeys were not | ||
| + | altogether without a parallel in their rambling remarks. Apollonius of | ||
| + | Tyana, who figured in some fashionable cults as a sort of ideal | ||
| + | philosopher, | ||
| + | Ethiopia, more or less talking all the time. There was actually a school | ||
| + | of philosophers called the Peripatetics; | ||
| + | philosophers give us a vague impression of having very little to do | ||
| + | except to walk and talk. The great conversations which give us our | ||
| + | glimpses of the great minds of Socrates or Buddha or even Confucius | ||
| + | often seem to be parts of a never-ending picnic; and especially, which | ||
| + | is the important point, to have neither beginning nor end. Socrates did | ||
| + | indeed find the conversation interrupted by the incident of his | ||
| + | execution. But it is the whole point, and the whole particular merit, of | ||
| + | the position of Socrates that death was only an interruption and an | ||
| + | incident. We miss the real moral importance of the great philosopher if | ||
| + | we miss that point; that he stares at the executioner with an innocent | ||
| + | surprise,< | ||
| + | unreasonable as to cut short a little conversation for the elucidation | ||
| + | of truth. He is looking for truth and not looking for death. Death is | ||
| + | but a stone in the road which can trip him up. His work in life is to | ||
| + | wander on the roads of the world and talk about truth for ever. Buddha, | ||
| + | on the other hand, did arrest attention by one gesture; it was the | ||
| + | gesture of renunciation, | ||
| + | dramatic negation he passed into a world of negation that was not | ||
| + | dramatic; which he would have been the first to insist was not dramatic. | ||
| + | Here again we miss the particular moral importance of the great mystic | ||
| + | if we do not see the distinction; | ||
| + | had done with drama, which consists of desire and struggle and generally | ||
| + | of defeat and disappointment. He passes into peace and lives to instruct | ||
| + | others how to pass into it. Henceforth his life is that of the ideal | ||
| + | philosopher; | ||
| + | Apollonius of Tyana; but still a philosopher in the sense that it is not | ||
| + | his business to do anything but rather to explain everything; in his | ||
| + | case, we might almost say, mildly and softly to explode everything. For | ||
| + | the messages are basically different. Christ said ‘Seek first the | ||
| + | kingdom, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Buddha said | ||
| + | ‘Seek first the kingdom, and then you will need none of these things.’</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did | ||
| + | above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It | ||
| + | emphatically would not have been done if Jesus had walked about the | ||
| + | world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even the | ||
| + | external movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the | ||
| + | sense of forgetting that it was a journey. This is where it was a | ||
| + | fulfilment of the myths rather than of the<span class=" | ||
| + | journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to find the Golden | ||
| + | Fleece, or Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that | ||
| + | he was seeking was death. The primary thing that he was going to do was | ||
| + | to die. He was going to do other things equally definite and objective; | ||
| + | we might almost say equally external and material. But from first to | ||
| + | last the most definite fact is that he is going to die. No two things | ||
| + | could possibly be more different than the death of Socrates and the | ||
| + | death of Christ. We are meant to feel that the death of Socrates was, | ||
| + | from the point of view of his friends at least, a stupid muddle and | ||
| + | miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow of a humane and lucid, | ||
| + | I had almost said a light philosophy. We are meant to feel that Death | ||
| + | was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are | ||
| + | meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with | ||
| + | death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice. From the | ||
| + | moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment when | ||
| + | the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on | ||
| + | wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond | ||
| + | words.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a | ||
| + | hero moving to his achievement or his doom. It is a story that begins in | ||
| + | the paradise of Galilee, a pastoral and peaceful land having really some | ||
| + | hint of Eden, and gradually climbs the rising country into the mountains | ||
| + | that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars, as to a Mountain of | ||
| + | Purgatory. He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on | ||
| + | the way for discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the | ||
| + | mountain city. That is the meaning of that great culmination when he | ||
| + | crested the ridge and stood at the turning of the road and suddenly | ||
| + | cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem. Some light touch< | ||
| + | is in every patriotic poem; or if it is absent, the patriotism stinks | ||
| + | with vulgarity. That is the meaning of the stirring and startling | ||
| + | incident at the gates of the Temple, when the tables were hurled like | ||
| + | lumber down the steps, and the rich merchants driven forth with bodily | ||
| + | blows; the incident that must be at least as much of a puzzle to the | ||
| + | pacifists as any paradox about non-resistance can be to any of the | ||
| + | militarists. I have compared the quest to the journey of Jason, but we | ||
| + | must never forget that in a deeper sense it is rather to be compared to | ||
| + | the journey of Ulysses. It was not only a romance of travel but a | ||
| + | romance of return; and of the end of a usurpation. No healthy boy | ||
| + | reading the story regards the rout of the Ithacan suitors as anything | ||
| + | but a happy ending. But there are doubtless some who regard the rout of | ||
| + | the Jewish merchants and moneychangers with that refined repugnance | ||
| + | which never fails to move them in the presence of violence, and | ||
| + | especially of violence against the well-to-do. The point here, however, | ||
| + | is that all these incidents have in them a character of mounting crisis. | ||
| + | In other words, these incidents are not incidental. When Apollonius the | ||
| + | ideal philosopher is brought before the judgment-seat of Domitian and | ||
| + | vanishes by magic, the miracle is entirely incidental. It might have | ||
| + | occurred at any time in the wandering life of the Tyanean; indeed, I | ||
| + | believe it is doubtful in date as well as in substance. The ideal | ||
| + | philosopher merely vanished, and resumed his ideal existence somewhere | ||
| + | else for an indefinite period. It is characteristic of the contrast | ||
| + | perhaps that Apollonius was supposed to have lived to an almost | ||
| + | miraculous old age. Jesus of Nazareth was less prudent in his miracles. | ||
| + | When Jesus was brought before the judgment-seat of Pontius Pilate, he | ||
| + | did not vanish. It was the crisis and the goal; it was the hour and the | ||
| + | power of darkness. It was the supremely supernatural act, of all his | ||
| + | miraculous life, that he did not vanish.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | attempted by many men of real genius and eloquence as well as by only | ||
| + | too many vulgar sentimentalists and self-conscious rhetoricians. The | ||
| + | tale has been retold with patronising pathos by elegant sceptics and | ||
| + | with fluent enthusiasm by boisterous best-sellers. It will not be retold | ||
| + | here. The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like | ||
| + | the power of mill-stones; | ||
| + | feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them. Criticism is only words | ||
| + | about words; and of what use are words about such words as these? What | ||
| + | is the use of word-painting about the dark garden filled suddenly with | ||
| + | torchlight and furious faces? ‘Are you come out with swords and staves | ||
| + | as against a robber? All day I sat in your temple teaching, and you took | ||
| + | me not.’ Can anything be added to the massive and gathered restraint of | ||
| + | that irony; like a great wave lifted to the sky and refusing to fall? | ||
| + | ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and | ||
| + | for your children.’ As the High Priest asked what further need he had of | ||
| + | witnesses, we might well ask what further need we have of words. Peter | ||
| + | in a panic repudiated him: ‘and immediately the cock crew; and Jesus | ||
| + | looked upon Peter, and Peter went out and wept bitterly.’ Has any one | ||
| + | any further remarks to offer? Just before the murder he prayed for all | ||
| + | the murderous race of men, saying, ‘They know not what they do’; is | ||
| + | there anything to say to that, except that we know as little what we | ||
| + | say? Is there any need to repeat and spin out the story of how the | ||
| + | tragedy trailed up the Via Dolorosa and how they threw him in haphazard | ||
| + | with two thieves in one of the ordinary batches of execution; and how in | ||
| + | all that horror and howling wilderness of desertion one voice spoke in | ||
| + | homage, a startling voice from the very last place where it was looked | ||
| + | for, the gibbet of the criminal; and he said to that nameless ruffian,< | ||
| + | ‘This night shalt thou be with me in Paradise’? | ||
| + | after that but a full-stop? Or is any one prepared to answer adequately | ||
| + | that farewell gesture to all flesh which created for his Mother a new | ||
| + | Son?</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is more within my powers, and here more immediately to my purpose, to | ||
| + | point out that in that scene were symbolically gathered all the human | ||
| + | forces that have been vaguely sketched in this story. As kings and | ||
| + | philosophers and the popular element had been symbolically present at | ||
| + | his birth, so they were more practically concerned in his death; and | ||
| + | with that we come face to face with the essential fact to be realised. | ||
| + | All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or | ||
| + | another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not | ||
| + | save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and | ||
| + | everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract. | ||
| + | Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is | ||
| + | always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to | ||
| + | understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than | ||
| + | once: that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was | ||
| + | emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness, and | ||
| + | the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are | ||
| + | at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It | ||
| + | was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of | ||
| + | an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen | ||
| + | Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which | ||
| + | was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended | ||
| + | the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa | ||
| + | and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning | ||
| + | flash of this incident, we see great Rome,< | ||
| + | downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the | ||
| + | confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to | ||
| + | say what is justice can only ask, ‘What is truth?’ So in that drama | ||
| + | which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is | ||
| + | fixed in what seems the reverse of his true rôle. Rome was almost | ||
| + | another name for responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of | ||
| + | rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the | ||
| + | practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of | ||
| + | his own judgment-seat, | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the | ||
| + | most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the | ||
| + | world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; | ||
| + | like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring | ||
| + | face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some | ||
| + | intermediaries, | ||
| + | away. Anyhow it could not save the world; it could not even convert the | ||
| + | world. There were philosophers who held it in its highest and noblest | ||
| + | form; but they not only could not convert the world, but they never | ||
| + | tried. You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a | ||
| + | private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. | ||
| + | The Jewish priests had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad | ||
| + | sense. They had kept it as a gigantic secret. As savage heroes might | ||
| + | have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in the tabernacle. | ||
| + | They were proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a | ||
| + | single deity; and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind. | ||
| + | Since that day their representatives have been like blind men in broad | ||
| + | daylight, striking to right and left with their< | ||
| + | darkness. But there has been that in their monumental monotheism that it | ||
| + | has at least remained like a monument, the last thing of its kind, and | ||
| + | in a sense motionless in the more restless world which it cannot | ||
| + | satisfy. For it is certain that for some reason it cannot satisfy. Since | ||
| + | that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in his heaven | ||
| + | and all is right with the world; since the rumour that God had left his | ||
| + | heavens to set it right.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best, or | ||
| + | which Christ himself seems certainly to have felt as the best. The poor | ||
| + | to whom he preached the good news, the common people who heard him | ||
| + | gladly, the populace that had made so many popular heroes and demigods | ||
| + | in the old pagan world, showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving | ||
| + | the world. They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city, | ||
| + | and especially the mob of the capital, during the decline of a society. | ||
| + | The same thing that makes the rural population live on tradition makes | ||
| + | the urban population live on rumour. Just as its myths at the best had | ||
| + | been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily changed by | ||
| + | baseless assertion that is arbitrary without being authoritative. Some | ||
| + | brigand or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular | ||
| + | figure and run as a kind of candidate against Christ. In all this we | ||
| + | recognise the urban population that we know, with its newspaper scares | ||
| + | and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an evil | ||
| + | more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the | ||
| + | neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the | ||
| + | condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul | ||
| + | of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in | ||
| + | that hour, ‘It is well that one man die for the people.’ Yet this spirit | ||
| + | in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had also been in | ||
| + | itself< | ||
| + | martyrs; men still to be honoured for ever. It was failing through its | ||
| + | weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all | ||
| + | mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The | ||
| + | mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers | ||
| + | and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the | ||
| + | sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal | ||
| + | human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; | ||
| + | one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected | ||
| + | of men.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in | ||
| + | speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any | ||
| + | words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative | ||
| + | even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the | ||
| + | hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the | ||
| + | beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may | ||
| + | surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven | ||
| + | out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully | ||
| + | unintelligible, | ||
| + | they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss | ||
| + | that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the | ||
| + | absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in | ||
| + | his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be | ||
| + | some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural | ||
| + | symbolism in these natural proceedings; | ||
| + | be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture and guarded | ||
| + | by the authority of the Caesars. For<span class=" | ||
| + | that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up | ||
| + | and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a | ||
| + | very great thing called human history; the history that was merely | ||
| + | human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods | ||
| + | and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. | ||
| + | But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place | ||
| + | found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they | ||
| + | realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world | ||
| + | had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a | ||
| + | new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of | ||
| + | the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the | ||
| + | evening but the dawn.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE WITNESS OF THE HERETICS</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | words to the Apostles who received authority to found it. The first was | ||
| + | the phrase about founding it on Peter as on a rock; the second was the | ||
| + | symbol of the keys. About the meaning of the former there is naturally | ||
| + | no doubt in my own case; but it does not directly affect the argument | ||
| + | here save in two more secondary aspects. It is yet another example of a | ||
| + | thing that could only fully expand and explain itself afterwards, and | ||
| + | even long afterwards. And it is yet another example of something the | ||
| + | very reverse of simple and self-evident even in the language, in so far | ||
| + | as it described a man as a rock when he had much more the appearance of | ||
| + | a reed.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | exactly noticed. The keys have been conspicuous enough in the art and | ||
| + | heraldry of Christendom; | ||
| + | aptness of the allegory. We have now reached the point in history where | ||
| + | something must be said of the first appearance and activities of the | ||
| + | Church in the Roman Empire; and for that brief description nothing could | ||
| + | be more perfect than that ancient metaphor. The Early Christian was very | ||
| + | precisely a person carrying about a key, or what he said was a key. The | ||
| + | whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to possess that key. It | ||
| + | was not merely a vague forward movement, which might be better | ||
| + | represented by a battering-ram. It was not something< | ||
| + | with it similar and dissimilar things, as does a modern social movement. | ||
| + | As we shall see in a moment, it rather definitely refused to do so. It | ||
| + | definitely asserted that there was a key and that it possessed that key | ||
| + | and that no other key was like it; in that sense it was as narrow as you | ||
| + | please. Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the prison of | ||
| + | the whole world; and let in the white daylight of escape.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | conveniently summed up under this symbol. First, a key is above all | ||
| + | things a thing with a shape. It is a thing that depends entirely upon | ||
| + | keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the | ||
| + | philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness. That is where it | ||
| + | differs from all that formless infinity, Manichean or Buddhist, which | ||
| + | makes a sort of pool of night in the dark heart of Asia; the ideal of | ||
| + | uncreating all the creatures. That is where it differs also from the | ||
| + | analogous vagueness of mere evolutionism; | ||
| + | constantly losing their shape. A man told that his solitary latchkey had | ||
| + | been melted down with a million others into a Buddhistic unity would be | ||
| + | annoyed. But a man told that his key was gradually growing and sprouting | ||
| + | in his pocket, and branching into new wards or complications, | ||
| + | be more gratified.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | savage who did not know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty | ||
| + | in guessing what it could possibly be. And it is fantastic because it is | ||
| + | in a sense arbitrary. A key is not a matter of abstractions; | ||
| + | sense a key is not a matter of argument. It either fits the lock or it | ||
| + | does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered | ||
| + | by itself; or reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or | ||
| + | decorative art. It is senseless for a man to say he would like a simpler | ||
| + | key; it would be far more sensible to do his best with a<span class=" | ||
| + | thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was | ||
| + | one having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain | ||
| + | of the religion being so early complicated with theology and things of | ||
| + | the kind, they forget that the world had not only got into a hole, but | ||
| + | had got into a whole maze of holes and corners. The problem itself was a | ||
| + | complicated problem; it did not in the ordinary sense merely involve | ||
| + | anything so simple as sin. It was also full of secrets, of unexplored | ||
| + | and unfathomable fallacies, of unconscious mental diseases, of dangers | ||
| + | in all directions. If the faith had faced the world only with the | ||
| + | platitudes about peace and simplicity some moralists would confine it | ||
| + | to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and | ||
| + | labyrinthine lunatic asylum. What it did do we must now roughly | ||
| + | describe; it is enough to say here that there was undoubtedly much about | ||
| + | the key that seemed complex; indeed there was only one thing about it | ||
| + | that was simple. It opened the door.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | which may for brevity and convenience be described as lies. We have all | ||
| + | heard people say that Christianity arose in an age of barbarism. They | ||
| + | might just as well say that Christian Science arose in an age of | ||
| + | barbarism. They may think Christianity was a symptom of social decay, as | ||
| + | I think Christian Science a symptom of mental decay. They may think | ||
| + | Christianity a superstition that ultimately destroyed a civilisation, | ||
| + | I think Christian Science a superstition capable (if taken seriously) of | ||
| + | destroying any number of civilisations. But to say that a Christian of | ||
| + | the fourth or fifth centuries was a barbarian living in a barbarous time | ||
| + | is exactly like saying that Mrs. Eddy was a Red Indian. And if I allowed | ||
| + | my constitutional impatience with Mrs. Eddy to impel me to call her a | ||
| + | Red Indian, I should incidentally be telling a lie. We may like or | ||
| + | dislike the imperial civilisation of Rome in the fourth century;< | ||
| + | like or dislike the industrial civilisation of America in the nineteenth | ||
| + | century; but that they both were what we commonly mean by a civilisation | ||
| + | no person of common sense could deny if he wanted to. This is a very | ||
| + | obvious fact, but it is also a very fundamental one; and we must make it | ||
| + | the foundation of any further description of constructive Christianity | ||
| + | in the past. For good or evil, it was pre-eminently the product of a | ||
| + | civilised age, perhaps of an over-civilised age. This is the first fact | ||
| + | apart from all praise or blame; indeed I am so unfortunate as not to | ||
| + | feel that I praise a thing when I compare it to Christian Science. But | ||
| + | it is at least desirable to know something of the savour of a society in | ||
| + | which we are condemning or praising anything; and the science that | ||
| + | connects Mrs. Eddy with tomahawks or the Mater Dolorosa with totems may | ||
| + | for our general convenience be eliminated. The dominant fact, not merely | ||
| + | about the Christian religion, but about the whole pagan civilisation, | ||
| + | was that which has been more than once repeated in these pages. The | ||
| + | Mediterranean was a lake in the real sense of a pool; in which a number | ||
| + | of different cults or cultures were, as the phrase goes, pooled. Those | ||
| + | cities facing each other round the circle of the lake became more and | ||
| + | more one cosmopolitan culture. On its legal and military side it was the | ||
| + | Roman Empire; but it was very many-sided. It might be called | ||
| + | superstitious in the sense that it contained a great number of varied | ||
| + | superstitions; | ||
| + | barbarous.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In this level of cosmopolitan culture arose the Christian religion and | ||
| + | the Catholic Church; and everything in the story suggests that it was | ||
| + | felt to be something new and strange. Those who have tried to suggest | ||
| + | that it evolved out of something much milder or more ordinary have found | ||
| + | that in this case their evolutionary method is very difficult to apply. | ||
| + | They may suggest that Essenes or Ebionites or such< | ||
| + | seed; but the seed is invisible; the tree appears very rapidly | ||
| + | full-grown; and the tree is something totally different. It is certainly | ||
| + | a Christmas tree in the sense that it keeps the kindliness and moral | ||
| + | beauty of the story of Bethlehem; but it was as ritualistic as the | ||
| + | seven-branched candlestick, | ||
| + | more than were probably permitted by the first prayer-book of Edward the | ||
| + | Sixth. It might well be asked, indeed, why any one accepting the | ||
| + | Bethlehem tradition should object to golden or gilded ornament since the | ||
| + | Magi themselves brought gold; why he should dislike incense in the | ||
| + | church since incense was brought even to the stable. But these are | ||
| + | controversies that do not concern me here. I am concerned only with the | ||
| + | historical fact, more and more admitted by historians, that very early | ||
| + | in its history this thing became visible to the civilisation of | ||
| + | antiquity; and that already the Church appeared as a Church; with | ||
| + | everything that is implied in a Church and much that is disliked in a | ||
| + | Church. We will discuss in a moment how far it was like other | ||
| + | ritualistic or magical or ascetical mysteries in its own time. It was | ||
| + | certainly not in the least like merely ethical and idealistic movements | ||
| + | in our time. It had a doctrine; it had a discipline; it had sacraments; | ||
| + | it had degrees of initiation; it admitted people and expelled people; it | ||
| + | affirmed one dogma with authority and repudiated another with anathemas. | ||
| + | If all these things be the marks of Antichrist, the reign of Antichrist | ||
| + | followed very rapidly upon Christ.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | movement of idealists have been forced to push the period of its | ||
| + | perversion or disappearance further and further back. A bishop of Rome | ||
| + | writes claiming authority in the very lifetime of St. John the | ||
| + | Evangelist; and it is described as the first papal aggression. A friend | ||
| + | of the Apostles writes of them as men he knew, and says they taught him<span class=" | ||
| + | the doctrine of the Sacrament; and Mr. Wells can only murmur that the | ||
| + | reaction towards barbaric blood-rites may have happened rather earlier | ||
| + | than might be expected. The date of the Fourth Gospel, which at one time | ||
| + | was steadily growing later and later, is now steadily growing earlier | ||
| + | and earlier; until critics are staggered at the dawning and dreadful | ||
| + | possibility that it might be something like what it professes to be. The | ||
| + | last limit of an early date for the extinction of true Christianity has | ||
| + | probably been found by the latest German professor whose authority is | ||
| + | invoked by Dean Inge. This learned scholar says that Pentecost was the | ||
| + | occasion for the first founding of an ecclesiastical, | ||
| + | despotic Church utterly alien to the simple ideals of Jesus of Nazareth. | ||
| + | This may be called, in a popular as well as a learned sense, the limit. | ||
| + | What do professors of this kind imagine that men are made of? Suppose it | ||
| + | were a matter of any merely human movement, let us say that of the | ||
| + | Conscientious Objectors. Some say the early Christians were Pacifists; I | ||
| + | do not believe it for a moment; but I am quite ready to accept the | ||
| + | parallel for the sake of the argument. Tolstoy or some great preacher of | ||
| + | peace among peasants has been shot as a mutineer for defying | ||
| + | conscription; | ||
| + | an upper room in remembrance of him. They never had any reason for | ||
| + | coming together except that common memory; they are men of many kinds | ||
| + | with nothing to bind them, except that the greatest event in all their | ||
| + | lives was this tragedy of the teacher of universal peace. They are | ||
| + | always repeating his words, revolving his problems, trying to imitate | ||
| + | his character. The Pacifists meet at their Pentecost and are possessed | ||
| + | of a sudden ecstasy of enthusiasm and wild rush of the whirlwind of | ||
| + | inspiration, | ||
| + | Conscription, | ||
| + | going about armed to the teeth< | ||
| + | artillery; the proceedings concluding with the singing of ‘Boys of the | ||
| + | Bulldog Breed’ and ‘Don’t let them scrap the British Navy.’ That is | ||
| + | something like a fair parallel to the theory of these critics; that the | ||
| + | transition from their idea of Jesus to their idea of Catholicism could | ||
| + | have been made in the little upper room at Pentecost. Surely anybody’s | ||
| + | common sense would tell him that enthusiasts, | ||
| + | common enthusiasm for a leader whom they loved, would not instantly rush | ||
| + | away to establish everything that he hated. No, if the ‘ecclesiastical | ||
| + | and dogmatic system’ is as old as Pentecost it is as old as Christmas. | ||
| + | If we trace it back to such very early Christians we must trace it back | ||
| + | to Christ.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>We may begin then with these two negations. It is nonsense to say that | ||
| + | the Christian faith appeared in a simple age; in the sense of an | ||
| + | unlettered and gullible age. It is equally nonsense to say that the | ||
| + | Christian faith was a simple thing; in the sense of a vague or childish | ||
| + | or merely instinctive thing. Perhaps the only point in which we could | ||
| + | possibly say that the Church fitted into the pagan world is the fact | ||
| + | that they were both not only highly civilised but rather complicated. | ||
| + | They were both emphatically many-sided; but antiquity was then a | ||
| + | many-sided hole, like a hexagonal hole waiting for an equally hexagonal | ||
| + | stopper. In that sense only the Church was many-sided enough to fit the | ||
| + | world. The six sides of the Mediterranean world faced each other across | ||
| + | the sea and waited for something that should look all ways at once. The | ||
| + | Church had to be both Roman and Greek and Jewish and African and | ||
| + | Asiatic. In the very words of the Apostle of the Gentiles, it was indeed | ||
| + | all things to all men. Christianity then was not merely crude and | ||
| + | simple, and was the very reverse of the growth of a barbaric time. But | ||
| + | when we come to the contrary charge, we come to a much more plausible | ||
| + | charge. It is very much more tenable< | ||
| + | phase of the decay of civilisation, | ||
| + | civilisation; | ||
| + | dying of being much too civilised. That is an argument much better worth | ||
| + | considering; | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>At the beginning of this book I ventured on a general summary of it, in | ||
| + | a parallel between the rise of humanity out of nature and the rise of | ||
| + | Christianity out of history. I pointed out that in both cases what had | ||
| + | gone before might imply something coming after; but did not in the least | ||
| + | imply what did come after. If a detached mind had seen certain apes it | ||
| + | might have deduced more anthropoids; | ||
| + | anything within a thousand miles of what man has done. In short, it | ||
| + | might have seen Pithacanthropus or the Missing Link looming in the | ||
| + | future, if possible almost as dimly and doubtfully as we see him looming | ||
| + | in the past. But if it foresaw him appearing it would also foresee him | ||
| + | disappearing, | ||
| + | faint traces; if they are traces. To foresee that Missing Link would not | ||
| + | be to foresee Man, or anything like Man. Now this earlier explanation | ||
| + | must be kept in mind; because it is an exact parallel to the true view | ||
| + | of the Church; and the suggestion of it having evolved naturally out of | ||
| + | the Empire in decay.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | the imperial decadence would produce something like Christianity. That | ||
| + | is, something a little like and gigantically different. A man might very | ||
| + | well have said, for instance, ‘Pleasure has been pursued so | ||
| + | extravagantly that there will be a reaction into pessimism. Perhaps it | ||
| + | will take the form of asceticism; men will mutilate themselves instead | ||
| + | of merely hanging themselves.’ Or a man might very reasonably have said, | ||
| + | ‘If we weary of our Greek and Latin gods we shall be hankering after | ||
| + | some eastern mystery or other; there will be a fashion< | ||
| + | Hindoos.’ Or a man of the world might well have been shrewd enough to | ||
| + | say, ‘Powerful people are picking up these fads; some day the court will | ||
| + | adopt one of them and it may become official.’ Or yet another and | ||
| + | gloomier prophet might be pardoned for saying, ‘The world is going | ||
| + | down-hill; dark and barbarous superstitions will return, it does not | ||
| + | matter much which. They will all be formless and fugitive like dreams of | ||
| + | the night.’</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | were really fulfilled; but it was not the Church that fulfilled them. It | ||
| + | was the Church that escaped from them, confounded them, and rose above | ||
| + | them in triumph. In so far as it was probable that the mere nature of | ||
| + | hedonism would produce a mere reaction of asceticism, it did produce a | ||
| + | mere reaction of asceticism. It was the movement called Manichean, and | ||
| + | the Church was its mortal enemy. In so far as it would have naturally | ||
| + | appeared at that point of history, it did appear; it did also disappear, | ||
| + | which was equally natural. The mere pessimist reaction did come with the | ||
| + | Manichees and did go with the Manichees. But the Church did not come | ||
| + | with them or go with them; and she had much more to do with their going | ||
| + | than with their coming. Or again, in so far as it was probable that even | ||
| + | the growth of scepticism would bring in a fashion of eastern religion, | ||
| + | it did bring it in; Mithras came from far beyond Palestine out of the | ||
| + | heart of Persia, bringing strange mysteries of the blood of bulls. | ||
| + | Certainly there was everything to show that some such fashion would have | ||
| + | come in any case. But certainly there is nothing in the world to show | ||
| + | that it would not have passed away in any case. Certainly an Oriental | ||
| + | fad was something eminently fitted to the fourth or fifth century; but | ||
| + | that hardly explains it having remained to the twentieth century, and | ||
| + | still going strong. In short, in so far as things of the kind might have | ||
| + | been expected then, things like Mithraism were< | ||
| + | scarcely explains our more recent experiences. And if we were still | ||
| + | Mithraists merely because Mithraic head-dresses and other Persian | ||
| + | apparatuses might be expected to be all the rage in the days of | ||
| + | Domitian, it would almost seem by this time that we must be a little | ||
| + | dowdy.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is the same, as will be suggested in a moment, with the idea of | ||
| + | official favouritism. In so far as such favouritism shown towards a fad | ||
| + | was something that might have been looked for during the decline and | ||
| + | fall of the Roman Empire, it was something that did exist in that Empire | ||
| + | and did decline and fall with it. It throws no sort of light on the | ||
| + | thing that resolutely refused to decline and fall; that grew steadily | ||
| + | while the other was declining and falling; and which even at this moment | ||
| + | is going forward with fearless energy, when another aeon has completed | ||
| + | its cycle and another civilisation seems almost ready to fall or to | ||
| + | decline.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | Church is blamed for crushing testify to the unfairness for which she is | ||
| + | blamed. In so far as something deserved the blame, it was precisely the | ||
| + | things that she is blamed for blaming. In so far as something was merely | ||
| + | a superstition, | ||
| + | something was a mere reaction into barbarism, she herself resisted it | ||
| + | because it was a reaction into barbarism. In so far as something was a | ||
| + | fad of the fading empire, that died and deserved to die, it was the | ||
| + | Church alone that killed it. The Church is reproached for being exactly | ||
| + | what the heresy was repressed for being. The explanations of the | ||
| + | evolutionary historians and higher critics do really explain why | ||
| + | Arianism and Gnosticism and Nestorianism were born& | ||
| + | died. They do not explain why the Church was born or why she has refused | ||
| + | to die. Above all, they do not explain why she should have made war on | ||
| + | the very evils she is supposed to share.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | that if there was anything that was really a superstition of the dying | ||
| + | empire, it did really die with the dying empire; and certainly was not | ||
| + | the same as the very thing that destroyed it. For this purpose we will | ||
| + | take in order two or three of the most ordinary explanations of | ||
| + | Christian origins among the modern critics of Christianity. Nothing is | ||
| + | more common, for instance, than to find such a modern critic writing | ||
| + | something like this: ‘Christianity was above all a movement of ascetics, | ||
| + | a rush into the desert, a refuge in the cloister, a renunciation of all | ||
| + | life and happiness; and this was a part of a gloomy and inhuman reaction | ||
| + | against nature itself, a hatred of the body, a horror of the material | ||
| + | universe, a sort of universal suicide of the senses and even of the | ||
| + | self. It came from an eastern fanaticism like that of the fakirs and was | ||
| + | ultimately founded on an eastern pessimism, which seems to feel | ||
| + | existence itself as an evil.’</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | true; it is true in every detail except that it happens to be attributed | ||
| + | entirely to the wrong person. It is not true of the Church; but it is | ||
| + | true of the heretics condemned by the Church. It is as if one were to | ||
| + | write a most detailed analysis of the mistakes and misgovernment of the | ||
| + | ministers of George the Third, merely with the small inaccuracy that the | ||
| + | whole story was told about George Washington; or as if somebody made a | ||
| + | list of the crimes of the Bolshevists with no variation except that they | ||
| + | were all attributed to the Czar. The early Church was indeed very | ||
| + | ascetic, in connection with a totally different philosophy; but the | ||
| + | philosophy of a war on life and nature as such really did exist in the | ||
| + | world, if the critics only knew where to look for it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | world, the very first thing that< | ||
| + | in a sort of swarm of mystical and metaphysical sects, mostly out of the | ||
| + | East; like one lonely golden bee caught in a swarm of wasps. To the | ||
| + | ordinary onlooker, there did not seem to be much difference, or anything | ||
| + | beyond a general buzz; indeed in a sense there was not much difference, | ||
| + | so far as stinging and being stung were concerned. The difference was | ||
| + | that only one golden dot in all that whirring gold-dust had the power of | ||
| + | going forth to make hives for all humanity; to give the world honey and | ||
| + | wax or (as was so finely said in a context too easily forgotten) ‘the | ||
| + | two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.’ The wasps all died | ||
| + | that winter; and half the difficulty is that hardly any one knows | ||
| + | anything about them and most people do not know that they ever existed; | ||
| + | so that the whole story of that first phase of our religion is lost. Or, | ||
| + | to vary the metaphor, when this movement or some other movement pierced | ||
| + | the dyke between the east and west and brought more mystical ideas into | ||
| + | Europe, it brought with it a whole flood of other mystical ideas besides | ||
| + | its own, most of them ascetical and nearly all of them pessimistic. They | ||
| + | very nearly flooded and overwhelmed the purely Christian element. They | ||
| + | came mostly from that region that was a sort of dim borderland between | ||
| + | the eastern philosophies and the eastern mythologies, | ||
| + | with the wilder philosophers that curious craze for making fantastic | ||
| + | patterns of the cosmos in the shape of maps and genealogical trees. | ||
| + | Those that are supposed to derive from the mysterious Manes are called | ||
| + | Manichean; kindred cults are more generally known as Gnostic; they are | ||
| + | mostly of a labyrinthine complexity, but the point to insist on is the | ||
| + | pessimism; the fact that nearly all in one form or another regarded the | ||
| + | creation of the world as the work of an evil spirit. Some of them had | ||
| + | that Asiatic atmosphere that surrounds Buddhism; the suggestion that | ||
| + | life is a corruption of the purity of being.< | ||
| + | purely spiritual order which had been betrayed by the coarse and clumsy | ||
| + | trick of making such toys as the sun and moon and stars. Anyhow all this | ||
| + | dark tide out of the metaphysical sea in the midst of Asia poured | ||
| + | through the dykes simultaneously with the creed of Christ; but it is the | ||
| + | whole point of the story that the two were not the same; that they | ||
| + | flowed like oil and water. That creed remained in the shape of a | ||
| + | miracle; a river still flowing through the sea. And the proof of the | ||
| + | miracle was practical once more; it was merely that while all that sea | ||
| + | was salt and bitter with the savour of death, of this one stream in the | ||
| + | midst of it a man could drink.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | could not possibly have been preserved by anything else. If the Church | ||
| + | had not renounced the Manicheans it might have become merely Manichean. | ||
| + | If it had not renounced the Gnostics it might have become Gnostic. But | ||
| + | by the very fact that it did renounce them it proved that it was not | ||
| + | either Gnostic or Manichean. At any rate it proved that something was | ||
| + | not either Gnostic or Manichean; and what could it be that condemned | ||
| + | them, if it was not the original good news of the runners from Bethlehem | ||
| + | and the trumpet of the Resurrection? | ||
| + | she proved that she was not pessimistic, | ||
| + | pessimists. The creed declared that man was sinful, but it did not | ||
| + | declare that life was evil, and it proved it by damning those who did. | ||
| + | The condemnation of the early heretics is itself condemned as something | ||
| + | crabbed and narrow; but it was in truth the very proof that the Church | ||
| + | meant to be brotherly and broad. It proved that the primitive Catholics | ||
| + | were specially eager to explain that they did < | ||
| + | vile; that they did < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | because asceticism was the only possible purge of the sins of the world; | ||
| + | but in the very thunder of their anathemas they affirmed for ever that | ||
| + | their asceticism was not to be anti-human or anti-natural; | ||
| + | wish to purge the world and not destroy it. And nothing else except | ||
| + | those anathemas could possibly have made it clear, amid a confusion | ||
| + | which still confuses them with their mortal enemies. Nothing else but | ||
| + | dogma could have resisted the riot of imaginative invention with which | ||
| + | the pessimists were waging their war against nature; with their Aeons | ||
| + | and their Demiurge, their strange Logos and their sinister Sophia. If | ||
| + | the Church had not insisted on theology, it would have melted into a mad | ||
| + | mythology of the mystics, yet further removed from reason or even from | ||
| + | rationalism; | ||
| + | love of life. Remember that it would have been an inverted mythology, | ||
| + | one contradicting everything natural in paganism; a mythology in which | ||
| + | Pluto would be above Jupiter and Hades hang higher than Olympus; in | ||
| + | which Brahma and all that has the breath of life would be subject to | ||
| + | Siva, shining with the eye of death.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | renunciation and virginity makes this distinction much more striking and | ||
| + | not less so. It makes all the more important the place where the dogma | ||
| + | drew the line. A man might crawl about on all fours like a beast because | ||
| + | he was an ascetic. He might stand night and day on the top of a pillar | ||
| + | and be adored for being an ascetic. But he could not say that the world | ||
| + | was a mistake or the marriage state a sin without being a heretic. What | ||
| + | was it that thus deliberately disengaged itself from eastern asceticism | ||
| + | by sharp definition and fierce refusal, if it was not something with an | ||
| + | individuality of its own; and one that was quite different? If the | ||
| + | Catholics are to be confused with the Gnostics, we can only say it was | ||
| + | not their fault if they are. And it is rather< | ||
| + | should be blamed by the same critics for persecuting the heretics and | ||
| + | also for sympathising with the heresy.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | movement at all. It was not even merely an ascetical movement, because | ||
| + | it was not a movement at all. It would be nearer the truth to call it | ||
| + | the tamer of asceticism than the mere leader or loosener of it. It was a | ||
| + | thing having its own theory of asceticism, its own type of asceticism, | ||
| + | but most conspicuous at the moment as the moderator of other theories | ||
| + | and types. This is the only sense that can be made, for instance, of the | ||
| + | story of St. Augustine. As long as he was a mere man of the world, a | ||
| + | mere man drifting with his time, he actually was a Manichean. It really | ||
| + | was quite modern and fashionable to be a Manichean. But when he became a | ||
| + | Catholic, the people he instantly turned on and rent in pieces were the | ||
| + | Manicheans. The Catholic way of putting it is that he left off being a | ||
| + | pessimist to become an ascetic. But as the pessimists interpreted | ||
| + | asceticism, it might be said that he left off being an ascetic to become | ||
| + | a saint. The war upon life, the denial of nature, were exactly the | ||
| + | things he had already found in the heathen world outside the Church, and | ||
| + | had to renounce when he entered the Church. The very fact that St. | ||
| + | Augustine remains a somewhat sterner or sadder figure than St. Francis | ||
| + | or St. Teresa only accentuates the dilemma. Face to face with the | ||
| + | gravest or even grimmest of Catholics, we can still ask, ‘Why did | ||
| + | Catholicism make war on Manichees, if Catholicism was Manichean? | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | common enough to find another critic saying, ‘Christianity did not | ||
| + | really rise at all; that is, it did not merely rise from below; it was | ||
| + | imposed from above. It is an example of the power of the executive, | ||
| + | especially in despotic states. The Empire was really an Empire; that is, | ||
| + | it was really< | ||
| + | become a Christian. He might just as well have become a Mithraist or a | ||
| + | Jew or a Fire-Worshipper; | ||
| + | eminent and educated people to adopt these eccentric eastern cults. But | ||
| + | when he adopted it, it became the official religion of the Roman Empire; | ||
| + | and when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it became | ||
| + | as strong, as universal, and as invincible as the Roman Empire. It has | ||
| + | only remained in the world as a relic of that Empire; or, as many have | ||
| + | put it, it is but the ghost of Caesar still hovering over Rome.’ This | ||
| + | also is a very ordinary line taken in the criticism of orthodoxy, to say | ||
| + | that it was only officialism that ever made it orthodoxy. And here again | ||
| + | we can call on the heretics to refute it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | explode this idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in | ||
| + | this connection; and the upshot of it is in that in so far as there ever | ||
| + | was a merely official religion, it actually died because it was a merely | ||
| + | official religion; and what destroyed it was the real religion. Arius | ||
| + | advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely, in | ||
| + | the direction of what we should call Unitarianism; | ||
| + | same, for it gave to Christ a curious intermediary position between the | ||
| + | divine and human. The point is that it seemed to many more reasonable | ||
| + | and less fanatical; and among these were many of the educated class in a | ||
| + | sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion. Arians were a | ||
| + | sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that after | ||
| + | the first squabbles this was the final form of rationalised religion | ||
| + | into which civilisation might well settle down. It was accepted by Divus | ||
| + | Caesar himself and became the official orthodoxy; the generals and | ||
| + | military princes drawn from the new barbarian powers of the north, full | ||
| + | of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still< | ||
| + | important. Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to | ||
| + | complete agnosticism, | ||
| + | shed the last and thinnest pretence of Christianity; | ||
| + | Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar of the Caesars; a soldier, | ||
| + | a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the | ||
| + | philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose | ||
| + | again. The oracles began to speak like birds beginning to sing at dawn; | ||
| + | paganism was itself again; the gods returned. It seemed the end of that | ||
| + | strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed it was the end of | ||
| + | it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was | ||
| + | the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion | ||
| + | of a generation. If there really was something that began with | ||
| + | Constantine, | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | of history, defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the | ||
| + | Church, Athanasius against the world. We may pause upon the point at | ||
| + | issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this religious history, | ||
| + | and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put | ||
| + | it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal | ||
| + | have the habit of deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of | ||
| + | barren dogma and senseless sectarian strife, it is this Athanasian | ||
| + | question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other hand, if | ||
| + | there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of | ||
| + | pure and simple Christianity, | ||
| + | the single sentence, ‘God is Love.’ Yet the two statements are almost | ||
| + | identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense without the other. The | ||
| + | barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. | ||
| + | For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, | ||
| + | was He loving when there was nothing to<span class=" | ||
| + | unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is | ||
| + | love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical | ||
| + | conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to | ||
| + | self-expression; | ||
| + | begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate | ||
| + | the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love. If the moderns | ||
| + | really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the | ||
| + | Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, | ||
| + | the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or | ||
| + | Christmas Day, never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in | ||
| + | the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was | ||
| + | emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God | ||
| + | of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the | ||
| + | agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child | ||
| + | against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was | ||
| + | fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and | ||
| + | intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our | ||
| + | hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be | ||
| + | not misunderstood, | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | against the Empire, and actually for a second time refounded the Church | ||
| + | in spite of the Empire, is itself a proof that there was something | ||
| + | positive and personal working in the world, other than whatever official | ||
| + | faith the Empire chose to adopt. This power utterly destroyed the | ||
| + | official faith that the Empire did adopt. It went on its own way as it | ||
| + | is going on its own way still. There are any number of other examples in | ||
| + | which is repeated precisely the same process we have reviewed in the | ||
| + | case of the Manichean and the Arian. A few centuries after< | ||
| + | instance, the Church had to maintain the same Trinity, which is simply | ||
| + | the logical side of love, against another appearance of the isolated and | ||
| + | simplified deity in the religion of Islam. Yet there are some who cannot | ||
| + | see what the Crusaders were fighting for; and some even who talk as if | ||
| + | Christianity had never been anything but a form of what they call | ||
| + | Hebraism coming in with the decay of Hellenism. Those people must | ||
| + | certainly be very much puzzled by the war between the Crescent and the | ||
| + | Cross. If Christianity had never been anything but a simpler morality | ||
| + | sweeping away polytheism, there is no reason why Christendom should not | ||
| + | have been swept into Islam. The truth is that Islam itself was a | ||
| + | barbaric reaction against that very humane complexity that is really a | ||
| + | Christian character; that idea of balance in the deity, as of balance in | ||
| + | the family, that makes that creed a sort of sanity, and that sanity the | ||
| + | soul of civilisation. And that is why the Church is from the first a | ||
| + | thing holding its own position and point of view, quite apart from the | ||
| + | accidents and anarchies of its age. That is why it deals blows | ||
| + | impartially right and left, at the pessimism of the Manichean or the | ||
| + | optimism of the Pelagian. It was not a Manichean movement because it was | ||
| + | not a movement at all. It was not an official fashion because it was not | ||
| + | a fashion at all. It was something that could coincide with movements | ||
| + | and fashions, could control them and could survive them.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>So might rise from their graves the great heresiarchs to confound their | ||
| + | comrades of to-day. There is nothing that the critics now affirm that we | ||
| + | cannot call on these great witnesses to deny. The modern critic will say | ||
| + | lightly enough that Christianity was but a reaction into asceticism and | ||
| + | anti-natural spirituality, | ||
| + | love. But Manes the great mystic will answer them from his secret throne | ||
| + | and cry, ‘These Christians have no right to be called spiritual; these | ||
| + | Christians have no<span class=" | ||
| + | with the curse of life and all the filth of the family. Through them the | ||
| + | earth is still foul with fruit and harvest and polluted with population. | ||
| + | Theirs was no movement against nature, or my children would have carried | ||
| + | it to triumph; but these fools renewed the world when I would have ended | ||
| + | it with a gesture.’ And another critic will write that the Church was | ||
| + | but the shadow of the Empire, the fad of a chance Emperor, and that it | ||
| + | remains in Europe only as the ghost of the power of Rome. And Arius the | ||
| + | deacon will answer out of the darkness of oblivion: ‘No, indeed, or the | ||
| + | world would have followed my more reasonable religion. For mine went | ||
| + | down before demagogues and men defying Caesar; and around my champion | ||
| + | was the purple cloak and mine was the glory of the eagles. It was not | ||
| + | for lack of these things that I failed.’ And yet a third modern will | ||
| + | maintain that the creed spread only as a sort of panic of hell-fire; men | ||
| + | everywhere attempting impossible things in fleeing from incredible | ||
| + | vengeance; a nightmare of imaginary remorse; and such an explanation | ||
| + | will satisfy many who see something dreadful in the doctrine of | ||
| + | orthodoxy. And then there will go up against it the terrible voice of | ||
| + | Tertullian, saying, ‘And why then was I cast out; and why did soft | ||
| + | hearts and heads decide against me when I proclaimed the perdition of | ||
| + | all sinners; and what was this power that thwarted me when I threatened | ||
| + | all backsliders with hell? For none ever went up that hard road so far | ||
| + | as I; and mine was the < | ||
| + | fourth suggestion that there was something of the Semitic secret society | ||
| + | in the whole matter; that it was a new invasion of the nomad spirit | ||
| + | shaking a kindlier and more comfortable paganism, its cities and its | ||
| + | household gods; whereby the jealous monotheistic races could after all | ||
| + | establish their jealous God. And Mahomet shall answer out of the | ||
| + | whirlwind, the red whirlwind of the desert,< | ||
| + | jealousy of God as I did or left him more lonely in the sky? Who ever | ||
| + | paid more honour to Moses and Abraham or won more victories over idols | ||
| + | and the images of paganism? And what was this thing that thrust me back | ||
| + | with the energy of a thing alive; whose fanaticism could drive me from | ||
| + | Sicily and tear up my deep roots out of the rock of Spain? What faith | ||
| + | was theirs who thronged in thousands of every class and country crying | ||
| + | out that my ruin was the will of God; and what hurled great Godfrey as | ||
| + | from a catapult over the wall of Jerusalem; and what brought great | ||
| + | Sobieski like a thunderbolt to the gates of Vienna? I think there was | ||
| + | more than you fancy in the religion that has so matched itself with | ||
| + | mine.’</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | eternal perplexity. In their account it is bound to appear as fanatical | ||
| + | for nothing, and fanatical against everything. It is ascetical and at | ||
| + | war with ascetics, Roman and in revolt against Rome, monotheistic and | ||
| + | fighting furiously against monotheism; harsh in its condemnation of | ||
| + | harshness; a riddle not to be explained even as unreason. And what sort | ||
| + | of unreason is it that seems reasonable to millions of educated | ||
| + | Europeans through all the revolutions of some sixteen hundred years? | ||
| + | People are not amused with a puzzle or a paradox or a mere muddle in the | ||
| + | mind for all that time. I know of no explanation except that such a | ||
| + | thing is not unreason but reason; that if it is fanatical it is | ||
| + | fanatical for reason and fanatical against all the unreasonable things. | ||
| + | That is the only explanation I can find of a thing from the first so | ||
| + | detached and so confident, condemning things that looked so like itself, | ||
| + | refusing help from powers that seemed so essential to its existence, | ||
| + | sharing on its human side all the passions of the age, yet always at the | ||
| + | supreme moment suddenly rising superior to them, never< | ||
| + | what it was expected to say and never needing to unsay what it had said; | ||
| + | I can find no explanation except that, like Pallas from the brain of | ||
| + | Jove, it had indeed come forth out of the mind of God, mature and mighty | ||
| + | and armed for judgment and for war.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE ESCAPE FROM PAGANISM</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | become rather a figure of fun. He is chaffed among men of the world for | ||
| + | the ease with which he can be eaten by cannibals and the narrow bigotry | ||
| + | which makes him regard the cannibal culture as lower than his own. | ||
| + | Perhaps the best part of the joke is that the men of the world do not | ||
| + | see that the joke is against themselves. It is rather ridiculous to ask | ||
| + | a man just about to be boiled in a pot and eaten, at a purely religious | ||
| + | feast, why he does not regard all religions as equally friendly and | ||
| + | fraternal. But there is a more subtle criticism uttered against the more | ||
| + | old-fashioned missionary; to the effect that he generalises too broadly | ||
| + | about the heathen and pays too little attention to the difference | ||
| + | between Mahomet and Mumbo-Jumbo. There was probably truth in this | ||
| + | complaint, especially in the past; but it is my main contention here | ||
| + | that the exaggeration is all the other way at present. It is the | ||
| + | temptation of the professors to treat mythologies too much as | ||
| + | theologies; as things thoroughly thought out and seriously held. It is | ||
| + | the temptation of the intellectuals to take much too seriously the fine | ||
| + | shades of various schools in the rather irresponsible metaphysics of | ||
| + | Asia. Above all, it is their temptation to miss the real truth implied | ||
| + | in the idea of Aquinas contra Gentiles or Athanasius contra mundum.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>If the missionary says, in fact, that he is exceptional in being a | ||
| + | Christian, and that the rest of the races and religions can be | ||
| + | collectively classified as heathen,< | ||
| + | it in quite the wrong spirit, in which case he is spiritually wrong. But | ||
| + | in the cold light of philosophy and history, he is intellectually right. | ||
| + | He may not be right-minded, | ||
| + | right to be right, but he is right. The outer world to which he brings | ||
| + | his creed really is something subject to certain generalisations | ||
| + | covering all its varieties, and is not merely a variety of similar | ||
| + | creeds. Perhaps it is in any case too much of a temptation to pride or | ||
| + | hypocrisy to call it heathenry. Perhaps it would be better simply to | ||
| + | call it humanity. But there are certain broad characteristics of what we | ||
| + | call humanity while it remains in what we call heathenry. They are not | ||
| + | necessarily bad characteristics; | ||
| + | of Christendom; | ||
| + | substance of Christendom. But they existed before Christendom and they | ||
| + | still exist outside Christendom, | ||
| + | a boat and all round a boat; and they have as strong and as universal | ||
| + | and as unmistakable a savour as the sea.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | culture say one thing about it. They agree that in the ancient world | ||
| + | religion was one thing and philosophy quite another. There was very | ||
| + | little effort to rationalise and at the same time to realise a real | ||
| + | belief in the gods. There was very little pretence of any such real | ||
| + | belief among the philosophers. But neither had the passion or perhaps | ||
| + | the power to persecute the other, save in particular and peculiar cases; | ||
| + | and neither the philosopher in his school nor the priest in his temple | ||
| + | seems ever to have seriously contemplated his own concept as covering | ||
| + | the world. A priest sacrificing to Artemis in Calydon did not seem to | ||
| + | think that people would some day sacrifice to her instead of to Isis | ||
| + | beyond the sea; a sage following the vegetarian rule of the | ||
| + | Neo-Pythagoreans did not seem to think it would universally< | ||
| + | exclude the methods of Epictetus or Epicurus. We may call this | ||
| + | liberality if we like; I am not dealing with an argument but describing | ||
| + | an atmosphere. All this, I say, is admitted by all scholars; but what | ||
| + | neither the learned nor the unlearned have fully realised, perhaps, is | ||
| + | that this description is really an exact description of all | ||
| + | non-Christian civilisation to-day; and especially of the great | ||
| + | civilisations of the East. Eastern paganism really is much more all of a | ||
| + | piece, just as ancient paganism was much more all of a piece, than the | ||
| + | modern critics admit. It is a many-coloured Persian carpet as the others | ||
| + | was a varied and tessellated Roman pavement; but the one real crack | ||
| + | right across that pavement came from the earthquake of the Crucifixion.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | into Asia. Religion there is something different; it is both more and | ||
| + | less. He is like a man mapping out the sea as land; marking waves as | ||
| + | mountains; not understanding the nature of its peculiar permanence. It | ||
| + | is perfectly true that Asia has its own dignity and poetry and high | ||
| + | civilisation. But it is not in the least true that Asia has its own | ||
| + | definite dominions of moral government, where all loyalty is conceived | ||
| + | in terms of morality; as when we say that Ireland is Catholic or that | ||
| + | New England was Puritan. The map is not marked out in religions, in our | ||
| + | sense of churches. The state of mind is far more subtle, more relative, | ||
| + | more secretive, more varied and changing, like the colours of the snake. | ||
| + | The Moslem is the nearest approach to a militant Christian; and that is | ||
| + | precisely because he is a much nearer approach to an envoy from western | ||
| + | civilisation. The Moslem in the heart of Asia almost stands for the soul | ||
| + | of Europe. And as he stands between them and Europe in the matter of | ||
| + | space, so he stands between them and Christianity in the matter of time. | ||
| + | In that sense the Moslems in Asia are merely like the<span class=" | ||
| + | Asia. Islam, historically speaking, is the greatest of the eastern | ||
| + | heresies. It owed something to the quite isolated and unique | ||
| + | individuality of Israel; but it owed more to Byzantium and the | ||
| + | theological enthusiasm of Christendom. It owed something even to the | ||
| + | Crusades. It owed nothing whatever to Asia. It owed nothing to the | ||
| + | atmosphere of the ancient and traditional world of Asia, with its | ||
| + | immemorial etiquette and its bottomless or bewildering philosophies. All | ||
| + | that ancient and actual Asia felt the entrance of Islam as something | ||
| + | foreign and western and warlike, piercing it like a spear.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | religions, we should probably be reading into them something dogmatic | ||
| + | and ethical belonging to our own religion. It is as if a European | ||
| + | ignorant of the American atmosphere were to suppose that each ‘state’ | ||
| + | was a separate sovereign state as patriotic as France or Poland; or that | ||
| + | when a Yankee referred fondly to his ‘home town’ he meant he had no | ||
| + | other nation, like a citizen of ancient Athens or Rome. As he would be | ||
| + | reading a particular sort of loyalty into America, so we are reading a | ||
| + | particular sort of loyalty into Asia. There are loyalties of other | ||
| + | kinds; but not what men on the West mean by being a believer, by trying | ||
| + | to be a Christian, by being a good Protestant or a practising Catholic. | ||
| + | In the intellectual world it means something far more vague and varied | ||
| + | by doubts and speculations. In the moral world it means something far | ||
| + | more loose and drifting. A professor of Persian at one of our great | ||
| + | universities, | ||
| + | profess a contempt for the West, said to a friend of mine: ‘You will | ||
| + | never understand oriental religions, because you always conceive | ||
| + | religion as connected with ethics. This kind has really nothing to do | ||
| + | with ethics.’ We have most of us known some Masters of the Higher | ||
| + | Wisdom, some Pilgrims upon the Path to Power,< | ||
| + | saints and seers, who had really nothing to do with ethics. Something | ||
| + | different, something detached and irresponsible, | ||
| + | atmosphere of Asia and touches even that of Islam. It was very | ||
| + | realistically caught in the atmosphere of < | ||
| + | atmosphere too. It is even more vivid in such glimpses as we get of the | ||
| + | genuine and ancient cults of Asia. Deeper than the depths of | ||
| + | metaphysics, | ||
| + | that solemn universe of spiritual things, is a secret, an intangible and | ||
| + | a terrible levity. It does not really very much matter what one does. | ||
| + | Either because they do not believe in a devil, or because they do | ||
| + | believe in a destiny, or because experience here is everything and | ||
| + | eternal life something totally different, but for some reason they are | ||
| + | totally different. I have read somewhere that there were three great | ||
| + | friends famous in medieval Persia for their unity of mind. One became | ||
| + | the responsible and respected Vizier of the Great King; the second was | ||
| + | the poet Omar, pessimist and epicurean, drinking wine in mockery of | ||
| + | Mahomet; the third was the Old Man of the Mountain who maddened his | ||
| + | people with hashish that they might murder other people with daggers. It | ||
| + | does not really much matter what one does.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | he was all those three men. But this sort of universalist cannot have | ||
| + | what we call a character; it is what we call a chaos. He cannot choose; | ||
| + | he cannot fight; he cannot repent; he cannot hope. He is not in the same | ||
| + | sense creating something; for creation means rejection. He is not, in | ||
| + | our religious phrase, making his soul. For our doctrine of salvation | ||
| + | does really mean a labour like that of a man trying to make a statue | ||
| + | beautiful; a victory with wings. For that there must be a final choice; | ||
| + | for a man cannot make statues without rejecting stone. And there really | ||
| + | is this ultimate< | ||
| + | reason is that there has been nothing through all those unthinkable ages | ||
| + | to bring the human mind sharply to the point; to tell it that the time | ||
| + | has come to choose. The mind has lived too much in eternity. The soul | ||
| + | has been too immortal; in the special sense that it ignores the idea of | ||
| + | mortal sin. It has had too much of eternity, in the sense that it has | ||
| + | not had enough of the hour of death and the day of judgment. It is not | ||
| + | crucial enough; in the literal sense that it has not had enough of the | ||
| + | cross. That is what we mean when we say that Asia is very old. But | ||
| + | strictly speaking Europe is quite as old as Asia; indeed in a sense any | ||
| + | place is as old as any other place. What we mean is that Europe has not | ||
| + | merely gone on growing older. It has been born again.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | vast territory, in its varied populations, | ||
| + | achievement and its depths of dark speculation, | ||
| + | represents something of what we mean when we speak of the world. It is a | ||
| + | cosmos rather than a continent. It is the world as man has made it; and | ||
| + | contains many of the most wonderful things that man has made. Therefore | ||
| + | Asia stands as the one representative of paganism and the one rival to | ||
| + | Christendom. But everywhere else where we get glimpses of that mortal | ||
| + | destiny, they suggest stages in the same story. Where Asia trails away | ||
| + | into the southern archipelagoes of the savages, or where a darkness full | ||
| + | of nameless shapes dwells in the heart of Africa, or where the last | ||
| + | survivors of lost races linger in the cold volcano of prehistoric | ||
| + | America, it is all the same story; sometimes perhaps later chapters of | ||
| + | the same story. It is men entangled in the forest of their own | ||
| + | mythology; it is men drowned in the sea of their own metaphysics. | ||
| + | Polytheists have grown weary of the wildest of fictions. Monotheists | ||
| + | have grown< | ||
| + | there have such a hatred of heaven and earth that they have tried to | ||
| + | take refuge in hell. It is the Fall of Man; and it is exactly that fall | ||
| + | that was being felt by our own fathers at the first moment of the Roman | ||
| + | decline. We also were going down that wide road; down that easy slope; | ||
| + | following the magnificent procession of the high civilisations of the | ||
| + | world.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>If the Church had not entered the world then, it seems probable that | ||
| + | Europe would be now very much what Asia is now. Something may be allowed | ||
| + | for a real difference of race and environment, | ||
| + | in the modern world. But after all we talk about the changeless East | ||
| + | very largely because it has not suffered the great change. Paganism in | ||
| + | its last phase showed considerable signs of becoming equally changeless. | ||
| + | This would not mean that new schools or sects of philosophy would not | ||
| + | arise; as new schools did arise in Antiquity and do arise in Asia. It | ||
| + | does not mean that there would be no real mystics or visionaries; | ||
| + | there were mystics in Antiquity and are mystics in Asia. It does not | ||
| + | mean that there would be no social codes, as there were codes in | ||
| + | Antiquity and are codes in Asia. It does not mean that there could not | ||
| + | be good men or happy lives, for God has given all men a conscience and | ||
| + | conscience can give all men a kind of peace. But it does mean that the | ||
| + | tone and proportion of all these things, and especially the proportion | ||
| + | of good and evil things, would be in the unchanged West what they are in | ||
| + | the changeless East. And nobody who looks at that changeless East | ||
| + | honestly, and with a real sympathy, can believe that there is anything | ||
| + | there remotely resembling the challenge and revolution of the Faith.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In short, if classic paganism had lingered until now, a number of things | ||
| + | might well have lingered with it; and they would look very like what we | ||
| + | call the religions of the East. There would still be<span class=" | ||
| + | teaching reincarnation, | ||
| + | reincarnation. There would still be Stoics making a religion out of | ||
| + | reason and virtue, as there are still Confucians making a religion out | ||
| + | of reason and virtue. There would still be Neo-Platonists studying | ||
| + | transcendental truths, the meaning of which was mysterious to other | ||
| + | people and disputed even amongst themselves; as the Buddhists still | ||
| + | study a transcendentalism mysterious to others and disputed among | ||
| + | themselves. There would still be intelligent Apollonians apparently | ||
| + | worshipping the sun-god but explaining that they were worshipping the | ||
| + | divine principle; just as there are still intelligent Parsees apparently | ||
| + | worshipping the sun but explaining that they are worshipping the deity. | ||
| + | There would still be wild Dionysians dancing on the mountain as there | ||
| + | are still wild Dervishes dancing in the desert. There would still be | ||
| + | crowds of people attending the popular feasts of the gods, in pagan | ||
| + | Europe as in pagan Asia. There would still be crowds of gods, local and | ||
| + | other, for them to worship. And there would still be a great many more | ||
| + | people who worshipped them than people who believed in them. Finally | ||
| + | there would still be a very large number of people who did worship gods | ||
| + | and did believe in gods; and who believed in gods and worshipped gods | ||
| + | simply because they were demons. There would still be Levantines | ||
| + | secretly sacrificing to Moloch as there are still Thugs secretly | ||
| + | sacrificing to Kalee. There would still be a great deal of magic; and a | ||
| + | great deal of it would be black magic. There would still be a | ||
| + | considerable admiration of Seneca and a considerable imitation of Nero; | ||
| + | just as the exalted epigrams of Confucius could coexist with the | ||
| + | tortures of China. And over all that tangled forest of traditions | ||
| + | growing wild or withering would brood the broad silence of a singular | ||
| + | and even nameless mood; but the nearest name of it is nothing. All these | ||
| + | things, good and bad, would have an indescribable air of being too old | ||
| + | to die.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | would bear the least likeness to Christendom. Since the Pythagorean | ||
| + | Metempsychosis would still be there, we might call it the Pythagorean | ||
| + | religion as we talk about the Buddhist religion. As the noble maxims of | ||
| + | Socrates would still be there, we might call it the Socratic religion as | ||
| + | we talk about the Confucian religion. As the popular holiday was still | ||
| + | marked by a mythological hymn to Adonis, we might call it the religion | ||
| + | of Adonis as we talk about the religion of Juggernaut. As literature | ||
| + | would still be based on the Greek mythology, we might call that | ||
| + | mythology a religion, as we call the Hindu mythology a religion. We | ||
| + | might say that there were so many thousands or millions of people | ||
| + | belonging to that religion, in the sense of frequenting such temples or | ||
| + | merely living in a land full of such temples. But if we called the last | ||
| + | tradition of Pythagoras or the lingering legend of Adonis by the name of | ||
| + | a religion, then we must find some other name for the Church of Christ.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>If anybody says that philosophic maxims preserved through many ages, or | ||
| + | mythological temples frequented by many people, are things of the same | ||
| + | class and category as the Church, it is enough to answer quite simply | ||
| + | that they are not. Nobody thinks they are the same when he sees them in | ||
| + | the old civilisation of Greece and Rome; nobody would think they were | ||
| + | the same if that civilisation had lasted two thousand years longer and | ||
| + | existed at the present day; nobody can in reason think they are the same | ||
| + | in the parallel pagan civilisation in the East, as it is at the present | ||
| + | day. None of these philosophies or mythologies are anything like a | ||
| + | Church; certainly nothing like a Church Militant. And, as I have shown | ||
| + | elsewhere, even if this rule were not already proved, the exception | ||
| + | would prove the rule. The rule is that pre-Christian or pagan history | ||
| + | does not produce a Church Militant; and the exception, or<span class=" | ||
| + | would call the exception, is that Islam is at least militant if it is | ||
| + | not Church. And that is precisely because Islam is the one religious | ||
| + | rival that is < | ||
| + | Islam was a product of Christianity; | ||
| + | if it was a bad product. It was a heresy or parody emulating and | ||
| + | therefore imitating the Church. It is no more surprising that | ||
| + | Mahomedanism had something of her fighting spirit than that Quakerism | ||
| + | had something of her peaceful spirit. After Christianity there are any | ||
| + | number of such emulations or extensions. Before it there are none.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | effect a universal deliverance. The bondage from which the world is thus | ||
| + | to be delivered is something that is very well symbolised by the state | ||
| + | of Asia as by the state of pagan Europe. I do not mean merely their | ||
| + | moral or immoral state. The missionary, as a matter of fact, has much | ||
| + | more to say for himself than the enlightened imagine, even when he says | ||
| + | that the heathen are idolatrous and immoral. A touch or two of realistic | ||
| + | experience about Eastern religion, even about Moslem religion, will | ||
| + | reveal some startling insensibilities in ethics; such as the practical | ||
| + | indifference to the line between passion and perversion. It is not | ||
| + | prejudice but practical experience which says that Asia is full of | ||
| + | demons as well as gods. But the evil I mean is in the mind. And it is in | ||
| + | the mind wherever the mind has worked for a long time alone. It is what | ||
| + | happens when all dreaming and thinking have come to an end in an | ||
| + | emptiness that is at once negation and necessity. It sounds like an | ||
| + | anarchy, but it is also a slavery. It is what has been called already | ||
| + | the wheel of Asia; all those recurrent arguments about cause and effect | ||
| + | or things beginning and ending in the mind, which make it impossible for | ||
| + | the soul really to strike out and go anywhere or do anything. And the | ||
| + | point is that it<span class=" | ||
| + | been true in the end of Europeans& | ||
| + | Church Militant had not been a thing marching, all men would have been | ||
| + | marking time. If the Church Militant had not endured a discipline, all | ||
| + | men would have endured a slavery.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | Perhaps the one thing common to mythology and philosophy was that both | ||
| + | were really sad; in the sense that they had not this hope even if they | ||
| + | had touches of faith or charity. We may call Buddhism a faith; though to | ||
| + | us it seems more like a doubt. We may call the Lord of Compassion a Lord | ||
| + | of Charity; though it seems to us a very pessimist sort of pity. But | ||
| + | those who insist most on the antiquity and size of such cults must agree | ||
| + | that in all their ages they have not covered all their areas with that | ||
| + | sort of practical and pugnacious hope. In Christendom hope has never | ||
| + | been absent; rather it has been errant, extravagant, | ||
| + | upon fugitive chances. Its perpetual revolution and reconstruction has | ||
| + | at least been an evidence of people being in better spirits. Europe did | ||
| + | very truly renew its youth like the eagles; just as the eagles of Rome | ||
| + | rose again over the legions of Napoleon, or we have seen soaring but | ||
| + | yesterday the silver eagle of Poland. But in the Polish case even | ||
| + | revolution always went with religion. Napoleon himself sought a | ||
| + | reconciliation with religion. Religion could never be finally separated | ||
| + | even from the most hostile of the hopes; simply because it was the real | ||
| + | source of the hopefulness. And the cause of this is to be found simply | ||
| + | in the religion itself. Those who quarrel about it seldom even consider | ||
| + | it in itself. There is neither space nor place for such a full | ||
| + | consideration here; but a word may be said to explain a reconciliation | ||
| + | that always recurs and still seems to require explanation.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | until people face the fact that the only liberal part of it is really | ||
| + | the dogmatic part. If dogma is incredible, it is because it is | ||
| + | incredibly liberal. If it is irrational, it can only be in giving us | ||
| + | more assurance of freedom than is justified by reason. The obvious | ||
| + | example is that essential form of freedom which we call free-will. It is | ||
| + | absurd to say that a man shows his liberality in denying his liberty. | ||
| + | But it is tenable that he has to affirm a transcendental doctrine in | ||
| + | order to affirm his liberty. There is a sense in which we might | ||
| + | reasonably say that if man has a primary power of choice, he has in that | ||
| + | fact a supernatural power of creation, as if he could raise the dead or | ||
| + | give birth to the unbegotten. Possibly in that case a man must be a | ||
| + | miracle; and certainly in that case he must be a miracle in order to be | ||
| + | a man; and most certainly in order to be a free man. But it is absurd to | ||
| + | forbid him to be a free man and do it in the name of a more free | ||
| + | religion.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | God must believe in the absolute supremacy of God. But in so far as that | ||
| + | supremacy does allow of any degrees that can be called liberal or | ||
| + | illiberal, it is self-evident that the illiberal power is the deity of | ||
| + | the rationalists and the liberal power is the deity of the dogmatists. | ||
| + | Exactly in proportion as you turn monotheism into monism you turn it | ||
| + | into despotism. It is precisely the unknown God of the scientist, with | ||
| + | his impenetrable purpose and his inevitable and unalterable law, that | ||
| + | reminds us of a Prussian autocrat making rigid plans in a remote tent | ||
| + | and moving mankind like machinery. It is precisely the God of miracles | ||
| + | and of answered prayers who reminds us of a liberal and popular prince, | ||
| + | receiving petitions, listening to parliaments and considering the cases | ||
| + | of a whole people. I am not now arguing the rationality of this | ||
| + | conception in other respects; as a matter of fact it is not, as some | ||
| + | suppose, irrational; for there is nothing irrational in<span class=" | ||
| + | most well-informed king acting differently according to the action of | ||
| + | those he wishes to save. But I am here only noting the general nature of | ||
| + | liberality, or of free or enlarged atmosphere of action. And in this | ||
| + | respect it is certain that the king can only be what we call magnanimous | ||
| + | if he is what some call capricious. It is the Catholic, who has the | ||
| + | feeling that his prayers do make a difference when offered for the | ||
| + | living and the dead, who also has the feeling of living like a free | ||
| + | citizen in something almost like a constitutional commonwealth. It is | ||
| + | the monist who lives under a single iron law who must have the feeling | ||
| + | of living like a slave under a sultan. Indeed I believe that the | ||
| + | original use of the word < | ||
| + | a vote, was that employed in theology about a prayer. The dead in | ||
| + | Purgatory were said to have the suffrages of the living. And in this | ||
| + | sense, of a sort of right of petition to the supreme ruler, we may truly | ||
| + | say that the whole of the Communion of Saints, as well as the whole of | ||
| + | the Church Militant, is founded on universal suffrage.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | which has created the divine comedy of our creed. Nothing short of the | ||
| + | extreme and strong and startling doctrine of the divinity of Christ will | ||
| + | give that particular effect that can truly stir the popular sense like a | ||
| + | trumpet; the idea of the king himself serving in the ranks like a common | ||
| + | soldier. By making that figure merely human we make that story much less | ||
| + | human. We take away the point of the story which actually pierces | ||
| + | humanity; the point of the story which was quite literally the point of | ||
| + | a spear. It does not especially humanise the universe to say that good | ||
| + | and wise men can die for their opinions; any more than it would be any | ||
| + | sort of uproariously popular news in an army that good soldiers may | ||
| + | easily get killed. It is no news that King Leonidas is dead any more | ||
| + | than that Queen< | ||
| + | be men, in the full sense of being heroes. But if we are describing, for | ||
| + | the moment, the atmosphere of what is generous and popular and even | ||
| + | picturesque, | ||
| + | sufferings of the sons of men, or even of the servants of God, strike | ||
| + | the same note as the notion of the master suffering instead of his | ||
| + | servants. And this is given by the theological and emphatically not by | ||
| + | the scientific deity. No mysterious monarch, hidden in his starry | ||
| + | pavilion at the base of the cosmic campaign, is in the least like that | ||
| + | celestial chivalry of the Captain who carries his five wounds in the | ||
| + | front of battle.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | rather that dogma is too good to be true. That is, he means that dogma | ||
| + | is too liberal to be likely. Dogma gives man too much freedom when it | ||
| + | permits him to fall. Dogma gives even God too much freedom when it | ||
| + | permits him to die. That is what the intelligent sceptics ought to say; | ||
| + | and it is not in the least my intention to deny that there is something | ||
| + | to be said for it. They mean that the universe is itself a universal | ||
| + | prison; that existence itself is a limitation and a control; and it is | ||
| + | not for nothing that they call causation a chain. In a word, they mean | ||
| + | quite simply that they cannot believe these things; not in the least | ||
| + | that they are unworthy of belief. We say, not lightly but very | ||
| + | literally, that the truth has made us free. They say that it makes us so | ||
| + | free that it cannot be the truth. To them it is like believing in | ||
| + | fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy. It is like believing | ||
| + | in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like | ||
| + | accepting a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to | ||
| + | believe in a man who is free to ask or a God who is free to answer. This | ||
| + | is a manly and a rational negation, for which I for one shall always | ||
| + | show respect. But I decline to<span class=" | ||
| + | all clip the bird and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the | ||
| + | freedom, close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of | ||
| + | eternal iron, tell us that our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a | ||
| + | necessity; and then calmly turn round and tell us they have a freer | ||
| + | thought and a more liberal theology.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | other words, it is a vision, and a vision received by faith; but it is a | ||
| + | vision of reality. The faith consists in a conviction of its reality. | ||
| + | That, for example, is the difference between a vision and a day-dream. | ||
| + | And that is the difference between religion and mythology. That is the | ||
| + | difference between faith and all that fancy-work, quite human and more | ||
| + | or less healthy, which we considered under the head of mythology. There | ||
| + | is something in the reasonable use of the very word vision that implies | ||
| + | two things about it; first that it comes very rarely, possibly that it | ||
| + | comes only once; and secondly that it probably comes once and for all. A | ||
| + | day-dream may come every day. A day-dream may be different every day. It | ||
| + | is something more than the difference between telling ghost-stories and | ||
| + | meeting a ghost.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | philosophy because, being a vision, it is not a pattern but a picture. | ||
| + | It is not one of those simplifications which resolve everything into an | ||
| + | abstract explanation; | ||
| + | relative; or everything is inevitable; or everything is illusive. It is | ||
| + | not a process but a story. It has proportions, | ||
| + | picture or a story; it has not the regular repetitions of a pattern or a | ||
| + | process; but it replaces them by being convincing as a picture or a | ||
| + | story is convincing. In other words, it is exactly, as the phrase goes, | ||
| + | like life. For indeed it is life. An example of what is meant here might | ||
| + | well be found in the treatment of the problem of evil. It is easy< | ||
| + | enough to make a plan of life of which the background is black, as the | ||
| + | pessimists do; and then admit a speck or two of star-dust more or less | ||
| + | accidental, or at least in the literal sense insignificant. And it is | ||
| + | easy enough to make another plan on white paper, as the Christian | ||
| + | Scientists do, and explain or explain away somehow such dots or smudges | ||
| + | as may be difficult to deny. Lastly it is easiest of all, perhaps, to | ||
| + | say as the dualists do, that life is like a chess-board in which the two | ||
| + | are equal; and can as truly be said to consist of white squares on a | ||
| + | black board or of black squares on a white board. But every man feels in | ||
| + | his heart that none of these three paper plans is like life; that none | ||
| + | of these worlds is one in which he can live. Something tells him that | ||
| + | the ultimate idea of a world is not bad or even neutral; staring at the | ||
| + | sky or the grass or the truths of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he | ||
| + | has a vague feeling like the shadow of that saying of the great | ||
| + | Christian philosopher, | ||
| + | good.’ On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly | ||
| + | and debased and even diseased to minimise evil to a dot or even a blot. | ||
| + | He realises that optimism is morbid. It is if possible even more morbid | ||
| + | than pessimism. These vague but healthy feelings, if he followed them | ||
| + | out, would result in the idea that evil is in some way an exception but | ||
| + | an enormous exception; and ultimately that evil is an invasion or yet | ||
| + | more truly a rebellion. He does not think that everything is right or | ||
| + | that everything is wrong, or that everything is equally right and wrong. | ||
| + | But he does think that right has a right to be right and therefore a | ||
| + | right to be there; and wrong has no right to be wrong and therefore no | ||
| + | right to be there. It is the prince of the world; but it is also a | ||
| + | usurper. So he will apprehend vaguely what the vision will give to him | ||
| + | vividly; no less than all that strange story of treason in heaven and | ||
| + | the great desertion by which evil damaged and tried< | ||
| + | that it could not create. It is a very strange story and its proportions | ||
| + | and its lines and colours are as arbitrary and absolute as the artistic | ||
| + | composition of a picture. It is a vision which we do in fact symbolise | ||
| + | in pictures by titanic limbs and passionate tints of plumage; all that | ||
| + | abysmal vision of falling stars and the peacock panoplies of the night. | ||
| + | But that strange story has one small advantage over the diagrams. It is | ||
| + | like life.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | is called the problem of progress. One of the ablest agnostics of the | ||
| + | age once asked me whether I thought mankind grew better or grew worse or | ||
| + | remained the same. He was confident that the alternative covered all | ||
| + | possibilities. He did not see that it only covered patterns and not | ||
| + | pictures; processes and not stories. I asked him whether he thought that | ||
| + | Mr. Smith of Golder’s Green got better or worse or remained exactly the | ||
| + | same between the age of thirty and forty. It then seemed to dawn on him | ||
| + | that it would rather depend on Mr. Smith; and how he chose to go on. It | ||
| + | had never occurred to him that it might depend on how mankind chose to | ||
| + | go on; and that its course was not a straight line or an upward or | ||
| + | downward curve, but a track like that of a man across a valley, going | ||
| + | where he liked and stopping where he chose, going into a church or | ||
| + | falling drunk in a ditch. The life of man is a story; an adventure | ||
| + | story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of | ||
| + | a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in | ||
| + | that sense one of a hundred philosophies; | ||
| + | is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is | ||
| + | something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal | ||
| + | narrative instinct which produced all the fairy-tales< | ||
| + | is neglected by all the philosophies& | ||
| + | justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for | ||
| + | it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an | ||
| + | adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man | ||
| + | in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both | ||
| + | there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in | ||
| + | other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at | ||
| + | it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it. Now this deep and | ||
| + | democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all the | ||
| + | other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where | ||
| + | they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends | ||
| + | differently; | ||
| + | Buddha and his wheel to Akhen-Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with | ||
| + | his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, | ||
| + | there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul | ||
| + | of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion | ||
| + | of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each | ||
| + | of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does | ||
| + | something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by | ||
| + | fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of | ||
| + | adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of | ||
| + | drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into | ||
| + | atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral | ||
| + | consequences; | ||
| + | monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests | ||
| + | insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a | ||
| + | thing as the divine story which is also a human story. But there is no | ||
| + | such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story | ||
| + | or a determinist story. For every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a | ||
| + | cheap novelette,< | ||
| + | not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end | ||
| + | with a last judgment.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | until Christ came. That is why the Athenian democracy killed Socrates | ||
| + | out of respect for the gods; and why every strolling sophist gave | ||
| + | himself the airs of a Socrates whenever he could talk in a superior | ||
| + | fashion of the gods; and why the heretic Pharaoh wrecked his huge idols | ||
| + | and temples for an abstraction and why the priests could return in | ||
| + | triumph and trample his dynasty under foot; and why Buddhism had to | ||
| + | divide itself from Brahminism, and why in every age and country outside | ||
| + | Christendom there has been a feud for ever between the philosopher and | ||
| + | the priest. It is easy enough to say that the philosopher is generally | ||
| + | the more rational; it is easier still to forget that the priest is | ||
| + | always the more popular. For the priest told the people stories; and the | ||
| + | philosopher did not understand the philosophy of stories. It came into | ||
| + | the world with the story of Christ.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | Any one who will think of the theory of stories or pictures will easily | ||
| + | see the point. The true story of the world must be told by somebody to | ||
| + | somebody else. By the very nature of a story it cannot be left to occur | ||
| + | to anybody. A story has proportions, | ||
| + | dispositions, | ||
| + | sum. We could not deduce whether or no Achilles would give back the body | ||
| + | of Hector from a Pythagorean theory of number or recurrence; and we | ||
| + | could not infer for ourselves in what way the world would get back the | ||
| + | body of Christ, merely from being told that all things go round and | ||
| + | round upon the wheel of Buddha. A man might perhaps work out a | ||
| + | proposition of Euclid without having heard of Euclid; but he would not | ||
| + | work out the precise legend< | ||
| + | Eurydice. At any rate he would not be certain how the story would end | ||
| + | and whether Orpheus was ultimately defeated. Still less could he guess | ||
| + | the end of our story; or the legend of our Orpheus rising, not defeated, | ||
| + | from the dead.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>To sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man | ||
| + | offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring | ||
| + | tendencies of the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most | ||
| + | certainly never satisfied together. It met the mythological search for | ||
| + | romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being | ||
| + | a true story. That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical | ||
| + | character, as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical | ||
| + | character. But that is also why the historical character had to be the | ||
| + | ideal figure; and even fulfil many of the functions given to these other | ||
| + | ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he | ||
| + | could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun. | ||
| + | The more deeply we think of the matter the more we shall conclude that, | ||
| + | if there be indeed a God, his creation could hardly have reached any | ||
| + | other culmination than this granting of a real romance to the world. | ||
| + | Otherwise the two sides of the human mind could never have touched at | ||
| + | all; and the brain of man would have remained cloven and double; one | ||
| + | lobe of it dreaming impossible dreams and the other repeating invariable | ||
| + | calculations. The picture-makers would have remained for ever painting | ||
| + | the portrait of nobody. The sages would have remained for ever adding up | ||
| + | numerals that came to nothing. It was that abyss that nothing but an | ||
| + | incarnation could cover; a divine embodiment of our dreams; and he | ||
| + | stands above that chasm whose name is more than priest and older even | ||
| + | than Christendom; | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | the same tradition; the perfect pattern of the keys. This is a | ||
| + | historical and not a theological outline, and it is not my duty here to | ||
| + | defend in detail that theology, but merely to point out that it could | ||
| + | not even be justified in design without being justified in detail& | ||
| + | a key. Beyond the broad suggestion of this chapter I attempt no | ||
| + | apologetic about why the creed should be accepted. But in answer to the | ||
| + | historical query of why it was accepted, and is accepted, I answer for | ||
| + | millions of others in my reply; because it fits the lock; because it is | ||
| + | like life. It is one among many stories; only it happens to be a true | ||
| + | story. It is one among many philosophies; | ||
| + | truth. We accept it; and the ground is solid under our feet and the road | ||
| + | is open before us. It does not imprison us in a dream of destiny or a | ||
| + | consciousness of the universal delusion. It opens to us not only | ||
| + | incredible heavens, but what seems to some an equally incredible earth, | ||
| + | and makes it credible. This is the sort of truth that is hard to explain | ||
| + | because it is a fact; but it is a fact to which we can call witnesses. | ||
| + | We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but | ||
| + | because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of | ||
| + | liberty blow over the land of the living.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE FIVE DEATHS OF THE FAITH</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | Christianity, | ||
| + | involves controversies of which I hope to write more fully elsewhere. It | ||
| + | is devoted only to the suggestion that Christianity, | ||
| + | heathen humanity, had all the character of a unique thing and even of a | ||
| + | supernatural thing. It was not like any of the other things; and the | ||
| + | more we study it the less it looks like any of them. But there is a | ||
| + | certain rather peculiar character which marked it henceforward even down | ||
| + | to the present moment, with a note on which this book may well conclude.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old | ||
| + | to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had | ||
| + | a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. | ||
| + | Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who | ||
| + | knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which | ||
| + | marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over | ||
| + | and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the | ||
| + | same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always | ||
| + | converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion. This | ||
| + | truth is hidden from many by a convention that is too little noticed. | ||
| + | Curiously enough, it is a convention of the sort which those who ignore | ||
| + | it claim especially to detect and denounce. They are always telling us | ||
| + | that priests and ceremonies< | ||
| + | organisation can be a hollow sham; but they hardly realise how true it | ||
| + | is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of | ||
| + | Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; | ||
| + | almost every man in his heart expected its end. This fact is only masked | ||
| + | in medieval and other times by that very official religion which such | ||
| + | critics pride themselves on seeing through. Christianity remained the | ||
| + | official religion of a Renaissance prince or the official religion of an | ||
| + | eighteenth-century bishop, just as an ancient mythology remained the | ||
| + | official religion of Julius Caesar or the Arian creed long remained the | ||
| + | official religion of Julian the Apostate. But there was a difference | ||
| + | between the cases of Julius and of Julian; because the Church had begun | ||
| + | its strange career. There was no reason why men like Julius should not | ||
| + | worship gods like Jupiter for ever in public and laugh at them for ever | ||
| + | in private. But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it | ||
| + | had come to life again. He also found, incidentally, | ||
| + | the faintest sign of Jupiter ever coming to life again. This case of | ||
| + | Julian and the episode of Arianism is but the first of a series of | ||
| + | examples that can only be roughly indicated here. Arianism, as has been | ||
| + | said, had every human appearance of being the natural way in which that | ||
| + | particular superstition of Constantine might be expected to peter out. | ||
| + | All the ordinary stages had been passed through; the creed had become a | ||
| + | respectable thing, had become a ritual thing, had then been modified | ||
| + | into a rational thing; and the rationalists were ready to dissipate the | ||
| + | last remains of it, just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again | ||
| + | suddenly and threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising | ||
| + | from the dead. But there are many other examples of the same thing, even | ||
| + | about the same time. The rush of missionaries from Ireland, for | ||
| + | instance, has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an | ||
| + | old<span class=" | ||
| + | of them were martyred on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority | ||
| + | on Cornish antiquities told me that he did not believe for a moment that | ||
| + | they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it with some humour) | ||
| + | ‘by rather slack Christians.’</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | scope of this argument to do, I suspect that we should find several | ||
| + | occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from | ||
| + | within by doubt and indifference, | ||
| + | stood as the Pagan shell had stood so long. But the difference is that | ||
| + | in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the | ||
| + | fathers had been slack about it. This is obvious in the case of the | ||
| + | transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. It is | ||
| + | obvious in the case of a transition from the eighteenth century to the | ||
| + | many Catholic revivals of our own time. But I suspect many other | ||
| + | examples which would be worthy of separate studies.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might | ||
| + | have happened in Asia or ancient Europe, in that indifference or | ||
| + | tolerance in which mythologies and philosophies could live for ever side | ||
| + | by side. It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this | ||
| + | western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing. | ||
| + | Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and | ||
| + | reconstruction; | ||
| + | rejecting this old stone and ended by making it the head of the corner; | ||
| + | by bringing it back from the rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the | ||
| + | capitol. Some stones of Stonehenge are standing and some are fallen; and | ||
| + | as the stone falleth so shall it lie. There has not been a Druidic | ||
| + | renaissance every< | ||
| + | fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge has | ||
| + | not been rebuilt in every style of architecture from the rude round | ||
| + | Norman to the last rococo of the Baroque. The sacred place of the Druids | ||
| + | is safe from the vandalism of restoration.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed. | ||
| + | The consequence was that superficially and externally it often did get | ||
| + | killed; nay, it sometimes wore out even without getting killed. And | ||
| + | there follows a fact I find it somewhat difficult to describe, yet which | ||
| + | I believe to be very real and rather important. As a ghost is the shadow | ||
| + | of a man, and in that sense the shadow of life, so at intervals there | ||
| + | passed across this endless life a sort of shadow of death. It came at | ||
| + | the moment when it would have perished had it been perishable. It | ||
| + | withered away everything that was perishable. If such animal parallels | ||
| + | were worthy of the occasion, we might say that the snake shuddered and | ||
| + | shed a skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as | ||
| + | it lost only one of its nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives. It is truer | ||
| + | to say, in a more dignified image, that a clock struck and nothing | ||
| + | happened; or that a bell tolled for an execution that was everlastingly | ||
| + | postponed.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | century; when, as it has been so finely said, Julian stirred in his | ||
| + | sleep? Why did there appear so strangely early, in the twilight of dawn | ||
| + | after the Dark Ages, so deep a scepticism as that involved in urging | ||
| + | nominalism against realism? For realism against nominalism was really | ||
| + | realism against rationalism, | ||
| + | call rationalism. The answer is that just as some might have thought the | ||
| + | Church simply a part of the Roman Empire, so others later might have | ||
| + | thought the Church only a part of the Dark< | ||
| + | the Empire had ended; and the Church should have departed with them, if | ||
| + | she had been also one of the shades of night. It was another of those | ||
| + | spectral deaths or simulations of death. I mean that if nominalism had | ||
| + | succeeded, it would have been as if Arianism had succeeded; it would | ||
| + | have been the beginning of a confession that Christianity had failed. | ||
| + | For nominalism is a far more fundamental scepticism than mere atheism. | ||
| + | Such was the question that was openly asked as the Dark Ages broadened | ||
| + | into that daylight that we call the modern world. But what was the | ||
| + | answer? The answer was Aquinas in the chair of Aristotle, taking all | ||
| + | knowledge for his province; and tens of thousands of lads, down to the | ||
| + | lowest ranks of peasant and serf, living in rags and on crusts about the | ||
| + | great colleges, to listen to the scholastic philosophy.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | under the shadow of Islam, and fills every old romance with incongruous | ||
| + | images of Saracen knights swaggering in Norway or the Hebrides? Why were | ||
| + | men in the extreme West, such as King John if I remember rightly, | ||
| + | accused of being secretly Moslems, as men are accused of being secretly | ||
| + | atheists? Why was there that fierce alarm among some of the authorities | ||
| + | about the rationalistic Arab version or Aristotle? Authorities are | ||
| + | seldom alarmed like that except when it is too late. The answer is that | ||
| + | hundreds of people probably believed in their hearts that Islam would | ||
| + | conquer Christendom; | ||
| + | the Saracen culture was really, as it was superficially, | ||
| + | culture. Here again we should probably find a whole generation, the | ||
| + | older generation, very doubtful and depressed and weary. The coming of | ||
| + | Islam would only have been the coming of Unitarianism a thousand years | ||
| + | before its time. To many it may have seemed quite reasonable and quite | ||
| + | probable and quite likely to happen. If so, they would have< | ||
| + | surprised at what did happen. What did happen was a roar like thunder | ||
| + | from thousands and thousands of young men, throwing all their youth into | ||
| + | one exultant counter-charge; | ||
| + | Francis, the Jugglers of God, wandering singing over all the roads of | ||
| + | the world; it was the Gothic going up like a flight of arrows; it was | ||
| + | the waking of the world. In considering the war of the Albigensians, | ||
| + | come to the breach in the heart of Europe and the landslide of a new | ||
| + | philosophy that nearly ended Christendom for ever. In that case the new | ||
| + | philosophy was also a very new philosophy; it was pessimism. It was none | ||
| + | the less like modern ideas because it was as old as Asia; most modern | ||
| + | ideas are. It was the Gnostics returning; but why did the Gnostics | ||
| + | return? Because it was the end of an epoch, like the end of the Empire; | ||
| + | and should have been the end of the Church. It was Schopenhauer hovering | ||
| + | over the future; but it was also Manichaeus rising from the dead; that | ||
| + | men might have death and that they might have it more abundantly.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It is rather more obvious in the case of the Renaissance, | ||
| + | the period is so much nearer to us and people know so much more about | ||
| + | it. But there is more even in that example than most people know. Apart | ||
| + | from the particular controversies which I wish to reserve for a separate | ||
| + | study, the period was far more chaotic than those controversies commonly | ||
| + | imply. When Protestants call Latimer a martyr to Protestantism, | ||
| + | Catholics reply that Campion was a martyr to Catholicism, | ||
| + | forgotten that many perished in such persecutions who could only be | ||
| + | described as martyrs to atheism or anarchism or even diabolism. That | ||
| + | world was almost as wild as our own; the men wandering about in it | ||
| + | included the sort of man who says there is no God, the sort of man who | ||
| + | says he is himself God, the sort of man who says something that nobody | ||
| + | can make head or<span class=" | ||
| + | age following the Renaissance, | ||
| + | shameless negations. The remarks attributed to Marlowe are probably | ||
| + | pretty typical of the talk in many intellectual taverns. The transition | ||
| + | from Pre-Reformation to Post-Reformation Europe was through a void of | ||
| + | very yawning questions; yet again in the long run the answer was the | ||
| + | same. It was one of those moments when, as Christ walked on the water, | ||
| + | so was Christianity walking in the air.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | detail. We can see the fact much more clearly in the case when the | ||
| + | paganism of the Renaissance ended Christianity and Christianity | ||
| + | unaccountably began all over again. But we can see it most clearly of | ||
| + | all in the case which is close to us and full of manifest and minute | ||
| + | evidence; the case of the great decline of religion that began about the | ||
| + | time of Voltaire. For indeed it is our own case; and we ourselves have | ||
| + | seen the decline of that decline. The two hundred years since Voltaire | ||
| + | do not flash past us at a glance like the fourth and fifth centuries or | ||
| + | the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In our own case we can see this | ||
| + | oft-repeated process close at hand; we know how completely a society can | ||
| + | lose its fundamental religion without abolishing its official religion; | ||
| + | we know how men can all become agnostics long before they abolish | ||
| + | bishops. And we know that also in this last ending, which really did | ||
| + | look to us like the final ending, the incredible thing has happened | ||
| + | again; the Faith has a better following among the young men than among | ||
| + | the old. When Ibsen spoke of the new generation knocking at the door, he | ||
| + | certainly never expected that it would be the church-door.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, | ||
| + | the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to | ||
| + | all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five< | ||
| + | dog that died. How complete was the collapse and how strange the | ||
| + | reversal, we can only see in detail in the case nearest to our own time.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>A thousand things have been said about the Oxford Movement and the | ||
| + | parallel French Catholic revival; but few have made us feel the simplest | ||
| + | fact about it; that it was a surprise. It was a puzzle as well as a | ||
| + | surprise; because it seemed to most people like a river turning | ||
| + | backwards from the sea and trying to climb back into the mountains. To | ||
| + | have read the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is | ||
| + | to know that nearly everybody had come to take it for granted that | ||
| + | religion was a thing that would continually broaden like a river, till | ||
| + | it reached an infinite sea. Some of them expected it to go down in a | ||
| + | cataract of catastrophe, | ||
| + | estuary of equality and moderation; but all of them thought its | ||
| + | returning on itself a prodigy as incredible as witchcraft. In other | ||
| + | words, most moderate people thought that faith like freedom would be | ||
| + | slowly broadened down; and some advanced people thought that it would be | ||
| + | very rapidly broadened down, not to say flattened out. All that world of | ||
| + | Guizot and Macaulay and the commercial and scientific liberality was | ||
| + | perhaps more certain than any men before or since about the direction in | ||
| + | which the world is going. People were so certain about the direction | ||
| + | that they only differed about the pace. Many anticipated with alarm, and | ||
| + | a few with sympathy, a Jacobin revolt that should guillotine the | ||
| + | Archbishop of Canterbury or a Chartist riot that should hang the parsons | ||
| + | on the lamp-posts. But it seemed like a convulsion in nature that the | ||
| + | Archbishop instead of losing his head should be looking for his mitre; | ||
| + | and that instead of diminishing the respect due to parsons we should | ||
| + | strengthen it to the respect due to priests. It revolutionised their | ||
| + | very vision of revolution; and turned their very topsyturvydom | ||
| + | topsy-turvy.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In short, the whole world being divided about whether the stream was | ||
| + | going slower or faster, became conscious of something vague but vast | ||
| + | that was going against the stream. Both in fact and figure there is | ||
| + | something deeply disturbing about this, and that for an essential | ||
| + | reason. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can | ||
| + | go against it. A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all | ||
| + | the swiftness of a leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim | ||
| + | backwards. A paper boat can ride the rising deluge with all the airy | ||
| + | arrogance of a fairy ship; but if the fairy ship sails upstream it is | ||
| + | really rowed by the fairies. And among the things that merely went with | ||
| + | the tide of apparent progress and enlargement, | ||
| + | demagogue or sophist whose wild gestures were in truth as lifeless as | ||
| + | the movement of a dead dog’s limbs wavering in the eddying water; and | ||
| + | many a philosophy uncommonly like a paper boat, of the sort that it is | ||
| + | not difficult to knock into a cocked hat. But even the truly living and | ||
| + | even life-giving things that went with that stream did not thereby prove | ||
| + | that they were living or life-giving. It was this other force that was | ||
| + | unquestionably and unaccountably alive; the mysterious and unmeasured | ||
| + | energy that was thrusting back the river. That was felt to be like the | ||
| + | movement of some great monster; and it was none the less clearly a | ||
| + | living monster because most people thought it a prehistoric monster. It | ||
| + | was none the less an unnatural, an incongruous, | ||
| + | upheaval; as if the Great Sea Serpent had suddenly risen out of the | ||
| + | Round Pond& | ||
| + | the Serpentine. This flippant element in the fantasy must not be missed, | ||
| + | for it was one of the clearest testimonies to the unexpected nature of | ||
| + | the reversal. That age did really feel that a preposterous quality in | ||
| + | prehistoric animals belonged also to historic rituals; that mitres and | ||
| + | tiaras were like the horns or crests of antediluvian creatures; and<span class=" | ||
| + | that appealing to a Primitive Church was like dressing up as a Primitive | ||
| + | Man.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | still moves. I have said something elsewhere of the rather random sort | ||
| + | of reproaches that are still directed against it and its much greater | ||
| + | consequences; | ||
| + | reproach it the less they explain it. In a sense it is my concern here, | ||
| + | if not to explain it, at least to suggest the direction of the | ||
| + | explanation; | ||
| + | thing about it. And that is that it had all happened before; and even | ||
| + | many times before.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>To sum up, in so far as it is true that recent centuries have seen an | ||
| + | attenuation of Christian doctrine, recent centuries have only seen what | ||
| + | the most remote centuries have seen. And even the modern example has | ||
| + | only ended as the medieval and pre-medieval examples ended. It is | ||
| + | already clear, and grows clearer every day, that it is not going to end | ||
| + | in the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather in the return | ||
| + | of those parts of it that had really disappeared. It is going to end as | ||
| + | the Arian compromise ended, as the attempts at a compromise with | ||
| + | Nominalism and even with Albigensianism ended. But the point to seize in | ||
| + | the modern case, as in all the other cases, is that what returns is not | ||
| + | in that sense a simplified theology; not according to that view a | ||
| + | purified theology; it is simply theology. It is that enthusiasm for | ||
| + | theological studies that marked the most doctrinal ages; it is the | ||
| + | divine science. An old Don with D.D. after his name may have become the | ||
| + | typical figure of a bore; but that was because he was himself bored with | ||
| + | his theology, not because he was excited about it. It was precisely | ||
| + | because he was admittedly more interested in the Latin of Plautus than | ||
| + | in the Latin of Augustine, in the Greek of Xenophon than in the Greek of | ||
| + | Chrysostom. It was precisely because he was more interested in a<span class=" | ||
| + | tradition than in a decidedly living tradition. In short, it was | ||
| + | precisely because he was himself a type of the time in which Christian | ||
| + | faith was weak. It was not because men would not hail, if they could, | ||
| + | the wonderful and almost wild vision of a Doctor of Divinity.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | They mean, very literally, that they wish it to remain as a ghost. But | ||
| + | it is not going to remain as a ghost. What follows this process of | ||
| + | apparent death is not the lingering of the shade; it is the resurrection | ||
| + | of the body. These people are quite prepared to shed pious and | ||
| + | reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what they are | ||
| + | not prepared for is the Son of God walking once more upon the hills of | ||
| + | morning. These people, and indeed most people, were indeed by this time | ||
| + | quite accustomed to the idea that the old Christian candle-light would | ||
| + | fade into the light of common day. To many of them it did quite honestly | ||
| + | appear like that pale yellow flame of a candle when it is left burning | ||
| + | in daylight. It was all the more unexpected, and therefore all the more | ||
| + | unmistakable, | ||
| + | heaven like a miraculous tree and flamed until the sun turned pale. But | ||
| + | other ages have seen the day conquer the candle-light and then the | ||
| + | candle-light conquer the day. Again and again, before our time, men have | ||
| + | grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there has | ||
| + | followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson | ||
| + | cataract, the strength of the red original wine. And we only say once | ||
| + | more to-day as has been said many times by our fathers: ‘Long years and | ||
| + | centuries ago our fathers or the founders of our people drank, as they | ||
| + | dreamed, of the blood of God. Long years and centuries have passed since | ||
| + | the strength of that giant vintage has been anything but a legend of the | ||
| + | age of giants. Centuries ago already is the dark time< | ||
| + | fermentation, | ||
| + | Calvinism. Long since that bitter drink has been itself diluted; rinsed | ||
| + | out and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the world. | ||
| + | Never did we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity and | ||
| + | the spirit, still less the richer and the sweeter strength of the purple | ||
| + | vineyards in our dreams of the age of gold. Day by day and year by year | ||
| + | we have lowered our hopes and lessened our convictions; | ||
| + | more and more used to seeing those vats and vineyards overwhelmed in the | ||
| + | water-floods and the last savour and suggestion of that special element | ||
| + | fading like a stain of purple upon a sea of grey. We have grown used to | ||
| + | dilution, to dissolution, | ||
| + | Thou hast kept the good wine until now.’</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age. It has | ||
| + | not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death; in the | ||
| + | sense of coming to a natural and necessary end. It is obvious that it | ||
| + | has survived the most savage and the most universal persecutions from | ||
| + | the shock of the Diocletian fury to the shock of the French Revolution. | ||
| + | But it has a more strange and even a more weird tenacity; it has | ||
| + | survived not only war but peace. It has not only died often but | ||
| + | degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness | ||
| + | and even its own surrender. We need not repeat what is so obvious about | ||
| + | the beauty of the end of Christ in its wedding of youth and death. But | ||
| + | this is almost as if Christ had lived to the last possible span, had | ||
| + | been a white-haired sage of a hundred and died of natural decay, and | ||
| + | then had risen again rejuvenated, | ||
| + | sky. It was said truly enough that human Christianity in its recurrent | ||
| + | weakness was sometimes too much wedded to the powers of the world; but | ||
| + | if it<span class=" | ||
| + | immortal sort of widow. An enemy may have said at one moment that it was | ||
| + | but an aspect of the power of the Caesars; and it sounds as strange | ||
| + | to-day as to call it an aspect of the Pharaohs. An enemy might say that | ||
| + | it was the official faith of feudalism; and it sounds as convincing now | ||
| + | as to say that it was bound to perish with the ancient Roman villa. All | ||
| + | these things did indeed run their course to its normal end; and there | ||
| + | seemed no course for the religion but to end with them. It ended and it | ||
| + | began again.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | The civilisation of antiquity was the whole world: and men no more | ||
| + | dreamed of its ending than of the ending of daylight. They could not | ||
| + | imagine another order unless it were in another world. The civilisation | ||
| + | of the world has passed away and those words have not passed away. In | ||
| + | the long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was so familiar a thing that | ||
| + | no man could imagine himself without a lord: and religion was so woven | ||
| + | into that network that no man would have believed they could be torn | ||
| + | asunder. Feudalism itself was torn to rags and rotted away in the | ||
| + | popular life of the true Middle Ages; and the first and freshest power | ||
| + | in that new freedom was the old religion. Feudalism had passed away, and | ||
| + | the words did not pass away. The whole medieval order, in many ways so | ||
| + | complete and almost cosmic a home for man, wore out gradually in its | ||
| + | turn: and here at least it was thought that the words would die. They | ||
| + | went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty | ||
| + | years were using all its light and learning for new religious | ||
| + | foundations, | ||
| + | withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was | ||
| + | supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of | ||
| + | Revolution. Science explained it away; and it<span class=" | ||
| + | disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future. | ||
| + | To-day it stands once more in our path; and even as we watch it, it | ||
| + | grows.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men | ||
| + | really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a | ||
| + | story, it would seem that sooner or later even its enemies will learn | ||
| + | from their incessant and interminable disappointments not to look for | ||
| + | anything so simple as its death. They may continue to war with it, but | ||
| + | it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as | ||
| + | they war with the skies. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words | ||
| + | shall not pass away.’ They will watch for it to stumble; they will watch | ||
| + | for it to err; they will no longer watch for it to end. Insensibly, even | ||
| + | unconsciously, | ||
| + | relative terms of that astounding prophecy; they will forget to watch | ||
| + | for the mere extinction of what has so often been vainly extinguished; | ||
| + | and will learn instinctively to look first for the coming of the comet | ||
| + | or the freezing of the star.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | THE SUMMARY OF THIS BOOK</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | about an Outline of History; though this study of a special truth and a | ||
| + | special error can of course claim no sort of comparison with the rich | ||
| + | and many-sided encyclopedia of history, for which that name was chosen. | ||
| + | And yet there is a certain reason in the reference; and a sense in which | ||
| + | the one thing touches and even cuts across the other. For the story of | ||
| + | the world as told by Mr. Wells could here only be criticised as an | ||
| + | outline. And, strangely enough, it seems to me that it is only wrong as | ||
| + | an outline. It is admirable as an accumulation of history; it is | ||
| + | splendid as a storehouse or treasury of history; it is a fascinating | ||
| + | disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification of | ||
| + | history; but it is quite false as an outline of history. The one thing | ||
| + | that seems to me quite wrong about it is the outline; the sort of | ||
| + | outline that can really be a single line, like that which makes all the | ||
| + | difference between a caricature of the profile of Mr. Winston Churchill | ||
| + | and of Sir Alfred Mond. In simple and homely language, I mean the things | ||
| + | that stick out; the things that make the simplicity of a silhouette. I | ||
| + | think the proportions are wrong; the proportions of what is certain as | ||
| + | compared with what is uncertain, of what played a great part as compared | ||
| + | with what played a smaller part, of what is ordinary and what is | ||
| + | extraordinary, | ||
| + | out as an exception.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>I do not say it as a small criticism of a great writer,< | ||
| + | reason to do so; for in my own much smaller task I feel I have failed in | ||
| + | very much the same way. I am very doubtful whether I have conveyed to | ||
| + | the reader the main point I meant about the proportions of history, and | ||
| + | why I have dwelt so much more on some things than others. I doubt | ||
| + | whether I have clearly fulfilled the plan that I set out in the | ||
| + | introductory chapter; and for that reason I add these lines as a sort of | ||
| + | summary in a concluding chapter. I do believe that the things on which I | ||
| + | have insisted are more essential to an outline of history than the | ||
| + | things which I have subordinated or dismissed. I do not believe that the | ||
| + | past is most truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely fades | ||
| + | away into nature, or civilisation merely fades away into barbarism, or | ||
| + | religion fades away into mythology, or our own religion fades away into | ||
| + | the religions of the world. In short I do not believe that the best way | ||
| + | to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines. I believe | ||
| + | that, of the two, it would be far nearer the truth to tell the tale very | ||
| + | simply, like a primitive myth about a man who made the sun and stars or | ||
| + | a god who entered the body of a sacred monkey. I will therefore sum up | ||
| + | all that has gone before in what seems to me a realistic and reasonably | ||
| + | proportioned statement; the short story of mankind.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>In the land lit by that neighbouring star, whose blaze is the broad | ||
| + | daylight, there are many and very various things, motionless and moving. | ||
| + | There moves among them a race that is in its relation to the others a | ||
| + | race of gods. The fact is not lessened but emphasised because it can | ||
| + | behave like a race of demons. Its distinction is not an individual | ||
| + | illusion, like one bird pluming itself on its own plumes; it is a solid | ||
| + | and a many-sided thing. It is demonstrated in the very speculations that | ||
| + | have led to its being denied. That men, the gods of this lower world, | ||
| + | are linked with it in various ways is true; but it is another aspect of | ||
| + | the same truth. That they grow as the grass grows< | ||
| + | beasts walk is a secondary necessity that sharpens the primary | ||
| + | distinction. It is like saying that a magician must after all have the | ||
| + | appearance of a man; or that even the fairies could not dance without | ||
| + | feet. It has lately been the fashion to focus the mind entirely on these | ||
| + | mild and subordinate resemblances and to forget the main fact | ||
| + | altogether. It is customary to insist that man resembles the other | ||
| + | creatures. Yes; and that very resemblance he alone can see. The fish | ||
| + | does not trace the fish-bone pattern in the fowls of the air; or the | ||
| + | elephant and the emu compare skeletons. Even in the sense in which man | ||
| + | is at one with the universe it is an utterly lonely universality. The | ||
| + | very sense that he is united with all things is enough to sunder him | ||
| + | from all.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | that he alone has kindled, this demigod or demon of the visible world | ||
| + | makes that world visible. He sees around him a world of a certain style | ||
| + | or type. It seems to proceed by certain rules or at least repetitions. | ||
| + | He sees a green architecture that builds itself without visible hands; | ||
| + | but which builds itself into a very exact plan or pattern, like a design | ||
| + | already drawn in the air by an invisible finger. It is not, as is now | ||
| + | vaguely suggested, a vague thing. It is not a growth or a groping of | ||
| + | blind life. Each seeks an end; a glorious and radiant end, even for | ||
| + | every daisy or dandelion we see in looking across the level of a common | ||
| + | field. In the very shape of things there is more than green growth; | ||
| + | there is the finality of the flower. It is a world of crowns. This | ||
| + | impression, whether or no it be an illusion, has so profoundly | ||
| + | influenced this race of thinkers and masters of the material world, that | ||
| + | the vast majority have been moved to take a certain view of that world. | ||
| + | They have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as | ||
| + | the tree seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the flower. | ||
| + | But so long as the race of thinkers was able< | ||
| + | that the admission of this idea of a plan brought with it another | ||
| + | thought more thrilling and even terrible. There was some one else, some | ||
| + | strange and unseen being, who had designed these things, if indeed they | ||
| + | were designed. There was a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious | ||
| + | benefactor who had been before them and built up the woods and hills for | ||
| + | their coming, and had kindled the sunrise against their rising, as a | ||
| + | servant kindles a fire. Now this idea of a mind that gives a meaning to | ||
| + | the universe has received more and more confirmation within the minds of | ||
| + | men, by meditations and experiences much more subtle and searching than | ||
| + | any such argument about the external plan of the world. But I am | ||
| + | concerned here with keeping the story in its most simple and even | ||
| + | concrete terms; and it is enough to say here that most men, including | ||
| + | the wisest men, have come to the conclusion that the world has such a | ||
| + | final purpose and therefore such a first cause. But most men in some | ||
| + | sense separated themselves from the wisest men, when it came to the | ||
| + | treatment of that idea. There came into existence two ways of treating | ||
| + | that idea; which between them make up most of the religious history of | ||
| + | the world.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | meaning in things; of a strange master who knew the secret of the world. | ||
| + | But the majority, the mob or mass of men, naturally tended to treat it | ||
| + | rather in the spirit of gossip. The gossip, like all gossip, contained a | ||
| + | great deal of truth and falsehood. The world began to tell itself tales | ||
| + | about the unknown being or his sons or servants or messengers. Some of | ||
| + | the tales may truly be called old wives’ tales; as professing only to be | ||
| + | very remote memories of the morning of the world; myths about the baby | ||
| + | moon or the half-baked mountains. Some of them might more truly be | ||
| + | called travellers’ tales; as being curious but contemporary tales | ||
| + | brought from certain borderlands of experience; such as miraculous< | ||
| + | cures or those that bring whispers of what has happened to the dead. | ||
| + | Many of them are probably true tales; enough of them are probably true | ||
| + | to keep a person of real common sense more or less conscious that there | ||
| + | really is something rather marvellous behind the cosmic curtain. But in | ||
| + | a sense it is only going by appearances; | ||
| + | called apparitions. It is a matter of appearances& | ||
| + | At the most these gods are ghosts; that is, they are glimpses. For most | ||
| + | of us they are rather gossip about glimpses. And for the rest, the whole | ||
| + | world is full of rumours, most of which are almost avowedly romances. | ||
| + | The great majority of the tales about gods and ghosts and the invisible | ||
| + | king are told, if not for the sake of the tale, at least for the sake of | ||
| + | the topic. They are evidence of the eternal interest of the theme; they | ||
| + | are not evidence of anything else, and they are not meant to be. They | ||
| + | are mythology, or the poetry that is not bound in books& | ||
| + | other way.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | had taken up an equally congenial trade. They were drawing up plans of | ||
| + | the world; of the world which all believed to have a plan. They were | ||
| + | trying to set forth the plan seriously and to scale. They were setting | ||
| + | their minds directly to the mind that had made the mysterious world; | ||
| + | considering what sort of a mind it might be and what its ultimate | ||
| + | purpose might be. Some of them made that mind much more impersonal than | ||
| + | mankind has generally made it; some simplified it almost to a blank; a | ||
| + | few, a very few, doubted it altogether. One or two of the more morbid | ||
| + | fancied that it might be evil and an enemy; just one or two of the more | ||
| + | degraded in the other class worshipped demons instead of gods. But most | ||
| + | of these theorists were theists: and they not only saw a moral plan in | ||
| + | nature, but they generally laid down a moral plan for humanity. Most of | ||
| + | them were good men who did good work: and they were remembered and | ||
| + | rever< | ||
| + | became more or less holy scriptures. They were law-givers; and their | ||
| + | tradition became not only legal but ceremonial. We may say that they | ||
| + | received divine honours, in the sense in which kings and great captains | ||
| + | in certain countries often received divine honours. In a word, wherever | ||
| + | the other popular spirit, the spirit of legend and gossip, could come | ||
| + | into play, it surrounded them with the more mystical atmosphere of the | ||
| + | myths. Popular poetry turned the sages into saints. But that was all it | ||
| + | did. They remained themselves; men never really forgot that they were | ||
| + | men, only made into gods in the sense that they were made into heroes. | ||
| + | Divine Plato, like Divus Caesar, was a title and not a dogma. In Asia, | ||
| + | where the atmosphere was more mythological, | ||
| + | more like a myth, but he remained a man. He remained a man of a certain | ||
| + | special class or school of men, receiving and deserving great honour | ||
| + | from mankind. It is the order or school of the philosophers; | ||
| + | have set themselves seriously to trace the order across any apparent | ||
| + | chaos in the vision of life. Instead of living on imaginative rumours | ||
| + | and remote traditions and the tail-end of exceptional experiences about | ||
| + | the mind and meaning behind the world, they have tried in a sense to | ||
| + | project the primary purpose of that mind <i>a priori</ | ||
| + | put on paper a possible plan of the world; almost as if the world were | ||
| + | not yet made.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | It is quite unlike anything else. It is a thing final like the trump of | ||
| + | doom, though it is also a piece of good news; or news that seems too | ||
| + | good to be true. It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this | ||
| + | mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It | ||
| + | declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of | ||
| + | historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible | ||
| + | being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand | ||
| + | down myths;< | ||
| + | exists behind all things had indeed always been implied by all the best | ||
| + | thinkers, as well as by all the most beautiful legends. But nothing of | ||
| + | this sort had ever been implied in any of them. It is simply false to | ||
| + | say that the other sages and heroes had claimed to be that mysterious | ||
| + | master and maker, of whom the world had dreamed and disputed. Not one of | ||
| + | them had ever claimed to be anything of the sort. Not one of their sects | ||
| + | or schools had ever claimed that they had claimed to be anything of the | ||
| + | sort. The most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the | ||
| + | true servant of such a being. The most that any visionary had ever said | ||
| + | was that men might catch glimpses of the glory of that spiritual being; | ||
| + | or much more often of lesser spiritual beings. The most that any | ||
| + | primitive myth had ever suggested was that the Creator was present at | ||
| + | the Creation. But that the Creator was present at scenes a little | ||
| + | subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with | ||
| + | tax-collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of | ||
| + | the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by | ||
| + | the whole of that great civilisation for more than a thousand | ||
| + | years& | ||
| + | the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his | ||
| + | first articulate word, instead of barking like a dog. Its unique | ||
| + | character can be used as an argument against it as well as for it. It | ||
| + | would be easy to concentrate on it as a case of isolated insanity; but | ||
| + | it makes nothing but dust and nonsense of comparative religion.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p>It came on the world with a wind and rush of running messengers | ||
| + | proclaiming that apocalyptic portent; and it is not unduly fanciful to | ||
| + | say they are running still. What puzzles the world, and its wise | ||
| + | philosophers and fanciful pagan poets, about the priests and people of | ||
| + | the Catholic Church is that they still behave as if they were | ||
| + | messengers. A messenger does not dream about what his message might be,<span class=" | ||
| + | or argue about what it probably would be; he delivers it as it is. It is | ||
| + | not a theory or a fancy but a fact. It is not relevant to this | ||
| + | intentionally rudimentary outline to prove in detail that it is a fact; | ||
| + | but merely to point out that these messengers do deal with it as men | ||
| + | deal with a fact. All that is condemned in Catholic tradition, | ||
| + | authority, and dogmatism and the refusal to retract and modify, are but | ||
| + | the natural human attributes of a man with a message relating to a fact. | ||
| + | I desire to avoid in this last summary all the controversial | ||
| + | complexities that may once more cloud the simple lines of that strange | ||
| + | story; which I have already called, in words that are much too weak, the | ||
| + | strangest story in the world. I desire merely to mark those main lines | ||
| + | and specially to mark where the great line is really to be drawn. The | ||
| + | religion of the world, in its right proportions, | ||
| + | fine shades of mysticism or more or less rational forms of mythology. It | ||
| + | is divided by the line between the men who are bringing that message and | ||
| + | the men who have not yet heard it, or cannot yet believe it.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | concrete and complicated terminology of our time, we find it covered by | ||
| + | names and memories of which the very familiarity is a falsification. For | ||
| + | instance, when we say that a country contains so many Moslems, we really | ||
| + | mean that it contains so many monotheists; | ||
| + | that it contains so many men; men with the old average assumption of | ||
| + | men& | ||
| + | the customs of a certain culture and under the simpler laws of a certain | ||
| + | law-giver; but so they would if their law-giver were Lycurgus or Solon. | ||
| + | They testify to something which is a necessary and noble truth; but was | ||
| + | never a new truth. Their creed is not a new colour; it is the neutral | ||
| + | and normal tint that is the background of the many-coloured life of man. | ||
| + | Mahomet did not, like the Magi, find a new star; he saw through his own | ||
| + | particular< | ||
| + | starlight. So when we say that the country contains so many Confucians | ||
| + | or Buddhists, we mean that it contains so many Pagans whose prophets | ||
| + | have given them another and rather vaguer version of the invisible | ||
| + | power; making it not only invisible but almost impersonal. When we say | ||
| + | that they also have temples and idols and priests and periodical | ||
| + | festivals, we simply mean that this sort of heathen is enough of a human | ||
| + | being to admit the popular element of pomp and pictures and feasts and | ||
| + | fairy-tales. We only mean that Pagans have more sense than Puritans. But | ||
| + | what the gods are supposed to < | ||
| + | < | ||
| + | the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any | ||
| + | Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody | ||
| + | else has any news.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed | ||
| + | and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild | ||
| + | eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the | ||
| + | message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of | ||
| + | something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world | ||
| + | like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; | ||
| + | still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer | ||
| + | in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly | ||
| + | on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to | ||
| + | grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We | ||
| + | might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows | ||
| + | old.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | supernatural should have become so natural. I mean that anything so | ||
| + | unique when seen from the outside should only seem universal when seen | ||
| + | from the inside. I have not minimised the scale< | ||
| + | of our milder theologians think it wise to do. Rather have I | ||
| + | deliberately dwelt on that incredible interruption, | ||
| + | the very backbone of history. I have great sympathy with the | ||
| + | monotheists, | ||
| + | blasphemy that might shake the world. But it did not shake the world; it | ||
| + | steadied the world. That fact, the more we consider it, will seem more | ||
| + | solid and more strange. I think it a piece of plain justice to all the | ||
| + | unbelievers to insist upon the audacity of the act of faith that is | ||
| + | demanded of them. I willingly and warmly agree that it is, in itself, a | ||
| + | suggestion at which we might expect even the brain of the believer to | ||
| + | reel, when he realised his own belief. But the brain of the believer | ||
| + | does not reel; it is the brains of the unbelievers that reel. We can see | ||
| + | their brains reeling on every side and into every extravagance of ethics | ||
| + | and psychology; into pessimism and the denial of life; into pragmatism | ||
| + | and the denial of logic; seeking their omens in nightmares and their | ||
| + | canons in contradictions; | ||
| + | things beyond good and evil, or whispering of strange stars where two | ||
| + | and two make five. Meanwhile this solitary thing that seems at first so | ||
| + | outrageous in outline remains solid and sane in substance. It remains | ||
| + | the moderator of all these manias; rescuing reason from the Pragmatists | ||
| + | exactly as it rescued laughter from the Puritans. I repeat that I have | ||
| + | deliberately emphasised its intrinsically defiant and dogmatic | ||
| + | character. The mystery is how anything so startling should have remained | ||
| + | defiant and dogmatic and yet become perfectly normal and natural. I have | ||
| + | admitted freely that, considering the incident in itself, a man who says | ||
| + | he is God may be classed with a man who says he is glass. But the man | ||
| + | who says he is glass is not a glazier making windows for all the world. | ||
| + | He does not remain for after ages as a shining and crystalline figure, | ||
| + | in whose light everything is as clear as crystal.</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | everything else went mad. The madhouse has been a house to which, age | ||
| + | after age, men are continually coming back as to a home. That is the | ||
| + | riddle that remains; that anything so abrupt and abnormal should still | ||
| + | be found a habitable and hospitable thing. I care not if the sceptic | ||
| + | says it is a tall story; I cannot see how so toppling a tower could | ||
| + | stand so long without foundation. Still less can I see how it could | ||
| + | become, as it has become, the home of man. Had it merely appeared and | ||
| + | disappeared, | ||
| + | last leap of the rage of illusion, the ultimate myth of the ultimate | ||
| + | mood, in which the mind struck the sky and broke. But the mind did not | ||
| + | break. It is the one mind that remains unbroken in the break-up of the | ||
| + | world. If it were an error, it seems as if the error could hardly have | ||
| + | lasted a day. If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem that such an | ||
| + | ecstasy could not endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly two | ||
| + | thousand years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more | ||
| + | levelheaded, | ||
| + | instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate and death, | ||
| + | than all the world outside. For it was the soul of Christendom that came | ||
| + | forth from the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common sense. | ||
| + | Though we dared not look on His face we could look on His fruits; and by | ||
| + | His fruits we should know Him. The fruits are solid and the fruitfulness | ||
| + | is much more than a metaphor; and nowhere in this sad world are boys | ||
| + | happier in apple-trees, | ||
| + | tread the vine, than under the fixed flash of this instant and | ||
| + | intolerant enlightenment; | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | ON PREHISTORIC MAN</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | wanted is a reminder of the things that are seen so quickly that they | ||
| + | are forgotten almost as quickly. The one moral of this book, in a manner | ||
| + | of speaking, is that first thoughts are best. So a flash might reveal a | ||
| + | landscape; with the Eiffel Tower or the Matterhorn standing up in it as | ||
| + | they would never stand up again in the light of common day. I ended the | ||
| + | book with an image of everlasting lightning; in a very different sense, | ||
| + | alas, this little flash has lasted only too long. But the method has | ||
| + | also certain practical disadvantages upon which I think it well to add | ||
| + | these two notes. It may seem to simplify too much and to ignore out of | ||
| + | ignorance. I feel this especially in the passage about the prehistoric | ||
| + | pictures; which is not concerned with all that the learned may learn | ||
| + | from prehistoric pictures, but with the single point of what anybody | ||
| + | could learn from there being any prehistoric pictures at all. I am | ||
| + | conscious that this attempt to express it in terms of innocence may | ||
| + | exaggerate even my own ignorance. Without any pretence of scientific | ||
| + | research, I should be sorry to have it thought that I knew no more than | ||
| + | I had occasion to say in that passage of the stages into which primitive | ||
| + | humanity has been divided. I am aware, of course, that the story is | ||
| + | elaborately stratified; and that there were many such stages before the | ||
| + | Cro-Magnan or any peoples with whom we associate such pictures. Indeed | ||
| + | recent studies about the Neanderthal and other races rather tend to | ||
| + | repeat the moral that is here most relevant. The notion, noted in these | ||
| + | pages, of something necessarily slow or late in the development of | ||
| + | religion will gain little indeed from these later revelations about the | ||
| + | precursors of the reindeer picture-maker. The learned appear to hold | ||
| + | that, whether the reindeer picture could be religious or not, the people | ||
| + | that lived before it were religious already. Men were already burying | ||
| + | their dead with the care that is the<span class=" | ||
| + | hope. This obviously brings us back to the same argument; an argument | ||
| + | that is not approached by any measurement of the earlier man’s skull. It | ||
| + | is little use to compare the head of the man with the head of the | ||
| + | monkey, if it certainly has never come into the head of the monkey to | ||
| + | bury another monkey with nuts in his grave to help him towards a | ||
| + | heavenly monkey-house. Talking of skulls, we all know the story of the | ||
| + | finding of a Cro-Magnan skull that is much larger and finer than a | ||
| + | modern skull. It is a very funny story; because an eminent evolutionist, | ||
| + | awakening to a somewhat belated caution, protested against anything | ||
| + | being inferred from one specimen. It is the duty of a solitary skull to | ||
| + | prove that our fathers were our inferiors. Any solitary skull presuming | ||
| + | to prove that they were superior is felt to be suffering from swelled | ||
| + | head.< | ||
| + | |||
| + | < | ||
| + | ON AUTHORITY AND ACCURACY</ | ||
| + | |||
| + | <p class=" | ||
| + | fallacies, often indeed of very vulgar errors, I feel that I have | ||
| + | sometimes given an impression of scoffing at serious scientific work. It | ||
| + | was, however, the very reverse of my intention. I am not arguing with | ||
| + | the scientist who explains the elephant, but only with the sophist who | ||
| + | explains it away. And as a matter of fact the sophist plays to the | ||
| + | gallery, as he did in ancient Greece. He appeals to the ignorant, | ||
| + | especially when he appeals to the learned. But I never meant my own | ||
| + | criticism to be an impertinence to the truly learned. We all owe an | ||
| + | infinite debt to the researches, especially the recent researches, of | ||
| + | single-minded students in these matters; and I have only professed to | ||
| + | pick up things here and there from them. I have not loaded my abstract | ||
| + | argument with quotations and references, which only make a man look more | ||
| + | learned than he is; but in some cases I find that my own loose fashion | ||
| + | of allusion is rather misleading about my own meaning. The passage about | ||
| + | Chaucer and the Child Martyr is badly expressed; I only mean that the | ||
| + | English poet probably had in mind the English saint; of whose story he | ||
| + | gives a sort of foreign version. In the same way two statements in the | ||
| + | chapter on Mythology follow each other in such a way that it may seem to | ||
| + | be suggested that the second story about Monotheism refers to the | ||
| + | Southern Seas. I may explain that Atahocan belongs not to Australasian | ||
| + | but to American savages. So in the chapter called ‘The Antiquity of | ||
| + | Civilisation, | ||
| + | my own impression of the meaning of the development of Egyptian monarchy | ||
| + | too much, perhaps, as if it were identical with the facts on which it | ||
| + | was founded, as given in works like those of Professor J. L. Myres. But | ||
| + | the confusion was not intentional; | ||
| + | imply, in the remainder of<span class=" | ||
| + | speculations about races are less valuable than they undoubtedly are. My | ||
| + | criticism is strictly relative; I may say that the Pyramids are plainer | ||
| + | than the tracks of the desert, without denying that wiser men than I may | ||
| + | see tracks in what is to me the trackless sand.</ | ||
| + | </ | ||
the_everlasting_man.txt · Last modified: 2021/09/23 00:12 by briancarnell