A SHORT
HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT
[v]
VOLUME I
PAGE
Preface xi
Chap. I—Introductory
§ 1. | Origin and Meaning of the word Freethought | 1 | ||||||
§ 2. | Previous histories | 10 | ||||||
§ 3. | The Psychology of Freethinking | 15 |
Chap. II—Primitive Freethinking 22
Chap. III—Progress under Ancient Religions
§ 1. | Early Association and Competition of Cults | 44 | ||||||
§ 2. | The Process in India | 48 | ||||||
§ 3. | Mesopotamia | 61 | ||||||
§ 4. | Ancient Persia | 65 | ||||||
§ 5. | Egypt | 69 | ||||||
§ 6. | Phoenicia | 78 | ||||||
§ 7. | Ancient China | 82 | ||||||
§ 8. | Mexico and Peru | 88 | ||||||
§ 9. | The Common Forces of Degeneration | 91 |
Chap. IV—Relative Freethought in Israel
§ 1. | The Early Hebrews | 97 | ||||||
§ 2. | The manipulated prophetic literature | 104 | ||||||
§ 3. | The Post-Exilic Literature | 109 |
Chap. V—Freethought in Greece 120
Chap. VI—Freethought in ancient Rome
§ 1. | Culture Beginnings, to Ennius and the Greeks [viii] | 194 | ||||||
§ 2. | Lucretius, Cicero, Cæsar | 201 | ||||||
§ 3. | Decline under the Empire | 207 | ||||||
§ 4. | The higher Pagan ethics | 215 |
Chap. VII—Ancient Christianity and its Opponents
Chap. VIII—Freethought under Islam
Chap. IX—Christendom in the Middle Ages 277
Chap. X—Freethought in the Renaissance
Chap. XI—The Reformation Politically Considered
Chap. XII—The Reformation and Freethought
Chap. XIII.—The Rise of Modern Freethought
[xi]This, the third edition, represents a considerable expansion of the second (1906), which in its turn was a considerable expansion of the first (1899). The book now somewhat approximates, in point of fullness, to the modest ideal aimed at. Anything much fuller would cease to be a “Short History.”
The process of revision, carried on since the last issue, has, I hope, meant some further advance towards correctness, and some improvement in arrangement—a particularly difficult matter in such a book. As before, the many critical excursus have been so printed that they may be recognized and skipped by those readers who care to follow only the narrative. The chapter on the nineteenth century, though much expanded, like those on the eighteenth, remains, I fear, open to objection on the score of scantiness. I can only plead that the ample and excellent work of Mr. A. W. Benn has now substantially met the need for a fuller survey of that period.
It is fitting that I should acknowledge the generous critical reception given by most reviewers to the previous editions of a book which, breaking as it did new ground, lacked the gain from previous example that accrues to most historical writing. My many debts to historians of culture are, I trust, indicated in the notes; but I have to repeat my former acknowledgments as to the Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of my dead friend, J. M. Wheeler, inasmuch as the aid I have had from his manifold research does not thus appear on the surface. [xii]
It remains to add my thanks to a number of friendly correspondents who have assisted me by pointing out shortcomings and errors. Further assistance of the same kind will be gratefully welcomed. It is still my hope that the book may help some more leisured student in the construction of a more massive record of the development of rational thought on the side of human life with which it deals.
An apology is perhaps due to the purchasers of the second edition, which is now superseded by a fuller record. I can but plead that I have been unable otherwise to serve their need; and express a hope that the low price of the present edition will be a compensation.
J. M. R.
September, 1914. [1]
The words “freethinking” and “freethinker” first appear in English literature about the end of the seventeenth century, and seem to have originated there and then, as we do not find them earlier in French or in Italian,1 the only other modern literatures wherein the phenomena for which the words stand had previously arisen.
The title of “atheist” had been from time immemorial applied to every shade of serious heresy by the orthodox, as when the early Christians were so described by the image-adoring polytheists around them; and in Latin Christendom the term infidelis, translating the ἀπίστος of the New Testament, which primarily applied to Jews and pagans,2 was easily extensible, as in the writings of Augustine, to all who challenged or doubted articles of ordinary Christian belief, all alike being regarded as consigned to perdition.3 It is by this line of descent that the term “infidelity,” applied to doubt on such doctrines as that of the future state, comes up in England in the fifteenth century.4 It implied no systematic or critical thinking. The label of “deist,” presumably self-applied by the bearers, begins to come into use in French about the middle of the sixteenth century;5 and that of “naturalist,” also presumably chosen by those who bore it, came into currency about the same time. Lechler traces the latter term in the Latin form as far back as the MS. of the Heptaplomeres of Bodin, [2]dated 1588; but it was common before that date, as De Mornay in the preface to his De la Vérité de la religion chrétienne (1581) declaims “against the false naturalists (that is to say, professors of the knowledge of nature and natural things)”; and Montaigne in one of his later essays (1588) has the phrase “nous autres naturalistes.”6 Apart from these terms, those commonly used in French in the seventeenth century were bel esprit (sometimes, though not necessarily, connoting unbelief), esprit fort and libertin, the latter being used in the sense of a religious doubter by Corneille, Molière, and Bayle.7
It seems to have first come into use as one of the hostile names for the “Brethren of the Free Spirit,” a pantheistic and generally heretical sect which became prominent in the thirteenth century, and flourished widely, despite destructive persecution, till the fifteenth. Their doctrine being antinomian, and their practice often extravagant, they were accused by Churchmen of licentiousness, so that in their case the name Libertini had its full latitude of application. In the sixteenth century the name of Libertines is found borne, voluntarily or otherwise, by a similar sect, probably springing from some remnant of the first, but calling themselves Spirituales, who came into notice in Flanders, were favoured in France by Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Francis I, and became to some extent associated with sections of the Reformed Church. They were attacked by Calvin in the treatise Contre la sects fanatique et furieuse des Libertins (1544 and 1545).8 The name of Libertini was not in the sixteenth century applied by any Genevese writer to any political party;9 but by later historians it was in time either fastened on or adopted by the main body of Calvin’s opponents in Geneva, who probably included some members of the sect or movement in question. They were accused by him of general depravity, a judgment not at all to be acquiesced in, in view of the controversial habits of the age; though they probably included antinomian Christians and libertines in the modern sense, as well as orthodox lovers of freedom and orderly non-Christians. As the first Brethren of the Free Spirit, so-called, seem to have appeared in Italy (where they are supposed to have derived, like the Waldenses, from the immigrant Paulicians of the Eastern Church), the name Libertini presumably originated there. But in Renaissance [3]Italy an unbeliever seems usually to have been called simply ateo, or infedele, or pagano. “The standing phrase was non aver fede.”10
In England, before and at the Reformation, both “infidel” and “faithless” usually had the theological force of “non-Christian.” Thus Tyndale says of the Turks that though they “knowledge one God,” yet they “have erred and been faithless these eight hundred years”; adding the same of the Jews.11 Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, “infidel” seems thus to have commonly signified only a “heathen” or Jew or Mohammedan. Bishop Jewel, for instance, writes that the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain “then were infidels”;12 and the word appears to be normally used in that sense, or with a playful force derived from that, by the divines, poets, and dramatists, including Shakespeare, as by Milton in his verse.13 Ben Jonson has the phrase:
One or two earlier writers,15 indeed, use “infidel” in the modern sense; and it was at times so used by early Elizabethans.16 But Foxe brackets together “Jews, Turks, or infidels”;17 and Hooper, writing in 1547, speaks, like Jewel, of the heathen as “the infidels.”18 Hooker (1553–1600), in his Fifth Sermon, § 9,19 uses the word somewhat indefinitely, but in his margin makes “Pagans and Infidels” equivalent to “Pagans and Turks.” So also, in the Ecclesiastical Polity,20 “infidels” means men of another religion. On the title-page of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1574), on the other hand, we have “the infidelitie of atheists”; but so late as 1600 we find “J. H.” [John Healy], the translator of Augustine’s City of God, rendering infideles and homines infideles by “unbelievers.”21 “Infidelity,” in the modern sense, occurs in Sir T. Browne.22
In England, as in the rest of Europe, however, the phenomenon of freethought had existed, in specific form, long before it could express itself in propagandist writings, or find any generic name save those of atheism and infidelity; and the process of naming was as fortuitous as it generally is in matters of intellectual evolution. Phrases approximating to “free thought” occur soon after the Restoration. Thus Glanvill repeatedly writes sympathetically of [4]“free philosophers”23 and “free philosophy.”24 In 1667 we find Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society, describing the activity of that body as having arisen or taken its special direction through the conviction that in science, as in warfare, better results had been obtained by a “free way” than by methods not so describable.25 As Sprat is careful to insist, the members of the Royal Society, though looked at askance by most of the clergy26 and other pietists, were not as such to be classed as unbelievers, the leading members being strictly orthodox; but a certain number seem to have shown scant concern for religion;27 and while it was one of the Society’s first rules not to debate any theological question whatever,28 the intellectual atmosphere of the time was such that some among those who followed the “free way” in matters of natural science would be extremely likely to apply it to more familiar problems.29 At the same period we find Spinoza devoting his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) to the advocacy of libertas philosophandi; and such a work was bound to have a general European influence. It was probably, then, a result of such express assertion of the need and value of freedom in the mental life that the name “freethinker” came into English use in the last quarter of the century.
Before “deism” came into English vogue, the names for unbelief, even deistic, were simply “infidelity” and “atheism”—e.g., Bishop Fotherby’s Atheomastix (1622), Baxter’s Unreasonableness of Infidelity (1655) and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667), passim. Bishop Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist (1677) appears to be the first published attack on deism by name. His Origines Sacræ (1662) deals chiefly with deistic views, but calls unbelievers in general “atheists.” Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (written 1671, published 1678), does not speak of deism, attacking only atheism, and was himself suspected of Socinianism. W. Sherlock, in his Practical Discourse of Religious Assemblies (2nd ed., 1682), attacks “atheists and infidels,” but says nothing of “deists.” That term, first coined, as we have seen, in French, seems first to have found common currency in France—e.g., on the title-pages of the apologetic works of Marin Mersenne, 1623 and 1624. The term “atheist” [5]was often applied at random at this period; but atheism did exist.
When the orthodox Boyle pushed criticism in physical science under such a title as The Sceptical Chemist, the principle could not well be withheld from application to religion; and it lay in the nature of the case that the name “freethinker,” like that of “skeptic,” should come to attach itself specially to those who doubted where doubt was most resented and most resisted. At length the former term became specific.
In the meantime the word “rationalist,” which in English has latterly tended to become the prevailing name for freethinkers, had made its appearance, without securing much currency. In a London news-letter dated October 14, 1646, it is stated, concerning the Presbyterians and Independents, that “there is a new sect sprung up among them, and these are the rationalists; and what their reason dictates to them in Church or State stands for good until they be convinced with better.”30 On the Continent, the equivalent Latin term (rationalista) had been applied about the beginning of the century to the Aristotelian humanists of the Helmstadt school by their opponents,31 apparently in the same sense as that in which Bacon used the term rationales in his Redargutio Philosophiarum—“Rationales autem, aranearum more, telas ex se conficiunt.” Under this title he contrasts (as spiders spinning webs out of themselves) the mere Aristotelean speculators, who framed à priori schemes of Nature, with empiricists, who, “like ants, collect something and use it,” preferring to both the “bees” who should follow the ideal method prescribed by himself.32 There is here no allusion to heterodox opinion on religion. [Bishop Hurst, who (perhaps following the Apophthegms) puts a translation of Bacon’s words, with “rationalists” for rationales, as one of the mottoes of his History of Rationalism, is thus misleading his readers as to Bacon’s meaning.] In 1661 John Amos Comenius, in his Theologia Naturalis, applies the name rationalista to the Socinians and deists; without, however, leading to its general use in that sense. Later we shall meet with the term in English discussions between 1680 and 1715, applied usually to rationalizing Christians; but as a name for opponents of orthodox religion it was for the time superseded, in English, by “freethinker.” [6]
In the course of the eighteenth century the term was adopted in other languages. The first French translation (1714) of Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking is entitled Discours sur la liberté de penser; and the term “freethinkers” is translated on the title-page by esprit fort, and in the text by a periphrasis of liberté de penser. Later in the century, however, we find Voltaire in his correspondence frequently using the substantive franc-pensant, a translation of the English term which subsequently gave way to libre penseur. The modern German term Freigeist, found as early as 1702 in the allusion to “Alten Quäcker und neuen Frey-Geister” on the title-page of the folio Anabaptisticum et Enthusiasticum Pantheon, probably derives from the old “Brethren of the Free Spirit”; while Schöngeist arose as a translation of bel esprit. In the middle of the eighteenth century Freidenker came into German use as a translation of the English term.
In a general sense “free thoughts” was a natural expression, and we have it in Ben Jonson: “Being free master of mine own free thoughts.”33 But not till about the year 1700 did the phrase begin to have a special application to religious matters. The first certain instance thus far noted of the use of the term “freethinker” is in a letter of Molyneux to Locke, dated April 6, 1697,34 where Toland is spoken of as a “candid freethinker.” In an earlier letter, dated December 24, 1695, Molyneux speaks of a certain book on religion as somewhat lacking in “freedom of thought”;35 and in Burnet’s Letters36 occurs still earlier the expression “men ... of freer thoughts.” In the New English Dictionary a citation is given from the title-page of S. Smith’s brochure, The Religious Impostor ... dedicated to Doctor S-l-m-n and the rest of the new Religious Fraternity of Freethinkers, near Leather-Sellers’ Hall. Printed ... in the first year of Grace and Freethinking, conjecturally dated 1692. It is thought to refer to the sect of “Freeseekers” mentioned in Luttrell’s Brief Historical Relation (iii, 56) under date 1693. In that case it is not unbelievers that are in question. So in Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue (first ed. 1699) the expression “freethought” has a general and not a particular sense;37 and in Baker’s Reflections upon Learning, also published in 1699, in the remark: “After the way of freethinking had been lai’d open by my Lord Bacon, it was soon after greedily followed”;38 the reference is, of course, to scientific and not to religious thought. [7]
But in Shaftesbury’s Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709) the phrases “free-writers” and “a freethought”39 have reference to “advanced” opinions, though in his letters to Ainsworth (May 10, 1707) he had written, “I am glad to find your love of reason and freethought. Your piety and virtue I know you will always keep.”40 Compare the Miscellaneous Reflections (v, 3) in the Characteristics41 (1711), where the tendency to force the sense from the general to the special is incidentally illustrated. Shaftesbury, however, includes the term “free liver” among the “naturally honest appellations” that have become opprobrious.
In Swift’s Sentiments of a Church of England Man (1708) the specialized word is found definitely and abusively connoting religious unbelief: “The atheists, libertines, despisers of religion—that is to say, all those who usually pass under the name of freethinkers”; Steele and Addison so use it in the Tatler in 1709;42 and Leslie so uses the term in his Truth of Christianity Demonstrated (1711). The anonymous essay, Réflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en plaisantant, by Deslandes (Amsterdam, 1712), is translated in English (1713) as Reflections on the Death of Free-thinkers, and the translator uses the term in his prefatory Letter to the Author, beside putting it in the text (pp. 50, 85, 97, 102, 106, etc.), where the original had esprit fort.
It was not till 1713, however, that Anthony Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking, occasioned by the Rise and Growth of a Sect called Freethinkers, gave the word a universal notoriety, and brought it into established currency in controversy, with the normal significance of “deist,” Collins having entirely repudiated atheism. Even after this date, and indeed in full conformity with the definition in Collins’s opening sentence, Ambrose Philips took The Freethinker as the title of a weekly journal (begun in 1718) on the lines of the Spectator, with no heterodox leaning,43 the contributors including Boulter, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, and the son of Bishop Burnet. But despite this attempt to keep the word “freethinking” as a name for simple freedom from prejudice in secular affairs, the tendency to specialize it as aforesaid was irresistible. As names go, it was on the whole a good one; and the bitterness with which it was generally handled on the orthodox side showed that its implicit claim was felt to be disturbing, though some antagonists of course claimed from the first that they were as “free” under the law of [8]right reason as any skeptic.44 At this time of day the word may be allowed prescriptive standing, as having no more drawbacks than most other names for schools of thought or attitudes of mind, and as having been admitted into most European languages. The question-begging element is not greater in this than in many other terms of similar intention, such as “rationalism”; and it incurs no such charge of absurdity as lies against the invidious religious term, “infidelity.” The term “infidel” invites “fidel.”
A plausible objection may, indeed, arise on the score that such a term as “freethought” should not be set up by thinkers who almost invariably reject the term “freewill”—the rationalistic succession having for two hundred and fifty years been carried on mainly by determinists. But the issues raised by the two terms are on wholly different planes; and while in both cases the imperfection of the instrument of language is apparent, it is not in the present case a cause of psychological confusion, as it is in the discussion of the nature of will. The freewill fallacy consists in applying universally to the process of judgment and preference (which is a process of natural causation like another) a conception relevant only to human or animal action, as interfered with or unaffected by extraneous compulsion. To the processes of nature, organic or inorganic, the concepts “free” and “bond” are equally irrelevant: a tiger is no more “free” to crave for grass and recoil from flesh than is water to flow uphill; while, on the other hand, such “appetites” are not rationally to be described as forms of bondage. Only as a mode distinguishable from its contrary can “freedom” be predicated of any procedure, and it is so predicated of actions; whereas the whole category of volitions is alleged and denied by the verbal disputants to be “free.” Some attempt to save the case by distinguishing between free and alleged “unfree” volitions; but the latter are found to be simply cases of choices dictated by intense need, as in the case of deadly thirst. The difference, therefore, is only one of degree of impulse, not in the fact of choice.
The term “freewill,” therefore, is irrational, as being wholly irrelevant to the conception of volition. But “freethought,” on [9]the other hand, points to an actual difference in degree of employment of the faculty of criticism. The proposition is that some men think more “freely” than others in that they are (a) not terrorized by any veto on criticism, and (b) not hampered, or less hampered, by ignorant pre-suppositions. In both cases there is a real discrimination. There is no allegation that, absolutely speaking, “thought is free” in the sense of the orthodox formula; on the contrary, it is asserted that the rationalist’s critical course is specifically determined by his intellectual structure and his preparation, and that it is sometimes different structure, but more often different preparation, that determines the anti-critical or counter-critical attitude of the believer. Change in the preparation, it is contended, will put the latter in fuller use of his potential resources; his inculcated fear of doubt and docility of assent being simply acquiescences in vetoes on his attention to certain matters for reflection—that is to say, in arbitrary limitations of his action. It is further implied that the instructed man, other things being equal, is “freer” to think than the uninstructed, as being less obstructed; but for the purpose of our history it is sufficient to posit the discriminations above noted.
The essential thing to be realized is the fact that from its earliest stages humanity has suffered from conventional or traditionary hindrances to the use of judgment. This holds good even as to the early play of the simple inventive faculty, all innovations in implements being met by the inertia of habit; and when men reached the stages of ritual practice, social construction, and religious doctrine, the forces of repression became powerful in proportion to the seriousness of the problem. It is only in modern times that freedom in these relations has come to be generally regarded as permissible; and it has always been over questions of religion that the strife has been keenest.
For practical purposes, then, freethought may be defined as a conscious reaction against some phase or phases of conventional or traditional doctrine in religion—on the one hand, a claim to think freely, in the sense not of disregard for logic, but of special loyalty to it, on problems to which the past course of things has given a great intellectual and practical importance; on the other hand, the actual practice of such thinking. This sense, which is substantially agreed on, will on one or other side sufficiently cover those phenomena of early or rudimentary freethinking which wear the guise of simple concrete opposition to given doctrines or systems, whether by way of special demur or of the obtrusion of a new cult or doctrine. In either case, the claim to think in a measure freely is [10]implicit in the criticism or the new affirmation; and such primary movements of the mind cannot well be separated, in psychology or in history, from the fully conscious practice of criticism in the spirit of pure truth-seeking, or from the claim that such free examination is profoundly important to moral and intellectual health. Modern freethought, specially so-called, is only one of the developments of the slight primary capacity of man to doubt, to reason, to improve on past thinking, to assert his personality as against sacrosanct and menacing authority. Concretely considered, it has proceeded by the support and stimulus of successive accretions of actual knowledge; and the modern consciousness of its own abstract importance emerged by way of an impression or inference from certain social phenomena, as well as in terms of self-asserting instinct. There is no break in its evolution from primitive mental states, any more than in the evolution of the natural sciences from primitive observation. What particularly accrues to the state of conscious and systematic discrimination, in the one case as in the other, is just the immense gain in security of possession.
It is somewhat remarkable that in England this phenomenon has thus far45 had no general historic treatment save at the hands of ecclesiastical writers, who, in most cases, have regarded it solely as a form of more or less perverse hostility to their own creed. The modern scientific study of religions, which has yielded so many instructive surveys, almost of necessity excludes from view the specific play of freethought, which in the religion-making periods is to be traced rather by its religious results than by any record of its expression. All histories of philosophy, indeed, in some degree necessarily recognize it; and such a work as Lange’s History of Materialism may be regarded as part—whether or not sound in its historical treatment—of a complete history of freethought, dealing specially with general philosophic problems. But of freethought as a reasoned revision or rejection of current religious doctrines by more or less practical people, we have no regular history by a professed freethinker, though there are many monographs and surveys of periods.
The latest and freshest sketch of the kind is Professor J. B. Bury’s brief History of Freedom of Thought (1913), [11]notable for the force of its championship of the law of liberty. The useful compilation of the late Mr. Charles Watts, entitled Freethought: Its Rise, Progress, and Triumph (n. d.), deals with freethought in relation only to Christianity. Apart from treatises which broadly sketch the development of knowledge and of opinion, the nearest approaches to a general historic treatment are the Dictionnaire des Athées of Sylvain Maréchal (1800: 3e édit., par J. B. L. Germond, 1853) and the Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers by the late Joseph Mazzini Wheeler. The quaint work of Maréchal, expanded by his friend Lalande, exhibits much learning, but is made partly fantastic by its sardonic plan of including a number of typical religionists (including Job, John, and Jesus Christ!), some of whose utterances are held to lead logically to atheism. Mr. Wheeler’s book is in every respect the more trustworthy.
In excuse of Maréchal’s method, it may be noted that the prevailing practice of Christian apologists had been to impute atheism to heterodox theistic thinkers of all ages. The Historia universalis Atheismi et Atheorum falso et merito suspectorum of J. F. Reimmann (Hildesiæ, 1725) exhibits this habit both in its criticism and in its practice, as do the Theses de Atheismo et Superstitione of Buddeus (Trajecti ad Rhenum, 1716). These were the standard treatises of their kind for the eighteenth century, and seem to be the earliest systematic treatises in the nature of a history of freethought, excepting a Historia Naturalismi by A. Tribbechov (Jenæ, 1700) and a Historia Atheismi breviter delineata by Jenkinus Thomasius (Altdorf, 1692; Basileæ, 1709; London, 1716). In the same year with Reimmann’s Historia appeared J. A. Fabricius’s Delectus Argumentorum et Syllabus scriptorum qui veritatem religionis Christianæ adversus Atheos, Epicureos, Deistas, seu Naturalistas ... asseruerunt (Hamburghi), in which it is contended (cap. viii) that many philosophers have been falsely described as atheists; but in the Freydenker Lexicon of J. A. Trinius (Leipzig, 1759), planned as a supplement to the work of Fabricius, are included such writers as Sir Thomas Browne and Dryden.
The works of the late Rev. John Owen, Evenings with the Skeptics, Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, and Skeptics of the French Renaissance, which, though not constituting a literary whole, collectively cover a great deal of historical ground, must be expressly excepted from the above characterization of clerical histories of freethought, in respect of their liberality of view. They deal largely, however, with general or philosophical skepticism, which is a special development of freethought, often by way of reasonings in which many freethinkers do not acquiesce. (All strict skeptics, that is to say—as distinguished from religionists who profess skepticism up to a certain point by way of making a surrender to orthodox [12]dogmatism46—are freethinkers; but most freethinkers are not strictly skeptics.) The history of philosophic skepticism, again, is properly and methodically treated in the old work of Carl Friedrich Stäudlin, Geschichte und Geist des Skepticismus (2 Bde., Leipzig, 1794), the historic survey being divided into six periods: 1, Before Pyrrho; 2, from Pyrrho to Sextus; 3, from Sextus to Montaigne; 4, from Montaigne to La Mothe le Vayer; 5, from La Mothe le Vayer to Hume; 6, from Hume to Kant and Platner. The posthumous work of Émile Saisset, Le Scepticisme: Ænésidème—Pascal—Kant (1865), is a fragment of a projected complete history of philosophic skepticism.
Stäudlin’s later work, the Geschichte des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus (1826), is a shorter but more general history of the strife between general freethought and supernaturalism in the Christian world and era. It deals cursorily with the intellectual attitude of the early Fathers, the early heretics, and the Scholastics; proceeding to a fuller survey of the developments since the Reformation, and covering Unitarianism, Latitudinarianism, English and French Deism, and German Rationalism of different shades down to the date of writing. Stäudlin may be described as a rationalizing supernaturalist.
Like most works on religious and intellectual history written from a religious standpoint, those of Stäudlin treat the phenomena as it were in vacuo, with little regard to the conditioning circumstances, economic and political; critical thought being regarded purely as a force proceeding through its own proclivities. Saisset is at very much the same point of view. Needless to say, valuable work may be done up to a certain point on this method, which is seen in full play in Hegel; and high praise is due to the learned and thoughtful treatise of R. W. Mackay, The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (2 vols. 1850), where it is partially but ably supplemented by the method of inductive science. That method, again, is freshly and forcibly applied to a restricted problem in W. A. Schmidt’s Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums (1847).
Later come the Vorgeschichte des Rationalismus (1853–62) and Geschichte des Rationalismus (1865) of the theologian Tholuck. Of these the latter is unfinished, coming down only to the middle of the eighteenth century; while the former does not exactly fulfil its title, being composed of a volume (2 Abth. 1853, 1854) on Das akademische Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts, and of one on Das kirchliche Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts (2 Abth. 1861, 1862), both being restricted to German developments. They thus give much matter extraneous to the subject, and are [13]not exhaustive as to rationalism even in Germany. Hagenbach’s Die Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (2 Th. 1848, 1849), a series of lectures, translated in English, abridged, under the title German Rationalism in its Rise, Progress, and Decline (1865), conforms fairly to the latter title, save as regards the last clause.
Of much greater scholarly merit is the Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, vom Ende des achten Jahrhunderts bis zum Anfange des vierzehnten, by Hermann Reuter (1875, 1877). This is at once learned, judicious, and impartial. Its definition of “Aufklärung” is substantially in agreement with the working definition of Freethought given above.
Among other surveys of periods of innovating thought, as distinguished from histories of ecclesiastical heresy, or histories of “religious” or theological thought which only incidentally deal with heterodox opinion, should be noted the careful Geschichte des englischen Deismus of G. F. Lechler (1841); the slighter sketch of E. Sayous, Les déistes anglais et le Christianisme (1882); the somewhat diffuse work of Cesare Cantù, Gli eretici d’Italia (3 tom. 1865–67); the very intelligent study of Felice Tocco, L’Eresia nel medio evo (1884); Schmidt’s Histoire des Cathares (2 tom. 1849); Chr. U. Hahn’s learned Geschichte der Ketzer im Mittelalter (3 Bde. 1845–50); and the valuable research of F. T. Perrens, Les Libertins en France au xviie siècle (1896). A similar scholarly research for the eighteenth century in France is still lacking, and the many monographs on the more famous freethinkers leave a good deal of literary history in obscurity. Such a research has been very painstakingly made for England in the late Sir Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., 2nd ed., 1881), which, however, ignores scientific thought. One of the best monographs of the kind is La Critique des traditions religieuses chez les Grecs, des origines au temps de Plutarque, by Professor Paul Decharme (1904), a survey at once scholarly and attractive. The brilliant treatise of Mr. F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (1912), sketches on more speculative lines the beginnings of Greek rationalism in Ionia. The Geschichte des Monismus im Altertum of Prof. Dr. A. Drews (1913) is a wide survey, of great synthetic value.
Contributions to the general history of freethought, further, have been made in the works of J. W. Draper (A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, 2 vols, 1861, many reprints; and History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, 1873, many reprints), both full of suggestion and stimulus, but requiring thorough revision as to detail; in the famous Introduction to the History of Civilization in England of H. T. Buckle (2 vols. 1857–61; new ed. in 1 vol. with annotations by the present writer, 1904); in the History of the Rise and [14]Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe of W. E. H. Lecky (2 vols. 1865; R. P. A. rep. 1910), who was of Buckle’s school, but fell below him in point of coherence; in the comprehensive History of the Warfare of Science with Theology of Professor Andrew D. White (2 vols. 1896—a great expansion of his earlier essay, The Warfare of Science, 2nd ed. 1877); and in the essay of Mr. E. S. P. Haynes, Religious Persecution: A Study in Political Psychology (1904; R. P. A. rep. 1906), as well as in many histories of philosophy and of sciences.
The so-called History of Rationalism of the American Bishop J. F. Hurst, first published in 1865, and “revised” in 1901, is in the main a work of odium theologicum, dealing chiefly with the evolution of theology and criticism in Germany since the Reformation. Even to that purpose it is very inadequate. Its preface alleges that “happily the vital body of evangelical truth has received only comparatively weak and timorous attacks from the more modern representatives of the rank and rabid rationalism which reached its climax near the close of the eighteenth, and has had a continuous decline through the nineteenth, century.” It urges, however, as a reason for defensive activity, the consideration that “the work of Satan is never planless”; and further pronounces that the work of rationalism “must determine its character. This work has been most injurious to the faith and life of the Church, and its deeds must therefore be its condemnation” (Introd. p. 3). Thus the latest approximation to a history of theological rationalism by a clerical writer is the most negligible.
In English, apart from studies of given periods and of the progress of science and culture, the only other approaches to a history of freethought are those of Bishop Van Mildert, the Rev. J. E. Riddle, and the Rev. Adam Storey Farrar. Van Mildert’s Historical View of the Rise and Progress of Infidelity47 constituted the Boyle Lectures for 1802–05; Mr. Riddle’s Natural History of Infidelity and Superstition in Contrast with Christian Faith formed part of his Bampton Lectures for 1852; and Mr. Farrar produced his Critical History of Freethought in reference to the Christian Religion as the Bampton Lectures for 1862. All three were men of considerable reading, and their works give useful bibliographical clues; but the virulence of Van Mildert deprives his treatise of rational weight; Mr. Riddle, who in any case professes to give merely a “Natural History” or abstract argument, and not a history proper, is only somewhat more constrainedly hostile to “infidelity”; and even Mr. Farrar, the most judicial as well as the most comprehensive of the three, proceeds on the old assumption that “unbelief” [15](from which he charitably distinguishes “doubt”) generally arises from “antagonism of feeling, which wishes revelation untrue”—a thesis maintained with vehemence by the others.48
Writers so placed, indeed, could not well be expected to contemplate freethought scientifically as an aspect of mental evolution common to all civilizations, any more than to look with sympathy on the freethought which is specifically anti-Christian. The annotations to all three works, certainly, show some consciousness of the need for another temper and method than that of their text,49 which is too obviously, perhaps inevitably, composed for the satisfaction of the ordinary orthodox animus of their respective periods; but even the best remains not so much a history as an indictment. In the present sketch, framed though it be from the rationalistic standpoint, it is proposed to draw up not a counter indictment, but a more or less dispassionate account of the main historical phases of freethought, viewed on the one hand as expressions of the rational or critical spirit, playing on the subject-matter of religion, and on the other hand as sociological phenomena conditioned by social forces, in particular the economic and political. The lack of any previous general survey of a scientific character will, it is hoped, be taken into account in passing judgment on its schematic defects as well as its inevitable flaws of detail.
Though it is no part of our business here to elaborate the psychology of doubt and belief, it may be well to anticipate a possible criticism on the lines of recent psychological speculation, and to indicate at the outset the practical conception on which the present survey broadly proceeds. To begin with, the conception of freethinking implies that of hindrance, resistance, coercion, difficulty; and as regards objective obstacles the type of all hindrance is restraint upon freedom of speech or publication. In other words, all such restraint is a check upon thinking. On reflection it soon becomes clear that where men dare not say or write what they think, the very power of thinking is at length impaired in the ablest, while the natural stimulus to new thought is withdrawn from the rest. No man can properly develop his mind without contact with other minds, suggestion and criticism being alike factors in every fruitful mental evolution; and though for some the [16]atmosphere of personal intercourse is but slightly necessary to the process of mental construction, even for these the prospect of promulgation is probably essential to the undertaking of the task; and the study of other writers is a condition of useful ratiocination. In any case, it is certain that the exercise of argument is a condition of intellectual growth. Not one man in a million will or can argue closely with himself on issues on which he knows he can say nothing and can never overtly act; and for the average man all reasoning on great problems is a matter of prompting from without. The simple fact that the conversation of uneducated people runs so largely to citation of what “he says” makes clear this dependence. Each brings something to the common store, and progress is set up by “pooling” the mass of small intellectual variations or originalities. Thus in the long run freedom of speech is the measure of a generation’s intellectual capacity;50 and the promoters of such freedom are typically the truest servants of progress.
On the other hand, there is still a common disposition to ascribe to a species of intellectual malice the disturbance that criticism causes to the holders of established beliefs. Recent writers have pressed far the theorem that “will” enters as an element into every mental act, thus giving a momentary appearance of support to the old formula that unbelief is the result of an arbitrary or sinister perversity of individual choice. Needless to say, however, the new theorem—which inverts without refuting Spinoza’s denial of the entity of volition—applies equally to acts of belief; and it is a matter of the simplest concrete observation that, in so far as will or wilfulness in the ordinary sense operates in the sphere of religion, it is at least as obvious and as active on the side of belief51 as on the other. A moment’s reflection on the historic phenomena of orthodox resistance to criticism will satisfy any student that, whatever may have been the stimulus on the side of heresy, the antagonism it arouses is largely the index of primary passion—the spontaneous resentment of the believer whose habits are disturbed. His will normally decides his action, without any process of judicial deliberation.
It is another way of stating the same fact to point out the fallacy of the familiar assumption that freethinking represents a bias to “negation.” In the nature of the case, the believer has to do at [17]least as much negation as his opponents; and if again we scan history in this connection, we shall see cause to conclude that the temperamental tendency to negation—which is a form of variation like another—is abundantly common on the side of religious conservatism. Nowhere is there more habitual opposition to new ideas as such. At best the believer, so-called, rejects a given proposition or suggestion because it clashes with something he already believes. The new proposition, however, has often been reached by way not of preliminary negation of the belief in question, but of constructive explanation, undertaken to bring observed facts into theoretic harmony. Thus the innovator has only contingently put aside the old belief because it clashes with something he believes in a more vital way; and he has done this with circumspection, whereas his opponent too often repels him without a second thought. The phenomena of the rise of the Copernican astronomy, modern geology, and modern biology, all bear out this generalization.
Nor is the charge of negativeness any more generally valid against such freethinking as directly assails current doctrines. There may be, of course, negative-minded people on that side as on the other; and such may fortuitously do something to promote freethought, or may damage it in their neighbourhood by their atmosphere. But everything goes to show that freethinking normally proceeds by way of intellectual construction—that is, by way of effort to harmonize one position with another; to modify a special dogma to the general run of one’s thinking. Rationalism stands not for “skepticism” in the strict philosophic sense, but for a critical effort to reach certainties. The attitude of pure skepticism on a wide scale is really very rare—much rarer even than the philosophic effort. So far from freethinkers being given to “destroying without building up,” they are, as a rule, unable to destroy a dogma either for themselves or for others without setting a constructive belief in its place—a form of explanation, that is; such being much more truly a process of construction than would be the imposition of a new scheme of dogma. In point of fact, they are often accused, and by the same critics, of an undue tendency to speculative construction; and the early atheists of Greece and of the modern period did so err. But that is only a proof the more that their freethinking was not a matter of arbitrary volition or an undue negativeness.
The only explanation which ostensibly countervails this is the old one above glanced at—that the unbeliever finds the given doctrine troublesome as a restraint, and so determines to reject it. It is to be feared that this view has survived Mr. A. S. Farrar. Yet it is [18]very clear that no man need throw aside any faith, and least of all Christianity, on the ground of its hampering his conduct. To say nothing of the fact that in every age, under every religion, at every stage of culture from that of the savage to that of the supersubtle decadent or mystic, men have practised every kind of misconduct without abandoning their supernatural credences—there is the special fact that the whole Christian system rests on the doctrine of forgiveness of sins to the believer. The theory of “wilful” disbelief on the part of the reprobate is thus entirely unplausible. Such disbelief in the terms of the case would be uneasy, as involving an element of incertitude; and his fear of retribution could never be laid. On the other hand, he has but inwardly to avow himself a sinner and a believer, and he has the assurance that repentance at the last moment will outweigh all his sins.
It is not, of course, suggested that such is the normal or frequent course of believing Christians; but it has been so often enough to make the “libertine” theory of unbelief untenable. Indeed, the singular diversity between profession and practice among Christians has in all periods called out declarations by the more fervid believers that their average fellow-Christians are “practical atheists.” More judicial minds may be set asking instead how far men really “believe” who do not act on their opinions. As one high authority has put it, in the Middle Ages the normal opposition of theory and practice “was peculiarly abrupt. Men’s impulses were more violent, and their conduct more reckless, than is often witnessed in modern society; while the absence of a criticizing and measuring spirit made them surrender their minds more unreservedly than they would do now to a complete and imposing theory.... Resistance to God’s Vicar might be, and indeed was admitted to be, a deadly sin, but it was one which nobody hesitated to commit.”52 And so with other sins, the sinner having somewhere in the rear of his consciousness the reflection that his sins could be absolved.
And, apart from such half-purposive forms of licence among Christians, there have been countless cases of purposive licence. In all ages there have been antinomian Christians,53 whether of the sort that simply rest on the “seventy times seven” of the Gospel, or of the more articulately logical kind who dwell on the doctrine of faith versus works. For the rest, as the considerate theologian will [19]readily see, insistence on the possibility of a sinister motive for the unbeliever brings up the equal possibility of a sinister motive on the part of the convert to Christianity, ancient or modern. At every turn, then, the charge of perversity of the will recoils on the advocate of belief; so that it would be the course of common prudence to abandon it, even were it not in itself, as a rule, so plainly an expression of irritated bias.
On the other hand, it need not be disputed that unbelief has been often enough associated with some species of libertinism to give a passing colour for the pretence of causal connection. The fact, however, leads us to a less superficial explanation, worth keeping in view here. Freethinking being taken to be normally a “variation” of intellectual type in the direction of a critical demand for consistency and credibility in beliefs, its social assertion will be a matter on the one side of force of character or degree of recklessness, and on the other hand of force of circumstances. The intellectual potentiality and the propagandist purpose will be variously developed in different men and in different surroundings. If we ask ourselves how, in general, the critical tendency is to arise or to come into play, we are almost compelled to suppose a special stimulus as well as a special faculty. Critical doubt is made possible, broadly speaking, by the accumulation of ideas or habits of certain kinds which insensibly undo a previous state of homogeneity of thought. For instance, a community subsiding into peace and order from a state of warfare and plunder will at length find the ethic of its daily life at variance with the conserved ethic of its early religion of human sacrifice and special family or tribal sanctions; or a community which has accumulated a certain amount of accurate knowledge of astronomy will gradually find such knowledge irreconcilable with its primitive cosmology. A specially gifted person will anticipate the general movement of thought; but even for him some standing-ground must be supposed; and for the majority the advance in moral practice or scientific knowledge is the condition of any effective freethinking.
Between top and bottom, however, there are all grades of vivacity, earnestness, and courage; and on the side of the normal resistance there are all varieties of political and economic circumstance. It follows, then, that the avowed freethinker may be so in virtue either of special courage or of antecedent circumstances which make the attitude on his part less courageous. And it may even be granted to the quietist that the courage is at times that of ill-balanced judgment or heady temperament; just as it may be [20]conceded to the conservative that it is at times that which goes with or follows on disregard of wise ways of life. It is well that the full force of this position be realized at the outset. When we find, as we shall, some historic freethinkers displaying either extreme imprudence or personal indiscipline, we shall be prepared, in terms of this preliminary questioning, to realize anew that humanity has owed a great deal to some of its “unbalanced” types; and that, though discipline is nearly the last word of wisdom, indiscipline may at times be the morbid accompaniment or excess of a certain openness of view and spontaneity of action which are more favourable to moral and intellectual advance than a cold prudence or a safe insusceptibility.
But cold or calm prudence in turn is not a vice; and it is hardly possible to doubt that there have been in all ages varying numbers of unbelievers who shrugged their shoulders over the follies of faith, and declined to tilt against the windmills of fanaticism. There is much reason for surmising that Shakespeare was a case in point. It is not to be supposed, then, because some freethinkers who came out into the open were unbalanced types, that their psychology is the psychology of freethought, any more than that of General Gordon or Francis of Assisi is to be reckoned typical on the side of belief. There must have been myriads of quiet unbelievers, rational all round, whose unbelief was a strictly intellectual process, undisturbed by temperament. In our own day such types abound, and it is rather in them than in the abnormal types of past freethought—the Brunos and the Voltaires—that the average psychology of freethought is to be looked for and understood.
As for the case of the man who, already at odds with his fellows in the matter of his conduct, may in some phases of society feel it the easier to brave them in the matter of his avowed creed, we have already seen that even this does not convict him of intellectual dishonesty. And were such cases relatively as numerous as they are scarce—were the debauched deists even commoner than the vinous Steeles and Fieldings—the use of the fact as an argument would still be an oblique course on the side of a religion which claims to have found its first and readiest hearing among publicans and sinners. For the rest, the harm done in the world’s history by unbalanced freethinkers is as dust in the balance against the immeasurable evil deliberately wrought on serious religious motives, to say nothing of the constant deviation of the mass of believers from their own professed code.
It may, finally, help a religious reader to a judicial view of the [21]phenomenon of freethought if he is reminded that every step forward in the alleged historic evolution of his own creed would depend, in the case put, on the existence of persons capable of rejecting a current and prevailing code in favour of one either denounced as impious or marked off by circumstances as dangerous. The Israelites in Egypt, the prophets and their supporters, the Gospel Jesus and his adherents, all ostensibly stand in some degree for positions of “negation,” of hardy innovation, of disregard to things and persons popularly venerated; wherefore Collins, in the Discourse above mentioned, smilingly claimed at least the prophets as great freethinkers. On that head it may suffice to say that some of the temperamental qualifications would probably be very much the same for those who of old brought about religious innovation in terms of supernatural beliefs, and for those who in later times innovate by way of minimizing or repudiating such beliefs, though the intellectual qualifications might be different. Bruno and Dolet and Vanini and Voltaire, faulty men all four, could at least be more readily conceived as prophets in early Jewry, or reformers under Herod, than as Pharisees, or even Sadducees, under either regimen.
Be that as it may, however, the issues between freethought and creed are ultimately to be settled only in respect of their argumentative bases, as appreciable by men in society at any given time. It is with the notion of making the process of judicial appreciation a little easier, by historically exhibiting the varying conditions under which it has been undertaken in the past, that these pages are written. [22]
1 Cp. Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus, 1841, p. 458; A. S. Farrar, Critical History of Freethought, 1862, p. 588; Larousse’s Dictionnaire, art. Libre Pensée; Sayous, Les déistes anglais et le Christianisme, 1882, p. 203. ↑
2 Jesus is made to apply it either to his disciples or to willing followers in Matt. xvii, 17, where the implication seems to be that lack of faith alone prevents miraculous cures. So with ἀπιστία in Matt. xiii, 58. In the Epistles, a pagan as such is ἀπίστος—e.g., 1 Cor. vi, 6. Here the Vulgate has infideles: in Matt. xiii, 58, the word is incredulitatem. ↑
3 Cp. Luke xii, 46; Tit. i, 15; Rev. xxi, 8. ↑
4 In the prologue to the first print of the old (1196) Revelation of the Monk of Evesham, 1482. ↑
5 Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Viret, Note D. ↑
6 Essais, liv. iii. ch. 12. Édit. Firmin-Didot, 1882, ii, 518. ↑
7 See F. T. Perrens, Les Libertins en France au xviie Siècle, 1896, Introd. § 11, for a good general view of the bearings of the word. It stood at times for simple independence of spirit, apart from religious freethinking. Thus Madame de Sevigné (Lettre à Mme. de Grignan, 28 juin, 1671) writes: “Je suis libertine, plus que vous.” ↑
8 Stähelin, Johannes Calvin, 1863, i, 383 sq.; Perrens as cited, pp. 5–6; Mosheim, Eccles. Hist., 13 Cent., part ii, ch. v, §§ 9–12, and notes; 14 Cent., part ii, ch. v, §§ 3–5; 16 Cent., § 3, part ii, ch. ii. §§ 38–42. ↑
9 A. Bossert, Calvin, 1906. p. 151. ↑
10 Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, Eng. tr. ed. 1892, p. 542, note. ↑
11 Answer to Sir T. More, Parker Soc. rep. 1850, pp. 53–54. ↑
12 Controversy with Harding, Parker Soc. rep. of Works, 1845, i, 305. ↑
13 Paradise Lost, i, 582; Samson Agonistes, 221. ↑
14 The New Inn, 1628–9, Act iii. Sc. 2. ↑
15 The New English Dictionary gives instances in 1526 and 1552. ↑
16 If Mr. Froude’s transcript of a manuscript can here be relied on. History, ed. 1870, x, 545. (Ed. 1872, xi, 199.) ↑
17 Four Questions Propounded (pref. to Acts and Monuments). ↑
18 Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, Parker Soc. rep., p. 129. ↑
19 Works, ed. 1850, ii, 752. ↑
20 B. V, ch. i, § 3. Works, i, 429. ↑
21 De civitate Dei, xx, 30, end; xxi, 5, beginn., etc. ↑
22 Religio Medici, 1642, pt. i. §§ 19, 20. ↑
23 Essay II, Of Scepticism and Certainty (rep. of reply to Thomas White, app. to Scepsis Scientifica in 1665) in Glanvill’s collected Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion, 1676, pp. 38, 44. ↑
24 Plus Ultra: or, The Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since the Days of Aristotle, 1668, p. 146. ↑
25 History of the Royal Society, 1667, p. 73. Describing the beginnings of the Society, Sprat remarks that Oxford had at that time many members “who had begun a free way of reasoning” (p. 53). ↑
26 Buckle, Introd. to Hist. of Civ. in Eng., 1-vol. ed. p. 211. ↑
27 Sprat, p. 375 (printed as 367). ↑
28 Id., p. 83. The French Academy had the same rule. ↑
29 Some of Sprat’s uses of the term have a very general sense, as when he writes (p. 87) that “Amsterdam is a place of Trade without the mixture of men of freer thoughts.” The latter is an old application, as in “the free sciences” or “the liberal arts.” ↑
30 Cited by Archbishop Trench, The Study of Words, 19th ed., p. 230, from the Clarendon State Papers, App. Vol. III, p. 40. ↑
31 Art. Rationalismus and Supernaturalismus in Herzog and Plitt’s Real-Encyk. für prot. Theol. und Kirche, 1883. xii, 509. ↑
32 Philosophical Works of Bacon, ed. Ellis and Spedding, iii, 583. See the same saying quoted among the Apophthegms given in Tenison’s Baconiana (Routledge’s ed. of Works, p. 895). ↑
33 Every Man in his Humour (1598), Act iii, sc. 3. ↑
34 Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of his Friends, 1708, p. 190. ↑
36 Ed. Rotterdam, 1686. p. 195. ↑
38 Ch. on Logic, cited by Professor Fowler in his ed. of the Novum Organum, 1878, introd. p. 118. ↑
41 Orig. ed. iii, 305, 306, 311; ed. J. M. R., 1900, ii, 349, 353. ↑
43 Cp. Johnson on A. Philips in Lives of the Poets. Swift, too, issued his Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs in 1714. ↑
44 Thus Bentley, writing as Phileleutherus Lipsiensis against Collins, claims to have been “train’d up and exercis’d in Free Thought from my youth.” Dr. Samuel Clarke somewhere makes a similar statement; and the point is raised by Berkeley in his Minute Philosopher, Dial. i, § 10. One of the first replies to Collins, A Letter to the Free-thinkers, By a Layman, dated February 24, 1712–13, likewise insists on the right of believers to the title, declaring that “a free-thinker may be the best or worst of men.” Shaftesbury on the other side protests that the passion of orthodoxy “holds up the intended chains and fetters and declares its resolution to enslave” (Characteristics, iii. 305; ed. 1900, ii, 345). Later, the claim of Bentley and Clarke became common; and one tract on Christian evidences, A Layman’s Faith, 1732, whose author shows not a grain of the critical spirit, professes to be written “by a Freethinker and a Christian.” ↑
46 Cp. Hauréau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique, ed. 1870–1872, i, 543–46. ↑
47 Second ed. with enlarged Appendix (of authorities and references), 1808, 2 vols. ↑
48 Farrar, pref., p. x; Riddle, p. 99; Van Mildert, i, 105, etc. ↑
49 Van Mildert even recast his first manuscript. See the Memoir of Joshua Watson, 1863, p. 35. ↑
50 Cp. W. A. Schmidt, Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums, 1847, pp. 12–13. ↑
51 Its legitimacy on that side is expressly contended for by Professor William James in his volume The Will to Believe (1897), the positions of which were criticized by the present writer in the University Magazine, April and June, 1897. ↑
52 Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed., p. 135. ↑
53 A religious basis for sexual licence is of course a common feature in non-Christian religions also. Classic instances are well known. As to sexual promiscuity in an “intensely religious” savage community, see Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 290. ↑
To consider the normal aspects of primitive life, as we see them in savage communities and trace them in early literature, is to realize the enormous hindrance offered to critical thinking in the primary stages of culture by the mere force of habit. “The savage,” says our leading anthropologist, “by no means goes through life with the intention of gathering more knowledge and framing better laws than his fathers. On the contrary, his tendency is to consider his ancestors as having handed down to him the perfection of wisdom, which it would be impiety to make the least alteration in. Hence among the lower races there is obstinate resistance to the most desirable reforms, and progress can only force its way with a slowness and difficulty which we of this century can hardly imagine.”1 Among the Bantu of South Africa, before the spread of European rule, “any person in advance of his fellows was specially liable to suspicion [of sorcery], so that progress of any kind towards what we should term higher civilization was made exceedingly difficult by this belief.”2 The real or would-be sorcerer could thus secure the elimination of the honest inventor; fear of sorcery being most potent as against the supposed irregular practitioner. The relative obstinacy of conservatism in periods and places of narrow knowledge is again illustrated in Lane’s account of the modern Egyptians in the first half of the nineteenth century: “Some Egyptians who had studied for a few years in France declared to me that they could not instil any of the notions which they had there acquired even into the minds of their most intimate friends.”3 So in modern Japan there were many assassinations of reformers, and some civil war, before Western ideas could gain a footing.4 The less the knowledge, in short, the harder to add to it. [23]
It is hardly possible to estimate with any confidence the relative rates of progress; but, though all are extremely slow, it would seem that reason could sooner play correctively on errors of secular practice5 than on any species of proposition in religion—taking that word to connote at once mythology, early cosmology, and ritual ethic. Mere disbelief in a particular medicine-man or rain-maker who failed would not lead to any reflective disbelief in all; any more than the beating or renunciation of his fetish by a savage or barbarian means rejection of his fetishism, or than the renunciation of a particular saint by a modern Catholic6 means abandonment of prayer to saints for intercession.
The question as to whether savages do beat their idols is a matter in some dispute. Sir A. B. Ellis, a high authority, offers a notable denial to the current belief that negroes “beat their Gods if their prayers are unanswered.” “After an experience of the Gold Coast extending over thirteen years,” he writes, “I have never heard of, much less witnessed, anything of the kind, although I have made inquiries in every direction” (The Tshi-speaking Peoples, 1887, p. 194). Other anthropologists have collected many instances in other races—e.g., Fr. Schultze, Der Fetischismus, 1871, p. 130. In one case, a priest beats a fetish in advance, to secure his careful attention. (Id. pp. 90–91, citing the personal narrative of Bastian.) It seems to be a matter of psychic stage. The more primitive negro is as it were too religious, too much afraid of his Gods, who are not for him “idols,” but spirits residing in images or objects. Where the state of fear is only chronic another temper may arise. Among the Bataks of Sumatra disappointed worshippers often scold a God; and their legends tell of men who declared war on a deity and shot at him from a mountain. (Warneck, Die Religion des Batak, 1909, p. 7. Cp. Gen. ii, 4–9.) A temper of defiance towards deity has been noted in an Aryan Kafir of the Hindu-Kush. (Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, 1899, p. 182.) Some peoples go much further. Among the Polynesians, when a God failed to cure a sick chief or notable, he “was regarded as inexorable, and was usually banished from the temple and his image destroyed” (W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. 1831, i, 350). So among the Chinese, “if the God does not give rain they will threaten and beat him; sometimes they publicly depose him from the rank [24]of deity” (Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship, 1905, pp. 98–101. Cp. Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed., 1672, p. 80).
There are many analogous phenomena. In old Samoa, in the ritual of mourning for the dead, the family God was first implored to restore the deceased, and then fiercely abused and menaced.7 See, too, the story of the people of Niuē or Savage Island in the South Pacific, who in the time of a great pestilence, thinking the sickness was caused by a certain idol, broke it in pieces and threw it away (Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 306). See further the cases cited by Constant, De la religion, 1824, vol. i, ptie. ii, pp. 32–34; and by Peschel, The Races of Man, Eng. tr. 1876, pp. 247–8, in particular that of Rastus, the last pagan Lapp in Europe, who quarrelled with his fetish stone for killing his reindeer in revenge for the withholding of its customary offering of brandy, and “immediately embraced Christianity.” (Compare E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 276.) See again the testimony of Herman Melville in his Typee, ch. xxiv; and that of T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1858, i, 236: “Sometimes the natives get angry with their deities, and abuse and even challenge them to fight.” Herodotos has similar stories of barbarians who defy their own and other deities (iv, 172, 183, 184). Compare the case of King Rum Bahadur of Nepaul, who cannonaded his Gods. Spencer, Study of Sociology, pp. 301–2. Also the anecdote cited by Spencer (Id. p. 160) from Sir R. Burton’s Goa, p. 167. Here there is no disbelief, no reflection, but simple resentment. Compare, too, the amusing story of a blasphemy by Rossini, told by Louis Viardot, Libre Examen, 6e éd. pp. 166–67, note. That threats against the Gods are possible at a semi-civilized stage is proved by various passages in medieval literature. Thus in Caxton’s Charles the Grete, a translation from an older French original, Charles is made to say: “O lord God, if ye suffre that Olyver be overcome and that my ryght at thys tyme be loste and defyled, I make a vowe that al Crystyante shal be destroyed. I shal not leve in Fraunce chirche ne monasterye, ymage ne aulter,” etc. (Early Eng. Text Soc. rep. 1881, pp. 70–71.) Such language was probably used by not a few medieval kings in moments of fury; and there is even record that at the battle of Dunbar certain of the Scots Presbyterian clergy intimated to their deity that he would not be their God if he failed them on that day.
If such flights be reckoned possible for Christian kings and clerics in the Christian era, there would seem to be no unlikelihood about the many stories of God-beating and God-defying among contemporary savages, though so good an observer as Sir A. B. Ellis may not have witnessed them in the part of [25]Africa best known to him. The conclusion reached by Sir A. B. Ellis is that the negroes of the Gold Coast are not properly to be described as fetishists. Fetishism, on his view, is a worship of objects as in themselves endowed with magical power; whereas the Gold Coast negro ascribes no virtue to the object commonly called his fetish, regarding it simply as inhabited by a supernatural power. This writer sees “true fetishism” in the attitude of Italian peasants and fishermen who beat and ill-treat their images when prayers are not answered, and in that of Spaniards who cover the faces of their images or turn them to the wall when about to do anything which they think the saint or deity would disapprove of. On this view, fetishism is a later yet lower stage of religious evolution than that of the negro. On the other hand, Miss Kingsley takes fetishism to be the proper name of the attitude of the negro towards particular objects as divinely inhabited, and represents it as a kind of pantheism (West African Studies, 2nd ed. 1901, ch. v). And since, by her definition, “Gods of fetish” do not necessarily “require a material object to manifest themselves in” (p. 96), the term “fetish” is thus detached from all of its former meanings. It seems expedient, as a matter of terminology, to let fetishism mean both object- or image-worship and the belief in the special inhabiting of objects by deities, with a recognition that the beliefs may be different stages in an evolution, though, on the other hand, they are obviously likely to coalesce or concur. In the “Obeah” system of the negroes of the West Indies the former belief in the indwelling spirit has become, or has coalesced with, belief in the magical powers of the object (Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 57).
As to defiance or contumely towards the Gods, finally, we have the testimony of the Swiss missionary Junod that the South African Thonga, whom he studied very closely, have in their ritual “a regular insulting of the Gods.” (Life of a South African Tribe, ii, 1912, p. 384.) Why not? “Prayers to the ancestors ... are ... absolutely devoid of awe” (p. 385), though “the ancestor-Gods are certainly the most powerful spiritual agency acting on man’s life” (p. 361); and “the spirits of the ancestors are the main objects of religious worship” (p. 344). The Thonga, again, use “neither idolatry nor fetishism,” having no “idols” (p. 388), though they recognize “hidden virtues” in plants, animals, and stones (p. 345). They simply regard their ancestor-Gods very much as they do their aged people, whom they generally treat with little consideration. But the dead can do harm, and must therefore be propitiated—as savages propitiate, with fear or malice or derision in their hearts, as the case may be. (Cp. p. 379.) On the other hand, despite the denial of their “fetishism,” they believe that ancestor-Gods may come in the shape of animals; and they so venerate [26]a kind of palladium (made up like a medicine-man’s amulet) as to raise the question whether this kind of belief is not just that which Miss Kingsley called “fetish.” (Junod, pp. 358, 373–74.)
Whatever may be the essence, or the varieties, of fetishism, it is clear that the beating of idols or threatening of Gods does not amount to rational doubt concerning the supernatural. Some general approach to that attitude may perhaps be inferred in the case of an economic revolt against the burdens of a highly specialized religious system, which may often have occurred in unwritten history. We shall note a recorded instance of the kind in connection with the question whether there are any savage tribes without religion. But it occurs in the somewhat highly evolved barbarism of pre-Christian Hawaii; and it can set up no inference as to any development of critical unbelief at lower levels. In the long stage of lower savagery, then, the only approach to freethinking that would seriously affect general belief would presumably be that very credulity which gave foothold to religious beliefs to begin with. That is to say, without anything in the nature of general criticism of any story or doctrine, one such might to some extent supersede another, in virtue of the relative gift of persuasion or personal weight of the propounders. Up to a certain point persons with a turn for myth or ritual-making would compete, and might even call in question each other’s honesty, as well as each other’s inspiration.
Since the rise of scientific hierology there has been a disposition among students to take for granted the good faith of all early religion-makers, and to dismiss entirely that assumption of fraud which was so long made by Christian writers concerning the greater part of every non-Christian system. The assumption had been passed on from the freethinkers of antiquity who formulated the view that all religious doctrine had been invented by politicians in order to control the people.8 Christian polemists, of course, applied it to all systems but their own. When, however, all systems are seen to be alike natural in origin, such charges are felt to recoil on the system which makes them; and latterly9 Christian writers, seeing as much, have been fain to abandon the conception of “priestcraft,” [27]adroitly representing it as an extravagance of rationalism. It certainly served rationalistic purposes, and the title of the supposititious medieval work on “The Three Impostors” points to its currency among unbelievers long ago; but when we first find it popularly current in the seventeenth century, it is in a Christian atmosphere.10 Some of the early deists and others have probably in turn exaggerated the amount of deliberate deceit involved in the formation of religious systems; but nevertheless “priestcraft” is a demonstrable factor in the process. What is called the psychology of religion has been much obscured in response to the demand of religious persons to have it so presented as to flatter them in that capacity.11 Such a claim cannot be permitted to overrule the fair inductions of comparative science.
Anthropological evidence suggests that, while religion clearly begins in primordial fear and fancy, wilful fraud must to some extent have entered into all religious systems alike, even in the period of primeval credulity, were it only because the credulity was so great. One of the most judicial and sympathetic of the Christian scholars who have written the history of Greece treats as unquestionable the view that alike in pagan and Christian cults “priestcraft” has been “fertile in profitable devices, in the invention of legends, the fabrication of relics, and other modes of imposture”;12 and the leading hierologist of the last generation pronounces decisively as to an element of intentional deceit in the Koran-making of Mohammed13—a judgment which, if upheld, can hardly fail to be extended to some portions of all other sacred books. However that may be, we have positive evidence that wilful and systematic fraud enters into the doctrine of contemporary savages, and that among some “primitives” known myths are deliberately propounded to the boys and women by the male adults.14 Indeed, the majority of modern travellers among primitives seem to have regarded their priests and sorcerers in the mass as conscious deceivers.15 If, then, we can point [28]to deliberate imposture alike in the charm-mongering and myth-mongering of contemporary savages and in the sacred-book-making of the higher historical systems, it seems reasonable to hold that conscious deceit, as distinguished from childlike fabrication, would chronically enter into the tale-making of primitive men, as into their simpler relations with each other. It is indeed impossible to conceive how a copious mythology could ever arise without the play of a kind of imaginativeness that is hardly compatible with veracity; and it is probably only the exigencies of ecclesiastical life that cause modern critics still to treat the most deliberate fabrications and forgeries in the Hebrew sacred books as somehow produced in a spirit of the deepest concern for truth. An all-round concern for truth is, in fact, a late intellectual development, the product of much criticism and much doubt; hence, perhaps, the lenity of the verdicts under notice. Certain wild tribes here and there, living in a state of great simplicity, are in our own day described as remarkably truthful;16 but they are not remarkable for range of supernatural belief; and their truthfulness is to be regarded as a product of their special stability and simplicity of life. The trickery of a primitive medicine-man, of course, is a much more childlike thing than the frauds of educated priesthoods; and it is compatible with so much of spontaneous pietism as is implied in the common passing of the operator into the state of convulsion and trance—a transition which comes easily to many savages.17 But even at that stage of psychosis, and in a community where simple secular lying is very rare, the professional wizard-priest becomes an adept in playing upon credulity.18
It belongs, in short, to the very nature of the priestly function, in its earlier forms, to develop in a special degree the normal bias of the undisciplined mind to intellectual fraud. Granting that there are all degrees of self-consciousness in the process, we are bound to recognize that in all of us there is “the sophist within,” who stands between us and candour in every problem either of self-criticism or of self-defence. And, if the instructed man recognizes this clearly and the uninstructed does not, none the less is the latter an exemplification of the fact. His mental obliquities are not any less real because of his indifference to them than are the [29]acts of the hereditary thief because he does them without shame. And if we consider how the fetish-priest is at every turn tempted to invent and prevaricate, simply because his pretensions are fundamentally preposterous; and how in turn the priest of a higher grade, even when he sincerely “believes” in his deity, is bound to put forward as matters of knowledge or revelation the hypotheses he frames to account for either the acts or the abstentions of the God, we shall see that the priestly office is really as incompatible with a high sincerity in the primitive stages as in those in which it is held by men who consciously propound falsities, whether for their mere gain or in the hope of doing good. It may be true that the priestly claim of supernatural sanction for an ethical command is at times motived by an intense conviction of the rightness of the course of conduct prescribed; but none the less is such a habit of mind fatal to intellectual sincerity. Either there is sheer hallucination or there is pious fraud.
Given, however, the tendency to deceit among primitive folk, distrust and detection in a certain number of cases would presumably follow, constituting a measure of simple skepticism. By force partly of this and partly of sheer instability of thought, early belief would be apt to subsist for ages like that of contemporary African tribes,19 in a state of flux.20 Comparative fixity would presumably arise with the approach to stability of life, of industry, and of political institutions, whether with or without a special priesthood. The usages of early family worship would seem to have been no less rigid than those of the tribal and public cults. For primitive man as for the moderns definite organization and ritual custom must have been a great establishing force as regards every phase of religious belief;21 and it may well have been that there was thus less intellectual liberty of a kind in the long ages of what we regard as primitive civilization than in those of savagery and barbarism which preceded them. On that view, systems which are supposed to represent in the fullest degree the primeval spontaneity of religion may have been in part priestly reactions against habits of freedom accompanied by a certain amount of skepticism. A modern inquirer22 has in some such sense advanced the theory that in ancient India, in even the earlier period of collection of the Rig-Veda, which itself [30]undermined the monarchic character of the pre-Vedic religion, there was a decay of belief, which the final redaction served to accelerate. Such a theory can hardly pass beyond the stage of hypothesis in view of the entire absence of history proper in early Indian literature; but we seem at least to have the evidence of the Veda itself that while it was being collected there were deniers of the existence of its Gods.23
The latter testimony alone may serve as ground for raising afresh an old question which recent anthropology has somewhat inexactly decided—that, namely, as to whether there are any savages without religious beliefs.
[For old discussions on the subject see Cicero, De natura deorum, i, 23; Cumberland, Disquisitio de legibus naturæ, 1672, introd. (rejecting negative view as resting on inadequate testimony); Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, Bk. I, ch. iii, § 9; ch. iv, § 8 (accepting negative view); protests against it by Vico (Scienza Nuova, 1725, as cited above, p. 26); by Shaftesbury (Letters to a Student, 1716, rep. in Letters, 1746, pp. 32–33); by Rev. John Milne, An Account of Mr. Lock’s Religion (anon.), 1700, pp. 5–8; and by Sir W. Anstruther, Essays Moral and Divine, Edinburgh, 1701, p. 24; further protests by Lafitau (Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps, 1724, i, 5), following Boyle, to the effect that the very travellers and missionaries who denied all religion to savages avow facts which confute them; and general view by Fabricius, Delectus argumentorum et Syllabus scriptorum, Hamburghi, 1725, ch. viii. Cp. also Swift, Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, § 2.
Büchner (Force and Matter, ch. on “The Idea of God”); Lord Avebury = Sir John Lubbock (Prehistoric Times, 5th ed., pp. 574–80; Origin of Civilization, 5th ed., pp. 213–17); and Mr. Spencer (Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583) have collected modern travellers’ testimonies as to the absence of religious ideas in certain tribes. Cp. also J. A. St. John’s (Bohn) ed. of Locke, notes on passages above cited, and on Bk. IV, ch. x, § 6. As Lord Avebury points out, the word “religion” is by some loosely or narrowly used to signify only a higher theology as distinct from lower supernaturalist beliefs. [31]He himself, however, excludes from the field of “religion” a belief in evil spirits and in magic—here coinciding with the later anthropologists who represented magic and religion as fundamentally “opposed”—a view rejected even by some religionists. Cp. Avebury, Marriage, Totemism, and Religion, (1911), p. 116 sq.; Rev. E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 1902, p. 3; Prof. T. Witten Davies, Magic, Divination, and Demonology, 1898, pp. 18–24. The proved erroneousness of many of the negative testimonies has been insisted on by Benjamin Constant (De la Religion, 1824, i, 3–4); Theodore Parker (Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, 1842 and 1855, ed. 1877, p. 16); G. Roskoff (Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvölker, 1880, Abschn. I and II); Dr. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 3rd ed., i, pp. 417–25); and Dr. Max Müller (Introd. to the Science of Religion, ed. 1882, p. 42 sq.; Hibbert Lectures, p. 91 sq.; Natural Religion, 1889, pp. 81–89; Anthropological Religion, 1892, pp. 428–35.)
The Rev. H. A. Junod (Life of a South African Tribe, vol. ii, 1913, p. 346) shows how easily misconception on the subject may arise. Galton (Narrative of an Explorer, ch. viii, ed. 1891, p. 138) writes: “I have no conception to this day whether or no the Ovampo have any religion, for Click was frightened and angry if the subject of death was alluded to.” The context shows that the native regarded all questions on religious matters with suspicion. Schweinfurth, again, contradicts himself twice within three pages as to the beliefs of the Bongo in a “Supreme Being” and in a future state; and thus leaves us doubting his statement that the neighbouring race, the Dyoor, “put no faith at all in any witchcraft” (The Heart of Africa, 3rd ed. i, 143–45). Much of the confusion turns on the fact that savages who practise no worship have religious beliefs (cp. Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, ed. 1878, p. 17, citing Monsignor Salvado; and Carl Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, 1889, p. 284). The dispute, as it now stands, mainly turns on the definition of religion (cp. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. 1891, pp. 16–18, where Lubbock’s position is partly misunderstood). Dr. Tylor, while deciding that no tribes known to us are religionless, leaves open the question of their existence in the past.
A notable example of the prolongation of error on this subject through orthodox assumptions is seen in Dr. A. W. Howitt’s otherwise valuable work on The Native Tribes of South Australia (1904). Dr. Howitt produces (pp. 488–508) abundant evidence to show that a number of tribes believe in a “supernatural anthropomorphic being,” variously named Nurrundere, Nurelli, Bunjil, Mungan-ngaua, Daramalun, and Baiame (“the same being under different names,” writes Dr. Howitt, p. 499). This being he describes as “the tribal All-Father,” “a venerable [32]kindly Headman of a tribe, full of knowledge and tribal wisdom, and all-powerful in magic, of which he is the source, with virtues, failings, and passions such as the aborigines regard them” (pp. 500–1). But he insists (p. 506) that “in this being, though supernatural, there is no trace of a divine nature,” and, again, that “the Australian aborigines do not recognize any divinity, good or evil” (p. 756), though (p. 501) “it is most difficult for one of us to divest himself of the tendency to endow such a supernatural being [as the All-Father] with a nature quasi-divine, if not altogether so.” Dr. Howitt does not name any European deity who satisfies him on the point of divinity! Obviously the Australian deities have evolved in exactly the same way as those of other peoples, Yahweh included. Dr. Howitt, indeed, admits (p. 507) that the Australian notions “may have been at the root of monotheistic beliefs.” They certainly were; and when he adds that, “although it cannot be alleged that these aborigines have consciously any form of religion, it may be said that their beliefs are such that, under favourable conditions, they might have developed into an actual religion,” he indicates afresh the confusion possible from unscientific definitions. The sole content of his thesis is, finally, that a “supernatural” being is not “divine” till the priests have somewhat trimmed him, and that a religion is not “actual” till it has been sacerdotally formulated. Dr. Howitt’s negations are as untenable as Mr. Andrew Lang’s magnification of the Australian All-Father into a perfect Supreme Being.
The really important part of Dr. Howitt’s survey of the problem is his conclusion that the kind of belief he has described exists only in a specified area of Australia, and that this area is “the habitat of tribes ... where there has been the advance from group marriage to individual marriage, from descent in the female line to that in the male line” (p. 500). Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s denial of the existence of any belief in a personal deity among the tribes of Central Australia (Northern Tribes, 1904, p. 491) appears to stand for actual fact.
As to the “divinity” of the ancestor-gods of the primitives, see Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 41 sq.]
The problem has been unduly narrowed to the question whether there are any whole tribes so developed. It is obviously pertinent to ask whether there may not be diversity of opinion within a given tribe. Such testimonies as those collected by Sir John Lubbock [Lord Avebury] and others, as to the existence of religionless savages, are held to be disposed of by further proof that tribes of savages who had been set down as religionless on the evidence of some of themselves had in reality a number of religious beliefs. Travellers’ questions had been falsely answered, either on the [33]principle that non-initiates must not be told the mysteries, or from that sudden perception of the oddity of their beliefs which comes even to some civilized people when they try to state them to an unbelieving outsider. Questions, again, could easily be misunderstood, and answers likewise. We find, for instance, that savages who scout the idea that the dead can “rise again” do believe in the continued disembodied existence of all their dead, and even at times conceive of them as marrying and procreating! On the whole, they conceive of a continuity of spirit-life on earth in human shape. To speak of such people as having no idea of “a life beyond the grave” would obviously be misleading, though they have no notion of a judgment day or of future rewards or punishments.24
Undoubtedly, then, the negative view of savage religion had in a number of cases been hastily taken; but there remains the question, as a rule surprisingly ignored, whether some of the savages who disavowed all belief in things supernatural may not have been telling the simple truth about themselves, or even about their families and their comrades. As one sympathetic traveller notes of the Samoyedes: “There can be no such thing as strict accuracy of grammar or expression among an illiterate people; nor can there be among these simple creatures any consistent or fixed appreciation even of their own forms of ... belief.... Having no object in arriving at a common view of such matters, each Samoyede, if questioned separately, will give more or less his own disconnected impression of his faith.”25 And this holds of unfaith. A savage asked by a traveller, “Do you believe” so-and-so, might very well give a true negative answer for himself;26 and the traveller’s resulting misconception would be due to his own arbitrary assumption that all members of any tribe must think alike.
A good witness expressly testifies: “In the tribe [of Australians] with which I was best acquainted, while the blacks had a term for ghost and believed that there were departed spirits who were sometimes to be seen among the foliage, individual men would tell you upon inquiry that they believed that death was the last of them” (Eaglehawk and Crow: A Study of the Australian Aborigines, by John Mathew, M.A., B.D., 1899, p. 146). As to the risk of wrong negative inferences, on the other hand, see pp. 145, 147. [34]
One of the best of our missionary witnesses, H. A. Junod, in his valuable study of the South African Thonga, testifies both to the commonness of individual variation in the way of religious fancy and the occurrence of sporadic unbelief, usually ended by fear. Individuals freely indulge in concrete speculations—e.g., as to the existence of animal souls—which do not win vogue (Life of a South African Tribe, vol. ii, 1913, p. 342 sq.), though the reporter seems to overlook the possibility that such ideas may be adopted by a tribe. Freethinking ideas have, of course, by far the least chance of currency. “The young folks of Libombo used to blaspheme in their hearts, saying, ‘There are no Gods.’ But,” added the witness, “we very soon saw that there were some, when they killed one of us,” who trod on a snake (work cited, pp. 354–55). That testimony illustrates well the difficulties of rational progress in a primitive community. But at times the process may be encouraged by the environment. The early missionary Ellis gives an instance of a community in Hawaii that had abandoned all religious practices: “We asked them who was their God. They said they had no God; formerly they had many: but now they had cast them all away. We asked them if they had done well in abolishing them. They said ‘Yes,’ for tabu had occasioned much labour and inconvenience, and drained off the best of their property. We asked them if it was a good thing to have no God.... They said perhaps it was; for they had nothing to provide for the great sacrifices, and were under no fear of punishment for breaking tabu; that now one fire cooked their food, and men and women ate together the same kind of provisions.” (W. Ellis, Tour Through Hawaii or Owhyhee, 1827, p. 100.) The community in question had in their own way reached the Lucretian verdict, Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum.
Unless, again, such witnesses as Moffat be unfaithful reporters as well as mistaken in their inferences, some of the natives with whom they dealt were all but devoid of the ordinary religious notions27 which in the case of other natives have enabled the missionaries to plant their doctrines. Nor is there anything hard of belief in the idea that, just as special religious movements spread credence in certain periods, a lack of active teachers in certain tribes may for a time have let previously common beliefs pass almost out of knowledge. If it be true that the Black Death wrought a great decline in the ecclesiastical life of England in the fourteenth century,28 a long period of life-destroying conditions might eliminate from the life of a savage tribe all lore save that of primary self-preservation. [35]Moffat incidentally notes the significant fact that rain-makers in his time were usually foreigners to the tribes in which they operated.29
The explanation is partly that given by him later, that “a rain-maker seldom dies a natural death,”30 most being executed as impostors for their failures. To this effect there are many testimonies.31 Among the Bushmen, says Lichtenstein, when a magician “happens to have predicted falsely several times in succession, he is thrust out of the kraal, and very likely burned or put to death in some other way.”32 “A celebrated magician,” says Burton again, “rarely if ever dies a natural death.”33 And it is told of the people of Niuē, or Savage Island, in the South Pacific, that “of old they had kings; but as they were the high priests as well, and were supposed to cause the food to grow, the people got angry with them in times of scarcity, and killed them; and as one after the other was killed, the end of it was that no one wished to be king.”34 So, in Uganda, if a chief and his medicine-men cannot make rain, “his whole existence is at stake in times of distress.” One chief was actually driven out; and the rain-doctors always live on sufferance.35 In such a state of things religion might well lose vogue.
Among some peoples of the Slave Coast, it appears, the regular priests, despite their power and prestige, are always under suspicion by reason of their frequent miscarriages; and they are—or were—not unfrequently put to death.36 Here there is disbelief in the priest without disbelief in the God. But a disbelief in the priest which tended to exterminate him might well diminish religion.
On the other hand, a relative indifference to religion in a given tribe might result from the influence of one or more leading men who spontaneously doubted the religious doctrine offered to them, as many in Israel, on the face of the priestly records, disbelieved in the whole theocratic polity. In modern times preachers are constantly found charging “unbelief” on their own flocks, in respect not of any criticism of religious narrative or dogma, but of simple lack of ostensible faith in doctrines of prayer and Providence nominally [36]accepted.37 Among peasants who have never seen a freethinking book or heard a professed freethinker’s arguments may be heard expressions of spontaneous unfaith in current doctrines of Providence.
This is but a type of variations possible in primitive societies. Despite the social potency of primitive custom, variation may be surmised to occur in the mental as in the physical life at all stages; and what normally happens in savagery and low civilization appears to be a cancelment of the skeptical variation by the total circumstances—the strength of the general lead to supernaturalism, the plausibility of such beliefs to the average intelligence, and the impossibility of setting up skeptical institutions to oppose the others. In civilized ages skeptical movements are repeatedly seen to dwindle for simple lack of institutions; which, however, are spontaneously set up by and serve as sustainers of religious systems. On the simpler level of savagery, skeptical personalities would in the long run fail to affirm themselves as against the institutions of ordinary savage religion—the seasonal feasts, the ceremonies attending birth and death, the use of rituals, images, charms, sorcery, all tending to stimulate and conserve supernatural beliefs in general. Only the abnormally courageous would dare outspokenly to doubt or deny at all; and their daring would put them in special jeopardy.38 The ancient maxim, Primus in orbe deos fecit timor, is verified by all modern study of primitive life.39 It is a recent traveller who gives the definition: “Fetishism is the result of the efforts of the savage intelligence seeking after a theory which will account for the apparent hostility of nature to man.”40 And this incalculable force of fear is constantly exploited by the religious bias from the earliest stages of sorcery.41 [37]
The check to intellectual evolution would here be on all fours with some of the checks inferribly at work in early moral evolution, where the types with the higher ideals would seem often to be positively endangered by their peculiarity, and would thus be the less likely to multiply. And what happened as between man and man would further tend to happen at times as between communities. Given the possible case of a tribe so well placed as to be unusually little affected by fear of enemies and the natural forces, the influence of rationalistic chiefs or of respected tribesmen might set up for a time a considerable anti-religious variation, involving at least a minimizing of religious doctrine and practices. Such a case is actually seen among the prosperous peoples of the Upper Congo, some of whom, like the poorer tribes known to Moffat, have no “medicine-men” of their own, and very vague notions of deity.42 But when such a tribe did chance to come into conflict with others more religious, it would be peculiarly obnoxious to them; and, being in the terms of the case unwarlike, its chance of survival on the old lines would be small.
Such a possibility is suggested with some vividness by the familiar contrast between the modern communities of Fiji and Samoa—the former cruel, cannibalistic, and religious, the latter much less austerely religious and much more humane. The ferocious Fijians “looked upon the Samoans with horror, because they had no religion, no belief in any such deities [as the Fijians’], nor any of the sanguinary rites which prevailed in other islands” (Spencer, Study of Sociology, pp. 293–94, following J. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprise in the South Sea Islands, ed. 1837, pp. 540–41; cp. the Rev. A. W. Murray, Forty Years’ Mission Work, 1876, p. 171). The “no religion” is, of course, only relatively true. Mr. Lang has noticed the error of the phrase “the godless Samoans” (cp. Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, pp. 16–17); but, while suggesting that the facts are the other way, he admits that in their creed “the religious sentiment has already become more or less self-conscious, and has begun to reason on its own practices” (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, ii, 34; 2nd ed., ii, 58).
Taking the phenomena all along the line of evolution, we are led to the generalization that the rationalistic tendency, early or late, like the religious tendency, is a variation which prospers at different times in different degrees relatively to the favourableness of the environment. This view will be set forth in some detail in the course of our history. [38]
It is not, finally, a mere surmise that individual savages and semi-savages in our own time vary towards disbelief in the supernaturalism of their fellows. To say nothing of the rational skepticism exhibited by the Zulu converts of Bishop Colenso, which was the means of opening his eyes to the incredibility of the Pentateuch,43 or of the rationalism of the African chief who debated with Sir Samuel Baker the possibility of a future state,44 we have the express missionary record that the forcible suppression of idolatry and tabu and the priesthood by King Rihoriho in the island of Hawaii, in 1819, was accomplished not only “before the arrival of any missionary,” but on purely common-sense grounds, and with no thought of furthering Christianity, though he had heard of the substitution of Christianity for the native religion by Pomare in Tahiti. Rihoriho simply desired to save his wives and other women from the cruel pressure of the tabu system, and to divert the priests’ revenues to secular purposes; and he actually had some strong priestly support.45 Had not the missionary system soon followed, however, the old worship, which had been desperately defended in battle at the instigation of the conservative priests, would in all probability have grown up afresh, though perhaps with modifications. The savage and semi-savage social conditions, taken as a whole, are fatally unpropitious to rationalism.
A parallel case to that of Rihoriho is that of King Finow of the Tonga Islands, described by Mariner, who was his intimate. Finow was noted for his want of religion. “He used to say that the Gods would always favour that party in war in which there were the greatest chiefs and warriors”—the European mot strictly adapted to Fiji conditions. “He did not believe that the Gods paid much attention in other respects to the affairs of mankind; nor did he think that they could have any reason for doing so—no more than men could have any reason or interest in attending to the affairs of the Gods.” For the rest, “it is certain that he disbelieved most of the oracles delivered by the priests,” though he carefully used them for political and military purposes; and he acquiesced in the usage of human sacrifices—particularly on his own account—while professing to deplore the taste of the Gods in these matters. His own death seems to have been the result of poisoning by a priest, whom the king had planned to strangle. The king’s daughter was sick, and the priest, instead of bringing about her recovery by his [39]prayers, hardily explained that the illness was the act of the Gods in punishment of the king’s frequent disrespect to them. Daughter and father were alternately ill, till the former died; and then it was that the king, by disclosing his resolve to strangle the priest, brought on his own death (1810). A few warriors were disposed to take revenge on the priest; but the majority, on learning the facts, shuddered at the impious design of the late king, and regarded his death as the natural vengeance of the Gods. But, though such “impiety” as his was very rare, his son after him decided to abolish the priestly office of “divine chieftain,” on the score that it was seen to avail for nothing, while it cost a good deal; and the chiefs and common people were soon brought to acquiesce in the policy.46
Such cases appear to occur in many barbarous communities. It is recorded of the Kaffir chief Go that he was perfectly aware of the hollowness of the pretensions of the magicians and rain-makers of his tribe, though he held it impolitic to break with them, and called them in and followed their prescriptions, as did his subjects.47 Of the Galeka chief Segidi it is similarly told that, while his medicine-men went into trances for occult knowledge preparatory to a military expedition, he carefully obtained real information through spies, and, while liberally rewarding his wizards, sent his sons to school at Blythswood.48 Yet again, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, we have the story of King Edwin’s priest, Coifi, naïvely avowing that he saw no virtue in his religion,49 inasmuch as many men received more royal favours than he, who had been most diligent in serving the Gods.50 Such a declaration might very well have been arranged for by the Christian Bishop Paulinus, who was converting the king, and would naturally provide for Coifi; but on any view a process of skepticism had taken place in the barbarian’s mind.51
Other illustrations come from the history of ancient Scandinavia. Grimm notes in several Norse sagas and songs expressions of contempt for various Gods, which appear to be independent of [40]Christian influence;52 and many warriors continued alike the Christian and the Pagan deities. In the saga of King Olaf Tryggvason, who enforced Christianity on Norway, it is declared by one chief that he relied much more on his own arm than on Thor and Odin; while another announced that he was neither Christian nor Pagan, adding: “My companions and I have no other religion than the confidence of our own strength and in the good success which always attends us in war.” Similar sentiments are recorded to have been uttered by Rolf Krake, a legendary king of Denmark (circa 500);53 and we have in the Æneid the classic type—doubtless drawn from barbaric life—of Mezentius, divum contemptor, who calls his right arm his God, and in dying declares that he appeals to no deity.54 Such utterances, indeed, do not amount to rational freethinking; but, where some could be thus capable of anti-theism, it is reasonable to surmise that among the more reflective there were some capable of simple atheism or non-belief, and of the prudence of keeping the fact to themselves. Partial skepticism, of course, would be much more common, as among the Aryan Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, with whom, before their conquest by the Ameer of Afghanistan, a British agent found among the younger men an inclination to be skeptical about some sacred ceremonies, while very sincere in their worship of their favourite deity, the God of war.55
It is thus seen to be inaccurate to say, as has been said by an accomplished antagonist of apriorism, that “under the yoke of tribal custom skepticism can hardly arise: there is no place for the half-hearted: as all men feel alike, so all think alike: skepticism arises when beliefs are put into formal propositions.”56 It is broadly true that “there is no place for” the doubter as such in the tribal society; but doubters do exist. Skepticism—in the sense in which the term is here used, that of rational disbelief—may even be commoner in some stages of the life of tribal customs than in some stages of backward civilization loaded with formulated creeds. What is true is that in the primitive life the rationalism necessarily fails, for lack of culture and institutions, to diffuse and [41]establish itself, whereas superstition succeeds, being naturally institution-making. Under such conditions skepticism is but a recurrent variation.57
It is significant, further, that in the foregoing cases of unbelief at the lower levels of civilization it is only the high rank of the doubter that secures publication for the fact of the doubt. In Hawaii, or Tonga, only a king’s unbelief could make itself historically heard. So in the familiar story of the doubting Inca of Peru, who in public religious assembly is said to have avowed his conclusion that the deified Sun was not really a living thing, it is the status of the speaker that gives his words a record. The doubt had in all likelihood been long current among the wise men of Peru; it is indeed ascribed to two or three different Incas;58 but, save for the Incas’ promulgation of it, history would bear no trace of Peruvian skepticism. So again in the Acolhuan State of Tezcuco, the most civilized in the New World before the Spanish conquest, the great King Netzahualcoyotl is found opposing the cults of human sacrifice and worshipping an “unknown God,” without an image and with only incense for offering.59 Only the king in such an environment could put on record such a conception. There is, in fact, reason to believe that all ancient ameliorations of bloody rites were the work of humane kings or chiefs,60 as they are known to have been among semi-savages in our own day.61 In bare justice we are bound to surmise that similar developments of rationalism have been fairly frequent in unwritten history, and that there must have been much of it among the common folk; though, on the other hand, the very position of a savage king, and the special energy of character which usually goes to secure it, may count for much in giving him the courage to think in defiance of custom. In modern as in early Christian times, it is always to the chief or king of a savage or barbarous tribe that the missionary looks for permission to proceed against the force of popular conservatism.62 Apart from kings and [42]chiefs, the priesthood itself would be the likeliest soil for skepticism, though, of course, not for the open avowal of it.
There are to be noted, finally, the facts collected as to marked skeptical variation among children;63 and the express evidence that “it has not been found in a single instance that an uneducated deaf-mute has had any conception of the existence of a Supreme Being as the Creator and Ruler of the Universe.”64 These latter phenomena do not, of course, entitle us to accept Professor Gruppe’s sweeping theorem that it is the religious variation that is abnormal, and that religion can have spread only by way of the hereditary imposition of the original insanity of one or two on the imagination of the many.65 Deaf-mutes are not normal organisms. But all the facts together entitle us to decide that religion, broadly speaking, is but the variation that has chiefly flourished, by reason of its adaptation to the prevailing environment thus far; and to reject as unscientific the formulas which, even in the face of the rapidly-spreading rationalism of the more civilized nations, still affirm supernaturalist beliefs to be a universal necessity of the human mind.
On the same grounds, we must reject the claim—arbitrarily set up by one historian in the very act of showing how religion historically oppugns science—that all sacred books as such “are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history; and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable, they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity.”66 In this proposition the opening words, “are true because” are strictly meaningless. All literature whatever has been developed under the same general laws. But if it be meant that sacred books were specially likely to garner truth as such, the claim must be negated. In terms of the whole demonstration of the bias of theology against new truth in modern times, the irresistible presumption is that in earlier times also the theological and theocratic spirit was in general hostile to every process by which truth is [43]normally attained. And if the thesis be limited to moral truth, it is still less credible. It is, in fact, inconceivable that literature so near the popular level as to suit whole priesthoods should be morally the best of which even the age producing it is capable; and nothing is more certain than that enlightened ethic has always had to impeach or explain away the barbarisms of some sacred books. The true summary is that in all cases the accepted sacred books have of necessity fallen short not only of scientific truth and of pure ethic, but even of the best speculation and the best ethic of the time of their acceptance, inasmuch as they excluded the criticism of the freethinking few on the sacred books themselves. There is sociological as well as physical science, and the former is flouted when the whole freethinking of the human race in the period of Bible-making is either ignored or treated as worthless.
It is probable, for instance, that in all stages of primitive religion there have been disbelievers in the value of sacrifice, who might or might not dare to denounce the practice. The demurrers to it in the Hebrew prophetic literature are probably late; but they were in all likelihood anticipated in early times. Among the Fijians, for whom cannibalism was an essentially religious act, and the privilege of the males of the aristocracy, there were a number of the latter who, before and apart from the entrance of Christianity, abominated and denounced the practice, reasoning against it also on utilitarian grounds, while the orthodox made it out to be a social duty. There were even whole towns which revolted against it and made it tabu; and it was by force mainly of this rationalistic reaction that the missionaries succeeded so readily in putting down the usage.67 It is impossible to estimate how often in the past such a revolt of reason against religious insanity has been overborne by the forces of pious habit. [44]
1 E. B. Tylor, Anthropology, 1881, p. 439. Cp. Lang, Custom and Myth, ed. 1893, p. 72; J. G. Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 1905, pp. 85–87. ↑
2 Theal, The Beginning of South African History, 1902, p. 57. See also the Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, p. 192. ↑
3 Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 5th ed. 1871, i, 280, note. ↑
4 Life of Mr. Yukichi Fukuzawa, Tokyo, 1902, pp. 48–53, 56–69. ↑
5 See Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. i, 71, as to savage conservatism in handicraft; but compare his Researches into the Early History of Mankind, 1865, p. 160, as to countervailing forces. ↑
6 E.g., in the first chapter of Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, the account of the French soldiers who at the siege of Namur burned and broke the images of Saint Médard for sending so much rain. Cp. Irvine, Letters on Sicily, 1813, p. 72; and Ramage, Wanderings through Italy, ed. 1868, p. 113. Constant, De la religion, 1824, vol. i, ptie. ii, p. 34, gives a number of Christian instances. ↑
7 Rev. J. B. Stair, Old Samoa, 1897, pp. 181–82. ↑
8 Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Mathematicos, ix, 14, 29; Pseudo-Plutarch, De placitis philosophorum, i, 7; Lactantius, De ira Dei, x, 47; Cicero, De natura Deorum, i, 42; Augustine, De civitate Dei, iv, 32. It is noteworthy that the skeptic Sextus rejects the opinion as absurd, even as does the high-priest Cotta in Cicero. ↑
9 Vico was one of the first, after Sextus Empiricus and his modern commentator Fabricius, to insist (following the saying of Petronius, Primus in orbe deos fecit timor) that “False religions were founded not by the imposture of some, but by the credulity of all” (Scienza Nuova [1725], lib. i, prop. 40). Yet when denying (id., De’ Principii, ed. 1852, p. 114) the assertions of travellers as to tribes without religion, he insisted that they were mere fictions planned to sell the authors’ books—here imputing fraud as lightly as others had done in the case of the supposed founders of religions. ↑
10 E.g., the Elizabethan play Selimus (Huth Lib. ed. of Greene, vol. xiv, ed. Grosart), dated 1594, vv. 258–262. (In “Temple Dramatists” ed., vv. 330–334.) See also below, vol. ii, ch. xiii. ↑
11 On the principle of self-expression in religion, cp. Feuerbach, Das Wesen der Religion, in Werke, ed. 1846–1849, i, 413, 445, 498, etc. ↑
12 Bishop Thirlwall, History of Greece, ed. 1839, i, 186, 204. Cp. Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, 1858, i, 389. ↑
13 Tiele, Outlines of the Hist. of Religions, Eng. tr., p. 96. Cp. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 2nd ed., p. 141, note. ↑
14 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 1904, pp. 258, 347, 366, 373, 492. ↑
15 See the article by E. J. Glave, of Stanley’s force, on “Fetishism in Congoland,” in the Century Magazine, April, 1891, p. 836. Compare F. Schultze, Der Fetischismus, 1871, pp. 137, 141, 142, 144, etc.; Theal, The Beginning of South African History, 1902, pp. 49, 52; Kranz, Natur- und Kulturleben der Zulus, 1880, pp. 110, 113–14; Moffat, Missionary Labours, 35th thous., pp. 69, 81–84; A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples, 1887, pp. 125–29, 137–39, 142; Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899, pp. 405, 417; E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 149; Turner, Samoa, 1884, p. 272. It is certain that the wizards of contemporary savage races are frequently killed as impostors by their own people. See below, p. 35. ↑
16 Tylor, Anthropology, p. 406; Primitive Culture, 3rd ed., i, 38. ↑
17 The fact that this phenomenon occurs everywhere among primitives, from the South Seas to Lapland, should be noted in connection with the latterly revived claims of so-called “Mysticism.” ↑
18 Cp. E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, pp. 149, 263. ↑
19 Glave, article cited, pp. 835–36. ↑
20 Cp. Max Müller, Natural Religion, 1889, p. 133; Anthropological Religion, 1892, p. 150; Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 2nd ed. ii, 358 sq. ↑
21 Compare Bishop Butler’s Charge to the Clergy of Durham, and Bishop Wordsworth On Religious Restoration in England, 1854, p. 75, etc. ↑
22 P. von Bradke, Dyâus Asura, Ahura Mazda, und die Asuras, Halle. 1885, p. 115. ↑
23 Rig-Veda, x, 121 (as translated by Muir, Müller, Dutt, and von Bradke); and x, 82 (Dutt’s rendering). It is to be noted that the refrain “Who is the God whom we should worship?” is entirely different in Ludwig’s rendering of x, 121. [Bertholet’s Religionsgeschichtliches Lesebuch (1908) compiled on the principle that “the best translations are good enough for us,” follows the rendering of Muir, Müller, Dutt, and von Bradke (p. 165).] Cp. Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 302, and Natural Religion, pp. 227–229, citing R. V., viii, 100, 3, etc., for an apparently undisputed case of skepticism. See again Langlois’s version of vi, 7, iii, 3 (p. 459). He cannot diverge much more from the German and English translators than they do from each other. ↑
24 Junod, as above cited, pp. 341, 343, 350, 388. Cp. Dalton, as cited, p. 115. ↑
25 E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, pp. 146–7. ↑
26 On the other hand, there might be genuine defect of knowledge of the religion of others of the tribe. This is said to occur in thousands of cases in Christian countries: why not also among savages? See the express testimony of Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899, pp. 377, 409. ↑
27 E.g., Moffat, Missionary Labours, end of ch. xvi and beginning of ch. xix. ↑
28 See Dr. Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 1893. ↑
29 Missionary Labours, ch. xix: stereo. ed. pp. 81, 82. It is noteworthy that the women were the first to avow unbelief in an unsuccessful rainmaker (Id. p. 84). ↑
30 Missionary Labours, as cited, p. 85. ↑
31 Cp. Schultze, Der Fetischismus, 1871, pp. 155–56; A. H. Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 49; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, i, 86. ↑
32 Travels in Southern Africa in the Years 1803–1806, 1815, ii, 61. Cp. Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, p. 192, as to the compulsion on men of superior intelligence to play the wizard, by reason of the common connection of wizardry with any display of mental power. There is no more tragical aspect in the life-conditions of primitive peoples. ↑
33 The Lake Regions of Central Africa, 1860, ii, 351. ↑
34 Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, pp. 304–305. Cp. Herodotos, iv, 68, as to the slaying of “false prophets” among the Scythians; and i, 128, as to the impaling of the Magi by Astyages. ↑
35 Paul Kollmann, The Victoria Nyanza, 1899, p. 168. ↑
36 Sir A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887, p. 127. ↑
37 E.g., an aged female relative of the writer, quite orthodox in all her habits, and devout to the extent of calling the Book of Esther “Godless” because the word “God” does not occur in it, yet at a pinch declared that she had “never heard of Providence putting a boll of meal inside anybody’s door.” Her daughter-in-law, also of quite religious habits, quoted the saying with a certain sense of its audacity, but endorsed it, as she had cause to do. Yet both regularly practised prayer and asserted divine beneficence. ↑
38 See B. Seeman, “Fiji and the Fijians,” in Galton’s Vacation Tourists, 1862, pp. 275–76, as to the terrorism resorted to by Fijian priests against unbelievers. “Punishment was sure to overtake the skeptic, let his station in life be what it might”—i.e., supernatural punishment was threatened, and the priests were not likely to let it fail. Cp. Basil Thomson, The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom, 1909, introd., p. xi: “The reformers of primitive races never lived long: if they were low-born they were clubbed, and that was the end of them and their reforms; if they were chiefs, and something happened to them, either by disease or accident, men saw therein the figure of an offended deity; and obedience to the existing order of things became stronger than before.” Cp. Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 60–62, as to kings who wished to put down human sacrifices. ↑
39 See Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 1–2. ↑
40 E. J. Glave, art. cited, p. 825. Cp. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 582, 594. ↑
41 Cp. the Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, pp. 222–23, as to the “universal suspicion” which falls upon tribesmen of rationalistic and anti-superstitious tendencies, making them “almost doubt their own sanity.” ↑
42 Sir H. H. Johnston, The River Congo, ed. 1805, p. 289. Cp. Moffat, as cited above. ↑
43 Colenso, The Pentateuch, vol. i, pref. p. vii; introd. p. 9. ↑
44 Spencer, Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583. ↑
45 W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 1831, iv, 30–31, 126–28. ↑
46 Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, compiled from the communications of W. Mariner, by John Martin, M.D., 3rd ed. 1827, i, 289–300, 306–307, 338–39; ii, 27–28, 83–86, 134. Mariner, who saw much of the priests, found no reason to suspect them of any systematic deception. See ii, 129. But his narrative leaves small room for doubt as to the procedure of the priest of Toobo Totai. ↑
47 Dr. A. Kropf, Das Volk der Xosa-Kaffern in östlichen Südafrika, Berlin, 1899, pp. 203–204. Dr. Kropf, a missionary of forty years’ experience, states that many of the Kaffirs latterly disbelieve in their sorcerers; but this may be partly a result of missionary teaching—not so much the religious as the scientific. See the testimony of the Rev. J. Macdonald, Life in Africa, 1890, pp. 47–48. ↑
48 Rev. J. Macdonald, Life in Africa, pp. 225–26. ↑
49 It is clear that in the Christianization of Europe much use was made of the argument that the best lands had fallen to the Christian peoples. See the epistle of Bishop Daniel of Winchester to St. Boniface (Ep. lxvii) cited in Schlegel’s note to Mosheim, Reid’s ed. of Murdock’s translation, p. 262. ↑
50 Bede, Eccles. Hist., ii, 13. ↑
51 Cp. A. H. Mann in Social England, illustr. ed., i, 217. ↑
52 Teutonic Mythology, Eng. trans. 1882, i, 7. ↑
53 Crichton and Wheaton, Scandinavia, 1837, i, 198, note. Compare Dr. Ph. Schweitzer, Geschichte der Skandinavischen Litteratur, i, 25: “In the higher circles [in the pagan period] from an early date (schon lange) unbelief and even contempt of religion flourished ... probably never reaching the lower grades of the people.” See also C. F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, French trans., Copenhagen, 1878, i, 55. ↑
54 Æneid, vii, 648; x, 773, 880. Mezentius does not deny that Gods exist: see x, 743. ↑
55 Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899, p. 379. ↑
56 Professor T. Clifford Allbutt, Harveian Oration on Science and Medieval Thought, 1901, p. 82. ↑
57 Mr. Basil Thomson, in the able introduction to his excellent work on The Fijians, speaks of primitive reformers (p. xi) as “rare souls born before their time.” But there is no special “time” for reformers, who, as such, must be in advance of their average contemporaries. ↑
58 Garcilasso, 1. viii, c. 8; 1. ix, c. 10; Herrera, Dec. v, 1. iv, c. 4. See the passages in Réville’s Hibbert Lectures, pp. 162–65. ↑
59 Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Kirk’s ed., pp. 81 sq., 91–93, 97; H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, v, 427–29; Clavigero, History of Mexico, Eng. tr. ed. 1807, B. iv, §§ 4, 15; vii. § 42. ↑
60 See the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 60–62, 361. Cp. Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, 1904, pp. 313–14. ↑
61 Cp. T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1870, i, 231; Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 202. ↑
62 “A long time elapses between each step that their [missionaries’] stations advance: and when they do it invariably is under the influence of some chief that they are even then led on.” Dalton, Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, ed. 1891, p. 102. ↑
63 See Professor Sully’s Studies of Childhood, 1895. ↑
64 Rev. S. Smith, Church Work among the Deaf and Dumb, 1875, cited by Spencer, Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583. Cp. the testimony cited there from Dr. Kitto, Lost Senses, p. 200. ↑
65 Die griechischen Culte und Mythen, 1887, pp. 263, 276, 277, etc. What is true as regards the thesis is that some of the central insanities of religion, such as the cult of human sacrifice, seem to have been propagated in all directions from an Asiatic centre. See the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 273, 292, 343, 354, 362, etc. Cp. the Rev. D. Macdonald’s Asiatic Origin of the Oceanic Languages, Luzac & Co., 1894; the Nubische Grammatik of Lepsius, 1880; and Terrien de Lacouperie, Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilization, 1894, pp. 134, 362–63. ↑
66 Dr. Andrew White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 1896, i, 23. ↑
When religion has entered on the stage of quasi-civilized organization, with fixed legends or documents, temples, and the rudiments of hierarchies, the increased forces of terrorism and conservatism are in nearly all cases seen to be in part countervailed by the simple interaction of the systems of different communities. There is no more ubiquitous force in the whole history of the subject, operating as it does in ancient Assyria, in the life of Vedic India and Confucian China, and in the diverse histories of progressive Greece and relatively stationary Egypt, down through the Christian Middle Ages to our own period of comparative studies.
In ages when any dispassionate comparative study was impossible, religious systems appear to have been considerably modified by the influence of those of conquered peoples on those of their conquerors, and vice versâ. Peoples who while at arm’s length would insult and affect to despise each other’s Gods, and would deride each other’s myths,1 appear frequently to have altered their attitude when one had conquered the other; and this not because of any special growth of sympathy, but by force of the old motive of fear. In the stage of natural polytheism no nation really doubted the existence of the Gods of another; at most, like the Hebrews of the early historic period, it would set its own God above the others, calling him “Lord of Lords.” But, every community having its own God, he remained a local power even when his own worshippers were conquered, and his cult and lore were respected accordingly. This procedure, which has been sometimes attributed to the Romans in particular as a stroke of political sagacity, was the normal and natural course of polytheism. Thus in the Hebrew books the Assyrian conqueror is represented as admitting that it is [45]necessary to leave a priest who knows “the manner of the God of the land” among the new inhabitants he has planted there.
See 2 Kings xvii, 26. Cp. Ruth i, 16, and Judges xvii, 13. The account by Herodotos (ii, 171) of the preservation of the Pelasgic rites of Dêmêtêr by the women of Arcadia points to the same principle. See also hereinafter, ch. vi, § 1; K. O. Müller, Introd. to a Sci. Study of Mythol., Eng. trans., p. 193; Adolf Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 1860, i, 189; Rhys, Celtic Britain, 2nd ed., p. 69; Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, p. 164; Gibbon, ch. xxxiv—Bohn ed., iii, 554, note; Tylor, Primitive Culture, i, 113–15; and Dr. F. B. Jevons’s Introd. to the Hist. of Relig., 1896, pp. 36–40, where the fear felt by conquering races for the occult powers of the conquered is limited to the sphere of “magic.” But when Dr. Jevons so defines magic as to admit of his proposition (p. 38) that “the hostility from the beginning between religion and magic is universally admitted,” he throws into confusion the whole phenomena of the early official-religious practice of magic, of which sacrifice and prayer are the type-forms that have best survived. And in the end he upsets his definition by noting (p. 40) how magic, “even where its relation to religion is one of avowed hostility,” will imitate religion. Obviously magic is a function or aspect or element of primitive religion (cp. Roskoff, Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvölker, 1880, p. 144; Sayce, pp. 315, 319, 327, and passim; and Tiele, Egyptian Rel., pp. 22, 32); and any “hostility,” far from being universal, is either a social or a philosophical differentiation. On the whole question compare the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 11–38. In the opinion of Weber (Hist. of Ind. Lit., p. 264) the magic arts “found a more and more fruitful soil as the religious development of the Hindus progressed”; “so that they now, in fact, reign almost supreme.” See again Dr. Jevons’s own later admission, p. 395, where the exception of Christianity is somewhat arbitrary. On this compare Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, B. iv, Th. ii, § 3.
Similar cases have been noted in primitive cults still surviving. Fear of the magic powers of “lower” or conquered races is in fact normal wherever belief in wizardry survives; and to the general tendency may be conjecturally ascribed such phenomena as that of the Saturnalia, in which masters and slaves changed places, and the institution of the Levites among the Hebrews, otherwise only mythically explained. But if conquerors and conquered thus tended to amalgamate or associate their cults, equally would allied tribes tend to do so; and, when particular Gods of different groups were seen to correspond in respect of special attributes, a further analysis [46]would be encouraged. Hence, with every extension of every State, every advance in intercourse made in peace or through war, there would be a further comparison of credences, a further challenge to the reasoning powers of thoughtful men.
On the normal tendency to defer to local deities, compare Tylor, Primitive Culture, as last cited; B. Thomson, The Fijians, 1908, p. 112; A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887, p. 147, and The Ewe-Speaking Peoples, 1890, p. 55; P. Wurm, Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2te Aufl., p. 43 (as to Madagascar); Sir H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii, 589; Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, iii, 186; P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. 1908, p. 191; W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic, 1900, pp. 56, 84; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, i, 86–87, 94, 100; iii, 188; iv, 170; v, 467–68; W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas, 1906, p. 263; Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 262; Élie Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 254–56; Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, 1897, pp. 289, 301–302; Castrén, Vorlesungen über die Finnische Mythologie, 1853, p. 281; Gummere, Germanic Origins, 1892, p. 140, citing Weinhold, Deutsche Frauen, i, 105; Gobineau, Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale, 2e éd. p. 67; E. Higgins, Hebrew Idolatry and Superstition, 1893, pp. 20, 24; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 1889, p. 77; Wellhausen, Heidenthum, pp. 129, 183, cited by Smith, p. 79; Lang, Making of Religion, p. 65; Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. ii, 72. Above all, see the record in Old New Zealand, “by a Pakeha Maori” (2nd ed. Auckland, 1863, p. 154), of the believing resort of some white men to native wizards in New Zealand.
Stevenson, again, is evidently proceeding upon observation when he makes his trader in The Beach of Falesà say: “We laugh at the natives and their superstitions; but see how many traders take them up, splendidly educated white men that have been bookkeepers (some of them) and clerks in the old country” (Island Nights’ Entertainments, 1893, pp. 104–105). In Abyssinia, “Galla sorceresses are frequently called in by the Christians of Shoa to transfer sickness or to rid the house of evil spirits” (Major W. Cornwallis Harris, The Highlands of Aethiopia, 1844, iii, 50). On the other hand, some Sudanese tribes “believe in the virtue both of Christian and Moslem amulets, but have hitherto lent a deaf ear to the preachers of both these religions” (A. H. Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 50).
This tendency did not exclude, but would in certain cases conflict with, the strong primitive tendency to associate every God permanently with his supposed original locality. Tiele writes (Hist. of the Egypt. Relig., Eng. trans. introd. p. xvii) [47]that in no case was a place given to the Gods of one nation in another’s pantheon “if they did not wholly alter their form, character, appearance, and not seldom their very name.” This seems an over-statement, and is inconsistent with Tiele’s own statement (Hist. comparée des anc. relig. égyptiennes et sémitiques, French trans., 1882, pp. 174–80) as to the adoption of Sumerian and Akkadian Gods and creeds by the Semites. What is clear is that local cults resisted the removal of their Gods’ images; and the attempt to deport such images to Babylon, thus affecting the monopoly of the God of Babylon himself, was a main cause of the fall of Nabonidos, who was driven out by Cyrus. (E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i (1884), 599.) But the Assyrians invoked Bel Merodach of Babylon, after they had conquered Babylon, in terms of his own ritual; even as Israelites often invoked the Gods of Canaan (cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, Relig. of the Anc. Babylonians, p. 123). And King Mardouk-nadinakhe of Babylon, in the twelfth century B.C., carried off statues of the Assyrian Gods from the town of Hekali to Babylon, where they were kept captive for 418 years (Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, 4e éd. p. 300). A God could migrate with his worshippers from city to city (Meyer, iii, 169; Sayce, p. 124); and the Assyrian scribe class maintained the worship of their special God Nebo wherever they went, though he was a local God to start with (Sayce, pp. 117, 119, 121). And as to the recognition of the Gods of different Egyptian cities by politic kings, see Tiele’s own statement, p. 36. Cp. his Outlines, pp. 73, 84, 207.
A concrete knowledge of the multiplicity of cults, then, was obtruded on the leisured and travelled men of the early empires and of such a civilization as that of Hellas;2 and when to such knowledge there was added a scientific astronomy (the earliest to be constituted of the concrete sciences), a revision of beliefs by such men was inevitable.3 It might take the form either of a guarded skepticism or of a monarchic theology, answering to the organization of the actual earthly empire; and the latter view, in the nature of the case, would much the more easily gain ground. The freethought of early civilization, then, would be practically limited for a long time to movements in the direction of co-ordinating polytheism, to the end of setting up a supreme though not a sole deity; the chief [48]God in any given case being apt to be the God specially affected by the reigning monarch. Allocation of spheres of influence to the principal deities would be the working minimum of plausible adjustment, since only in some such way could the established principle of the regularity of the heavens be formally accommodated to the current worship; and wherever there was monarchy, even if the monarch were polytheistic, there was a lead to gradation among the Gods.4 A pantheistic conception would be the highest stretch of rationalism that could have any vogue even among the educated class. All the while every advance was liable to the ill-fortune of overthrow or arrest at the hands of an invading barbarism, which even in adopting the system of an established priesthood would be more likely to stiffen than to develop it. Early rationalism, in short, would share in the fluctuations of early civilization; and achievements of thought would repeatedly be swept away, even as were the achievements of the constructive arts.
The process thus deducible from the main conditions is found actually happening in more than one of the ancient cultures, as their history is now sketched. In the Rig-Veda, which if not the oldest is the least altered of the Eastern Sacred Books, the main line of change is obvious enough. It remains so far matter of conjecture to what extent the early Vedic cults contain matter adopted from non-Aryan Asiatic peoples; but no other hypothesis seems to account for the special development of the cult of Agni in India as compared with the content and development of the other early Aryan systems, in which, though there are developments of fire worship, the God Agni does not appear.5 The specially priestly character of the Agni worship, and the precedence it takes in the Vedas over the solar cult of Mitra, which among the kindred Aryans of Iran receives in turn a special development, suggest some such grafting, though the relations between Aryans and the Hindu aborigines, as indicated in the Veda, seem to exclude the possibility of their adopting the fire-cult from the conquered [49]inhabitants,6 who, besides, are often spoken of in the Vedas as “non-sacrificers,”7 and at times as “without Gods.”8 But this is sometimes asserted even of hostile Aryans.9 In any case the carrying on of the two main cults of Agni and Indra side by side points to an original and marked heterogeneity of racial elements; while the varying combination with them of the worship of other deities, the old Aryan Varuna, the three forms of the Sun-God Aditya, the Goddess Aditi and the eight Adityas, the solar Mitra, Vishnu, Rudra, and the Maruts, imply the adaptation of further varieties of hereditary creed. The outcome is a sufficiently chaotic medley, in which the attributes and status of the various Gods are reducible to no code,10 the same feats being assigned to several, and the attributes of all claimed for almost any one. Here, then, were the conditions provocative of doubt among the critical; and while it is only in the later books of the Rig-Veda that such doubt finds priestly expression, it must be inferred that it was current in some degree among laymen before the hymn-makers avowed that they shared it. The God Soma, the personification of wine, identified with the Moon-God Chandra,11 “hurls the irreligious into the abyss.”12 This may mean that his cult, like that of his congener Dionysos in Greece, was at first forcibly resisted, and forcibly triumphed. At an earlier period doubt is directed against the most popular God, Indra, perhaps on behalf of a rival cult.13 Later it seems to take the shape of a half-skeptical, half-mystical questioning as to which, if any, God is real.
From the Catholic standpoint, Dr. E. L. Fischer has argued that “Varuna is in the ontological, physical, and ethical relation the highest, indeed the unique, God of ancient India”; and that the Nature-Gods of the Veda can belong only to a later period in the religious consciousness (Heidenthum und Offenbarung, 1878, pp. 36–37). Such a development, had it really occurred, might be said to represent a movement of primitive freethought from an unsatisfying monotheism to a polytheism that seemed better to explain natural facts. A more plausible view of the process, however, is that of von Bradke, to the effect that “the [50]old Indo-Germanic polytheism, with its pronounced monarchic apex, which ... constituted the religion of the pre-Vedic [Aryan] Hindus, lost its monarchic apex shortly before and during the Rig-Veda period, and set up for itself the so-called Henotheism [worship of deities severally as if each were the only one], which thus represented in India a time of religious decline; a decline that, at the end of the period to which the Rig-Veda hymns belong, led to an almost complete dissolution of the old beliefs. The earlier collection of the hymns must have promoted the decline; and the final redaction must have completed it. The collected hymns show only too plainly how the very deity before whom in one song all the remaining Gods bow themselves, in the next sinks almost in the dust before another. Then there sounds from the Rig-Veda (x, 121) the wistful question: Who is the God whom we should worship?” (Dyâus Asura, Ahuramazda, und die Asuras, Halle, 1885, p. 115; cp. note, supra, p. 30). On this view the growth of monotheism went on alongside of a growth of critical unbelief, but, instead of expressing that, provoked it by way of reaction. Dr. Muir more specifically argues (Sanskrit Texts, v, 116) that in the Vedic hymns Varuna is a God in a state of decadence; and, despite the dissent of M. Barth (Religions of India, p. 18), this seems true. But the recession of Varuna is only in the normal way of the eclipse of the old Supreme God by a nearer deity, and does not suffice to prove a growth of agnosticism. M. Fontane (Inde Védique, 1881, p. 305) asserts on other grounds a popular movement of negation in the Vedic period, but offers rather slender evidence. There is better ground for his account of the system as one in which different cults had the upper hand at different times, the devotees of Indra rejecting Agni, and so on (pp. 310–11).
To meet such a doubt, a pantheistic view of things would naturally arise, and in the Vedas it often emerges.14 Thus “Agni is all the Gods”; and “the Gods are only a single being under different names.”15 For ancient as for more civilized peoples such a doctrine had the attraction of nominally reconciling the popular cult with the skepticism it had aroused. Rising thus as freethought, the pantheistic doctrine in itself ultimately became in India a dogmatic system, the monopoly of a priestly caste, whose training [51]in mystical dialectic made them able to repel or baffle amateur criticism. Such fortifying of a sophisticated creed by institutions—of which the Brahmanic caste system is perhaps the strongest type—is one of the main conditions of relative permanence for any set of opinions; yet even within the Brahmanic system, by reason, presumably, of the principle that the higher truth was for the adept and need not interfere with the popular cult, there were again successive critical revisions of the pantheistic idea.
Prof. Garbe (Philosophy of Anc. India, sect. on Hindu Monism) argues that all monistic, and indeed all progressive, thinking in ancient India arose not among the Brahmans, who were conscienceless oppressors, but among the warrior caste; citing stories in the Upanishads in which Brahmans are represented as receiving such ideas from warriors. The thesis is much weakened by the Professor’s acceptance of Krishna as primarily a historic character, of the warrior class. But there is ground for his general thesis, which recognizes (p. 78) that the Brahmans at length assimilated the higher thought of laymen. Max Müller puts it that “No nation was ever so completely priestridden as the Hindus were under the sway of the Brahmanic law. Yet, on the other side, the same people were allowed to indulge in the most unrestrained freedom of thought, and in the schools of their philosophy the very names of their Gods were never mentioned. Their existence was neither denied nor asserted....” (Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 244). “Sankhya philosophy” [on which Buddhism is supposed to be based], “in its original form, claims the name of an-îsvara, ‘lordless’ or ‘atheistic,’ as its distinctive title” (ibid. p. 283).
Of the nature of a freethinking departure, among the early Brahmanists as in other societies, was the substitution of non-human for human sacrifices—a development of peaceful life-conditions which, though not primitive, must have ante-dated Buddhism. See Tiele, Outlines, pp. 126–27 and refs.; Barth, Religions of India, pp. 57–59; and Müller, Physical Religion, p. 101. Prof. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, p. 346) appears to hold that animal sacrifice was never a substitute for human; but his ingenious argument, on analysis, is found to prove only that in certain cases the idea of such a substitution having taken place may have been unhistorical. If it be granted that human sacrifices ever occurred—and all the evidence goes to show that they were once universal—substitution would be an obvious way of abolishing them. Historical analogy is in favour of the view that the change was forced on the priesthood from the outside, and only after a time accepted by the Brahmans. Thus we find the Khârvâkas, a [52]school of freethinkers, rising in the Alexandrian period, making it part of their business to denounce the Brahmanic doctrine and practice of sacrifice, and to argue against all blood sacrifices; but they had no practical success (Tiele, p. 126) until Buddhism triumphed (Mitchell, Hinduism, 1885, p. 106; Rhys Davids, tr. of Dialogues of the Buddha, 1899, p. 165).
In the earliest Upanishads the World-Being seems to have been figured as the totality of matter,16 an atheistic view associated in particular with the teaching of Kapila,17 who himself, however, was at length raised to divine status,18 though his system continues to pass as substantially atheistic.19 This view being open to all manner of anti-religious criticism, which it incurred even within the Brahmanic pale,20 there was evolved an ideal formula in which the source of all things is “the invisible, intangible, unrelated, colourless one, who has neither eyes nor ears, neither hands nor feet, eternal, all-pervading, subtile, and undecaying.”21 At the same time, the Upanishads exhibit a stringent reaction against the whole content of the Vedas. Their ostensible object is “to show the utter uselessness—nay, the mischievousness—of all ritual performances; to condemn every sacrificial act which has for its motive a desire or hope of reward; to deny, if not the existence, at least the exceptional and exalted character of the Devas; and to teach that there is no hope of salvation and deliverance except by the individual self recognizing the true and universal self and finding rest there, where alone rest can be found.”22
And the critical development does not end there. “In the old Upanishads, in which the hymns and sacrifices of the Veda are looked upon as useless, and as superseded by the higher knowledge taught by the forest-sages, they are not yet attacked as mere impositions. That opposition, however, sets in very decidedly in the Sutra period. In the Nirukta (i, 15) Yâska quotes the opinion of Kautsa, that the hymns of the Veda have no meaning at all.”23 In short, every form of critical revolt against incredible doctrine that has arisen in later [53]Europe had taken place in ancient India long before the Alexandrian conquest.24 And the same attitude continued to be common within the post-Alexandrian period; for Panini, who must apparently be dated then,25 “was acquainted with infidels and nihilists”;26 and the teaching of Brihaspati,27 on which was founded the system of the Khârvâkas—apparently one of several sections of a freethinking school called the Lokâyatas28 or Lokâyatikas—is extremely destructive of Vedic pretensions. “The Veda is tainted by the three faults of untruth, self-contradiction, and tautology.... The impostors who call themselves Vedic pandits are mutually destructive.... The three authors of the Vedas were buffoons, knaves, and demons: All the well-known formulas of the pandits, and all the horrid rites for the queen commanded in the Asvamedha—these were invented by buffoons, and so all the various kinds of presents to the priests; while the eating of flesh was similarly commanded by night-prowling demons.”29
To what extent such aggressive rationalism ever spread it is now quite impossible to ascertain. It seems probable that the word Lokâyata, defined by Sanskrit scholars as signifying “directed to the world of sense,”30 originally, or about 500 B.C., signified “Nature-lore,” and that this passed as a branch of Brahman learning.31 Significantly enough, while the lore was not extensive, it came to be regarded as disposing men to unbelief, though it does not seem to have suggested any thorough training. At length, in the eighth century of our era, it is found applied as a term of abuse, in the sense of “infidel,” by Kumârila in controversy with opponents as orthodox as himself; and about the same period Sankara connects with it a denial of the existence of a separate and immortal soul;32 though that opinion had been debated, and not called Lokâyata, long before, when the word was current in the broader sense.33 Latterly, in the fourteenth century, on the strength of some doggerel verses which cannot have belonged to the early Brahmanic Lokâyata, it stands for extreme atheism and a materialism not professed by any known school speaking for itself.34 The evidence, such as it is, is preserved only in Sarva-darsana-samgraha, a compendium [54]of all philosophical systems, compiled in the fourteenth century by the Vedantic teacher Mâdhavâchâra.35 One source speaks of an early text-book of materialism, the Sutras of Brihaspati;36 but this has not been preserved. Thus in Hindu as in later European freethought for a long period we have had to rely for our knowledge of freethinkers’ ideas upon the replies made by their opponents. It is reasonable to conclude that, save insofar as the arguments of Brihaspati were common to the Khârvâkas and the Buddhists,37 such doctrine as his or that of the later Lokâyatikas cannot conceivably have been more than the revolt of a thoughtful minority against official as well as popular religion; and to speak of a time when “the Aryan settlers in India had arrived at the conviction that all their Devas or Gods were mere names”38 is to suggest a general evolution of rational thought which can no more have taken place in ancient India than it has done to-day in Europe. The old creeds would always have defenders; and every revolt was sure to incur a reaction. In the Hitopadesa or “Book of Good Counsel” (an undated recension of the earlier Panchatantra, “The Five Books,” which in its first form may be placed about the fifth century of our era) there occur both passages disparaging mere study of the Sacred Books39 and passages insisting upon it as a virtue in itself40 and otherwise insisting on ritual observances.41 They seem to come from different hands.
The phenomenon of the schism represented by the two divisions of the Yazur Veda, the “White” and the “Black,” is plausibly accounted for as the outcome of the tendencies of a new and an old school, who selected from their Brahmanas, or treatises of ritual and theology, the portions which respectively suited them. The implied critical movement would tend to affect official thought in general. This schism is held by Weber to have arisen only in the period of ferment set up by Buddhism; but other disputes seem to have taken place in abundance in the Brahmanical schools before that time. (Cp. Tiele, Outlines, p. 123; Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 10, 27, 232; Max Müller, Anthropol. Relig., 1892, pp. 36–37; and Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 34.) Again, the ascetic and penance-bearing hermits, who were encouraged by the veneration paid them to exalt themselves above all save the highest Gods, would by their utterances of necessity affect the course of doctrine. Compare the same tendency as seen in Buddhism and Jainism (Tiele, pp. 135, 140).
[55]
But in the later form of the Vedânta, “the end of the Veda,” a monistic and pantheistic teaching holds its ground in our own day, after all the ups and downs of Brahmanism, alongside of the aboriginal cults which Brahmanism adopted in its battle with Buddhism; alongside, too, of the worship of the Veda itself as an eternal and miraculous document. “The leading tenets [of the Vedânta] are known to some extent in every village.”42 Yet the Vedântists, again, treat the Upanishads in turn as a miraculous and inspired system,43 and repeat in their case the process of the Vedas: so sure is the law of fixation in religious thought, while the habit of worship subsists.
The highest activity of rationalistic speculation within the Brahmanic fold is seen to have followed intelligibly on the most powerful reaction against the Brahmans’ authority. This took place when their sphere had been extended from the region of the Punjaub, of which alone the Rig-Veda shows knowledge, to the great kingdoms of Southern India, pointed to in the Sutras,44 or short digests of ritual and law designed for general official use. In the new environment “there was a well-marked lay-feeling, a widespread antagonism to the priests, a real sense of humour, a strong fund of common sense. Above all there was the most complete and unquestioned freedom of thought and expression in religious matters that the world had yet witnessed.”45
The most popular basis for rejection of a given system—belief in another—made ultimately possible there the rise of a practically atheistic system capable, wherever embraced, of annulling the burdensome and exclusive system of the Brahmans, which had been obtruded in its worst form,46 though not dominantly, in the new environment. Buddhism, though it cannot have arisen on one man’s initiative in the manner claimed in the legends, even as stripped of their supernaturalist element,47 was in its origin essentially a movement of freethought, such as could have arisen only [56]in the atmosphere of a much mixed society48 where the extreme Brahmanical claims were on various grounds discredited, perhaps even within their own newly-adjusted body. It was stigmatized as “the science of reason,” a term equivalent to “heresy” in the Christian sphere;49 and its definite rejection of the Vedas made it anti-sacerdotal even while it retained the modes of speech of polytheism. The tradition which makes the Buddha50 a prince suggests an upper-class origin for the reaction; and there are traces of a chronic resistance to the Brahmans’ rule among their fellow-Aryans before the Buddhist period.
“The royal families, the warriors, who, it may be supposed, strenuously supported the priesthood so long as it was a question of robbing the people of their rights, now that this was effected turned against their former allies, and sought to throw off the yoke that was likewise laid upon them. These efforts were, however, unavailing: the colossus was too firmly established. Obscure legends and isolated allusions are the only records left to us in the later writings of the sacrilegious hands which ventured to attack the sacred and divinely consecrated majesty of the Brahmans; and these are careful to note at the same time the terrible punishments which befel those impious offenders” (Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 19).
The circumstances, however, that the Buddhist writings were from the first in vernacular dialects, not in Sanskrit,51 and that the mythical matter which accumulated round the story of the Buddha is in the main aboriginal, and largely common to the myth of Krishna,52 go to prove that Buddhism spread specially in the non-Aryan sphere.53 Its practical (not theoretic)54 atheism seems to have rested fundamentally on the conception of Karma, the transition of the soul, or rather of the personality, through many stages up to that in which, by self-discipline, it attains the impersonal peace of Nirvana; and of this conception there is no trace in the Vedas,55 though it became a leading tenet of Brahmanism.
To the dissolvent influence of Greek culture may possibly be due some part of the success of Buddhism before our era, and even later. Hindu astronomy in the Vedic period was but [57]slightly developed (Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 246, 249, 250); and “it was Greek influence that first infused a real life into Indian astronomy” (Id. p. 251; cp. Letronne, Mélanges d’Érudition, 1860 (?), p. 40; Narrien, Histor. Acc. of Orig. and Prog. of Astron., p. 33, and Lib. Use. Kn. Hist. of Astron., c. ii). This implies other interactions. It is presumably to Greek stimulus that we must trace the knowledge by Aryabhata (Colebrooke’s Essays, ed. 1873, ii, 404; cp. Weber, p. 257) of the doctrine of the earth’s diurnal revolution on its axis; and the fact that in India as in the Mediterranean world the truth was later lost from men’s hands may be taken as one of the proofs that the two civilizations alike retrograded owing to evil political conditions. In the progressive period (from about 320 B.C. onwards for perhaps some centuries) Greek ideas might well help to discredit traditionalism; and their acceptance at royal courts would be favourable to toleration of the new teaching. At the same time, Buddhism must have been favoured by the native mental climate in which it arose.
The main differentiation of Buddhism from Brahmanism, again, is its ethical spirit, which sets aside formalism and seeks salvation in an inward reverie and discipline; and this element in turn can hardly be conceived as arising save in an old society, far removed from the warlike stage represented by the Vedas. Whatever may have been its early association with Brahmanism56 then, it must be regarded as essentially a reaction against Brahmanical doctrine and ideals; a circumstance which would account for its early acceptance in the Punjaub, where Brahmanism had never attained absolute power and was jealously resisted by the free population.57 And the fact that Jainism, so closely akin to Buddhism, has its sacred books in a dialect belonging to the region in which Buddhism arose, further supports the view that the reaction grew out of the thought of a type of society differing widely from that in which Brahmanism arose. Jainism, like Buddhism, is substantially atheistic,58 and like it has an ancient monkish organization to which women were early admitted. The original crypto-atheism or agnosticism of the Buddhist movement thus appears as a product of a relatively high, because complex, moral and intellectual evolution. It certainly never impugned the belief in the Gods; on the contrary, the Buddha is often represented as speaking of their existence,59 and at times as approving of their customary worship;60 but he is never [58]said to counsel his own order to pray to them; he makes light of sacrifice; and above all he is made quite negative as to a future life, preaching the doctrine of Karma in a sense which excludes individual immortality.61 “It cannot be denied that if we call the old Gods of the Veda—Indra and Agni and Yama—Gods, Buddha was an atheist. He does not believe in the divinity of these deities. What is noteworthy is that he does not by any means deny their bare existence.... The founder of Buddhism treats the old Gods as superhuman beings.”62 Thus it is permissible to say both that Buddhism recognizes Gods and that it is practically atheistic.
“The fact cannot be disputed away that the religion of Buddha was from the beginning purely atheistic. The idea of the Godhead ... was for a time at least expelled from the sanctuary of the human mind,63 and the highest morality that was ever taught before the rise of Christianity was taught by men with whom the Gods had become mere phantoms, without any altars, not even an altar to the unknown God” (Max Müller, Introd. to the Science of Religion, ed. 1882, p. 81. Cp. the same author’s Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 300.)
“He [Buddha] ignores God in so complete a way that he does not even seek to deny him; he does not suppress him, but he does not speak of him either to explain the origin and anterior existence of man or to explain the present life, or to conjecture his future life and definitive deliverance. The Buddha knows God in no fashion whatever” (Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, Le Bouddha et sa Religion, 1866, p. v).
“Buddhism and Christianity are indeed the two opposite poles with regard to the most essential points of religion: Buddhism ignoring all feeling of dependence on a higher power, and therefore denying the very existence of a supreme deity” (Müller, Introd. to Sc. of Rel., p. 171).
“Lastly, the Buddha declared that he had arrived at [his] conclusions, not by study of the Vedas, nor from the teachings of others, but by the light of reason and intuition alone” (Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 48). “The most ancient Buddhism despises dreams and visions” (Id., p. 177). “Agnostic atheism ... is the characteristic of his [Buddha’s] system of philosophy” (Id., p. 207).
“Belief in a Supreme Being, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, is unquestionably a modern graft upon the unqualified atheism of Sákya Muni: it is still of very limited recognition. In none of the standard authorities ... is there the slightest [59]allusion to such a First Cause, the existence of which is incompatible with the fundamental Buddhist dogma of the eternity of all existence” (H. H. Wilson, Buddha and Buddhism, in Essays and Lectures, ed. by Dr. R. Rost, 1862, ii, 361. Cp. p. 363).
On the other hand, the gradual colouring of Buddhism with popular mythology, the reversion (if, indeed, this were not early) to adoration and worship of the Buddha himself, and the final collapse of the system in India before the pressure of Brahmanized Hinduism, all prove the potency of the sociological conditions of success and failure for creeds and criticisms. Buddhism took the monastic form for its institutions, thus incurring ultimate petrifaction alike morally and intellectually; and in any case the normal Indian social conditions of abundant population, cheap food, and general ignorance involved an overwhelming vitality for the popular cults. These the orthodox Brahmans naturally took under their protection as a means of maintaining their hold over the multitude;64 and though their own highest philosophy has been poetically grafted on that basis, as in the epic of the Mahâbhârata and in the Bhagavat Gita,65 the ordinary worship of the deities of these poems is perforce utterly unphilosophical, varying between a primitive sensualism and an emotionalism closely akin to that of popular forms of Christianity. Buddhism itself, where it still prevails, exhibits similar tendencies.66
It is disputed whether the Brahman influence drove Buddhism out of India by physical force, or whether the latter decayed because of maladaptation to its environment. Its vogue for some seven hundred years, from about 300 B.C. to about 400 A.C., seems to have been largely due to its protection and final acceptance as a State religion by the dynasty of Chandragupta (the Sandracottos of the Greek historians), whose grandson Asoka showed it special favour. His rock-inscribed edicts (for which see Max Müller, Introd. to Science of Rel., pp. 5–6, 23; Anthrop. Relig., pp. 40–43; Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 220–28; Wheeler’s Hist. of India, vol. iii, app. 1; Asiatic Society’s Journals, vols. viii and xii; Indian Antiquary, 1877, vol. vi) show a general concern for natural ethics, and especially for tolerance; but his mention of “The Terrors of the Future” among the religious works he specially honours shows (if genuine) that normal superstition, if ever widely repudiated (which is doubtful), had interpenetrated the system. The king, [60]too, called himself “the delight of the Gods,” as did his contemporary the Buddhist king of Ceylon (Davids, Buddhism, p. 84). Under Asoka, however, Buddhism was powerful enough to react somewhat on the West, then in contact with India as a result of the Alexandrian conquest (cp. Mahaffy, Greek World under Roman Sway, ch. ii; Weber’s lecture on Ancient India, Eng. tr., pp. 25–26; Indische Skizzen, p. 28 [cited in the present writer’s Christianity and Mythology, p. 165]; and Weber’s Hist of Ind. Lit., p. 255 and p. 309, note); and the fact that after his time it entered on a long conflict with Brahmanism proves that it remained practically dangerous to that system. In the fifth and sixth centuries of our era Buddhism in India “rapidly declined”—a circumstance hardly intelligible save as a result of violence. Tiele, after expressly asserting the “rapid decline” (Outlines, p. 139), in the next breath asserts that there are no satisfactory proofs of such violence, and that, “on the contrary, Buddhism appears to have pined away slowly” (p. 140: contrast his Egypt. Rel., p. xxi). Rhys Davids, in his Buddhism, p. 246 (so also Max Müller, Anthrop. Rel., p. 43), argues for a process of violent extinction; but in his later work, Buddhist India, he retracts this view and decides for a gradual decline in the face of a Brahmanic revival. The evidences for violence and persecution are, however, pretty strong. (See H. H. Wilson, Essays, as cited, ii, 365–67.) Internal decay certainly appears to have occurred. Already in Gautama’s own life, according to the legends, there were doctrinal disputes within his party (Müller, Anthrop. Rel., p. 38); and soon heresies and censures abounded (Introd. to Sc. of Rel., p. 23), till schisms arose and no fewer than eighteen sects took shape (Davids, Buddhism, pp. 213–18).
Thus early in our inquiry we may gather, from a fairly complete historical case, the primary laws of causation as regards alike the progress and the decadence of movements of rationalistic thought. The fundamental economic dilemma, seen already in the life of the savage, presses at all stages of civilization. The credent multitude, save in the very lowest stages of savage destitution, always feeds and houses those who furnish it with its appropriate mental food; and so long as there remains the individual struggle for existence, there will always be teachers ready. If the higher minds in any priesthood, awaking to the character of their traditional teaching, withdraw from it, lower minds, howbeit “sincere,” will always take their place. The innovating teacher, in turn, is only at the beginning of his troubles when he contrives, on whatever bases, to set up a new organized movement. The very process of organization, on the one hand, sets up the call for special economic sustenance—a constant [61]motive to compromise with popular ignorance—and, on the other hand, tends to establish merely a new traditionalism, devoid of the critical impulse in which it arose.67 And without organization the innovating thought cannot communicate itself, cannot hold its own against the huge social pressures of tradition.
In ancient society, in short, there could be no continuous progress in freethinking: at best, there could but be periods or lines of relative progress, the result of special conjunctures of social and political circumstance. So much will appear, further, from the varying instances of still more ancient civilizations, the evolution of which may be the better understood from our survey of that of India.
The nature of the remains we possess of the ancient Babylonian and Assyrian religions is not such as to yield a direct record of their development; but they suffice to show that there, as elsewhere, a measure of rationalistic evolution occurred. Were there no other ground for the inference, it might not unreasonably be drawn from the post-exilic monotheism of the Hebrews, who, drawing so much of their cosmology and temple ritual from Babylon, may be presumed to have been influenced by the higher Semitic civilizations in other ways also.68 But there is concrete evidence. What appears to have happened in Babylonia and Assyria, whose religious systems were grafted on that of the more ancient Sumer-Akkadian civilization, is a gradual subordination of the numerous local Gods (at least in the thought of the more philosophic, including some of the priests) to the conception of one all-pervading power. This process would be assisted by that of imperialism; and in the recently-recovered code of Hammurabi we actually find references to Ilu “God” (as in the European legal phrase, “the act of God”) without any further God-name.69 On the other hand, the unifying tendency would be resisted by the strength of the traditions of the Babylonian cities, all of which had ancient cults before the later empires were built up.70 Yet, again, peoples who failed in war would be in some measure led to renounce their God as weak; while those who clung to their faith [62]would be led, as in Jewry, to recast its ethic. The result was a set of compromises in which the provincial and foreign deities were either treated genealogically or grouped in family or other relations with the chief God or Gods of the time being.71 Certain cults, again, were either kept always at a higher ethical level than the popular one, or were treated by the more refined and more critical worshippers in an elevated spirit;72 and this tendency seems to have led to conceptions of purified deities who underlay or transcended the popular types, the names of the latter being held to point to one who was misconceived under their grosser aspects.73 Astronomical knowledge, again, gave rise to cosmological theories which pointed to a ruling and creating God,74 who as such would have a specially ethical character. In some such way was reached a conception of a Creator-God as the unity represented by the fifty names of the Great Gods, who lost their personality when their names were liturgically given to him75—a conception which in some statements even had a pantheistic aspect76 among a “group of priestly thinkers,” and in others took the form of an ideal theocracy.77 There is record that the Babylonian schools were divided into different sects,78 and their science was likely to make some of these rationalistic.79 Professor Sayce even goes so far as to say that in the later cosmogony, “under a thin disguise of theological nomenclature, the Babylonian theory of the universe has become a philosophical materialism.”80
It might be taken for granted, further, that disbelief would be set up by such a primitive fraud as the alleged pretence of the priests of Bel Merodach that the God cohabited nightly with the concubine set apart for him (Herodotos, i, 181–82), as was similarly pretended by the priests of Amun at Thebes. Herodotos could not believe the story, which, indeed, is probably a late Greek fable; but there must have been some skeptics within the sphere of the Semitic cult of sacred prostitution.
As regards freethinking in general, much would depend on the development of the Chaldæan astronomy. That science, [63]growing out of primitive astrology (cp. Whewell, Hist. of the Induct. Sciences, 3rd ed. i, 108), would tend to discredit, among its experts, much of the prevailing religious thought; and they seem to have carried it so far as to frame a scientific theory of comets (Seneca, citing Apollonius Myndius, Quaest. Nat., vii, 3; cp. Lib. Use. Kn. Hist. of Astron., c. 3; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 186; and Weber, Ind. Lit., p. 248). Such knowledge would greatly favour skepticism, as well as monotheism and pantheism. It was sought to be astrologically applied; but, as the horoscopes varied, this was again a source of unbelief (Meyer, p. 179). Medicine, again, made little progress (Herod., i, 197).
It can hardly be doubted, finally, that in Babylonia and Assyria there were idealists who, like the Hebrew prophets, repudiated alike image-worship and the religion of sacrifices. The latter repudiation occurs frequently in later Greece and Rome. There, as in Jerusalem, it could make itself heard in virtue of the restrictedness of the power of the priests, who in imperial Babylonia and Assyria, on the other hand, might be trusted to suppress or override any such propaganda, as we have seen was done in Brahmanical India.
Concerning image-worship, apart from the proved fact of pantheistic doctrine, and the parallels in Egypt and India, it is to be noted that Isaiah actually puts in the mouth of the Assyrian king a tirade against the “kingdoms of the idols” or “false gods,” including in these Jerusalem and Samaria (Isa. x, 10, 11). The passage is dramatic, but it points to the possibility that in Assyria just as in Israel a disbelief in idols could arise from reflection on the spectacle of their multitude.
The chequered political history of Babylon and Assyria, however, made impossible any long-continued development of critical and philosophical thought. Their amalgamations of creeds and races had in a measure favoured such development;81 and it was probably the setting up of a single rule over large populations formerly at chronic war that reduced to a minimum, if it did not wholly abolish, human sacrifice in the later pre-Persian empires;82 but the inevitably subject state of the mass of the people, and the chronic military upset of the government, were conditions fatally favourable to ordinary superstition. The new universalist conceptions, instead of dissolving the special cults in pantheism, led only to a fresh competition of cults on cosmopolitan lines, all making the same pretensions, and stressing their most artificial peculiarities as all-important. [64]Thus, when old tribal or local religions went proselytizing in the enlarged imperial field, they made their most worthless stipulations—as Jewish circumcision and abstinence from pork, and the self-mutilation of the followers of Cybelê—the very grounds of salvation.83 Culture remained wholly in the hands of the priestly and official class,84 who, like the priesthoods of Egypt, were held to conservatism by their vast wealth.85 Accordingly we find the early religion of sorcery maintaining itself in the literature of the advanced empires.86 The attitude of the Semitic priests and scribes towards the old Akkadic as a sacred language was in itself, like the use of sacred books in general, long a check upon new thought;87 and though the Assyrian life seems to have set this check aside, by reason of the lack of a culture class in Assyria, the later Babylonian kingdom which rose on the fall of Assyria was too short-lived to profit much by the gain, being in turn overthrown in the second generation by Cyrus. It is significant that the conqueror was welcomed by the Babylonian priests as against their last king, the inquiring and innovating Nabonidos88 (Nabu-nahid), who had aimed at a monarchic polytheism or quasi-monotheism. He is described as having turned away from Mardouk (Merodach), the great Babylonian God, who accordingly accepted Cyrus in his stead. It is thus clear that Cyrus, who restored the old state of things, was no strict monotheist of the later Persian type, but a schemer who relied everywhere on popular religious interests, and conciliated the polytheists and henotheists of Babylon as he did the Yahweh-worshipping Jews.89 The Persian quasi-monotheism and anti-idolatry, however, already existed, and it is conceivable that they may have been intensified among the more cultured through the peculiar juxtaposition of cults set up by the Persian conquest.
Mr. Sayce’s dictum (Hib. Lect., p. 314), that the later ethical element in the Akkado-Babylonian system is “necessarily” due to Semitic race elements, is seen to be fallacious in the light of his own subsequent admission (p. 353) as to the lateness of the development among the Semites. The difference between early Akkadian and later Babylonian was simply one of culture-stage. See Mr. Sayce’s own remarks on p. 300; and compare E. Meyer (Gesch. des Alt., i, 178, 182, 183), who [65]entirely rejects the claim made for Semitic ethics. See, again, Tiele, Outlines, p. 78, and Mr. Sayce’s own account (Anc. Em. of the East, p. 202) of the Phœnician religion as “impure and cruel.” Other writers take the line of arguing that the Phœnicians were “not Semites,” and that they differed in all things from the true Semites (cp. Dr. Marcus Dods, Israel’s Iron Age, 1874, p. 10, and Farrar, as there cited). The explanation of such arbitrary judgments seems to be that the Semites are assumed to have had a primordial religious gift as compared with “Turanians,” and that the Hebrews in turn are assumed to have been so gifted above other Semites. We shall best guard against à priori injustice to the Semites themselves, in the conjunctures in which they really advanced civilization, by entirely discarding the unscientific method of explaining the history of races in terms of hereditary character (see below, § 6, end).
The Mazdean system, or worship of Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), of which we find in Herodotos positive historical record as an anti-idolatrous and nominally monotheistic creed90 in the fifth century B.C., is the first to which these aspects can be ascribed with certainty. As the Jews are found represented in the Book of Jeremiah91 (assumed to have been written in the sixth century B.C.) worshipping numerous Gods with images: and as polytheistic and idolatrous practices are still described in the Book of Ezekiel92 (assumed to have been written during or after the Babylonian Captivity), it is inadmissible to accept the unauthenticated writings of ostensibly earlier prophets as proving even a propaganda of monotheism on their part, the so-called Mosaic law being known to be in large part of late invention and of Babylonian derivation.93 In any case, the mass of the people were clearly image-worshippers. The Persians, on the other hand, can be taken with certainty to have had in the sixth century an imageless worship (though images existed for other purposes), with a supreme God set above all others. The Magian or Mazdean creed, as we have seen, was not very devoutly held by Cyrus; but Dareios a generation later is found holding it with zeal; and it cannot have grown in a generation to the form it then bore. It must therefore be regarded as a development of the religion of some section of the “Iranian” race, centering as it does round some deities common to the Vedic Aryans.
The Mazdean system, as we first trace it in history, was the [66]religion of the Medes, a people joined with the Persians proper under Cyrus; and the Magi or priests were one of the seven tribes of the Medes,94 as the Levites were one of the tribes of Israel. It may then be conjectured that the Magi were the priests of a people who previously conquered or were conquered by the Medes, who had then adopted their religion, as did the Persians after their conquest by or union with the Medes. Cyrus, a semi-Persian, may well have regarded the Medes with some racial distrust, and, while using them as the national priests, would naturally not be devout in his adherence at a time when the two peoples were still mutually jealous. When, later, after the assassination of his son Smerdis (Bardes or Bardija) by the elder son, King Cambyses, and the death of the latter, the Median and Magian interest set up the “false Smerdis,” Persian conspirators overthrew the pretender and crowned the Persian Dareios Hystaspis, marking their sense of hostility to the Median and Magian element by a general massacre of Magi.95 Those Magi who survived would naturally cultivate the more their priestly influence, the political being thus for the time destroyed; though they seem to have stirred up a Median insurrection in the next century against Dareios II.96 However that may be, Dareios I became a zealous devotee of their creed,97 doubtless finding that a useful means of conciliating the Medes in general, who at the outset of his reign seem to have given him much trouble.98 The richest part of his dominions99 was East-Iran, which appears to have been the original home of the worship of Ahura-Mazda.100
Such is the view of the case derivable from Herodotos, who remains the main authority; but recent critics have raised some difficulties. That the Magians were originally a non-Median tribe seems clear; Dr. Tiele (Outlines, pp. 163, 165) even decides that they were certainly non-Aryan. Compare Ed. Meyer (Gesch. des Alt., i, 530, note, 531, §§ 439, 440), who holds that the Mazdean system was in its nature not national but abstract, and could therefore take in any race. Several modern writers, however (Canon Rawlinson, ed. of Herodotos, i, 426–31; Five Great Monarchies, 2nd ed. ii, 345–55, iii, 402–404; Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, Eng. tr. pp. 197, 218–39; Sayce, Anc. Emp. of the East, p. 248), represent the Magians as not only anti-Aryan (= anti-Persian), but opposed to the very worship of Ormazd, which is specially associated with their name. It seems difficult to reconcile this view with the [67]facts; at least it involves the assumption of two opposed sets of Magi. The main basis for the theory seems to be the allusion in the Behistun inscription of Dareios to some acts of temple-destruction by the usurping Magian Gomates, brother and controller of the pretender Smerdis. (See the inscription translated in Records of the Past, i, 111–15.) This Meyer sets aside as an unsettled problem, without inferring that the Magians were anti-Mazdean (cp. § 449 and § 511, note). As to the massacre, however, Meyer decides (i, 613) that Herodotos blundered, magnifying the killing of “the Magus” into a slaughter of “the Magi.” But this is one of the few points at which Herodotos is corroborated by Ktesias (cp. Grote, iii, 440, note). A clue to a solution may perhaps be found in the facts that, while the priestly system remained opposed to all image-worship, Dareios made emblematic images of the Supreme God (Meyer, i, 213, 617) and of Mithra; and that Artaxerxes Mnemon later put an image of Mithra in the royal temple of Susa, besides erecting many images to Anaitis. (Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, iii, 320–21, 360–61.) There may have been opposing tendencies; the conquest of Babylon being likely to have introduced new elements. The Persian art now arising shows the most marked Assyrian influences.
The religion thus imposed on the Persians seems to have been imageless by reason of the simple defect of art among its cultivators;101 and to have been monotheistic only in the sense that its chief deity was supreme over all others, including even the great Evil Power, Ahriman (Angra Mainyu). Its God-group included Mithra, once the equal of Ahura-Mazda,102 and later more prominent than he;103 as well as a Goddess, Anahita, apparently of Akkadian origin. Before the period of Cyrus, the eastern part of Persia seems to have been but little civilized;104 and it was probably there that its original lack of images became an essential element in the doctrine of its priests. As we find it in history, and still more in its sacred book, the Zendavesta, which as we have it represents a late liturgical compilation,105 Mazdeism is a priest-made religion rather than the work of one Zarathustra or any one reformer; and its rejection of images, however originated, is to be counted to the credit of its priests, like the pantheism or nominal monotheism of the Mesopotamian, Brahmanic, and Egyptian religions. The original popular faith had clearly been a normal polytheism.106 For the rest, the Mazdean ethic [68]has the usual priestly character as regards the virtue it assigns to sacrifice;107 but otherwise compares favourably with Brahmanism.
As to this cult being priest-made, see Meyer, i, 523, 540, 541. Tiele (Outlines, pp. 167, 178) assumes a special reformation such as is traditionally associated with Zarathustra, holding that either a remarkable man or a sect must have established the monotheistic idea. Meyer (i, 537) holds with M. Darmesteter that Zarathustra is a purely mythical personage, made out of a Storm-God. Dr. Menzies (Hist. of Relig. p. 384) holds strongly by his historic actuality. The problem is analogous to those concerning Moses and Buddha; but though the historic case of Mohammed bars a confident decision in the negative, the balance of presumption is strongly against the traditional view. See the author’s Pagan Christs, pp. 286–88.
There is no reason to believe, however, that among the Persian peoples the higher view of things fared any better than elsewhere.108 The priesthood, however enlightened it may have been in its inner culture, never slackened the practice of sacrifice and ceremonial; and the worship of subordinate spirits and the propitiation of demons figured as largely in their beliefs as in any other. In time the cult of the Saviour-God Mithra came to the front very much as did that of Jesus later; and in the one case as in the other, despite ethical elements, superstition was furthered. When, still later, the recognition of Ahriman was found to endanger the monotheistic principle, an attempt seems to have been made under the Sassanian dynasty, in our own era, to save it by positing a deity who was father of both Ahura-Mazda and Angra-mainyu;109 but this last slight effort of freethinking speculation came to nothing. Social and political obstacles determined the fate of Magian as of other ancient rationalism.
According to Rawlinson, Zoroastrianism under the Parthian (Arsacide) empire was gradually converted into a complex system of idolatry, involving a worship of ancestors and dead kings (Sixth Orient. Mon. p. 399; Seventh Mon. pp. 8–9, 56). Gutschmid, however, following Justin (xli, 3, 5–6), pronounces the Parthians zealous followers of Zoroastrianism, dutifully obeying it in the treatment of their dead (Geschichte Irans von Alexander bis zum Untergang der Arsakiden, 1888, pp. 57–58)—a law not fully obeyed even by Dareios and his dynasty (Heeren, Asiatic Nations, Eng. tr. i, 127). Rawlinson, on the contrary, says the Parthians burned their dead—an abomination [69]to Zoroastrians. Certainly the name of the Parthian King Mithradates implies acceptance of Mazdeism. At the same time Rawlinson admits that in Persia itself, under the Parthian dynasty, Zoroastrianism remained pure (Seventh Mon. pp. 9–10), and that, even when ultimately it became mixed up with normal polytheism, the dualistic faith and the supremacy of Ormazd were maintained (Five Monarchies, 2nd ed. iii, 362–63; cp. Darmesteter, Zendavesta, i, lxvi, 2nd ed.).
The relatively rich store of memorials left by the Egyptian religions yields us hardly any more direct light on the growth of religious rationalism than do those of Mesopotamia, though it supplies much fuller proof that such a growth took place. All that is clear is that the comparison and competition of henotheistic cults there as elsewhere led to a measure of relative skepticism, which took doctrinal shape in a loose monism or pantheism. The language is often monotheistic, but never, in the early period, is polytheism excluded; on the contrary, it is affirmed in the same breath.110 The alternate ascendancy of different dynasties, with different Gods, forced on the process, which included, as in Babylon, a priestly grouping of deities in families and triads111—the latter arrangement, indeed, being only a return to a primitive African conception.112 It involved further a syncretism or a combining of various Gods into one,113 and also an esoteric explanation of the God-myths as symbolical of natural processes, or else of mystical ideas.114 There are even evidences of quasi-atheism in the shape of materialistic hymns on Lucretian lines.115 At the beginning of the New Kingdom (1500 B.C.) it had been fully established for all the priesthoods that the Sun-God was the one real God, and that it was he who was worshipped in all the others.116 He in turn was conceived as a pervading spiritual force, of anthropomorphic character and strong moral bias.117 This seems to have been by way of a purification of one pre-eminent compound deity, Amen-Ra, to begin with, whose model was followed in other cults.118 “Theocracies of this kind could not have been [70]formed unconsciously. Men knew perfectly well that they were taking a great step in advance of their fathers.”119 There had occurred, in short, among the educated and priestly class a considerable development, going on through many centuries, alike in philosophical and in ethical thought; the ethics of the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” being quite as altruistic as those of any portion of the much later Christian Gospels.120 Such a development could arise only in long periods of peace and law-abiding life; though it is found to be accelerated after the Persian conquest, which would force upon the Egyptian priesthood new comparisons and accommodations.121 And yet all this was done “without ever sacrificing the least particle of the beliefs of the past.”122 The popular polytheism, resting on absolute ignorance, was indestructible; and the most philosophic priests seem never to have dreamt of unsettling it, though, as we shall see, a masterful king did.
An eminent Egyptologist has written that, “whatever literary treasures may be brought to light in the future as the result of excavations in Egypt, it is most improbable that we shall ever receive from that country any ancient Egyptian work which can properly be classed among the literature of atheism or freethought; the Egyptian might be more or less religious according to his nature and temperament, but, judging from the writings of his priests and teachers which are now in our hands, the man who was without religion and God in some form or other was most rare, if not unknown.”123 It is not clear what significance the writer attaches to this statement. Unquestionably the mass of the Egyptians were always naïf believers in all that was given them as religion; and among the common people even the minds which, as elsewhere, varied from the norm of credulity would be too much cowed by the universal parade of religion to impugn it; while their ignorance and general crudity of life would preclude coherent critical thought on the subject. But to conclude that among the priesthood and the upper classes there was never any “freethinking” in the sense of disbelief in the popular and official religion, even up to the point of pantheism or atheism, is to ignore the general lesson of culture history elsewhere. Necessarily there was no “literature of atheism or freethought.” Such literature could have no public, and, as a [71]menace to the wealth and status of the priesthood, would have brought death on the writer. But in such a multitudinous priesthood there must have been, at some stages, many who realized the mummery of the routine religion, and some who transcended the commonplaces of theistic thought. From the former, if not from the latter, would come esoteric explanations for the benefit of the more intelligent of the laity of the official class, who could read; and it is idle to decide that deeper unbelief was privately “unknown.”
It is contended, as against the notion of an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine, that the scribes “did not, as is generally supposed, keep their new ideas carefully concealed, so as to leave to the multitude nothing but coarse superstitions. The contrary is evident from a number of inscriptions which can be read by anybody, and from books which anyone can buy.”124 But the assumption that “anyone” could read or buy books in ancient Egypt is a serious misconception. Even in our own civilization, where “anyone” can presumably buy freethought journals or works on anthropology and the history of religions, the mass of the people are so placed that only by chance does such knowledge reach them; and multitudes are so little cultured that they would pass it by with uncomprehending indifference were it put before them. In ancient Egypt, however, the great mass of the people could not even read; and no man thought of teaching them.
This fact alone goes far to harmonize the ancient Greek testimonies as to the existence of an esoteric teaching in Egypt with Tiele’s contention to the contrary. See the pros and cons set forth and confusedly pronounced upon by Professor Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 400–401. We know from Diodorus (i, 81), what we could deduce from our other knowledge of Egyptian conditions, that, apart from the priests and the official class, no one received any literary culture save in some degree the higher grades of artificers, who needed some little knowledge of letters for their work in connection with monuments, sepulchres, mummy-cases, and so forth. Cp. Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, p. 285. Even the images of the higher Gods were shown to the people only on festival-days (Meyer Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 82).
The Egyptian civilization was thus, through all its stages, obviously conditioned by its material basis, which in turn ultimately determined its polity, there being no higher contemporary civilization [72]to lead it otherwise. An abundant, cheap, and regular food supply maintained in perpetuity a dense and easily-exploited population, whose lot through thousands of years was toil, ignorance, political subjection, and a primitive mental life.125 For such a population general ideas had no light and no comfort; for them was the simple human worship of the local natural Gods or the presiding Gods of the kingdom, alike confusedly conceived as great powers, figured often as some animal, which for the primeval mind signified indefinite capacity and unknown possibility of power and knowledge.126 Myths and not theories, magic and not ethics, were their spiritual food, albeit their peaceful animal lives conformed sufficiently to their code. And the life-conditions of the mass determined the policy of priest and king. The enormous priestly revenue came from the people, and the king’s power rested on both orders.
As to this revenue see Diodorus Siculus, i, 73; and Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Eng. tr. 1907, p. 71. According to Diodorus, a third of the whole land of the kingdom was allotted to the priesthoods. About a sixth of the whole land seems to have been given to the Gods by Ramessu III alone, besides 113,000 slaves, 490,000 cattle, and immense wealth of other kinds (Flinders Petrie, Hist. of Egypt, iii (1905), 154–55). The bulk of the possessions here enumerated seems to have gone to the temple of Amen at Thebes and that of the Sun-God at Heliopolis (Erman, as cited). It is to be noted, however, that the priestly order included all the physicians, lawyers, clerks, schoolmasters, sculptors, painters, land measurers, drug sellers, conjurers, diviners, and undertakers. Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, ed. Birch, 1878, i, 157–58; Sharpe, Egypt. Mythol. p. 26; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, § 68. “The sacred domains included herds of cattle, birds, fishermen, serfs, and temple servants” (Flinders Petrie, as cited, iii, 42). When the revenues assigned for a temple of Seti I were found to be misappropriated, and the building stopped, his son, Ramessu II, assigned a double revenue for the completion of the work and the worship (id.). Like the later priesthood of Christendom, that of Egypt forged documents to establish claims to revenue (id. p. 69). Captured cattle in great quantities were bestowed on temples of Amen (id. p. 149), whose priests were especially grasping (id. p. 153). Thus in the one reign of Ramessu III they received fifty-six towns of Egypt and nine of Syria and 62,000 serfs (id. p. 155).
This was fully seen when King Akhunaton (otherwise Echnaton, or Icheniton, or Akhunaton, or Akhunaten, or Chuenaten, or Khu-en-aten, [73]or Kku-n-aten, or Khouniatonou, or Khounaton!) = Amen-hetep or Amun-hotep (or Amenophis) IV, moved by monotheistic zeal, departed so far from the customary royal policy as to put under the ban all deities save that he had chosen for himself, repudiating the God-name Amen in his own name, and making one from that of his chosen Sun-God, Aten (“the sun’s disk”) or Aton or Atonou127 or Iton128 (latterly held to be = the Syrian Adon, “the Lord,” symbolized by the sun’s disk). There is reason to think that his was not a mere Sun-worship, but the cult of a deity, “Lord of the Disk,” who looked through the sun’s disk as through a window.129 In any interpretation, however, the doctrine was wholly inacceptable to a priesthood whose multitudinous shrines its success would have emptied. Of all the host of God-names, by one account only that of the old Sun-God Ra-Harmachis was spared,130 as being held identical with that of Aten; and by one account131 the disaffection of priests and people rose to the point of open rebellion. At length Akhunaton, “Glory of the Disk,” as he elected to name himself, built for himself and his God a new capital city in Middle Egypt, Akhet-Aten (or Khut-Aten), the modern Tell-el-Amarna, where he assembled around him a society after his own heart, and carried on his Aten-worship, while his foreign empire was crumbling. The “Tell-el-Amarna tablets” were found in the ruins of his city, which was deserted a generation after his death. Though the king enforced his will while he lived, his movement “bore no fruit whatever,” his policy being reversed after his family had died out, and his own monuments and capital city razed to the ground by orthodox successors.132 In the same way the earlier attempt of the alien Hyksos to suppress the native polytheism and image-worship had come to nothing.133
The history of Akhunaton is established by the later Egyptology. Sharpe makes no mention of it, though the point had been discussed from 1839 onwards. Cp. Lepsius, Letters from Egypt, etc., Bohn trans. 1853, p. 27; and Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind, 1854, p. 147, and Indigenous Races of the Earth, 1857, pp. 116–17, in both of which places [74]will be found the king’s portrait. See last reference for the idle theory that he had been emasculated, as to which the confutation by Wiedemann (Aegyptische Geschichte, p. 397, cited by Budge, Hist. of Egypt, 1902, iv, 128) is sufficient. In point of fact, he figures in the monuments as father of three or seven children (Wiedemann, Rel. of Anc. Eg. p. 37; Erman, p. 69; Budge, iv, 123, 127).
Dispute still reigns as to the origin of the cult to which he devoted himself. A theory of its nature and derivation, based on that of Mr. J. H. Breasted (History of Egypt, 1906, p. 396), is set forth in an article by Mr. A. E. P. Weigall on “Religion and Empire in Ancient Egypt” in the Quarterly Review, Jan. 1909. On this view Aten or Aton is simply Adon = “the Lord”—a name ultimately identified with Adonis, the Syrian Sun-God and Vegetation-God. The king’s grandfather was apparently a Syrian, presumably of royal lineage; and Queen Tii or Thiy, the king’s mother, who with her following had wrought a revolution against the priesthood of Amen, brought him up as a devotee of her own faith. On her death he became more and more fanatical, getting out of touch with people and priesthood, so that “his empire fell to pieces rapidly.” Letters still exist (among the Tell-el-Amarna tablets) which were sent by his generals in Asia, vainly imploring help. He died at the age of twenty-eight; and if the body lately found, and supposed to be his, is really so, his malady was water on the brain.
Mr. Breasted, finding that Akhunaton’s God is described by him in inscriptions as “the father and the mother of all that he made,” ranks the cult very high in the scale of theism. Mr. Weigall (art. cited, p. 60; so also Budge, Hist. iv, 125) compares a hymn of the king’s with Ps. civ, 24 sq., and praises it accordingly. The parallel is certainly close, but the document is not thereby certificated as philosophic. On the strength of the fact that Akhunaton “had dreamed that the Aton religion would bind the nations together,” Mr. Weigall credits him with harbouring “an illusive ideal towards which, thirty-two centuries later, mankind is still struggling in vain” (p. 66). The ideal of subjugating the nations to one God, cherished later by Jews, and still later by Moslems, is hardly to be thus identified with the modern ideal of international peace. Brugsch, in turn, credits the king with having “willingly received the teaching about the one God of Light,” while admitting that Aten simply meant the sun’s disk (Hist. of Egypt, 1-vol. ed. p. 216).
Maspero, again, declares Tii to have been an Egyptian of old stock, and the God “Atonou” to have been the deity of her tribe (Hist. anc., as cited, p. 249); and he pronounces the cult probably the most ancient variant of the religions of Ra (p. 250). Messrs. King and Hall, who also do not accept the theory of a Syrian derivation, coincide with Messrs. Breasted and Weigall [75]in extolling Akhunaton’s creed. In a somewhat summary fashion they pronounce (work cited, p. 383) that, “given an ignorance of the true astronomical character of the sun, we see how eminently rational a religion” was this. The conception of a moving window in the heavens, which appears to be the core of it, seems rather a darkening than a development of the “philosophical speculations of the priests of the Sun at Heliopolis,” from which it is held by Messrs. King and Hall to have been derived. Similarly ill-warranted is the decision (id. p. 384) that in Akhunaton’s heresy “we see ... the highest attitude [? altitude] to which religious ideas had attained before the days of the Hebrew prophets.” Alike in India and in Egypt, pantheistic ideas of a larger scope than his or those of the Hebrew prophets had been attained before Akhunaton’s time.
Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge, on the other hand, points out that the cult of the Aten is really an ancient one in Egypt, and was carried on by Thothmes III, father of Amen-hetep II, a century before Akhunaton (Amen-hetep IV), its “original home” being Heliopolis (History of Egypt, 1902, iv, 48, 119). So also von Bissing, Gesch. Aeg. in Umriss, p. 52 (reading “Iton”). Rejecting the view that “Aten” is only a form of “Adon,” Dr. Budge pronounces that “as far as can be seen now the worship of Aten was something like a glorified materialism”—whatever that may be—“which had to be expounded by priests who performed ceremonies similar to those which belonged to the old Heliopolitan sun-worship, without any connection whatsoever with the worship of Yahweh; and a being of the character of the Semitic God Adôn had no place in it anywhere.” Further, he considers that it “contained no doctrines on the unity or oneness of Aten similar to those which are found in the hymns to Rā, and none of the beautiful ideas on the future life with which we are familiar from the hymns and other compositions in the Book of the Dead” (Ib. pp. 120–21).
By Prof. Flinders Petrie Queen Tii or Thiy is surmised to have been of Armenian origin (see Budge, iv, 96–98, as to her being “Mesopotamian”); and Prof. Petrie, like Mr. Breasted, has inferred that she brought with her the cult of which her son became the devotee. (So also Brugsch, p. 214.) Messrs. King and Hall recognize that the cult had made some headway before Akhunaton took it up; but deny that there is any reason for supposing Queen Tii to have been of foreign origin; adding: “It seems undoubted that the Aten cult was a development of pure Egyptian religious thought.” Certainty on such an issue seems hardly possible; but it may be said, as against the theory of a foreign importation, that there is no evidence whatever of any high theistic cult of Adonis in Syria at the period in question. Adonis was primarily a Vegetation-God; and the older view that Aten simply means “the sun’s disk” [76]is hardly disposed of. It is noteworthy that under Akhunaton’s patronage Egyptian sculpture enjoyed a term of freedom from the paralyzing convention which reigned before and after (King and Hall, as cited, pp. 383–84). This seems to have been the result of the innovating taste of the king (Budge, Hist. iv, 124–26).
As the centuries lapsed the course of popular religion was rather downward than upward, if it can be measured by the multiplication of superstitions.134 When under the Ramesside dynasty the high-priests of Amen became by marriage with the royal family the virtual rulers, sacerdotalism went from bad to worse.135 The priests, who held the allegorical key to mythology, seem to have been the main multipliers of magic and fable, mummery, ceremonial, and symbol; and they jealously guarded their specialty against lay competition.136 Esoteric and exoteric doctrine flourished in their degrees side by side,137 the instructed few apparently often accepting or acting upon both; and primitive rites all the while flourished on the level of the lowest savagery,138 though the higher ethical teaching even improves, as in India.
Conflicts, conquests, and changes of dynasties seem to have made little difference in the life of the common people.139 Religion was the thread by which any ruler could lead them; and after the brief destructive outbreak of Cambyses,140 himself at first tolerant, the Persian conquerors allowed the old faiths to subsist, caring only, like their predecessors, to prevent strife between the cults which would not tolerate each other.141 The Ptolemies are found adopting and using the native cults as the native kings had done ages before them;142 and in the learned Greek-speaking society created by their dynasty at Alexandria there can have been at least as little concrete belief as prevailed in the priesthood of the older civilization. It developed a pantheistic philosophy which ultimately, in the hands of Plotinus, compares very well with that of the Upanishads and of later European systems. But this was a hot-house [77]flower; and in the open world outside, where Roman rule had broken the power of the ancient priesthood and Greek immigration had overlaid the native element, Christianity found an easy entrance, and in a declining society flourished at its lowest level.143 The ancient ferment, indeed, produced many stirrings of relative freethought in the form of Christian heresies to be noted hereafter; one of the most notable being that of Arius, who, like his antagonist Athanasius, was an Alexandrian. But the cast of mind which elaborated the dogma of the Trinity is as directly an outcome of Egyptian culture-history as that which sought to rationalize the dogma by making the popular deity a created person;144 and the long and manifold internecine struggles of the sects were the due duplication of the older strifes between the worshippers of the various sacred animals in the several cities.145 In the end the entire population was but so much clay to take the impress of the Arab conquerors, with their new fanatic monotheism standing for the minimum of rational thought.
For the rest, the higher forms of the ancient religion had been able to hold their own till they were absolutely suppressed, with the philosophic schools, by the Byzantine government, which at the same time marked the end of the ancient civilization by destroying or scattering the vast collection of books in the Serapeion, annihilating at once the last pagan cult and the stored treasure of pagan culture. With that culture too, however, there had been associated to the last the boundless credulity which had so long kept it company. In the second century of our era, under the Antonines, we have Apuleius telling of Isis worshipped as “Nature, parent of things, mistress of all elements, the primordial birth of the ages, highest of divinities, queen of departed spirits, first of the heavenly ones, the single manifestation of all Gods and Goddesses,” who rules all things in earth and heaven, and who stands for the sole deity worshipped throughout the world under many names;146 the while her worshipper cherishes all manner of the wildest superstitions, which even the subtle philosophy of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonic school did not discard. All alike, with the machinery of exorcism, were passed on to the worship of the Christian Queen of Heaven, leaving out only the pantheism; and when that worship in turn was overthrown, the One God of Islam enrolled in his train the [78]same host of ancient hallucinations.147 The fatality of circumstance was supreme.
Of the inner workings of thought in the Phoenician religion we know even less, directly, than can be gathered as to any other ancient system of similar notoriety,148 so completely did the Roman conquest of Carthage, and the Macedonian conquest of Tyre and Sidon, blot out the literary remains of their peoples. Yet there are some indirect clues of a remarkable sort.
It is hardly to be doubted, in the first place, that Punic speculation took the same main lines as the early thought of Egypt and Mesopotamia, whose cultures, mixing in Syria as early as the fifteenth century B.C., had laid the basis of the later Phoenician civilization.149 The simple fact that among the Syro-Phoenicians was elaborated the alphabet adopted by all the later civilizations of the West almost implies a special measure of intellectual progress. We can indeed trace the normal movement of syncretism in the cults, and the normal tendency to improve their ethics. The theory of an original pure monotheism150 is no more tenable here than anywhere else; we can see that the general designation of the chief God of any city, usually recognizable as a Sun-God, by a title rather than a name,151 though it pointed to a general worship of a pre-eminent power, in no sense excluded a belief in minor powers, ranking even as deities. It did not do so in the admittedly polytheistic period; and it cannot therefore be supposed to have done so previously.
The chief Phoenician Gods, it is admitted, were everywhere called by one or several of the titles Baal (Lord), Ram or Rimmon (High), Melech or Molech (King), Melkarth (King of the City), Eliun (Supreme), Adonai (Lord), Bel-Samin (Lord of Heaven), etc. (Cp. Rawlinson, History of Phoenicia, p. 231; Tiele, Hist. comp. des anc. relig., etc., Fr. tr. 1882, ch. iii, pp. 281–87; Outlines, p. 82; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 246, and art. “Phoenicia” in Encyc. Biblica, iii, 3742–5; Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 200.) The just inference is that the Sun-God was generally worshipped, the sun being for the Semitic peoples the pre-eminent Nature-power. “He alone of all the Gods is by Philo explained not as a deified man, but as the sun, who had been invoked from the earliest times” (Meyer, last cit.). (All Gods were not Baals: the division between [79]them and lesser powers corresponded somewhat, as Tiele notes, to that between Theoi and Daimones with the Greeks, and Ases and Vanes with the old Scandinavians. So in Babylonia and India the Bels and Asuras were marked off from lesser deities.) The fact that the Western Semites thus carried with them the worship of their chief deities in all their colonies would seem to make an end of the assumption (Gomme, Ethnology of Folklore, p. 68; Menzies, History of Religion, pp. 284, 250) that there is something specially “Aryan” in the “conception of Gods who could and did accompany the tribes wheresoever they travelled.” Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iii, 169.
The worship of the Baal, however, being that of a special Nature-power, cannot in early any more than in later times have been monotheistic. What happened was a preponderance of the double cult of the God and Goddess, Baal and Ashtoreth, as in the unquestionably polytheistic period (Rawlinson, p. 323; Tiele, Hist. Comp., as cited, p. 319).
Apart from this normal tendency to identify Gods called by the same title (a state of things which, however, in ancient as in modern Catholic countries, tended at the same time to set up special adoration of a given image), there is seen in the later religion of Phoenicia a spirit of syncretism which operated in a manner the reverse of that seen in later Jewry. In the latter case the national God was ultimately conceived, however fanatically, as universal, all others being negated: in commercial Phoenicia, many foreign Gods were adopted,152 the tendency being finally to conceive them as all manifestations of one Power.153 And there is reason to suppose that in the cosmopolitan world of the Phoenician cities the higher intelligence reached a yet more subversive, though still fallacious, theory of religion. The pretended ancient Phoenician cosmogony of Sanchoniathon, preserved by Eusebius,154 while worthless as a record of the most ancient beliefs,155 may be taken as representing views current not only in the time and society of Philo of Byblos (100 C.E.), who had pretended to translate it, but in a period considerably earlier. This cosmogony is, as Eusebius complains, deliberately atheistic; and it further systematically explains away all God stories as being originally true of remarkable men.
Where this primitive form of atheistic rationalism originated we cannot now tell. But it was in some form current before the time of the Greek Evêmeros, who systematically developed it about [80]300 B.C.; for in a monotheistic application it more or less clearly underlies the redaction of much of the Hebrew Bible, where both patriarchal and regal names of the early period are found to be old God-names; and where the Sun-God Samson is made a “judge”156—having originally been the Judge-God. In the Byblian writer, however, the purpose is not monotheistic, but atheistic; and the problem is whether this or that was the earlier development of the method. The natural presumption seems to be that the Hebrew adaptors of the old mythology used an already applied method, as the Christian Fathers later used the work of Evêmeros; and the citation from Thallos by Lactantius157 suggests that the method had been applied in Chaldea, as it was spontaneously applied by the Greek epic poets who made memorable mortals out of the ancient deities Odysseus and Æneas,158 Helen, Castor and Pollux, Achilles, and many more.159 It is in any case credible enough that among the much-travelling Phoenicians, with their open pantheon, an atheistic Evêmerism was thought out by the skeptical types before Evêmeros; and that the latter really drew his principles from Phoenicia.160 At any rate, they were there received, doubtless by a select few, as a means of answering the customary demand for “something in place of” the rejected Gods. Concerning the tradition that an ancient Phoenician, Moschus, had sketched an atomic theory, we may again say that, though there is no valid evidence for the statement, it counts for something as proof that the Phoenicians had an old repute for rationalism.
The Byblian cosmogony may be conceived as an atheistic refinement on those of Babylon, adopted by the Jews. It connects with the theogony ascribed to Hesiod (which has Asiatic aspects), in that both begin with Chaos, and the Gods of Hesiod are born later. But whereas in Hesiod Chaos brings forth Erebos and Night (Eros being causal force), and Night bears Æther and Day to Erebos, while Earth virginally brings forth Heaven (Uranos) and the Sea, and then bears the first Gods in union with Heaven, the Phoenician fragment proceeds from black chaos and wind, after long ages, through Eros or Desire, to a kind of primeval slime, from which arise first [81]animals without intelligence, who in turn produce some with intelligence. The effort to expel Deity must have been considerable, for sun and moon and stars seem to arise uncreated, and the sun’s action spontaneously produces further developments. The first man and his wife are created by male and female principles of wind, and their offspring proceed to worship the Sun, calling him Beel Samin. The other Gods are explained as eminent mortals deified after their death. See the details in Cory’s Ancient Fragments, Hodges’ ed. pp. 1–22. As to Moschus, cp. Renouvier, Manuel de philos. ancienne, 1844, i, 238; and Mosheim’s ed. of Cudworth’s Intellectual System, Harrison’s tr. i, 20; also Cudworth’s Eternal and Immutable Morality, same ed. iii, 548. On the general question of Phoenician rationalism, compare Pausanias’s account (vii, 23) of his discussion with a Sidonian, who explained that Apollo was simply the sun, and his son Æsculapius simply the healing art.
At the same time there are signs even in Phoenician worship of an effort after an ethical as well as an intellectual purification of the common religion. To call “the” Phoenician religion “impure and cruel”161 is to obscure the fact that in all civilizations certain types and cults vary from the norm. In Phoenicia as in Israel there were humane anti-sensualists who either avoided or impugned the sensual and the cruel cults around them; as well as ascetics who stood by human sacrifice while resisting sexual licence. That the better types remained the minority is to be understood in terms of the balance of the social and cultural forces of their civilization, not of any racial bias or defect, intellectual or moral.
The remark of E. Meyer (Gesch. des Alt. i, 211, § 175), that an ethical or mystical conception of the God was “entirely alien” to “the Semite,” reproduces the old fallacy of definite race-characters; and Mr. Sayce, in remarking that “the immorality performed in the name of religion was the invention of the Semitic race itself” (Anc. Emp. p. 203; contrast Tiele, Outlines, p. 83), after crediting the Semitic race with an ethical faculty alien to the Akkadian (above, p. 66), suggests another phase of the same error. There is nothing special to the Semites in the case save degree of development, similar phenomena being found in many savage religions, in Mexico, and in India. (Meyer in later passages and in his article on Ba’al in Boscher’s Lexikon modifies his position as to Semitic versus other religions.) On the other hand, there was a chaste as well as an unchaste worship of the Phoenician Ashtoreth. Ashtoreth Karnaim, or Tanit, the Virgin, as opposed to Atergates and [82]Annit, the Mother-Goddesses, had the characteristics of Artemis. Cp. Tiele, Religion comparée, as cited, pp. 318–19; Menzies, History of Religion, pp. 159, 168–71; Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i, 91; Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 292, 458. [In Rome, Venus Cloacina, sometimes ignorantly described as a Goddess of Vice, was anciently “the Goddess of chaste and holy matrimony” (Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Eng. tr. 1906, p. 199)]. For the rest, the cruelty of the Phoenician cults, in the matter of human sacrifice, was fully paralleled among the early Teutons. See Tiele, Outlines, p. 199; and the author’s Pagan Christs, Pt. ii, ch. i, § 4.
Of all the ancient Asiatic systems that of China yields us the first clear biographical trace of a practical rationalist, albeit a rationalist stamped somewhat by Chinese conservatism. Confucius (Kung-fu-tse = Kung the Master) is a tangible person, despite some mythic accretions, whereas Zarathustra and Buddha are at best but doubtful possibilities, and even Lao-Tsze (said to have been born 604 B.C.) is somewhat elusive.
Before Confucius (551–478 B.C.), it is evident, there had been a slackening in religious belief among the governing classes. It is claimed for the Chinese, as for so many other races, that they had anciently a “pure” monotheism;162 but the ascription, as usual, is misleading. They saw in the expanse of heaven the “Supreme” Power, not as a result of reflection on the claims of other deities among other races, but simply as expressing their primordial tribal recognition of that special God, before contact with the God-ideas of other peoples. Monotheistic in the modern sense they could not be. Concerning them as concerning the Semites we may say that the claim of a primary monotheism for them “is also true of all primitive totemistic or clannish communities. A man is born into a community with such a divine head, and the worship of that God is the only one possible to him.”163 Beside the belief in the Heaven-God, there stood beliefs in heavenly and earthly spirits, and in ancestors, who were worshipped with altars.164
The remark of Professor Legge (Religions of China, p. 11), that the relation of the names Shang-Ti = Supreme Ruler, and T’ien = the sky, “has kept the monotheistic element prominent in the religion proper of China down to the present time,” [83]may serve to avert disputation. It may be agreed that the Chinese were anciently “monotheists” in the way in which they are at present, when they worship spirits innumerable. When, however, Professor Legge further says (p. 16) that the ancient monotheism five thousand years ago was “in danger of being corrupted” by nature worship and divination, he puts in doubt the meaning of the other expression above cited. He states several times (pp. 46, 51, 52) that the old monotheism remains; but speaks (p. 84) of the mass of the people as “cut off from the worship of God for themselves.” And see p. 91 as to ancestor-worship by the Emperor. Tiele (Outlines, p. 27) in comparison somewhat overstresses the polytheistic aspect of the Chinese religion in his opening definition; but he adds the essential facts. Dr. Legge’s remark that “the idea of revelation did not shock” the ancient Chinese (p. 13) is obscure. He is dealing with the ordinary Akkado-Babylonian astrology. Pauthier, on the contrary (Chine Moderne, 1853, p. 250), asserts that in China “no doctrine has ever been put forth as revealed.”
As regards ancestral worship, we have record of a display of disregard for it by the lords of Lû in Confucius’s time;165 and the general attitude of Confucius himself, religious only in his adherence to old ceremonies, is incompatible with a devout environment. It has been disputed whether he makes a “skeptic denial of any relation between man and a living God”;166 but an authority who disputes this complains that his “avoiding the personal name of Tî, or God, and only using the more indefinite term Heaven,” suggests “a coldness of temperament and intellect in the matter of religion.”167 He was, indeed, above all things a moralist; and concerning the spirits in general he taught that “To give one’s self to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.”168 He would never express an opinion concerning the fate of souls,169 or encourage prayer;170 and in his redaction of the old records he seems deliberately to have eliminated mythological expressions.171 “I would say,” writes Dr. Legge (who never forgets to be a missionary), “that he was unreligious rather than irreligious; yet, by the coldness of his temperament and intellect in this matter, his influence is unfavourable to the development of true religious feeling among the Chinese people generally, and he prepared the way for the speculations of [84]the literati of medieval and modern times, which have exposed them to the charge of atheism.”172
The view that there was a very early “arrest of growth” in the Chinese religion (Menzies, History of Religion, p. 108), “before the ordinary developments of mythology and doctrine, priesthood,” etc., had “time to take place,” is untenable as to the mythology. The same writer had previously spoken (p. 107) of the Chinese system before Confucius as having “already parted with all savage and irrational elements.” That Confucius would seek to eliminate these seems likely enough, though the documentary fact is disputed.
In the elder contemporary of Confucius, Lao-Tsze (“Old Philosopher”), the founder of Taouism, may be recognized another and more remarkable early freethinker of a different stamp, in some essential respects much less conservative, and in intellectual cast markedly more original. Where Confucius was an admirer and student of antiquity, Lao-Tsze expressly put such concern aside,173 seeking a law of life within himself, in a manner suggestive of much Indian and other Oriental thought. So far as our records go, he is the first known philosopher who denied that men could form an idea of deity, that being the infinite; and he avowedly evolved, by way of makeshift, the idea of a primordial and governing Reason (Tau), closely analogous to the Logos of later Platonism. Since the same idea is traceable in more primitive forms alike in the Babylonian and Brahmanic systems,174 it is arguable that he may have derived it from one of these sources; but the problem is very obscure. In any case, his system is one of rationalistic pantheism.175
His personal relation to Confucius was that of a self-poised sage, impatient of the other’s formalism and regard to prescription and precedent. Where they compare is in their avoidance of supernaturalism, and in the sometimes singular rationality of their views of social science; in which latter respect, however, they were the recipients and transmitters of an already classic tradition.176 Thus both had a strong bias to conservatism; and in Lao-Tsze it went the length of prescribing that the people should not be instructed.177 Despite this, it is not going too far to say that no ancient people appears to have produced sane thinkers and scientific [85]moralists earlier than the Chinese. The Golden Rule, repeatedly formulated by Confucius, seems to be but a condensation on his part of doctrine he found in the older classics;178 and as against Lao-Tsze he is seen maintaining the practical form of the principle of reciprocity. The older man, like some later teachers, preached the rule of returning kindness for evil,179 without leaving any biographical trace of such practice on his own part. Confucius, dealing with human nature as it actually is, argued that evil should be met by justice, and kindness with kindness, else the evil were as much fostered as the good.180
It is to be regretted that Christian writers should keep up the form of condemning Confucius (so Legge, Religions of China, p. 144; Life and Teachings of Confucius, 4th ed. p. 111 sq.; Douglas, p. 144) for a teaching the practice of which is normally possible, and is never transcended in their own Church, where the profession of returning good for evil merely constitutes one of the great hypocrisies of civilization. Dr. Legge does not scruple to resort to a bad sophism in this connection. “If,” he says, “we only do good to them that do good to us, what reward have we?” He thus insinuates that Confucius vetoed any spontaneous act of benevolence. The question is not of such acts, but of kind acts to those who seek to injure us. On the other hand, Mr. Chalmers, who dedicates his translation of Lao-Tsze to Dr. Legge, actually taunts Lao-Tsze (p. 38) with absurdity in respect of his doctrine. Such is the sincerity of orthodox polemic. How little effect the self-abnegating teaching of Lao-Tsze, in turn, has had on his followers may be gathered from their very legends concerning him (Douglas, p. 182). There is a fallacy, further, in the Christian claim that Confucius (Analects, v, 11; xv, 23) put the Golden Rule in a lower form than that of the Gospels, in that he gave it the negative form, “Do not that which ye would not have done unto you.” This is really the rational and valid form of the Rule. The positive form, unless construed in the restrictive sense, would merely prescribe a non-moral doing of favours in the hope of receiving favours in return. It appears, further, from the passage in the Analects, v, 11, that the doctrine in this form was familiar before Confucius.
Lao-Tsze, on his part, had reduced religion to a minimum. “There is not a word in the Tâo Têh King [by Lao-Tsze] of the sixth century B.C. that savours either of superstition or religion.”181 [86]But the quietist and mystical philosophy of Lao-Tsze and the practicality of Confucius alike failed to check the growth of superstition among the ever-increasing ignorant Chinese population. Says our Christian authority: “In the works of Lieh-Tsze and Chwang-Tsze, followers of Lao-Tsze, two or three centuries later, we find abundance of grotesque superstition, though we are never sure how far those writers really believed the things they relate.” In point of fact, Lieh-Tsze is now commonly held by scholars to be an imaginary personage, whose name is given to a miscellaneous collection of teachings and moral tales, much interpolated and added to long after the date assigned to him—circa 400 B.C.182 It contains a purely pantheistic statement of the cosmic problem,183 and among the apologues is one in which a boy of twelve years is made tersely and cogently to rebut the teleological view of things.184 The writers of such sections are not likely to have held the superstitions set forth in others. But that superstition should supervene upon light where the means of light were dwindling was a matter of course. It was but the old fatality, seen in Brahmanism, in Buddhism, in Egypt, in Islam, and in Christianity.
Confucius himself was soon worshipped.185 A reaction against him set in after a century or two, doctrines of pessimism on the one hand, and of universal love on the other, finding a hearing;186 but the influence of the great Confucian teacher Mencius (Meng-Tse) carried his school through the struggle. “In his teaching, the religious element retires still further into the background”187 than in that of Confucius; and he is memorable for his insistence on the remarkable principle of Confucius, that “the people are born good”; that they are the main part of the State; and that it is the ruler’s fault if they go astray.188 Some rulers seem to have fully risen to this view of things, for we have an account of a rationalistic duke, who lived earlier than 250 B.C., refusing to permit the sacrifice of a man as a scapegoat on his behalf; and in the year 166 B.C. such sacrifices were permanently abolished by the Han Emperor Wen.189 But Mencius, who, as a sociologist, excels not only Lao-Tsze but Confucius, put his finger on the central force in Chinese history when he taught that “it is only men of education who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood, it follows that they [87]will not have a fixed heart.”190 So clearly was the truth seen in China over two thousand years ago. But whether under feudalism or under imperialism, under anarchy or under peace—and the teachings of Lao-Tsze and Mencius combined to discredit militarism191—the Chinese mass always pullulated on cheap food, at a low standard of comfort, and in a state of utter ignorance. Hence the cult of Confucius was maintained among them only by recognizing their normal superstition; but on that basis it has remained secure, despite competition, and even a term of early persecution. One iconoclastic emperor, the founder of the Ch’in or Ts’in dynasty (221 or 212 B.C.), sought to extirpate Confucianism as a means to a revolution in the government; but the effort came to nothing.192
In the same way Lao-Tsze came to be worshipped as a God193 under the religion called Taouism, a title sometimes mistranslated as rationalism, “a name admirably calculated to lead the mind astray as to what the religion is.”194 It would seem as if the older notion of the Tau, philosophically purified by Lao-Tsze, remained a popular basis for his school, and so wrought its degradation. The Taoists or Tao-sse “do their utmost to be as unreasonable as possible.”195 They soon reverted from the philosophic mysticism of Lao-Tsze, after a stage of indifferentism,196 to a popular supernaturalism,197 which “the cultivated Chinese now regard with unmixed contempt”;198 the crystallized common-sense of Confucius, on the other hand, allied as it is with official ceremonialism, retaining its hold as an esoteric code for the learned. The evolution has thus closely resembled that which took place in India.
Nowhere, perhaps, is our sociological lesson more clearly to be read than in China. Centuries before our era it had a rationalistic literature, an ethic no less earnest and far more sane that that of the Hebrews, and a line of known teachers as remarkable in their way as those of ancient Greece who flourished about the same period. But where even Greece, wrought upon by all the other cultures of antiquity, ultimately retrograded, till under Christianity it stayed at a Chinese level of unprogressiveness for a thousand years, isolated China, helped by no neighbouring culture adequate to the need, has stagnated as regards the main mass of its life, despite some political [88]and other fluctuations, till our own day. Its social problem, like that of India, is now more or less dependent, unfortunately, on the solutions that may be reached in Europe, where the problem is only relatively more mature, not fundamentally different.
In the religions of pre-Christian Mexico and Peru we have peculiarly interesting examples of “early” religious systems, flourishing at some such culture-level as the ancient Akkadian, in full play at the time of the European Renaissance. In Mexico a partly “high” ethical code, as the phrase goes, went concurrently with the most frightful indulgence in human sacrifice, sustained by the continuous practice of indecisive war for the securing of captives, and by the interest of a vast priesthood. In this system had been developed all the leading features of those of the Old World—the identification of all the Gods with the Sun; the worship of fire, and the annual renewal of it by special means; the conception of God-sacrifice and of communion with the God by the act of eating his slain representative; the belief in a Virgin-Mother-Goddess; the connection of humanitarian ethic with the divine command; the opinion that celibacy, as a state of superior virtue, is incumbent on most priests and on all would-be saints; the substitution of a sacramental bread for the “body and blood” of the God-Man; the idea of an interceding Mother-Goddess; the hope of a coming Saviour; the regular practice of prayer; exorcism, special indulgences, confession, absolution, fasting, and so on.199 In Peru, also, many of those conceptions were in force; but the limitation of the power and numbers of the priesthood by the imperial system of the Incas, and the state of peace normal in their dominions, prevented the Mexican development of human sacrifice.
It seems probable that the Toltecs, who either fled before or were for the most part subdued or destroyed by the barbarian Chichimecs (in turn subdued by the Aztecs) a few centuries before Cortes, were on the whole a less warlike and more civilized people, with a less bloody worship.200 Their God, Quetzalcoatl, retained through fear by the Aztecs,201 was a comparatively benign deity opposed to human [89]sacrifice, apparently rather a late purification or partial rationalization of an earlier God-type than a primitively harmless conception.202 Insofar as they were sundered by quarrels between the sectaries of the God Quetzalcoatl and the God Votan, though their religious wars seem to have been as cruel as those of the early Christians of North Africa, there appears to have been at work among them a movement towards unbloody religion. In any case their overthrow seems to stand for the military inferiority of the higher and more rational civilization203 to the lower and more religious, which in turn, however, was latterly being destroyed by its enormously burdensome military and priestly system, and may even be held to have been ruined by its own superstitious fears.204
Among the recognizable signs of normal progress in the ordinary Aztec religion were (1) the general recognition of the Sun as the God really worshipped in all the temples of the deities with special names;205 (2) the substitution in some cults of baked bread-images for a crucified human victim. The question arises whether the Aztecs, but for their overwhelming priesthood, might conceivably have risen above their system of human sacrifices, as the Aryan Hindus had done in an earlier age. Their material civilization, which carried on that of the kindred Toltecs, was at several points superior to that which the Spaniards put in its place; and their priesthood, being a leisured and wealthy class, might have developed intellectually as did the Brahmans,206 if its economic basis had been changed. But only a conquest or other great political convulsion could conceivably have overturned the vast cultus of human sacrifice, which overran all life, and cherished war as a means of procuring victims.
In the kindred State of Tezcuco, civilization seems to have gone further than in Aztec Anahuac; and about the middle of the fifteenth century one Tezcucan king, the conqueror Netzahualcoyotl, who has left writings in both prose and verse, is seen attaining to [90]something like a philosophic creed, of a monotheistic stamp.207 He is said to have rejected all idol-worship, and erected, as aforesaid, an altar “to the Unknown God,”208 forbidding all sacrifices of blood in that worship. But among the Tezcucans these never ceased; three hundred slaves were sacrificed at the obsequies of the conqueror’s son, Netzahualpilli; and the Aztec influence over the superior civilization was finally complete.
In Peru, again, we find civilization advancing in respect of the innovation of substituting statuettes for wives and slaves in the tombs of the rich; and we have already noted209 the remarkable records of the avowed unbelief of several Incas in the divinity of the nationally worshipped Sun. For the rest, there was the dubious quasi-monotheistic cult of the Creator-God, Pachacamac, concerning whom every fresh discussion raises fresh doubt.210
Mr. Lang, as usual, leans to the view that Pachacamac stands for a primordial and “elevated” monotheism (Making of Religion, pp. 263–70), while admitting the slightness of the evidence. Garcilasso, the most eminent authority, who, however, is contradicted by others, represents that the conception of Pachacamac as Creator, needing no temple or sacrifice, was “philosophically” reached by the Incas and their wise men (Lang, p. 262). The historical fact seems to be that a race subdued by the Incas, the Yuncas, had one temple to this deity; and that the Incas adopted the cult. Garcilasso says the Yuncas had human sacrifices and idols, which the Incas abolished, setting up their monotheistic cult in that one temple. This is sufficiently unlikely; and it may very well have been the fact that the Yuncas had offered no sacrifices. But if they did not, it was because their material conditions, like those of the Australians and Fuegians, had not facilitated the practice; and in that case their “monotheism” likewise would merely represent the ignorant simplicity of a clan-cult. (Compare Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii, 335 sq.; Brinton, Myths of the New World, p. 52.) On the other hand, if the Incas had set up a cult without sacrifices to a so-called One God, their idea would be philosophical, as taking into account the multitude of clan-cults as well as their own national worships, and transcending these.
But the outstanding sociological fact in Incarial Peru was the [91]absolute subjection of the mass of the people; and though its material development and political organization were comparable to those of ancient Persia under the Akhamenidæ, so that the Spanish Conquest stood here for mere destruction, there is no reason to think that at the best its intellectual life could have risen higher than that of pre-Alexandrian Egypt, to which it offers so many resemblances. The Incas’ schools were for the nobility only.211 Rationalistic Incas and high priests might have ruled over a docile, unlettered multitude, gradually softening their moral code, in connection with their rather highly-developed doctrine (resembling the Egyptian) of a future state. But these seem the natural limits, in the absence of contact with another civilization not too disparate for a fruitful union.
In Mexico, on the other hand, an interaction of native cultures had already occurred to some purpose; and the strange humanitarianism of the man-slaying priests, who made free public hospitals of part of their blood-stained temples,212 suggests a possibility of esoteric mental culture among them. They had certainly gone relatively far in their moral code, as apart from their atrocious creed of sacrifice, even if we discount the testimony of the benevolent priest Sahagun;213 and they had the beginnings of a system of education for the middle classes.214 But unless one of the States which habitually warred for captives should have conquered the others—in which case a strong ruler might have put an end to the wholesale religious slaughter of his own subjects, as appears to have been done anciently in Mesopotamia—the priests in all likelihood would never have transcended their hideous hallucination of sacrifice. Their murdered civilization is thus the “great perhaps” of sociology; organized religion being the most sinister factor in the problem.
It is implied more or less in all the foregoing summaries that there is an inherent tendency in all systematized and instituted religion to degenerate intellectually and morally, save for the constant corrective activity of freethought. It may be well, however, to note specifically the forms or phases of the tendency.
1. Dogmatic and ritual religion being, to begin with, a more or less general veto on fresh thinking, it lies in its nature that the [92]religious person is as such less intelligently alive to all problems of thought and conduct than he otherwise might be—a fact which at least outweighs, in a whole society, the gain from imposing a terrorized conformity on the less well-biassed types. Wherever conduct is a matter of sheer obedience to a superhuman code, it is ipso facto uncritical and unprogressive. Thus the history of most religions is a record of declines and reformations, each new affirmation of moral freethought ad hoc being in turn erected into a set of sheer commands. To set up the necessary ferment of corrective thought even for a time, there seems to be needed (a) a provocation to the intelligence, as in the spectacle of conflict of cults; and (b) a provocation to the moral sense and to self-interest through a burdensome pressure of rites or priestly exactions. An exceptional personality, of course, may count for much in the making of a movement; though the accident of the possession of kingly power by a reformer seems to count for much more than does genius.
2. The fortunes of such reactions are determined by socio-economic or political conditions. They are seen to be at a minimum, as to energy and social effect, in the conditions of greatest social invariability, as in ancient Egypt, where progress in thought, slow at best, was confined to the priestly and official class, and never affected popular culture.
3. In the absence of social conditions fitted to raise popular levels of life and thought, every religious system tends to worsen intellectually in the sense of adding to its range of superstition—that is, of ignorant and unreasoning belief. Credulity has its own momentum. Even the possession of limitary sacred books cannot check this tendency—e.g., Hinduism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Mazdeism, Christianity up till the age of doubt and science, and the systems of ancient Egypt, Babylon, and post-Confucian China. This worsening can take place alongside of a theoretic purification of belief within the sphere of the educated theological class.
Christian writers have undertaken to show that such deterioration went on continuously in India from the beginning of the Vedic period, popular religion sinking from Varuna to Indra, from Indra to the deities of the Atharva Veda, and from these to the Puranas (cp. Dr. J. Murray Mitchell, Hinduism Past and Present, 1885, pp. 22, 25, 26, 54). The argument, being hostile in bias from the beginning, ignores or denies the element of intellectual advance in the Upanishads and other later literature; but it holds good of the general phenomena. It holds good equally, however, of the history of Christianity in the period of the supremacy of ignorant faith and absence of [93]doubt and science; and is relatively applicable to the religion of the uneducated mass at any time and place.
On the other hand, it is not at all true that religious history is from the beginning, in any case, a process of mere degeneration from a pure ideal. Simple statements as to primitive ideas are found to be misleading because of their simplicity. They can connote only the ethic of the life conditions of the worshipper. Now, we have seen (p. 28) that small primitive peoples living at peace and in communism, or in some respects well placed, may be on that account in certain moral respects superior to the average or mass of more civilized and more intelligent peoples. [As to the kindliness and unselfishness of some savages, living an almost communal life, and as to the scrupulous honesty of others, there is plenty of evidence—e.g., as to Andaman islanders, Max Müller, Anthrop. Relig., citing Colonel Cadell, p. 177; as to Malays and Papuans, Dr. Russel Wallace, Malay Archipelago, p. 595 (but cp. pp. 585, 587, 589); as to Esquimaux, Keane, Man, p. 374; Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 15, 37, 115 (but cp. pp. 41–42). In these and other cases unselfishness within the tribe is the concomitant of the communal life, and represents no conscious ethical volition, being concurrent with phases of the grossest tribal egoism, in some cases with cannibalism, and with the perpetual oppression of women. In the case of the preaching of unselfishness to the young by the old among the Australians, where Lubbock and his authorities see “the tyranny of the old” (Origin of Civilization, 5th ed. pp. 451–52) Mr. Lang sees a pure primeval ethic. Obviously the other is the true explanation. The closest and best qualified observers testify, as regards a number of tribes: “So far as anything like moral precepts are concerned in these tribes ... it appears to us to be most probable that they have originated in the first instance in association with the purely selfish ideas of the older men to keep all the best things for themselves, and in no case whatever are they supposed to have the sanction of a superior being” (Spencer and Gillen, North. Tribes of Cent. Australia, 1904, p. 504).]
The transition from that state to one of war and individualism would be in a sense degeneration; but on the other hand the entirely communistic societies are unprogressive. Broadly speaking, it is by the path of social individuation that progress in civilization has been made, the early city States and the later large military States ultimately securing within themselves some of the conditions for special development of thought, arts, and knowledge. The residual truth is that the simple religion of the harmless tribe is pro tanto superior to the instituted religion of the more civilized nation with greater heights and lower depths of life, the popular religion in the latter case standing for the worse conditions. But the simple religion [94]did not spring from any higher stage of knowledge. The old theorem revived by Mr. Lang (Making of Religion), as to religion having originally been a pure and highly ethical monotheism, from which it degenerated into animism and non-moral polytheism, is at best a misreading of the facts just stated. Mr. Lang never asks what “Supreme Being” and “monotheism” mean for savages who know nothing of other men’s religions: he virtually takes all the connotations for granted. And as regards the most closely studied of contemporary savages our authorities come to an emphatic conclusion that they have no notion whatever of anything like a Supreme Being (Spencer and Gillen, North. Tribes of Cent. Austr. pp. 491–92. Cp. A. H. Keane, Man, p. 395, as to the “Great Spirit” of the Redskins). For the rest, Mr. Lang’s theory is demonstrably wrong in its ethical interpretation of many anthropological facts, and as it stands is quite irreconcilable with the law of evolution, since it assumes an abstract monotheism as primordial. In general it approximates scientifically to the eighteenth-century doctrine of the superiority of savagery to civilization. (See it criticized in the author’s Studies in Religious Fallacy, and Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 37–43, 46 sq.)
4. Even primary conditions of material well-being, if not reacted upon by social science or a movement of freethought, may in a comparatively advanced civilization promote religious degeneration. Thus abundance of food is favourable to multiplication of sacrifice, and so to priestly predominance.215 The possession of domesticated animals, so important to civilization, lends itself to sacrifice in a specially demoralizing degree. But abundant cereal food-supply, making abundant population, may greatly promote human sacrifice—e.g., Mexico.
The error of Mr. Lang’s method is seen in the use he makes (work cited, pp. 286–289, 292) of the fact that certain “low” races—as the Australians, Andamanese, Bushmen, and Fuegians—offer no animal sacrifice. He misses the obvious significance of the facts that these unwarlike races have as a rule no domesticated animals and no agriculture, and that their food supply is thus in general precarious. The Andamanese, sometimes described (Malthus, Essay on Population, ch. iii, and refs.; G. W. Earl, Papuans, 1853, pp. 150–51) as very ill-fed, are sometimes said to be well supplied with fish and game (Peschel, Races of Man, Eng. tr. 1876, p. 147; Max Müller, Anthrop. Rel. citing Cadell, p. 177); but in any case they have had no agriculture, and seem to have only occasional animal food in the shape of a wild hog (Colebrooke in Asiatic Researches, iv, 390). [95]The Australians and Fuegians, again, have often great difficulty in feeding themselves (Peschel, pp. 148, 159, 334; Darwin, Voyage, ch. 10). It is argued concerning the Australian aborigines that “as a rule they have an abundance” (A. F. Calvert, The Aborigines of Western Australia, 1894, p. 24); but this abundance is made out by cataloguing the whole edible fauna and flora of the coasts and the interior, and ignores the fact that for all hunting peoples food supply is precarious. For the Australian, “the difficulty of capturing game with his primitive methods compels him to give his whole time to the quest of food” (Keane, Man, p. 148). In the contrary case of the primitive Vedic Aryans, well supplied with animals, sacrifices were abundant, and tended to become more so (Müller, Nat. Relig. pp. 136, 185; Physical Relig. p. 105; but cp. pp. 98, 101; Mitchell, Hinduism, p. 43; Lefmann, Geschichte des alten Indiens, in Oncken’s series, 1890, pp. 49, 430–31). Of these sacrifices that of the horse seems to have been in Aryan use in a most remote period (cp. M. Müller, Nat. Rel. pp. 524–25; H. Böttger, Sonnencult der Indogermanen, Breslau, 1891, pp. 41–44; Preller, Römische Mythologie, ed. Köhler, pp. 102, 299, 323; Griechische Mythologie, 2te Aufg. i, 462; Frazer, Golden Bough, ii, 315). Max Müller’s remark (Physical Religion, p. 106), that “the idea of sacrifice did not exist at a very early period,” because there is no common Aryan term for it, counts for nothing, as he admits (p. 107) that the Sanskrit word cannot be traced back to any more general root; and he concedes the antiquity of the practice. On this cp. Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 37–38; and the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 122. The reform in Hindu sacrifice, consummated by Buddhism, has been noted above.
5. Even scientific knowledge, while enabling the thoughtful to correct their religious conceptions, in some forms lends itself easily to the promotion of popular superstition. Thus the astronomy of the Babylonians, while developing some skepticism, served in general to encourage divination and fortune-telling; and seems to have had the same effect when communicated to the Chinese, the Hindus, and the Hebrews, all of whom, however, practised divination previously on other bases.
6. Finally, the development of the arts of sculpture and painting, unaccompanied by due intellectual culture, tends to keep religion at a low anthropomorphic level, and worsens its psychology by inviting image-worship.216 It is not that the earlier and non-artistic religions are not anthropomorphic, but that they give more play for intellectual [96]imagination than does a cult of images. But where the arts have been developed, idolatry has always arisen save when resisted by a special activity or revival of freethought to that end; and even in Protestant Christendom, where image-worship is tabooed, religious pictures now promote popular credulity and ritualism as they did in the Italian Renaissance.217 So manifold are the forces of intellectual degeneration—degeneration, that is, from an attained ideal or stage of development, not from any primordial knowledge. [97]
1 Cp. Lang (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i, 91) as to the contemptuous disbelief of savages in Christian myths. Mr. Lang observes that this shows savages and civilized men to have “different standards of credulity.” That, however, does not seem to be the true inference. Each order of believer accepts the myths of his own creed, and derides others. ↑
2 Cp. Decharme, La Critique des trad. relig. chez les Grecs, 1904, p. 121. ↑
3 The same process will be recorded later in the case of the intercourse of Crusaders and Saracens; and in the seventeenth century it is noted by La Bruyère (Caractères, ch. xvi, Des esprits forts, par. 3) as occurring in his day. The anonymous English author of an essay on The Agreement of the Customs of the East Indians with those of the Jews (1705, pp. 152–53) naïvely endorses La Bruyère. Macaulay’s remark to the Edinburgh electors, on the view taken of sectarian strifes by a man who in India had seen the worship of the cow, is well known. ↑
4 Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 96, 121–22; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 74; Tiele, Egyptian Religion, p. 36; and Outlines, p. 52. ↑
5 Cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 109–110, and Fischer, Heidenthum und Offenbarung, p. 59. Professor Max Müller’s insistence that the lines of Vedic religion could not have been “crossed by trains of thought which started from China, from Babylon, or from Egypt” (Physical Religion, p. 251), does not affect the hypothesis put above. The Professor admits (p. 250) the exact likeness of the Babylonian fire-cult to that of Agni. ↑
6 But cp. Müller, Anthropolog. Relig., p. 164, as to possible later developments; and see above, pp. 45–47, as to the many cases in which conquering races have actually adopted the Gods of the conquered. ↑
7 Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts, ii (2nd ed.), 372, 379, 384. ↑
9 Max Müller, Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 207–208. ↑
10 Cp. Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, 1894, pp. 94, 98–99; Ghosha, Hist. of Hindu Civ. as illust. in the Vedas, Calcutta, 1889, pp. 190–91; Max Müller, Phys. Relig., 1891, pp. 197–98. ↑
11 Max Müller, Selected Essays, ii, 237. ↑
12 Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts, v, 268. ↑
13 Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 302, citing R. V., viii, 100, 3; and ii, 12, 5. The first passage runs: “If you wish for strength, offer to Indra a hymn of praise: a true hymn, if Indra truly exist; for some one says, Indra does not exist! Who has seen him? Whom shall we praise?” The hymn of course asseverates his existence. ↑
14 Cp. Rig-Veda, i, 164, 46; x, 90 (cited by Ghosa, pp. 191, 198); viii, 10 (cited by Müller, Natural Religion, pp. 227–29); and x, 82, 121, 129 (cited by Romesh Chunder Dutt, Hist. of Civ. in Anc. India, ed. 1893, i, 95–97); Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v, 353 sq.; Tiele, Outlines, p. 125; Weber, Hist. of Ind. Lit., Eng. trans., p. 5; Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, ed. 1880, pp. 298–304, 310, 315; Phys. Relig., p. 187; Barth, Religions of India, Eng. trans., p. 8; Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii, 354. ↑
15 Barth, Religions of India, pp. 26, 31, citing Rig-Veda, v, 3, 1; i, 164, 46; viii, 68, 2. The phrase as to Agni is common in the Brâhmanas, but is not yet so in the Vedas. The second text cited is rendered by Müller: “That which is one the sages speak of in many ways—they call it Agni, Yama, Mâtarisvan” (Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 240). ↑
16 Colebrooke’s Miscellaneous Essays, ed. 1873, i, 375–76. Weber (Ind. Lit., pp. 27, 137, 236, 284–85) has advanced the view that the adherents of this doctrine, who gradually became stigmatized as heretics, were the founders or beginners of Buddhism. But the view that the universe is a self-existent totality appears to enter into the Brahmans’ Sankhya teaching, which is midway between the popular Nyaya system and the esoteric Vedânta (Ballantyne, Christianity Contrasted with Hindu Philosophy, 1859, pp. xviii, 59, 61). As to the connection between the Sankhya system and Buddhism, see Oldenberg, Der Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, 3te Aufl., Excurs, pp. 443. ↑
17 H. H. Wilson, Works, 1862–71, ii, 346. ↑
18 Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 236. ↑
19 Ballantyne, pp. 58, 61; Major Jacob, Manual of Hindu Pantheism, 1881, p. 13. ↑
20 Cp. Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, ed. 1880, i, 228–232, and Banerjea’s Dialogues on the Hindu Philosophy, p. 73, cited by Major Jacob, Hindu Pantheism, p. 13. ↑
22 Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 340–41. Cp. Barth, Religions of India, p. 81. ↑
23 Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 139. ↑
24 Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 28. ↑
26 Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 139, note, citing Panini, iv, 4, 60. ↑
27 Apparently belonging to the later or middle Buddhist period. Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 141. ↑
28 On these cp. Müller, p. 139, note; Garbe, Philos. of Anc. India, Eng. tr. 2nd ed. Chicago, 1899, p. 25; and Weber, Ind. Lit. p. 246, note, with the very full research of Professor Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, 1899, pp. 166–72. ↑
29 Müller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 140–41. Cp. Garbe. p. 28. ↑
31 Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, p. 171. ↑
35 Trans. in English by Cowell and Gough, 1882. ↑
37 See Müller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 141–42, citing Burnouf. ↑
38 Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 310. ↑
39 Bk. I, Stories ii, 7, 8, 16; vii. 180. ↑
40 Bk. I, 11, 40; St. ii, 32. ↑
42 Major Jacob, as cited, preface. ↑
43 Müller, Psychol. Relig., pp. 95, 97, 126; Lect. on the Vedânta Philos., 1894, p. 32. ↑
44 Chunder Dutt, Hist. of Civ. in Anc. India, as cited, i, 112–13. ↑
45 Rhys Davids, trans. of Dialogues of the Buddha, p. 166. Cp. his Buddhism, p. 143, as to Buddhist censures of an extravagant skepticism which denied every religious theory. In one of the Dialogues (ii, 25, p. 74) a contemporary sophist is cited as flatly denying a future state. Mr. Lillie, however (Buddhism in Christendom, 1887, p. 187), contends as against Professor Rhys Davids that the Upanishads were only “whispered to pupils who had gone through a severe probation.” ↑
46 Prof. Weber (Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 4) says the peoples of the Punjaub never at all submitted to the Brahmanical rule and caste system. But the subject natives there must at the outset have been treated as an inferior order. Cp. Tiele, Outlines, p. 120 and refs.; and Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 23. ↑
47 Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 236, 284–85; Max Müller, Chips, i, 228–32; Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 258–64; and the general discussion of the problem in the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 239–63. ↑
48 Brahmanism had itself been by this time influenced by aboriginal elements, even to the extent of affecting its language. Weber, as cited, p. 177. Cp. Müller, Anthrop. Relig., p. 164. ↑
49 Major Jacob, as cited, p. 12. ↑
50 I.e., “the enlightened,” a title given to sages in general. Weber, p. 284. ↑
51 Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 179, 299; Müller, Natural Religion, p. 299. ↑
52 See Senart, Essai sur la légende de Buddha, 2e édit., p. 297 ff. ↑
53 Cp. Weber, pp. 286–87, 303. ↑
54 See Weber, pp. 301, 307; also Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 43, 83, etc. ↑
56 Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 27, 284–87; Max Müller, Natural Religion, p. 555; Jacobi, as there cited; Tiele, Outlines, pp. 135–36; Rhys Davids, American Lectures on Buddhism, pp. 115–16; Buddhism, p. 84; and the author’s Pagan Christs, pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 8–13. ↑
57 Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 4, 39. ↑
58 Barth, Religions of India, p. 146. ↑
59 Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 35, 79, 99. ↑
60 Cp. Pagan Christs, pp. 248–50. ↑
61 Rhys Davids, trans. of Dialogues, pp. 188–89; Amer. Lec. on Buddhism, 1896, pp. 127–34; Hibbert Lectures, 1881, p. 109; Buddhism, pp. 95, 98–99. ↑
62 Max Müller, Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 295. ↑
63 As the context in Professor Müller’s work shows, these phrases are inaccurate. ↑
64 Cp. Weber, Ind. Lit., p. 289, note; and Banerjea, Dialogues on the Hindu Philosophy, p. 520, cited by Major Jacob, pp. 29–30. ↑
65 See Muir, Sanskrit Texts, iv, 50 (cited by Jacob, pp. 30–31), as to the Brahman view of the licence ascribed to Krishna. And see iii, 32 (cited by Jacob, p. 14), as to a remarkable disparagement of Vedism in the Bhagavat Gita. ↑
66 Müller, Selected Essays, ii, 363: H. H. Wilson, as last cited, ii, 368 sq. ↑
67 See this brought out in a strikingly dramatic way in Mr. Dennis Hird’s novel, The Believing Bishop. ↑
68 Cp. Dr. A. Jeremias, Monotheistische Strömungen innerhalb der Babylonischen Religion, 1904, p. 44—a very candid research. ↑
69 The Hammurabi Code, by Chilperic Edwards, 1904, pp. 67, 68, 70 (§§ 240, 249, 266). The invocations of named Gods by Hammurabi at the close of the code, however, suggest that the force of the word was “a God.” Cp. p. 76 with what follows; and see note on p. 93. On this question compare Jeremias, as cited, pp. 39, 43. ↑
70 Maspero, Hist. anc. des peup. de l’orient, 4e éd. p. 139; Sayce, Hib. Lect., pp. 121, 213, 215; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt., i (1884), 161 (§ 133); iii (1901), 167 sq. (§ 103). ↑
71 Sayce, pp. 219, 344; Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, Eng. ed. p. 127. ↑
72 Jastrow, Religions of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, p. 318. ↑
73 Jastrow, p. 187; Sayce, pp. 128, 267–68. Cp. Kuenen, Religion of Israel, Eng. tr., i, 91; Menzies, History of Religion, 1895, p. 171; Gunkel, Israel und Babylonien, 1903, p. 30; Jeremias, as cited, pp. 5–6. ↑
74 Meyer, iii, 168; Jastrow, p. 79; Sayce, p. 331 sq., 367 sq.; Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 112; Jeremias, pp. 7–23. ↑
75 Sayce, p. 305. Cp. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 452. ↑
76 Jastrow, p. 190, note, p. 319; Sayce, pp. 191–92, 367; Lenormant, pp. 112, 113, 119, 133; Jeremias, p. 26. ↑
77 Tiele, Outlines, p. 78; Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East, pp. 152–53; Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, 2nd ed. iii, 13; Maspero, p. 139. ↑
79 Cp. Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, i, 110; iii, 12–13. ↑
80 Hibbert Lectures, p. 385. ↑
81 Meyer, iii, § 103; Sayce, pp. 192, 345. ↑
82 Cp. Jastrow, p. 662; Sayce, p. 78; and Tiele, Hist. Comparée, p. 209. It seems probable that human sacrifice was latterly restricted to the case of criminals. ↑
85 Cp. T. G. Pinches, The Old Testament in the Light of the Hist. Records of Assyria and Babylonia, 1902, pp. 161–63. ↑
86 Jastrow, pp. 187, 256; Sayce, pp. 316, 320, 322, 327; Meyer, i, 183; Lenormant, p. 110; Jeremias, p. 5. ↑
87 Sayce, pp. 326, 341; cp. Jastrow, p. 317. ↑
88 Meyer, i, 599; Sayce, Hib. Lect., pp. 85–91; Anc. Emp. of the East, p. 245. ↑
91 Jer. xi, 13, etc. ↑
93 Cp. the recent literature on the recovered Code of Hammurabi. ↑
96 Cp. Grote, History of Greece, pt. ii, ch. 33 (ed. 1888, iii, 442), note. ↑
97 Meyer, Gesch. des Alt., i, 505 (§ 417), 542 (§ 451), 617 (§ 515); Tiele, Outlines, p. 164. ↑
99 Cp. Herod. iii, 94, 98; Grote, vol. iii, p. 448. ↑
100 Meyer, as cited, i, 505, 530 (§ 439); Tiele, Outlines, pp. 163, 165. ↑
102 Darmesteter, The Zendavesta (S. B. E. ser.), vol. i, introd., p. lx (1st ed.). ↑
103 Rawlinson, Religions of the Anc. World, p. 105; Meyer, §§ 417, 450–51. ↑
105 Cp. Meyer, i, 506–508; Renan, as cited by him, p. 508; Darmesteter, as cited, cc. iv-ix, 2nd ed.; Tiele, Outlines, p. 165. ↑
107 Meyer, i, 524 (§ 433); Tiele, Outlines, p. 178; Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman, 1877, pp. 7–18. ↑
108 Meyer, i, § 450 (p. 541). ↑
109 Tiele, Outlines, p. 167. Cp. Lenormant (Chaldean Magic, p. 229), who attributes the heresy to immoral Median Magi; and Spiegel (Avesta, 1852, i, 271), who considers it a derivation from Babylon. ↑
110 Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures on Relig. of Anc. Egypt, 2nd ed. p. 92; Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, Eng. tr. 1897, p. 109. Cp. p. 260. Renouf (pp. 93–103) supplies an interesting analysis. ↑
111 Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 83; Wiedemann, as cited, p. 103 sq. ↑
112 Cp. Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 354, 417, 433. ↑
113 Wiedemann, as cited, p. 136. ↑
114 Meyer, p. 81 (§ 66); Tiele, Hist. of the Egypt. Relig. Eng. tr., pp. 119, 154. ↑
115 Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 240. ↑
116 Meyer, Geschichte des Alten Egyptens, in Oncken’s series, 1877, B. iii, Kap. 3, p. 249; Gesch. des Alt. i. 109; Tiele, Egypt. Relig. pp. 149, 151, 157; Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, 4é ed., pp. 278–80; Le Page Renouf, as cited, pp. 215–30; Wiedemann, pp. 12, 13, 301; Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Eng. tr. 1907, p. 57. ↑
118 Tiele, Egypt. Rel. pp. 153, 155, 156. ↑
120 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, 1884; 1 Hälfte, pp. 90–91; Kuenen, Religion of Israel, Eng. trans. i, 395–97; Tiele, pp. 226–30; Erman, pp. 71, 103–105. ↑
122 Tiele, pp. 114, 118, 154. Cp. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 101–102 (§ 85). Wiedemann, p. 260. ↑
123 Dr. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, 1899, end. ↑
124 Tiele, p. 157. Cp. p. 217. ↑
125 Cp. Maspero, as cited, pp. 274–76. ↑
129 De Garis Davies, The Tombs of Amarna. ↑
130 Maspero (Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, ed. 1905, p. 251) says he respected also Osiris and Horus. ↑
131 Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, ed. 1891, p. 216. Maspero (as cited, p. 250) recognizes no such revolt. ↑
132 Maspero, Hist. anc. de l’orient, 7e éd. pp. 248–54; Brugsch, Hist. of Egypt under the Pharaohs, Eng. trans. ed. 1891, ch. x; Meyer, Geschichte des alten Aegyptens, B. iii, Kap. 4, 5; Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 271–74; Tiele, pp. 161–65; Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, iii (1905), 10; Wiedemann, pp. 35–39; Erman, pp. 61–70; L. W. King and H. H. Hall, Egypt and Western Asia in the Light of Recent Discoveries, 1907, pp. 383–87; F. W. von Bissing, Geschichte Aegyptens in Umriss, 1904, pp. 52–53. ↑
133 Tiele, p. 144; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 135. ↑
134 “We do not find magic predominant [in the tales] until the Ptolemaic age. At that time the physical magic of the early times reappears in full force” (Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, 1898, p. 29. Cp. Maspero, p. 286; Budge, Egyptian Magic, pp. 64, 233). ↑
135 Petrie, Hist. iii, 174–75, 180. ↑
136 Tiele, pp. 180–82; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 140–43. ↑
137 Tiele, pp. 184–85, 196, 217. ↑
138 Herodotos, ii, 48, 60–64, etc. Cp. Maspero, p. 286. ↑
139 “The Osiride and Cosmic Gods rose in importance as time went on, while the Abstract Gods continually sank on the whole. This agrees with the general idea that the imported Gods have to yield their position gradually to the older and more deeply-rooted faiths” (Petrie, as last cited, p. 95). ↑
140 The familiar narrative of Herodotos is put in doubt by the monuments. Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 246. But cp. Meyer, i, 611 (§ 508). ↑
142 See figures 209, 212, 221, 235, 242, 249, 250, in Sharpe’s Hist. of Egypt, 7th ed. ↑
143 Cp. Sharpe, ii, 287–95; Budge, Egyptian Magic, p. 64. ↑
144 Compare the orthodox view of Bishop Westcott, Essays in the History of Religious Thought in the West, 1891, pp. 197–200. ↑
145 These fights had not ceased even in the time of Julian (Sharpe, ii, 280). Cp. Juvenal, Sat. xv, 33 sq. ↑
147 Cp. Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, passim. ↑
148 Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 232–33. ↑
150 Put by Canon Rawlinson, History of Phoenicia, 1889, p. 321. ↑
151 As to the universality of this tendency, see Meyer, ii, 97. ↑
152 Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 251, § 209; Tiele, Outlines, p. 84; Histoire comparée des anciennes religions, Fr. tr. pp. 320–21. ↑
153 Rawlinson, Phoenicia, p. 340; Sayce, Anc. Emp. p. 204; Menzies, Hist. of Relig. p. 168. ↑
154 Præparatio Evangelica, B. i, c. 9–10. ↑
156 Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 159, as to Persian methods of the same kind. ↑
158 E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 104, 105. ↑
159 As to Greek instances, cp. Bury, Hist. of Greece, ed. 1906, pp. 53, 55, 65, 92, 104; and as to Roman, see Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Eng. trans. 1906, ch. x, where it is shown that Virginia and Lucretia are primarily ancient Latin divinities; and (ch. vii) that both Numa and Servius Tullius are probably in the same case, Servius Rex being in all likelihood the servus rex Nemorensis of the Arician grove, round whom turns the research of Dr. J. G. Frazer’s Golden Bough; while tullius is an old Latin word for a spring. See also ch. iv as to Acca Larentia, another Goddess reduced by the historians to the status of a hetaira, as was Flora. Horatius Cocles (id. p. 157) is also a God reduced to a hero. ↑
160 So Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 204. ↑
161 Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 202. ↑
162 Legge, Religions of China, 1880, pp. 11, 16; Douglas, Confucianism and Taouism, 1879, pp. 12, 82. ↑
163 Menzies, History of Religion, p. 158. ↑
164 Legge, pp. 12, 19, 23, 25, 26; Tiele, Outlines, p. 27; Douglas, p. 79. ↑
165 Legge, Religions of China, p. 142. ↑
166 See the citations made by Legge, p. 5. ↑
167 Id. p. 139; cp. Menzies, p. 109. ↑
168 Legge, p. 140; cp. p. 117; Douglas, p. 81. ↑
169 Legge, Religions, p. 117; Life and Teachings of Confucius, 4th ed. p. 101; Douglas, p. 68; Tiele, Outlines, p. 29. ↑
170 Tiele, p. 31; Legge, Religions, p. 143. ↑
171 Tiele, pp. 31–32; Douglas, pp. 68, 84. But cp. Legge, Religions, pp. 123, 127. ↑
172 Legge, Life and Teachings, pp. 100–101. ↑
174 See the author’s Pagan Christs, pp. 214–22. ↑
175 Pauthier, Chine Moderne, p. 351. There is a tradition that Lao-Tsze took his doctrine from an ancient sage who flourished before 1120 B.C.; and he himself (Tau Tĕh King, trans. by Chalmers, The Speculations of Lao-Tsze, 1868, ch. 41) cites doctrine as to Tau from “those who have spoken (before me).” Cp. cc. 22, 41, 62, 65, 70. ↑
176 Cp. E. J. Simcox, Primitive Civilizations, 1894, ii, 18. ↑
177 Pauthier, p. 358; Chalmers, pp. 14, 37. ↑
178 Legge, Religions, p. 137. ↑
179 Tau Tĕh King, as cited, pp. 38. 49, ch. 49, 63; Pauthier, p. 358; Legge, p. 223. ↑
180 Analects, xxv, 36; Legge, Religions, p. 143; Life and Teachings, p. 113; Douglas, p. 144. ↑
181 Legge, Religions, p. 164. We do find, however, an occasional allusion to deity, as in the phrase “the Great Architect” (Chalmers’ trans. 1868. ch. lxxiv, p. 57), and “Heaven” is spoken of in a somewhat personalized sense. Still, Mr. Chalmers complains (p. xv) that Lao-Tsze did not recognize a personal God, but put “an indefinite, impersonal, and unconscious Tau” above all things (ch. iv). ↑
182 F. H. Balfour, Art. “A Philosopher who Never Lived,” in Leaves from my Chinese Scrap-book, 1887, p. 83 sq. ↑
185 Legge, Religions of China, p. 147; Tiele, Outlines, p. 33. ↑
186 Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, 1875, pp. 29, 50, 77, etc. ↑
188 Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, pp. 44, 47, 56, 57, etc. ↑
189 Miss Simcox, Primitive Civilizations, ii, 36–37, following Chavannes. ↑
190 Legge’s Mencius, p. 49; cp. p. 48. ↑
191 Cp. Legge’s Mencius, pp. 47, 131; Chalmers’ Lao-Tsze, pp. 23, 28, 53, 58 (chs. xxx, xxxi, xxxvi, lxvii, lxxiv); Douglas, Taouism, chs. ii, iii. ↑
192 Legge, Religions of China, p. 147. The ruler in question seems to have been of non-Chinese descent. E. H. Parker, China, 1901, p. 18. ↑
193 Legge, Religions of China, p. 159. ↑
198 Tiele, p. 35; Douglas, p. 287. Taouism, however, has a rather noteworthy ethical code. See Douglas, ch. vi. It has to be noted that the translations of the Tâo Têh King have varied to a disquieting degree. Cp. Drews, Gesch. des Monismus, p. 121. ↑
199 Details are given in the author’s Pagan Christs, pt. iv. ↑
200 Nadaillac (L’Amérique préhistorique, 1883, pp. 273–84) gives them little of this credit, pronouncing them at once cruel and degenerate. He credits them, however, with being the first makers of roads and aqueducts in Central America, and cites the record of their free public hospitals, maintained by the sacerdotal kings. Prescott, on the other hand, overstated the bloodlessness of their religion (Conquest of Mexico, Kirk’s ed. 1890, p. 41 and ed. note). ↑
201 Réville, Hibbert Lectures, On the Native Religions of Mexico and Peru, 1884, pp. 62–67. ↑
202 J. G. Müller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, ed. 1867, pp. 577–90; H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, iii, 279. (Passage cited in author’s Pagan Christs, pp. 402–403; where is also noted Dr. Tylor’s early view, discarded later, that Quetzalcoatl was a real personage.) ↑
205 J. G. Müller, as cited, pp. 473–74; Réville, p. 46. Dr. Réville speaks of the worship of the unifying deity as pretty much “effaced” by that of the lower Gods. It seems rather to have been a priestly effort to syncretize these. Still, such an effacement did take place, as we have seen, in Central Asia in ancient times, after a syncretic idea had been reached (above, p. 45). As to the alleged monotheism of King Netzahuatl (or Netzahualcoyotl), of Tezcuco, mentioned above, p. 39, see Lang, Making of Religion, p. 270, note, and p. 282; Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, as cited, p. 92; and J. G. Müller, as cited, pp. 473–74, 480. ↑
206 As to the capabilities of the Aztec language, see Bancroft, Native Races, ii, 727–28 (quoted in Pagan Christs, p. 416, note). ↑
207 Refs. above, p. 41. Cp. Lang, Making of Religion, p. 270, note, and p. 282; J. G. Müller, as cited, pp. 473–74; and Nadaillac, as cited, p. 289. ↑
208 The Christianized descendant of the Tezcucan kings, Ixtilxochitl, who wrote their history, adds the words, “Cause of Causes”—a very unlikely formula in the place and circumstances. ↑
209 Above, p. 41. Cp. Lang, as last cited, pp. 263, 282. ↑
210 Cp. Kirk’s ed. of Prescott’s Conquest of Peru, 1889, p. 44; Réville, p. 189–90; Lang, as cited below. ↑
211 Réville, p. 152, citing Garcilasso. See same page for a story of resistance to the invention of an alphabet. ↑
212 Réville, p. 50. citing Torquemada, 1. viii, c. 20. end. ↑
213 History of the Affairs of New Spain, French trans. 1880, 1. vi, ch. 7, pp. 342–43. Cp. Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Kirk’s ed. pp. 31, 33. ↑
215 “The priest says, ‘the spirit is hungry.’ the fact being that he himself is hungry. He advises the killing of an animal” (Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, p. 307). ↑
216 On the general tendency cp. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, pp. 77–84. ↑
217 In the windows of the shop of the S. P. C. K., in London, may be often seen large displays of reproduced Madonna-pictures, by Catholic artists, at popular prices. ↑
The modern critical analysis of the Hebrew Sacred Books has made it sufficiently clear that in Jewish as in all other ancient history progress in religion was by way of evolving an ethical and sole deity out of normal primitive polytheism.1 What was special to the Hebrews was the set of social conditions under which the evolution took place. Through these conditions it was that the relative freethought which rejected normal polytheism was so far favoured as to lead to a pronounced monotheistic cultus, though not to a philosophic monotheism.
As seen in their earliest historical documents (especially portions of the Book of Judges), the Hebrews are a group of agricultural and pastoral but warlike tribes of Semitic speech, with household Gods and local deities,2 living among communities at the same or a higher culture stage. Their ancestral legends show similar religious practice.3 Of the Hebrew tribes some may have sojourned for a time in Egypt; but this is uncertain, the written record being a late and in large part deliberately fictitious construction.4 At one time twelve such tribes may have confederated, in conformity with a common ancient superstition, seen in Arab and Greek history as well as in the Jewish, as to the number twelve. As they advanced in civilization, on a basis of city life existing among a population settled in Canaan before them, parts of which they conquered, one of their public cults, that of Yahu or Yahweh, finally fixed at Jerusalem, became politically important. The special worshippers of this God (supposed to have been at first a Thunder-God or Nature-God)5 were in that sense monotheists; but not otherwise than kindred neighbouring communities such as the Ammonites and Moabites and Edomites, each of which had its special God, like the cities of Babylonia and Egypt. But that the earlier conceptions of [98]the people had assumed a multiplicity of Gods is clear from the fact that even in the later literary efforts to impose the sole cult of Yahweh on the people, the plural name Elohim, “Powers” or “Gods” (in general, things to be feared),6 is retained, either alone or with that of Yahweh prefixed, though cosmology had previously been written in Yahweh’s name. The Yahwists did not scruple to combine an Elohistic narrative, varying from theirs in cosmology and otherwise, with their own.7
As to the original similarity of Hebraic and other Canaanite religions cp. E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. §§ 309–11 (i, 372–76); Kuenen, i, 223; Wellhausen, Israel, p. 440; Winckler, Gesch. Israels, passim; Réville, Prolég. de l’hist. des relig. 1881, p. 85. “Before being monotheistic, Israel was simply monolatrous, and even that only in its religious élite” (Réville). “Their [the Canaanites’] worship was the same in principle as that of Israel, but it had a higher organization” (Menzies, Hist. of Rel. p. 179; cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 85–89). On the side of the traditional view, Mr. Lang, while sharply challenging most of the propositions of the higher critics, affirms that “we know that Israel had, in an early age, the conception of the moral Eternal; we know that, at an early age, the conception was contaminated and anthropomorphized; and we know that it was rescued, in a great degree, from this corruption, while always retaining its original ethical aspect and sanction” (Making of Religion, p. 295). If “we know” this, the discussion is at an end. But Mr. Lang’s sole documentary basis for the assertion is just the fabricated record, reluctantly abandoned by theological scholars as such. When this is challenged, Mr. Lang falls back on the position that such low races as the Australians and Fuegians have a “moral Supreme Being,” and that therefore Israel “must” have had one (p. 309). It will be found, however, that the ethic of these races is perfectly primitive, on Mr. Lang’s own showing, and that his estimate is a misinterpretation. As to their Supreme Beings, it might suffice to compare Mr. Lang’s Making of Religion, chs. ix, xii, with his earlier Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i, 168, 335; ii, 6, etc.; but, as we have seen (above, p. 93), the Supreme Being of the Australians eludes the closest search in a number of tribes; and the “moral” factor is equally intangible. Mr. Lang in his [99]later reasoning has merely added the ambiguous and misleading epithet “Supreme,” stressing it indefinitely, to the ordinary God-idea of the lower races. (Cp. Cox, Mythol. of Aryan Races, ed. 1882, p. 155; and K. O. Müller, Introd. to Sci. Mythol. Eng. tr. p. 184.)
There being thus no highly imagined “moral Eternal” in the religion of primitive man, the Hebrews were originally in the ordinary position. Their early practice of human sacrifice is implied in the legend of Abraham and Isaac, and in the story of Jephthah. (Cp. Micah vi, 7, and Kuenen on the passage, i, 237.) In their reputed earliest prophetic books we find them addicted to divination (Hosea iv, 12; Micah v, 12. Cp. the prohibition in Lev. xx, 6; also 2 Kings xxiii, 24, and Isa. iii, 2; as to the use of the ephod, teraphim, and urim and thummim, see Kuenen, Relig. of Israel, Eng. tr. i, 97–100) and to polytheism. (Amos v, 26, viii, 14; Hosea i, 13, 17, etc. Cp. Jud. viii, 27; 1 Sam. vii, 3.) These things Mr. Lang seems to admit (p. 309, note), despite his previous claim; but he builds (p. 332) on the fact that the Hebrews showed little concern about a future state—that “early Israel, having, so far as we know, a singular lack of interest in the future of the soul, was born to give himself up to developing, undisturbed, the theistic conception, the belief in a righteous Eternal”—whereas later Greeks and Romans, like Egyptians, were much concerned about life after death. Mr. Lang’s own general theory would really require that all peoples at a certain stage should act like the Israelites; but he suspends it in the interest of the orthodox view as to the early Hebrews. At the same time he omits to explain why the Hebrews failed to adopt the future-state creed when they were “contaminated”—a proposition hardly reconcilable, on any view, with the sentence just quoted. The solution, however, is simple. Israel was not at all “singular” in the matter. The early (Homeric) Greeks and Romans (cp. as to Hades the Iliad, passim; Odyssey, bk. xi, passim; Tiele, Outlines, p. 209, as to the myth of Persephone; and Preller, Römische Mythologie, ed. Köhler, 1865, pp. 452–55, as to the early Romans), like the early Vedic Aryans (Tiele, Outlines, p. 117; Müller, Anthropol. Relig. p. 269), and the early Babylonians and Assyrians (Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 181–82; Sayce, Hib. Lect. p. 364) took little thought of a future state.
“Homer knows no influence of the Psyche on the realm of the visible, and also no cult implying it.... A later poet, who made the last addition to the Odyssey, first introduced Hermes the ‘leader of souls’ [perhaps taken from a popular belief in some part of Hellas].... Underneath, in the gloomy shades, the souls waver, unconscious or at the best in a glimmering half-consciousness, endowed with faint voices, feeble, indifferent.... To speak, as do many old and recent scholars, of the ‘immortal [100]life’ of such souls, is erroneous. They live rather as the spectre of the living in a mirror.... If the Psyche outlives her visible mate (the body), she is powerless without him.... Thus is the Homeric world free from ghosts (for after the burning of the body the Psyche appears no more even in dream).... The living has peace from the dead.... No dæmonic power is at work apart from or against the Gods; and the night gives to the disembodied spirits no freedom” (Rohde, Psyche, 4te Aufl. 1907, pp. 9–11).
This minimization of the normal primitive belief in spirits is one of the reasons for seeing in the Homeric poems the outcome of a period of loosened belief. It is not to be supposed that the pre-Homeric Greeks, like the easterns with whom the Greeks met in Ionia, had not the usual ghost-lore of savages and barbarians; and it may be that for all the early civilizations under notice the explanation is that primitive ghost-cults were abandoned by migrating and conquering races, who rejected the ghost-cults of the races whom they conquered, though they ostensibly accepted their Gods. In any case they made little religious account of a future state for themselves.
This attitude has again been erroneously regarded (e.g., Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, p. 35) as peculiar to the Greeks. Mr. Lang’s assumption may, in fact, be overthrown by the single case of the Phoenicians, who showed no more concern about a future life than did the Hebrews (see Canon Rawlinson’s History of Phoenicia, 1889, pp. 351–52), but who are not pretended to have given themselves up much to “developing, undisturbed, the belief in a righteous Eternal.” The truth seems to be that in all the early progressive and combative civilizations the main concern was as to the continuance of this life. On that head the Hebrews were as solicitous as any (cp. Kuenen, i, 65); and they habitually practised divination on that score. Further, they attached the very highest importance to the continuance of the individual in his offspring. The idea of a future state is first found highly developed in the long-lived cults of the long-civilized but unprogressive Egyptians; and the Babylonians were developing in the same direction. Yet the Hebrews took it up (see the evidence in Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, Eng. tr. Div. II, vol. ii, p. 179) just when, according to Mr. Lang, their cult was “rescued, in a great degree, from corruption”; and, generally speaking, it was in the stage of maximum monotheism that they reached the maximum of irrationality. For the rest, belief in “immortality” is found highly developed in a sociologically “degenerate” and unprogressive people such as the Tasmanians (Müller, Anthrop. Rel. p. 433), who are yet primitively pure on Mr. Lang’s hypothesis; and is normal among negroes and Australian blackfellows.
[101]
This primary polytheism is seen to the full in that constant resort of Israelites to neighbouring cults, against which so much of the Hebrew doctrine is directed. To understand their practice the modern reader has to get rid of the hallucination imposed on Christendom by its idea of revelation. The cult of Yahweh was no primordial Hebrew creed, deserted by backsliding idolaters, but a finally successful tyranny of one local cult over others. It is probable that it was originally not Palestinian, but Sinaitic, and that Yahweh became the God of Caleb-Judah only under David.8 Therefore, without begging the question as to the moral sincerity of the prophets and others who identified Yahwism with morality, we must always remember that they were on their own showing devotees of a special local worship, and so far fighting for their own influence. Similar prophesying may conceivably have been carried on in connection with the same or other God-names in other localities, and the extant prophets freely testify that they had Yahwistic opponents; but the circumstance that Yahweh was worshipped at Jerusalem without any image might be an important cause of differentiation in the case of that cult. In any case it must have been through simple “exclusivism” that they reached any form of “monotheism.”9
The inveterate usage, in the Bible-making period, of forging and interpolating ancient or pretended writings, makes it impossible to construct any detailed history of the rise of Yahwism. We can but proceed upon data which do not appear to lend themselves to the purposes of the later adaptors. In that way we see cause to believe that at one early centre the so-called ark of Yahweh contained various objects held to have supernatural virtue.10 In the older historic documents it has, however, no such sacredness as accrues to it later,11 and no great traditional prestige. This ark, previously moved from place to place as a fetish,12 is said to have been transferred to Jerusalem by the early king David,13 whose story, like that of his predecessors Saul and his son Solomon, is in part blended with myth.
As to David, compare 1 Sam. xvi, 18, with xvii, 33, 42. Daoud (= Dodo = Dumzi = Tammuz = Adonis) was a Semitic deity (Sayce, Hib. Lec. pp. 52–57, and art. “The Names of the First Three Kings of Israel,” in Modern Review, Jan. 1884), [102]whom David resembles as an inventor of the lyre (Amos, vi, 5; cp. Hitzig, Die Psalmen, 2 Theil, 1836, p. 3). But Saul and Solomon also were God-names (Sayce, as cited), as was Samuel (id. pp. 54, 181; cp. Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, Eng. tr. p. 120); and when we note these data, and further the plain fact that Samson is a solar myth, being a personage Evemerized from Samas, the Sun-God, we are prepared to find further traces of Evemeristic redaction in the Hebrew books. To say nothing of other figures in the Book of Judges, we find that Jacob and Joseph were old Canaanitish deities (Sayce, Lectures, p. 51; Records of the Past, New Series, v, 48; Hugo Winckler, Geschichte Israels, ii, 57–77); and that Moses, as might be expected, was a name for more than one Semitic God (Sayce, pp. 46–47), and in particular stood for a Sun-God. Abraham and Isaac in turn appear to be ancient deities (Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 374, § 309; Winckler, Gesch. Israels, ii, 20–49). Miriam was probably in similar case (cp. Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 165–66). On an analysis of the Joshua myth as redacted, further, we may surmise another reduction of an ancient cult to the form of history, perhaps obscuring the true original of the worship of Mary and Jesus.
It seems probable, finally, that such figures as Elijah, who ascends to heaven in a fiery chariot, and Elisha, the “bald head” and miracle-worker, are similar constructions of personages out of Sun-God lore. In such material lies part of the refutation of the thesis of Renan (Hist, des langues sémit. 2e édit. pp. 7, 485) that the Semites were natural monotheists, devoid of mythology. [Renan is followed in whole or in part by Nöldeke, Sketches from Eastern Hist. Eng. tr. p. 6; Soury, Relig. of Israel, Eng. tr. pp. 2, 10; Spiegel, Erânische Alterthumskunde, i, 389; also Roscher, Draper, Peschel, and Bluntschli, as cited by Goldziher, Mythology Among the Hebrews, Eng. tr. p. 4, note. On the other side compare Goldziher, ch. i; Steinthal’s Prometheus and Samson, Eng. tr. (with Goldziher), pp. 391, 428, etc., and his Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und den Römern, 1863, pp. 15–17; Kuenen, Rel. of Israel, i, 225; Smith, Rel. of the Semites, p. 49; Ewald, Hist. of Israel, Eng. tr. 4th ed. i, 38–40; Müller, Chips, i, 345 sq.; Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 402 sq.; Nat. Rel. p. 314.] Renan’s view seems to be generally connected with the assumption that life in a “desert” makes a race for ever unimaginative or unitary in its thought. The Arabian Nights might be supposed a sufficient proof to the contrary. The historic truth seems to be that, stage for stage, the ancient Semites were as mythological as any other race; but that (to say nothing of the Babylonians and Assyrians) the mythologies of the Hebrews and of the Arabs were alike suppressed as far as possible in their monotheistic stage. [103]Compare Renan’s own admissions, pp. 27, 110, 475, and Hist. du peuple d’Israël, i, 49–50.
At other places, however, Yahweh was symbolized and worshipped in the image of a young bull,14 a usage associated with the neighbouring Semitic cult of Molech, but probably indigenous, or at least early, in the case of Yahweh also. A God, for such worshippers, needed to be represented by something, if he were to be individualized as against others; and where there was not an ark or a sacred stone or special temple or idol there could be no cult at all. “The practices of ancient religion require a fixed meeting-place between the worshippers and their God.”15 The pre-Exilic history of Yahweh-worship seems to be in large part that of a struggle between the devotees of the imageless worship fixed to the temple at Jerusalem, and other worships, with or without images, at other and less influential shrines.
So far as can be gathered from the documents, it was long before monotheistic pretensions were made in connection with Yahwism. They must in the first instance have seemed not only tyrannical but blasphemous to the devotees of the old local shrines, who in the earlier Hebrew writings figure as perfectly good Yahwists; and they clearly had no durable success before the period of the Exile. Some three hundred years after the supposed period of David,16 and again eighty years later, we meet with ostensible traces17 of a movement for the special aggrandizement of the Yahweh cult and the suppression of the others which competed with it, as well as of certain licentious and vicious practices carried on in connection with Yahweh worship. Concerning these, it could be claimed by those who had adhered to the simpler tradition of one of the early worships that they were foreign importations. They were, in fact, specialties of a rich ancient society, and were either native to Canaanite cities which the Hebrews had captured, or copied by them from such cities. But the fact that they were thus, on the showing of the later Yahwistic records, long associated with Yahwist practice, proves that there was no special elevation about Yahwism originally.
Even the epithet translated “Holy” (Kadosh) had originally no high moral significance. It simply meant “set apart,” “not common” (cp. Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i, 43; Wellhausen, Israel, in Prolegomena vol. p. 499); and the special substantive (Kadesh and Kedeshah) was actually the name for the most [104]degraded ministrants of both sexes in the licentious worship (see Deut. xxiii, 17, 18, and marg. Rev. Vers. Cp. 1 Kings xiv, 25; xv, 12; 2 Kings xxiii, 7). On the question of early Hebrew ethics it is somewhat misleading to cite Wellhausen (so Lang, Making of Religion, p. 304) as saying (Israel, p. 437) that religion inspired law and morals in Israel with exceptional purity. In the context Wellhausen has said that the starting-point of Israel was normal; and he writes in the Prolegomena (p. 302) that “good and evil in Hebrew mean primarily nothing more than salutary and hurtful: the application of the words to virtue and sin is a secondary one, these being regarded as serviceable or hurtful in their effects.”
Given the co-existence of a multitude of local cults, and of various local Yahweh-worships, it is conceivable that the Yahwists of Jerusalem, backed by a priest-ridden king, should seek to limit all worship to their own temple, whose revenues would thereby be much increased. But insoluble perplexities are set up as to the alleged movement by the incongruities in the documents. Passing over for the moment the prophets Amos and Hosea and others who ostensibly belong to the eighth century B.C., we find the second priestly reform,18 consequent on a finding or framing of “the law,” represented as occurring early in the reign of Josiah (641–610 B.C.). But later in the same reign are placed the writings of Jeremiah, who constantly contemns the scribes, prophets, and priests in mass, and makes light of the ark,19 besides declaring that in Judah20 there are as many Gods as towns, and in Jerusalem as many Baal-altars as streets. The difficulty is reduced by recognizing the quasi-historical narrative as a later fabrication; but other difficulties remain as to the prophetic writings; and for our present purpose it is necessary briefly to consider these.
1. The “higher criticism,” seeking solid standing-ground at the beginning of the tangible historic period, the eighth century, singles out21 the books of Amos and Hosea, setting aside, as dubious in date, Nahum and Joel; and recognizing in Isaiah a composite of different periods. If Amos, the “herdsman of Tekoa,” could be thus regarded as an indubitable historical person, he would be a remarkable figure in the history of freethought, as would his nominal contemporary Hosea. Amos is a monotheist, worshipping not a God of Israel but a Yahweh or Elohim of Hosts, called also by the [105]name Adon or Adonai, “the Lord,” who rules all the nations and created the universe. Further, the prophet makes Yahweh “hate and despise” the feasts and burnt-offerings and solemn assemblies of his worshippers;22 and he meddles impartially with the affairs of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. In the same spirit Hosea menaces the solemn assemblies, and makes Yahweh desire “mercy and not sacrifice.”23 Similar doctrine occurs in the reputedly genuine or ancient parts of Isaiah,24 and in Micah.25 Isaiah, too, disparages the Sabbath and solemn meetings, staking all upon righteousness.
2. These utterances, so subversive of the priestly system, are yet held to have been preserved through the ages—through the Assyrian conquest, through the Babylonian Captivity, through the later period of priestly reconstruction—by the priestly system itself. In the state of things pictured under Ezra and Nehemiah, only the zealous adherents of the priestly law can at the outset have had any letters, any literature; it must have been they, then, who treasured the anti-priestly and anti-ritual writings of the prophets—unless, indeed, the latter were preserved by the Jews remaining at Babylon.
3. The perplexity thus set up is greatly deepened when we remember that the period assigned to the earlier prophets is near the beginning of the known age of alphabetic writing,26 and before the known age of writing on scrolls. A herdsman of Judea, with a classic and flowing style, is held to have written out his hortatory addresses at a time when such writing is not certainly known to have been practised anywhere else;27 and the pre-eminent style of Isaiah is held to belong to the same period.
“His [Amos’s] language, with three or four insignificant exceptions, is pure, his style classical and refined. His literary power is shown in the regularity of structure which often characterizes his periods ... as well as in the ease with which he evidently writes.... Anything of the nature of roughness or rusticity is wholly absent from his writings” (Driver, Introd. to Lit. of Old Test. ch. vi, § 3, p. 297, ed. 1891). Isaiah, again, is in his own narrow field one of the most gifted and skilful writers of all antiquity. The difficulty is thus nearly as great [106]as that of the proposition that the Hebrew of the Pentateuch is a thousand years older than that of the latest prophetical books, whose language is substantially the same. (Cp. Andrews Norton, The Pentateuch, ed. 1863, pp. 47–48; Renan, Hist. des langues sémit. 2e édit. p. 118.)
4. The specialist critics, all trained as clergymen, and mostly loth to yield more than is absolutely necessary to skepticism, have surrendered the antiquity claimed for Joel, recognizing that the arguments for that are “equally consistent with a date after the Captivity.”28 One of the conclusions here involved is that “Egypt is probably mentioned only as the typical instance of a Power hostile to Judah.” Thus, when we remember the later Jewish practice of speaking of Rome as “Babylon,” or “Edom,” allusions by Amos and Hosea to “Assyria” have no evidential force. The same reasoning applies to the supposed ancient portions of Isaiah.
5. Even on the clerical side, among the less conservative critics, it is already conceded that there are late “insertions” in Amos. Some of these insertions are among, or analogous to, the very passages relied on by Kuenen to prove the lofty monotheism of Amos. If these passages, however, suggest a late date, no less do the others disparaging sacrifices. The same critics find interpolations and additions in Hosea. But they offer no proof of the antiquity of what they retain.
The principal passages in Amos given up as insertions by Dr. Cheyne, the most perspicacious of the English Hebraists, are: iv, 13; v, 8–9; ix, 5–6; and ix, 8–15. See his introduction to 1895 ed. of Prof. Robertson Smith’s Prophets of Israel, p. xv; and his art. on Amos in the Encyclopædia Biblica. Compare Kuenen, i, 46, 48. Dr. Cheyne regards as insertions in Hosea the following: i, 10–ii, 1; “and David their King” in iii, 5; viii, 14; and xiv, 1–9 (as cited, pp. xviii–xix). Obviously these admissions entail others.
6. The same school of criticism, while adhering to the traditional dating of Amos and Hosea, has surrendered the claim for the Psalms, placing most of these in the same age with the books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiasticus.29 Now, the sentiment of opposition to burnt-offerings is found in some of the Psalms in language identical with that of the supposed early prophets.30 Instead of taking the [107]former for late echoes of the latter, we may reasonably suspect that they belong to the same culture-stage.
The principle is in effect recognized by Dr. Cheyne when he writes: “Just as we infer from the reference to Cyrus in xliv, 28; xlv, 1, that the prophecy containing it proceeds from the age of the conqueror, so we may infer from the fraternal feeling towards Egypt and Assyria (Syria) in xix, 23–25, that the epilogue was written when hopes of the union and fusion of Israelitish and non-Israelitish elements first became natural for the Jews—i.e., in the early Jewish period” (Introd. to the Book of Isaiah, 1895, pp. 109–10).
7. From the scientific point of view, finally, the element of historical prediction in the prophets is one of the strongest grounds for presuming that they are in reality late documents. In regard to similar predictions in the gospels (Mt. xxiv, 15; Mk. xiii, 2; Lk. xxi, 20), rational criticism decides that they were written after the event. No other course can consistently be taken as to early Hebrew predictions of captivity and restoration; and the adherence of many Biblical scholars at this point to the traditional view is psychologically on a par with their former refusal to accept a rational estimate of the Pentateuchal narrative.
On some points, such as the flagrant pseudo-prediction in Isaiah xix, 18, all reasonable critics surrender. Thus “König sees rightly that xix, 18, can refer only to Jewish colonies in Egypt, and refrains from the arbitrary supposition that Isaiah was supernaturally informed of the future establishment of such colonies” (Cheyne, Introd. to Smith’s Prophets of Israel, p. xxxiii). But in other cases Dr. Cheyne’s own earlier positions appear to involve such an “arbitrary supposition,” as do Kuenen’s; and Smith explicitly posited it as to the prophets in general. And even as to Isaiah xix, 18, whereas Hitzig, as Havet later, rightly brings the date down to the actual historic time of the establishment of the temple at Heliopolis by Onias (Josephus, Ant. xiii, 3, 1; Wars, vii, 10, 2), about 160 B.C., Dr. Cheyne (Introd. to Isaiah, p. 108) compromises by dating it about 275 B.C.
The lateness of the bulk of the prophetical writings has been ably argued by Ernest Havet (Le Christianisme et ses Origines, vol. iv, 1878, ch. vi; and in the posthumous vol., La Modernité des Prophètes, 1891), who supports his case by many cogent reasonings. For instance, besides the argument as to Isaiah xix, 18, above noted: (1) The frequent prediction of the ruin of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar (Isa. ch. xxiii; Jer. xxv, 22; Ezek. xxvi, 7; ch. xxvii), false as to him (a fact which might be construed as a proof of the fallibility of the prophets and the [108]candour of their transcribers), is to be understood in the light of other post-predictions as referring to the actual capture of the city by Alexander. (2) Hosea’s prediction of the fall of Judah as well as of Israel, and of their being united, places the passage after the Exile, and may even be held to bring it down to the period of the Asmoneans. So with many other details: the whole argument deserves careful study. M. Havet’s views were, of course, scouted by the conservative specialists, as their predecessors scouted the entire hypothesis of Graf, now taken in its essentials as the basis of sound Biblical criticism. M. Scherer somewhat unintelligently objected to him (Études sur la litt. contemp. vii, 268) that he was not a Hebraist. There is no question of philology involved. It was non-Hebraists who first pointed out the practical incredibility of the central Pentateuchal narrative, on the truth of which Kuenen himself long stood with other Hebraists. (Cp. Wellhausen, Proleg. pp. 39, 347; also his (4th) ed. of Bleek’s Einleit. in das alte Test. 1878, p. 154; and Kuenen, Hexateuch, Eng. tr. pp. xv, 43.) Colenso’s argument, in the gist of which he was long preceded by lay freethinkers, was one of simple common sense. The weak side of M. Havet’s case is his undertaking to bring the prophets bodily down to the Maccabean period. This is claiming too much. But his negative argument is not affected by the reply (Darmesteter, Les Prophètes d’Israël, 1895, pp. 128–31) to his constructive theory.
[Since the above was written, two French critics, MM. Dujardin and Maurice Vernes, have sought vigorously to reconstruct the history of the prophetic books upon new lines. I have been unable to acquiesce in their views at essential points, but would refer the reader to the lucid and interesting survey of the problem in Mr. T. Whittaker’s Priests, Philosophers, and Prophets (Black, 1911), ch. vi.]
It is true that where hardly any documentary datum is intrinsically sure, it is difficult to prove a negative for one more than for another. The historical narratives being systematically tampered with by one writer after another, and even presumptively late writings being interpolated by still later scribes, we can never have demonstrative proof as to the original date of any one prophet. Thus it is arguable that fragments of utterance from eighth-century prophets may have survived orally and been made the nucleus of later documents. This view would be reconcilable with the fact that the prophets Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and Micah are all introduced with some modification of the formula that they prophesied “in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah,” Jeroboam’s name being added in the cases of Hosea and [109]Amos. But that detail is also reconcilable with absolute fabrication. To say nothing of sheer bad faith in a community whose moral code said nothing against fraud save in the form of judicial perjury, the Hebrew literature is profoundly compromised by the simple fact that the religious development of the people made the prestige of antiquity more essential there for the purposes of propaganda than in almost any other society known to us. Hence an all-pervading principle of literary dissimulation; and what freethinking there was had in general to wear the guise of the very force of unreasoning traditionalism to which it was inwardly most opposed. Only thus could new thought find a hearing and secure its preservation at the hands of the tribe of formalists. Even the pessimist Koheleth, wearied with groping science, yet believing nothing of the doctrine of immortality, must needs follow precedent and pose as the fabulous King Solomon, son of the half-mythic David.
We are forced, then, to regard with distrust all passages in the “early” prophets which express either a disregard of sacrifice and ritual, or a universalism incongruous with all that we know of the native culture of their period. The strongest ground for surmising a really “high” development of monotheism in Judah before the Captivity is the stability of the life there as compared with northern Israel.31 In this respect the conditions might indeed be considered favourable to priestly or other culture; but, on the other hand, the records themselves exhibit a predominant polytheism. The presumption, then, is strong that the “advanced” passages in the prophets concerning sacrifice belong to an age when such ideas had been reached in more civilized nations, with whose thought travelled Jews could come in contact.
It is true that some such ideas were current in Egypt many centuries before the period under notice—a fact which alone discounts the ethical originality claimed for the Hebrew prophets. E.g., the following passage from the papyrus of Ani, belonging to the Nineteenth Dynasty, not later than 1288 B.C.: “That which is detestable in the sanctuary of God is noisy feasts; if thou implore him with a loving heart of which all the words are mysterious, he will do thy matters, he hears thy words, he accepts thine offerings” (Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, by Flinders Petrie, 1898, p. 160). The word rendered “mysterious” here may mean “magical” [110]or “liturgical,” or may merely prescribe privacy or silence; and this last is the construction put upon it by Renouf (Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 102) and Erman (Handbook of Eg. Relig. Eng. tr. p. 84). The same doctrine is put in a hymn to Thoth (id.). But in any case we must look for later culture-contacts as the source of the later Hebrew radicalism under notice, though Egyptian sources are not to be wholly set aside. See Kuenen, i, 395; and Brugsch, as there cited; but cp. Wellhausen, Israel, p. 440.
It is clear that not only did they accept a cosmogony from the Babylonians, but they were influenced by the lore of the Zoroastrian Persians, with whom, as with the monotheists or pantheists of Babylon, they would have grounds of sympathy. It is an open question whether their special hostility to images does not date from the time of Persian contact.32 Concerning the restoration, it has been argued that only a few Jewish exiles returned to Jerusalem “both under Cyrus and under Dareios”; and that, though the temple was rebuilt under Dareios Hystaspis, the builders were not the Gola or returned exiles, but that part of the Judahite population which had not been deported to Babylon.33 The problem is obscure;34 but, at least, the separatist spirit of the redacted narratives of Ezra and Nehemiah (which in any case tell of an opposite spirit) is not to be taken as a decisive clue to the character of the new religion. For the rest, the many Jews who remained in Babylon or spread elsewhere in the Persian Empire, and who developed their creed on a non-local basis, were bound to be in some way affected by the surrounding theology. And it is tolerably certain that not only was the notion of angels derived by the Jews from either the Babylonians or the Persians, but their rigid Sabbath and their weekly synagogue meetings came from one or both of these sources.
That the Sabbath was an Akkado-Babylonian and Assyrian institution is now well established (G. Smith, Assyrian Eponym Canon, 1875, p. 20; Jastrow, Relig. of Bab. and Assyria, p. 377; Sayce, Hib. Lect. p. 76, and in Variorum Teacher’s Bible, ed. 1885, Aids, p. 71). It was before the fact was ascertained that Kuenen wrote of the Sabbath (i, 245) as peculiar to Israel. The Hebrews may have had it before the Exile; but it was [111]clearly not then a great institution; and the mention of Sabbaths in Amos (viii, 5) and Isaiah (i, 13) is one of the reasons for doubting the antiquity of those books. The custom of synagogue meetings on the Sabbath is post-exilic, and may have arisen either in Babylon itself (so Wellhausen, Israel, p. 492) or in imitation of Parsee practice (so Tiele, cited by Kuenen, iii, 35). Compare E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iii (1901), § 131. The same alternative arises with regard to the belief in angels, usually regarded as certainly Persian in origin (cp. Kuenen, iii, 37; Tiele, Outlines, p. 90; and Sack, Die altjüdische Religion, 1889, p. 133). This also could have been Babylonian (Sayce, in Var. Bible, as cited, p. 71); even the demon Asmodeus in the Book of Tobit, usually taken as Persian, being of Babylonian derivation (id.). Cp. Darmesteter’s introd. to Zendavesta, 2nd ed. ch. v. On the other hand, the conception of Satan, the Adversary, as seen in 1 Chr. xxi, 1; Zech. iii, 1, 2, seems to come from the Persian Ahriman, though the Satan of Job has not Ahriman’s status. Such a modification would come of the wish to insist on the supremacy of the good God. And this quasi-monotheistic view, again, we are led to regard, in the case of the prophets, as a possible Babylonian derivation, or at least as a result of the contact of Yahwists with Babylonian culture. To a foreign influence, finally, must be definitely attributed the later Priestly Code, over-ruling Deuteronomy, lowering the Levites, setting up a high priest, calling the dues into the sanctuary, resting on the Torah the cultus which before was rested on the patriarchs, and providing cities and land for the Aaronidae and the Levites (Wellhausen, Prolegomena, pp. 123, 127, 147, 149, 347; Israel, pp. 495, 497)—the latter an arrangement impossible in mountainous Palestine, as regards the land-measurements (id. Proleg. p. 159, following Gramberg and Graf), and clearly deriving from some such country as Babylonia or Persia. As to the high-priest principle in Babylon and Assyria, see Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 59–61; Jastrow, as cited, p. 658.
Of the general effect of such contacts we have clear traces in two of the most remarkable of the later books of the Old Testament, Job and Ecclesiastes, both of which clearly belong to a late period in religious development. The majority of the critics still confidently describe Job as an original Hebrew work, mainly on the ground, apparently, that it shows no clear marks of translation, though its names and its local colour are all non-Jewish. In any case it represents, for its time, a cosmopolitan culture, and contains the work of more than one hand, the prologue and epilogue being probably older than the rest; while much of the dialogue is obviously late interpolation. [112]
Compare Cheyne, Job and Solomon, 1887, p. 72; Bradley, Lectures on Job, p. 171; Bleek-Wellhausen, Einleitung, § 268 (291), ed. 1878, p. 542; Driver, Introd. pp. 405–8; Cornill, Einleit. in das alte Test. 2te. Aufl. 1892, §§ 38, 42; Sharpe, Hist. of the Hebrew Nation, 4th ed. p. 282 sq.; Dillon, Skeptics of the Old Test. 1895, pp. 36–39. Renan’s dating of the book six or seven centuries before Ecclesiastes (L’Ecclésiaste, p. 26; Job, pp. xv–xliii) is oddly uncritical. It must clearly be dated after Jeremiah and Ezekiel (Dillon, as cited); and Cornill even ascribes it to the fourth or third century B.C. Dr. Cheyne notes that in the skeptical passages the name Yahweh is very seldom used (only once or twice, as in xii, 9; xxviii, 28); and Dr. Driver admits that the whole book not only abounds in Aramaic words, but has a good many “explicable only from the Arabic.” Other details in the book suggest the possible culture-influence of the Himyarite Arabs, who had reached a high civilization before 500 B.C. Dr. Driver’s remark that “the thoughts are thoroughly Hebraic” burkes the entire problem as to the manifest innovation the book makes in Hebrew thought and literary method alike. Sharpe (p. 287) is equally arbitrary. Cp. Renan, Job, 1859, pp. xxv, where the newness of the whole treatment is admitted.
Dr. Dillon (pp. 43–59), following Bickell, has pointed out more or less convincingly the many interpolations made in the book after, and even before, the making of the Septuagint translation, which originally lacked 400 lines of the matter in the present Hebrew version. The discovery of the Saidic version of the LXX text of Job decides the main fact. (See Professor Bickell’s Das Buch Job, 1894.) “It is quite possible even now to point out, by the help of a few disjointed fragments still preserved, the position, and to divine the sense, of certain spiteful and defiant passages, which, in the interest of ‘religion and morals,’ were remorselessly suppressed; to indicate others which were split up and transposed; and to distinguish many prolix discourses, feeble or powerful word-pictures, and trite commonplaces, which were deliberately inserted later on, for the sole purpose of toning down the most audacious piece of rationalistic philosophy which has ever yet been clothed in the music of sublime verse” (Dillon, pp. 45–46).
“Besides the four hundred verses which must be excluded on the ground that they are wanting in the Septuagint version, and were therefore added to the text at a comparatively recent period, the long-winded discourse of Elihu must be struck out, most [? much] of which was composed before the book was first translated into Greek.... In the prologue in prose ... Elihu is not once alluded to; and in the epilogue, where all the [other] debaters are named and censured, he ... is absolutely ignored.... Elihu’s style is toto cœlo different from that of the [113]other parts of the poem; ... while his doctrinal peculiarities, particularly his mention of interceding angels, while they coincide with those of the New Testament, are absolutely unknown to Job and his friends.... The confusion introduced into the text by this insertion is bewildering in the extreme; and yet the result is but a typical specimen of the ... tangle which was produced by the systematic endeavour of later and pious editors to reduce the poem to the proper level of orthodoxy” (id. pp. 55–57). Again: “Ch. xxiv, 5–8, 10–24, and ch. xxx, 3–7, take the place of Job’s blasphemous complaint about the unjust government of the world.”
It need hardly be added here that not only the Authorized but the Revised Version is false in the text “I know that my redeemer liveth,” etc. (xix, 25–27), that being a perversion dating from Jerome. The probable meaning is given in Dr. Dillon’s version:—
But I know that my avenger liveth;
Though it be at the end upon my dust,
My witness will avenge these things,
And a curse alight upon mine enemies.
The original expressed a complete disbelief in a future life (ch. xiv). Compare Dr. Dillon’s rhythmic version of the restored text.
What marks off the book of Job from all other Hebrew literature is its dramatic and reflective handling of the ethical problem of theism, which the prophets either evade or dismiss by declamation against Jewish sins. Not that it is solved in Job, where the rôle of Satan is an inconclusive resort to the Persian dualistic solution, and where the deity is finally made to answer Job’s freethinking by sheer literary thunder, much less ratiocinative though far more artistic than the theistic speeches of the friends. But at least the writer or writers of Job’s speeches consciously grasped the issue; and the writer of the epilogue evidently felt that the least Yahweh could do was to compensate a man whom he had allowed to be wantonly persecuted. The various efforts of ancient thought to solve the same problem will be found to constitute the motive power in many later heterodox systems, theistic and atheistic.
Broadly speaking, it is solved in practice in terms of the fortunes of priests and worshippers. At all stages of religious evolution extreme ill-fortune tends to detach men from the cults that have failed to bring them succour. Be it in the case of African indigenes slaying their unsuccessful rain-doctor, Anglo-Saxon priests welcoming Christianity as a surer source of income than their old worship, pagans turning Christian at the fall of Julian, or Christians going [114]over to Islam at the sight of its triumph—the simple primary motive of self-interest is always potent on this as on other sides; and at all stages of Jewish history, it is evident, there were many who held by Yahweh because they thought he prospered them, or renounced him because he did not. And the very vicissitude of things would breed a general skepticism.35 In Zephaniah (i, 12) there is a specific allusion to those “that say in their heart, The Lord will not do good, neither will he do evil.”
Judaism is thus historically a series of socio-political selections rather than a sequence of hereditary transmission. The first definite and exclusive Yahwistic cult was an outcome of special political conditions; and its priests would adhere to it in adversity insofar as they had no other economic resort. Every return of sunshine, on the other hand, would minister to faith; and while many Jews in the time of Assyro-Babylonian ascendancy decided that Yahweh could not save, those Yahwists who in the actual Captivity prospered commercially in the new life would see in such prosperity a fresh proof of Yahweh’s support,36 and would magnify his name and endow his priests accordingly. For similar reasons, the most intense development of Judaism occurs after the Maccabean revolt, when the military triumph of the racial remnant over its oppressors inspired a new and enduring enthusiasm.
On the other hand, foreign influences would chronically tend to promote doubt, especially where the foreigner was not a mere successful votary exalting his own God, but a sympathetic thinker questioning all the Godisms alike. This consideration is a reason the more for surmising a partly foreign source for the book of Job, where, as in the passage cited from Zephaniah, there is no thought of one deity being less potent than another, but rather an impeachment of divine rule in terms of a conceptual monotheism. In any case, the book stands for more than Jewish reverie; and where it is finally turned to an irrelevant and commonplace reaffirmation of the goodness of deity, a certain number of sincerer thinkers in all likelihood fell back on an “agnostic” solution of the eternal problem.
In certain aspects the book of Job speaks for a further reach of early freethinking than is seen in Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), which, however, at its lower level of conviction, tells of an unbelief that could not be overborne by any rhetoric. It unquestionably derives from late foreign influences. It is true that even in the book of [115]Malachi, which is commonly dated about 400 B.C., there is angry mention of some who ask, “Where is the God of judgment?” and say, “It is vain to serve God”;37 even as others had said it in the days of Assyrian oppression;38 but in Malachi these sentiments are actually associated with foreign influences, and in Koheleth such influences are implicit. By an increasing number of students, though not yet by common critical consent, the book is dated about 200 B.C., when Greek influence was stronger in Jewry than at any previous time.
Grätz even puts it as late as the time of Herod the Great. But compare Dillon, p. 129; Tyler, Ecclesiastes, 1874, p. 31; Plumptre’s Ecclesiastes, 1881, introd. p. 34; Renan, L’Ecclésiaste, 1882, pp. 54–59; Kuenen, Religion of Israel, iii, 82; Driver, Introduction, pp. 446–47; Bleek-Wellhausen, Einleitung, p. 527. Dr. Cheyne and some others still put the date before 332 B.C. Here again we are dealing with a confused and corrupted text. The German Prof. Bickell has framed an ingenious and highly plausible theory to the effect that the present incoherence of the text is mainly due to a misplacing of the leaves of the copy from which the current transcript was made. See it set forth by Dillon, pp. 92–97; cp. Cheyne, Job and Solomon, p. 273 sq. There has, further, been some tampering. The epilogue, in particular, is clearly the addition of a later hand—“one of the most timid and shuffling apologies ever penned” (Dillon, p. 118, note).
But the thought of the book is, as Renan says, profoundly fatigued; and the sombre avowals of the absence of divine moral government are ill-balanced by sayings, probably interpolated by other hands, averring an ultimate rectification even on earth. What remains unqualified is the deliberate rejection of the belief in a future life, couched in terms that imply the currency of the doctrine;39 and the deliberate caution against enthusiasm in religion. Belief in a powerful but remote deity, with a minimum of worship and vows, is the outstanding lesson.40
“To me, Koheleth is not a theist in any vital sense in his philosophic meditations” (Cheyne, Job and Solomon, p. 250). “Koheleth’s pessimistic theory, which has its roots in secularism, is utterly incompatible with the spirit of Judaism.... It is grounded upon the rejection of the Messianic expectations, and absolute disbelief in the solemn promises of Jahveh himself.... It would be idle to deny that he had far more in [116]common with the ‘impious’ than with the orthodox” (Dillon, pp. 119–20).
That there was a good deal of this species of tired or stoical semi-rationalism among the Jews of the Hellenistic period may be inferred from various traces. The opening verses of the thirtieth chapter of the book of Proverbs, attributed to Agur, son of Jakeh, are admittedly the expression of a skeptic’s conviction that God cannot be known,41 the countervailing passages being plainly the additions of a believer. Agur’s utterances probably belong to the close of the third century B.C. Here, as in Job, there are signs of Arab influence;42 but at a later period the main source of skepticism for Israel was probably the Hellenistic civilization. It is told in the Talmud that in the Maccabean period there came into use the formula, “Cursed be the man that cherisheth swine; and cursed be the man that teacheth his son the wisdom of the Greeks”; and there is preserved the saying of Rabbi Simeon, son of Gamaliel, that in his father’s school five hundred learnt the law, and five hundred the wisdom of the Greeks.43 Before Gamaliel, the Greek influence had affected Jewish philosophic thought; and it is very probable that among the Sadducees who resisted the doctrine of resurrection there were some thinkers of the Epicurean school. To that school may have belonged the unbelievers who are struck at in several Rabbinical passages which account for the sin of Adam as beginning in a denial of the omnipresence of God, and describe Cain as having said: “There is no judgment; there is no world to come, and there is no reward for the just, and no punishment for the wicked.”44 But of Greek or other atheism there is no direct trace in the Hebrew literature;45 and the rationalism of the Sadducees, who were substantially the priestly party,46 was like the rationalism of the Brahmans and the Egyptian priests—something esoteric and withheld from the multitude. In the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, which belongs to the first century A.C., the [117]denial of immortality, so explicit in Ecclesiastes, is treated as a proof of utter immorality, though the deniers are not represented as atheists.47 They thus seem to have been still numerous, and the imputation of wholesale immorality to them is of course not to be credited;48 but there is no trace of any constructive teaching on their part.
So far as the literature shows, save for the confused Judaic-Platonism of Philo of Alexandria, there is practically no rational progress in Jewish thought after Koheleth till the time of contact with revived Greek thought in Saracen Spain. The mass of the people, in the usual way, are found gravitating to the fanatical and the superstitious levels of the current creed. The book of Ruth, written to resist the separatism of the post-Exilic theocracy,49 never altered the Jewish practice, though allowed into the canon. The remarkable Levitical legislation providing for the periodical restoration of the land to the poor never came into operation,50 any more than the very different provision giving land and cities to the children of Aaron and the Levites. None of the more rationalistic writings in the canon seems ever to have counted for much in the national life. To conceive of “Israel,” in the fashion still prevalent, as being typified in the monotheistic prophets, whatever their date, is as complete a misconception as it would be to see in Mr. Ruskin the expression of the everyday ethic of commercial England. The anti-sacrificial and universalist teachings in the prophets and in the Psalms never affected, for the people at large, the sacrificial and localized worship at Jerusalem; though they may have been esoterically received by some of the priestly or learned class there, and though they may have promoted a continual exodus of the less fanatical types, who turned to other civilizations. Despite the resistance of the Sadducees and the teaching of Job and Ecclesiastes, the belief in a resurrection rapidly gained ground51 in the two or three centuries before the rise of Jesuism, and furnished a basis for the new creed; as did the Messianic hope and the belief in a speedy ending of the world, with both of which Jewish fanaticism sustained itself under the long frustration of nationalistic faith before the Maccabean interlude and after the Roman conquest. It was in vain that the great teacher Hillel declared, “There is no Messiah for [118]Israel”; the rest of the race persisted in cherishing the dream.52 With the major hallucination thus in full possession, the subordinate species of superstition flourished as in Egypt and India; so that at the beginning of our era the Jews were among the most superstitious peoples in the world.53 When their monotheism was fully established, and placed on an abstract footing by the destruction of the temple, it seems to have had no bettering influence on the practical ethics of the Gentiles, though it may have furthered the theistic tendency of the Stoic philosophy. Juvenal exhibits to us the Jew proselyte at Rome as refusing to show an unbeliever the way, or guide him to a spring.54 Sectarian monotheism was thus in part on a rather lower ethical and intellectual55 plane than the polytheism, to say nothing of the Epicureanism or the Stoicism, of the society of the Roman Empire.
It cannot even be said that the learned Rabbinical class carried on a philosophic tradition, while the indigent multitude thus discredited their creed. In the period after the fall of Jerusalem, the narrow nationalism which had always ruled there seems to have been even intensified. In the Talmud “the most general representation of the Divine Being is as the chief Rabbi of Heaven; the angelic host being his assessors. The heavenly Sanhedrim takes the opinion of living sages in cases of dispute. Of the twelve hours of the day three are spent by God in study, three in the government of the world (or rather in the exercise of mercy), three in providing food for the world, and three in playing with Leviathan. But since the destruction of Jerusalem all amusements were banished from the courts of heaven, and three hours were employed in the instruction of those who had died in infancy.”56 So little can a nominal monotheism avail, on the basis of a completed Sacred Book, to keep thought sane when freethought is lacking.
Finally, Judaism played in the world’s thought the great reactionary and obscurantist part by erecting into a dogma the irrational conception that its deity made the universe “out of nothing.” At the time of the redaction of the book of Genesis this [119]dogma had not been glimpsed: the Hebrew conception was the Babylonian—that of a pre-existent Chaos put into shape. But gradually, in the interests of monotheism, the anti-scientific doctrine was evolved57 by way of negative to that of the Gentiles; and where the great line of Ionian thinkers passed on to the modern world the developed conception of an eternal universe,58 Judaism passed on through Christianity, as well as in its own “philosophy,” the contrary dogma, to bar the way of later science. [120]
1 Compare the author’s Pagan Christs, pp. 66–95. ↑
4 Compare Hugo Winckler, Geschichte Israels, i, 56–58. ↑
5 Compare Tiele, Outlines, p. 87; Hist. comp. des anc. relig. p. 342 sq.; Kuenen, Relig. of Israel, iii, 35, 44, 398. Winckler (Gesch. Israels, i, 34–38) pronounces the original Semitic Yahu, and the Yahweh evolved from him, to have been each a “Wetter-Gott.” ↑
6 The word is applied to the apparition of Samuel in the story of the Witch of Endor (1 Sam. xxviii, 13). ↑
7 The unlearned reader may here be reminded that in Gen. i the Hebrew word translated “God” is “Elohim” and that the phrase in Gen. ii rendered “the Lord God” in our versions is in the original “Yah-weh-Elohim.” The first chapter, with its plural deity, is, however, probably the later as well as the more dignified narrative, and represents the influence of Babylonian quasi-science. See, for a good general account of the case, The Witness of Assyria, by C. Edwards, 1893, ch. ii. Cp. Wellhausen, Proleg. to Hist. of Israel, Eng. tr. pp. 196–308; E. J. Fripp, Composition of the Book of Genesis, 1892, passim; Driver, Introd. to the Lit. of the Old Test. 1891, pp. 18–19. ↑
8 Winckler, Gesch. Isr. i, 29–30. ↑
9 Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 398. ↑
10 See the myth of the offerings put in it by the Philistines (1 Sam. vi). ↑
11 1 Sam. iii, 3. Cp. ch. ii, 12–22. Contrast Lev. xvi, 2, ff. ↑
12 1 Sam. iv, 3–11. Cp. v. vii, 2. ↑
14 1 Kings xii, 28; Hosea viii, 4–6. Cp. Jud. viii. 27; Hosea viii, 5. ↑
15 Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 196. But see above, p. 79. ↑
17 2 Kings xviii, 4, 22; xxiii, 48. ↑
19 Jer. i, 18; iii, 16; vi, 13; vii, 4–22; viii, 8; xviii, 18; xx, 1, 2; xxiii, 11. ↑
20 Jer. ii, 28; xi, 13. ↑
21 So Kuenen, vol. i. App. i to Ch. 1. ↑
22 Amos v, 21, 22. ↑
23 Hosea ii, 11; vi, 6. ↑
26 Cp. M. Müller, Nat. Rel. pp. 560–61; Psychol. Rel. pp. 30–32; Wellhausen, Israel, p. 465. If the Moabite Stone be genuine—and it is accepted by Stade (Gesch. des Volkes Israel, in Oncken’s Series, 1881, i, 86) and by most contemporary scholars—the Hebrew alphabetic writing is carried back to the ninth century B.C. An account of the Stone is given in The Witness of Assyria, by C. Edwards, ch. xi. See again Mommsen, Hist. of Rome, bk. i, ch. 14, Eng. tr. 1894, i, 280, for a theory of the extreme antiquity of the alphabet. ↑
27 Dr. Cheyne (Art. Amos in Encyc. Biblica) gives some good reasons for attaching little weight to such objections, but finally joins in calling Amos “a surprising phenomenon.” ↑
28 Driver, Introd. to Lit. of Old Test. ch. vi, § 2 (p. 290, ed. 1891). Cp. Kuenen, Relig. of Israel, i, 86; and Robertson Smith, art. Joel, in Encyc. Brit. ↑
29 Cp. Wellhausen, Israel, p. 501; Driver, ch. vii (1st ed. pp. 352 sq., esp. pp. 355, 361, 362, 365); Stade, Gesch. des Volkes Israel, i, 85. ↑
30 E.g. Ps. l, 8–15; li, 16–17, where v. 19 is obviously a priestly addition, meant to countervail vv. 16, 17. ↑
31 Cp. Kuenen, i, 156; Wellhausen, Prolegomena, p. 139; Israel, p. 478. ↑
32 As to a possible prehistoric connection of Hebrews and Perso-Aryans, see Kuenen, i, 254, discussing Tiele and Spiegel, and iii, 35, 44, treating of Tiele’s view, set forth in his Godsdienst van Zarathustra, that fire-worship was the original basis of Yahwism. Cp. Land’s views, discussed by Kuenen, p. 398; and Renan, Hist. des langues sémit. p. 473. ↑
33 Cheyne, Introd. to Isaiah, Prol. pp. xxx, xxxviii, following Kosters. ↑
34 There is a cognate dispute as to the condition of the Samaritans at the time of the Return. Stade (Gesch. den Volkes Israel, i, 602) holds that they were numerous and well-placed. Winckler (Alttestamentliche Untersuchungen, 1892, p. 107) argues that, on the contrary, they were poor and unorganized, and looked to the Jews for help. So also E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iii (1901), 214. ↑
35 Cp. Rowland Williams, The Hebrew Prophets, ii (1871), 38. This translator’s rendering of the phrase cited by Zephaniah runs: “Neither good does the eternal nor evil.” ↑
36 Cp. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, iii, 216. ↑
37 Mal. ii, 17; iii, 13. Cp. ii, 8, 11. ↑
38 Cp. Jer. xxxiii, 24; xxxviii, 19. ↑
40 Ch. v. Renan’s translation lends lucidity. ↑
41 Driver, Introduction, p. 378. Prof. Dillon (Skeptics of the Old Testament, p. 155) goes so far as to pronounce Agur a “Hebrew Voltaire,” which is somewhat of a straining of the few words he has left. Cp. Dr. Moncure Conway, Solomon and Solomonic Literature, 1899, p. 55. In any case, Agur belongs to an age of “advanced religious reflection” (Cheyne, Job and Solomon, p. 152). ↑
42 Driver, Introduction, p. 378. ↑
43 Biscoe, Hist. of the Acts of the Apostles, ed. 1829, p. 80, following Selden and Lightfoot. ↑
44 S. Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 1896, p. 189, citing Sanhedrin, 386, and Pseudo-Jonathan to Gen. iv, 8. Cp. pp. 191–92, citing a mention of Epicurus in the Mishna. ↑
45 The familiar phrase in the Psalms (xiv, i; liii, 1), “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God,” supposing it to be evidence for anything, clearly does not refer to any reasoned unbelief. Atheism could not well be quite so general as the phrase, taken literally, would imply. ↑
46 Cp. W. R. Sorley, Jewish Christians and Judaism, 1881, p. 9; Robertson Smith, Old Test. in the Jewish Ch. ed. 1892, pp. 48–49. These writers somewhat exaggerate the novelty of the view they accept. Cp. Biscoe, History of the Acts, ed. 1829, p. 101. ↑
48 Cp. the implications in Ecclesiasticus, vi, 4–6; xvi, 11–12, as to the ethics of many believers. ↑
50 Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, xxv, 8, pt. ii, p. 548. ↑
51 In the Wisdom of Solomon, iii, 13; iv, 1, the old desire for offspring is seen to be in part superseded by the newer belief in personal immortality. ↑
52 Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 1896, p. 216. Compare pp. 193–94. ↑
53 See Supernatural Religion, 6th ed. i, 97–100, 103–21; Mosheim, Comm. on Christ. Affairs before Constantine, Vidal’s tr. i, 70; Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, Eng. tr. Div. II, vol. iii, p. 152. ↑
55 Cp. Horace, 1 Sat. v, 100. ↑
56 Rev. A. Edersheim, History of the Jewish Nation after the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1856, p. 462, citing the Avoda Sara, a treatise directed against idolatry! Other Rabbinical views cited by Dr. Edersheim as being in comparison “sublime” are no great improvement on the above—e.g., the conception of deity as “the prototype of the high priest, and the king of kings,”—“who created everything for his own glory.” With all this in view, Dr. Edersheim thought it showed “spiritual decadence” in Philo Judæus to speak of Persian magi and Indian gymnosophists in the same laudatory tone as he used of the Essenes, and to attend “heathenish theatrical representations” (p. 372). ↑
57 See Ps. xc, 2; Prov. viii, 22, 26. ↑
58 This is seen persisting in the lore of the Neo-Platonist writer Sallustius Philosophus (4th c.), De Diis et Mundo, c. 7, though quite unscientifically held. ↑
The highest of all the ancient civilizations, that of Greece, was naturally the product of the greatest possible complex of culture-forces;1 and its rise to pre-eminence begins after the contact of the Greek settlers in Æolia and Ionia with the higher civilizations of Asia Minor.2 The great Homeric epos itself stands for the special conditions of Æolic and Ionic life in those colonies;3 even Greek religion, spontaneous as were its earlier growths, was soon influenced by those of the East;4 and Greek philosophy and art alike draw their first inspirations from Eastern contact.5 Whatever reactions we may make against the tradition of Oriental origins,6 it is clear that the higher civilization of antiquity had Oriental (including in that term Egyptian) roots.7 At no point do we find a “pure” Greek civilization. Alike the “Mycenæan” and the “Minoan” civilizations, as recovered for us by modern excavators, show a composite basis, in which the East is implicated.8 And in the historic period the connection remains obvious. It matters not whether we hold the Phrygians and Karians of history to have been originally an Aryan stock, related to the Hellenes, and thus to have acted as intermediaries between Aryans and Semites, or to have been originally Semites, with whom Greeks intermingled.9 On either view, the intermediaries represented Semitic influences, which they passed on to the Greek-speaking races, though they in turn developed [121]their deities in large part on psychological lines common to them and the Semites.10
As to the obvious Asiatic influences on historic Greek civilization, compare Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 1872, p. 64; Von Ihering, Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europäer, Eng. tr. (“The Evolution of the Aryan”), p. 73; Schömann, Griech. Alterthümer, 2te Aufl. 1861, i, 10; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterth. ii, 155; A. Bertrand, Études de mythol. et d’archéol. grecques, 1858, pp. 40–41; Bury, introd. p. 3. It seems clear that the Egyptian influence is greatly overstated by Herodotos (ii. 49–52, etc.), who indeed avows that he is but repeating what the Egyptians affirm. The Egyptian priests made their claim in the spirit in which the Jews later made theirs. Herodotos, besides, would prefer an Egyptian to an Asiatic derivation, and so would his audience. But it must not be overlooked that there was an Egyptian influence in the “Minoan” period.
A Hellenistic enthusiasm has led a series of eminent scholars to carry so far their resistance to the tradition of Oriental beginnings11 as to take up the position that Greek thought is “autochthonous.”12 If it were, it could not conceivably have progressed as it did. Only the tenacious psychological prejudice as to race-characters and racial “genius” could thus long detain so many students at a point of view so much more nearly related to supernaturalism than to science. It is safe to say that if any people is ever seen to progress in thought, art, and life, with measurable rapidity, its progress is due to the reactions of foreign intercourse. The primary civilizations, or what pass for such, as those of Akkad and Egypt, are immeasurably slow in accumulating culture-material; the relatively rapid developments always involve the stimulus of old cultures upon a new and vigorous civilization, well-placed for social evolution for the time being. There is no point in early Greek evolution, so far as we have documentary trace of it, at which foreign impact or stimulus is not either patent or inferrible.13 In the very dawn of history the Greeks are found to be a composite stock,14 growing still more composite; and the very beginnings of its higher culture are traced to the non-Grecian people of Thrace,15 who worshipped the [122]Muses. As seen by Herodotos and Thucydides, “the original Hellenes were a particular conquering tribe of great prestige, which attracted the surrounding tribes to follow it, imitate it, and call themselves by its name. The Spartans were, to Herodotos, Hellenic; the Athenians, on the other hand, were not. They were Pelasgian, but by a certain time ‘changed into Hellenes and learnt their language.’ In historical times we cannot really find any tribe of pure Hellenes in existence.”16 The later supremacy of the Greek culture is thus to be explained in terms not of an abnormal “Greek genius,”17 but of the special evolution of intelligence in the Greek-speaking stock, firstly through constant crossing with others, and secondarily through its furtherance by the special social conditions of the more progressive Greek city-states, of which conditions the most important were their geographical dividedness and their own consequent competition and interaction.18
The whole problem of Oriental “influence” has been obscured, and the solution retarded, by the old academic habit of discussing questions of mental evolution in vacuo. Even the reaction against idolatrous Hellenism proceeded without due regard to historical sequence; and the return reaction against that is still somewhat lacking in breadth of inference. There has been too much on one side of assumption as to early Oriental achievement; and too much tendency on the other to assume that the positing of an “influence” on the Greeks is a disparagement of the “Greek mind.” The superiority of that in its later evolution seems too obvious to need affirming. But that hardly justifies so able a writer as Professor Burnet in concluding (Early Greek Philosophy, 2nd ed. introd. pp. 22–23) that “the” Egyptians knew no more arithmetic than was learned by their children in the schools; or in saying (id. p. 26) that “the” Babylonians “studied and recorded celestial phenomena for what we call astrological purposes, not from any scientific interest.” How can we have the right to say that no Babylonians had a scientific interest in the data? Such interest would in the nature of the case miss the popular reproduction given to astrological lore. But it might very well subsist.
Professor Burnet, albeit a really original investigator, has not here had due regard to the early usage of collegiate or corporate culture, in which arcane knowledge was reserved for the few. Thus he writes (p. 26) concerning the Greeks that “it was not [123]till the time of Plato that even the names of the planets were known.” Surely they must have been “known” to some adepts long before: how else came they to be accepted? As Professor Burnet himself notes (p. 34), “in almost every department of life we find that the corporation at first is everything and the individual nothing. The peoples of the East hardly got beyond this stage at all: their science, such as it is, is anonymous, the inherited property of a caste or guild, and we still see clearly in some cases that it was once the same among the Hellenes.” Is it not then probable that astronomical knowledge was so ordered by Easterns, and passed on to Hellenes?
There still attaches to the investigation of early Greek philosophy the drawback that the philosophical scholars do not properly posit the question: What was the early Ionic Greek society like? How did the Hellenes relate to the older polities and cultures which they found there? Professor Burnet makes justifiable fun (p. 21, note) of Dr. Gomperz’s theory of the influence of “native brides”; but he himself seems to argue that the Greeks could learn nothing from the men they conquered, though he admits (p. 20) their derivation of “their art and many of their religious ideas from the East.” If religion, why not religious speculation, leading to philosophy and science? This would be a more fruitful line of inquiry than one based on the assumption that “the” Babylonians went one way and “the” Greeks another. After all, only a few in each race carried on the work of thought and discovery. We do not say that “the English” wrote Shakespeare. Why affirm always that “the” Greeks did whatever great Greeks achieved?
On the immediate issue Professor Burnet incidentally concedes what is required. After arguing that the East perhaps borrowed more from the West than did the West from the East, he admits (p. 21): “It would, however, be quite another thing to say that Greek philosophy originated quite independently of Oriental influence.”
By the tacit admission of one of the ablest opponents of the theory of foreign influence, Hellenic religion as fixed by Homer for the Hellenic world was partly determined by Asiatic influences. Ottfried Müller decided not only that Homer the man (in whose personality he believed) was probably a Smyrnean, whether of Æolic or Ionic stock,19 but that Homer’s religion must have represented [124]a special selection from the manifold Greek mythology, necessarily representing his local bias.20 Now, the Greek cults at Smyrna, as in the other Æolic and Ionic cities of Asia Minor, would be very likely to reflect in some degree the influence of the Karian or other Asiatic cults around them.21 The early Attic conquerors of Miletos allowed the worship of the Karian Sun-God there to be carried on by the old priests; and the Attic settlers of Ephesos in the same way adopted the neighbouring worship of the Lydian Goddess (who became the Artemis or “Great Diana” of the Ephesians), and retained the ministry of the attendant priests and eunuchs.22 Smyrna was apparently not like these a mixed community, but one founded by Achaians from the Peloponnesos; but the genera] Ionic and Æolic religious atmosphere, set up by common sacrifices,23 must have been represented in an epic brought forth in that region. The Karian civilization had at one time spread over a great part of the Ægean, including Delos and Cyprus.24 Such a civilization must have affected that of the Greek conquerors, who only on that basis became civilized traders.25
It is not necessary to ask how far exactly the influence may have gone in the Iliad: the main point is that even at that stage of comparatively simple Hellenism the Asiatic environment, Karian or Phoenician, counted for something, whether in cosmogony or in furthering the process of God-grouping, or in conveying the cult of Cyprian Aphrodite,26 or haply in lending some characteristics to Zeus and Apollo and Athênê,27 an influence none the less real because the genius of the poet or poets of the Iliad has given to the whole Olympian group the artistic stamp of individuality which thenceforth distinguishes the Gods of Greece from all others. Indeed, the very creation of a graded hierarchy out of the independent local deities of Greece, the marrying of the once isolated Pelasgic Hêrê to Zeus, the subordination to him of the once isolated Athênê and Apollo—all this tells of the influence of a Semitic world in which each Baal had [125]his wife, and in which the monarchic system developed on earth had been set up in heaven.28 But soon the Asiatic influence becomes still more clearly recognizable. There is reason to hold with Schrader that the belief in a mildly blissful future state, as seen even in the Odyssey29 and in the Theogony ascribed to Hesiod,30 is “a new belief which is only to be understood in view of oriental tales and teaching.”31 In the Theogony, again, the Semitic element increases,32 Kronos being a Semitic figure;33 while Semelê, if not Dionysos, appears to be no less so.34 But we may further surmise that in Homer, to begin with, the conception of Okeanos, the earth-surrounding Ocean-stream, as the origin of all things,35 comes from some Semitic source; and that Hesiod’s more complicated scheme of origins from Chaos is a further borrowing of oriental thought—both notions being found in ancient Babylonian lore, whence the Hebrews derived their combination of Chaos and Ocean in the first verses of Genesis.36 It thus appears that the earlier oriental37 influence upon Greek thought was in the direction of developing religion,38 with only the germ of rationalism conveyed in the idea of an existence of matter before the Gods,39 which we shall later find scientifically developed. But the case is obscure. Insofar as the Theogony, for instance, partly moralizes the more primitively savage myths,40 it may be that it represents the spontaneous need of the more highly evolved race to give an acceptable meaning to divine tales which, coming from another race, have not a quite sacrosanct prescription, though the tendency is to [126]accept them. On the other hand, it may have been a further foreign influence that gave the critical impulse.
“It is plain enough that Homer and Hesiod represent, both theologically and socially, the close of a long epoch, and not the youth of the Greek world, as some have supposed. The real signification of many myths is lost to them, and so is the import of most of the names and titles of the elder Gods, which are archaic and strange, while the subordinate personages generally have purely Greek names” (Professor Mahaffy, History of Classical Greek Literature, 1880, i, 17).
Whatever be the determining conditions, it is clear that the Homeric epos stands for a new growth of secular song, distinct from the earlier poetry, which by tradition was “either lyrical or oracular.” The poems ascribed to the pre-Homeric bards “were all short, and they were all strictly religious. In these features they contrasted broadly with the epic school of Homer. Even the hexameter metre seems not to have been used in these old hymns, and was called a new invention of the Delphic priests.41 Still further, the majority of these hymns are connected with mysteries apparently ignored by Homer, or with the worship of Dionysos, which he hardly knew.”42 Intermediate between the earlier religious poetry and the Homeric epic, then, was a hexametric verse, used by the Delphic priesthood; and to this order of poetry belongs the Theogony which goes under the name of Hesiod, and which is a sample of other and older works,43 probably composed by priests. And the distinctive mark of the Homeric epos is that, framed as it was to entertain feudal chiefs and their courts, it turned completely away from the sacerdotal norm and purpose. “Thus epic poetry, from having been purely religious, became purely secular. After having treated men and heroes in subordination to the Gods, it came to treat the Gods in relation to men. Indeed, it may be said of Homer that in the image of man created he God.”44
As to the non-religiousness of the Homeric epics, there is a division of critical opinion. Meyer insists (Gesch. des Alt. ii, 395) that, as contrasted with the earlier religious poetry, “the epic poetry is throughout secular (profan); it aims at charming its hearers, not at propitiating the Gods”; and he further sees [127]in the whole Ionian mood a certain cynical disillusionment (id. ii, 723). Cp. Benn, Philos. of Greece, p. 40, citing Hegel. E. Curtius (G. G. i, 126) goes so far as to ascribe a certain irony to the portraiture of the Gods (Ionian Apollo excepted) in Homer, and to trace this to Ionian levity. To the same cause he assigns the lack of any expression of a sense of stigma attaching to murder. This sense he holds the Greek people had, though Homer does not hint it. (Cp. Grote, i, 24, whose inference Curtius implicitly impugns.) Girard (Le Sentiment religieux en Grèce, 1869), on the contrary, appears to have no suspicion of any problem to solve, treating Homer as unaffectedly religious. The same view is taken by Prof. Paul Decharme. “On chercherait vainement dans l’Iliade et dans l’Odyssée les premières traces du scepticisme grec à l’égard des fables des dieux. C’est avec une foi entière en la réalité des événements mythiques que les poètes chantent les légendes ...; c’est en toute simplicité d’âme aussi que les auditeurs de l’épopée écoutent....” (La critique des traditions religieuses chez les grecs, 1904, p. 1.) Thus we have a kind of balance of contrary opinions, German against French. Any verdict on the problem must recognize on the one hand the possibilities of naïve credulity in an unlettered age, and on the other the probability of critical perception on the part of a great poet. I have seen both among Boers in South Africa. On the general question of the mood of the Homeric poems compare Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, 1912, p. 77, and Hist. of Anc. Greek Lit. pp. 34, 35; and A. Benn, The Philosophy of Greece in Relation to the Character of its People, 1898, pp. 29–30.
Still, it cannot be said that in the Iliad there is any clear hint of religious skepticism, though the Gods are so wholly in the likeness of men that the lower deities fight with heroes and are worsted, while Zeus and Hêrê quarrel like any earthly couple. In the Odyssey there is a bare hint of possible speculation in the use of the word atheos; but it is applied only in the phrase οὐκ ἀθεεὶ, “not without a God,”45 in the sense of similar expressions in other passages and in the Iliad.46 The idea was that sometimes the Gods directly meddled. When Odysseus accuses the suitors of not dreading the Gods,47 he has no thought of accusing them of unbelief.48 [128]Homer has indeed been supposed to have exercised a measure of relative freethought in excluding from his song the more offensive myths about the Gods,49 but such exclusion may be sufficiently explained on the score that the epopees were chanted in aristocratic dwellings, in the presence of womenkind, without surmising any process of doubt on the poet’s part.
On the other hand, it was inevitable that such a free treatment of things hitherto sacred should not only affect the attitude of the lay listener towards the current religion, but should react on the religious consciousness. God-legends so fully thrust on secular attention were bound to be discussed; and in the adaptations of myth for liturgical purposes by Stesichoros (fl. circa 600 B.C.) we appear to have the first open trace of a critical revolt in the Greek world against immoral or undignified myths.50 In his work, it is fair to say, we see “the beginning of rationalism”: “the decisive step is taken: once the understanding criticizes the sanctified tradition, it raises itself to be the judge thereof; no longer the common tradition but the individual conviction is the ground of religious belief.”51 Religious, indeed, the process still substantially is. It is to preserve the credit of Helena as a Goddess that Stesichoros repudiates the Homeric account of her,52 somewhat in the spirit in which the framers of the Hesiodic theogony manipulated the myths without rejecting them, or the Hebrew redactors tampered with their text. But in Stesichoros there is a new tendency to reject the myth altogether;53 so that at this stage freethought is still part of a process in which religious feeling, pressed by an advancing ethical consciousness, instinctively clears its standing ground.
It is in Pindar, however (518–442 B.C.), that we first find such a mental process plainly avowed by a believer. In his first Olympic Ode he expressly declares the need for bringing afterthought to bear on poetic lore, that so men may speak nought unfitting of the Gods; and he protests that he will never tell the tale of the blessed ones banqueting on human flesh.54 In the ninth Ode he again protests that his lips must not speak blasphemously of such a thing as strife among the immortals.55 Here the critical [129]motive is ethical, though, while repudiating one kind of scandal about the Gods, Pindar placidly accepts others no less startling to the modern sense. His critical revolt, in fact, is far from thoroughgoing, and suggests rather a religious man’s partial response to pressure from others than any independent process of reflection.56
“He [Pindar] was honestly attached to the national religion and to its varieties in old local cults. He lived a somewhat sacerdotal life, labouring in honour of the Gods, and seeking to spread a reverence for old traditional beliefs. He, moreover, shows an acquaintance with Orphic rites and Pythagorean mysteries, which led him to preach the doctrine of immortality, and of rewards and punishments in the life hereafter. [Note.—The most explicit fragment (θρῆνοι, 3), is, however, not considered genuine by recent critics.]... He is indeed more affected by the advance of freethinking than he imagines; he borrows from the neologians the habit of rationalizing myths, and explaining away immoral acts and motives in the Gods; but these things are isolated attempts with him, and have no deep effect upon his general thinking” (Mahaffy, Hist. of Greek Lit. i, 213–14).
For such a development we are not, of course, forced to assume a foreign influence: mere progress in refinement and in mental activity could bring it about; yet none the less it is probable that foreign influence did quicken the process. It is true that from the beginnings of the literary period Greek thought played with a certain freedom on myth, partly perhaps because the traditions visibly came from various races, and there was no strong priesthood to ossify them. After Homer and Hesiod, men looked back to those poets as shaping theology to their own minds.57 But all custom is conservative, and Pindar’s mind had that general cast. On the other hand, external influence was forthcoming. The period of Pindar and Æschylus [525–455 B.C.] follows on one in which Greek thought, stimulated on all sides, had taken the first great stride in its advance beyond all antiquity. Egypt had been fully thrown open to the Greeks in the reign of Psammetichos58 (650 B.C.); and a great historian, who contends that the “sheer inherent and expansive force” of “the” Greek intellect, “aided but by no means either impressed or provoked from without,” was the true cause, yet concedes that intercourse with Egypt “enlarged the range of [130]their thoughts and observations, while it also imparted to them that vein of mysticism which overgrew the primitive simplicity of the Homeric religion,” and that from Asia Minor in turn they had derived “musical instruments and new laws of rhythm and melody,” as well as “violent and maddening religious rites.”59 And others making similar à priori claims for the Greek intelligence are forced likewise to admit that the mental transition between Homer and Herodotos cannot be explained save in terms of “the influence of other creeds, and the necessary operation of altered circumstances and relations.”60 In the Persae of Æschylus we even catch a glimpse of direct contact with foreign skepticism;61 and again in the Agamemnon there is a reference to some impious one who denied that the Gods deigned to have care of mortals.62 It seems unwarrantable to read as “ridicule of popular polytheism” the passage in the same tragedy:63 “Zeus, whosoever he be; if this name be well-pleasing to himself in invocation, by this do I name him.” It may more fitly be read64 as an echo of the saying of Herakleitos that “the Wise [= the Logos?] is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.”65 But in the poet’s thought, as revealed in the Prometheus, and in the Agamemnon on the theme of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, there has occurred an ethical judgment of the older creeds, an approach to pantheism, a rejection of anthropomorphism, and a growth of pessimism that tells of their final insufficiency.
The leaning to pantheism is established by the discovery that the disputed lines, “Zeus is sky, earth, and heaven: Zeus is all things, yea, greater than all things” (Frag. 443), belonged to the lost tragedy of the Heliades (Haigh, Tragic Drama of the Greeks, 1896, p. 88). For the pessimism see the Prometheus, 247–51. The anti-anthropomorphism is further to be made out from the lines ascribed to Æschylus by Justin Martyr (De Monarchia, c. 2) and Clemens Alexandrinus (Stromata, v, 14). They are expressly pantheistic; but their genuineness is doubtful. The story that Æschylus was nearly killed by a theatre audience on the score that he had divulged part of the mysteries in a tragedy (Haigh, The Attic Theatre, 1889, p. 316; Tragic Drama, pp. 49–50) does not seem to have suggested to [131]Aristotle, who tells it (Nicomachean Ethics, iii, 2), any heterodox intention on the tragedian’s part; but it is hard to see an orthodox believer in the author either of the Prometheus, wherein Zeus is posed as brutal might crucifying innocence and beneficence, or of the Agamemnon, where the father, perplexed in the extreme, can but fall back helplessly on formulas about the all-sufficiency of Zeus when called upon to sacrifice his daughter. Cp. Haigh, Tragic Drama, p. 86 sq. “Some critics,” says Mr. Haigh (p. 88), “have been led to imagine that there is in Æschylus a double Zeus—the ordinary God of the polytheistic religion and the one omnipotent deity in whom he really believed. They suppose that he had no genuine faith in the credibility of the popular legends, but merely used them as a setting for his tragedies; and that his own convictions were of a more philosophical type,” as seen in the pantheistic lines concerning Zeus. To this Mr. Haigh replies that it is “most improbable that there was any clear distinction in the mind of Æschylus” between the two conceptions of Zeus; going on, however, to admit that “much, no doubt, he regarded as uncertain, much as false. Even the name ‘Zeus’ was to him a mere convention.” Mr. Haigh in this discussion does not attempt to deal with the problem of the Prometheus.
The hesitations of the critics on this head are noteworthy. Karl Ottfried Müller, who is least himself in dealing with fundamental issues of creed, evades the problem (Lit. of Anc. Greece, 1847, p. 329) with the bald suggestion that “Æschylus, in his own mind, must have felt how this severity [of Zeus], a necessary accompaniment of the transition from the Titanic period to the government of the Gods of Olympus, was to be reconciled with the mild wisdom which he makes an attribute of Zeus in the subsequent ages of the world. Consequently, the deviation from right ... would all lie on the side of Prometheus.” This nugatory plea—which is rightly rejected by Burckhardt (Griech. Culturgesch. ii, 25)—is ineffectually backed by the argument that the friendly Oceanides recur to the thought, “Those only are wise who humbly reverence Adrasteia (Fate)”—as if the positing of a supreme Fate were not a further belittlement of Zeus.
Other critics are similarly evasive. Patin (Eschyle, éd. 1877, p. 250 sq.), noting the vagaries of past criticism, hostile and other, avowedly leaves the play an unsolved enigma, affirming only the commonly asserted “piety” of Æschylus. Girard (Le sentiment religieux en Grèce, pp. 425–29) does no better, while dogmatically asserting that the poet is “the Greek faithful to the faith of his fathers, which he interprets with an intelligent and emotional (émue) veneration.” Meyer (iii, §§ 257–58) draws an elaborate parallel between Æschylus and Pindar, affirming in turn the “tiefe Frömmigkeit” of the [132]former—and in turn leaves the enigma of the Prometheus unsolved. Professor Decharme, rightly rejecting the fanciful interpretations of Quinet and others who allegorize Prometheus into humanity revolting against superstition, offers a very unsatisfying explanation of his own (p. 107), which practically denies that there is any problem to solve.
Prof. Mahaffy, with his more vivacious habit of thought, comes to the evaded issue. “How,” he asks, “did the Athenian audience, who vehemently attacked the poet for divulging the mysteries, tolerate such a drama? And still more, how did Æschylus, a pious and serious thinker, venture to bring such a subject on the stage with a moral purpose?” The answers suggested are: (1) that in all old religions there are tolerated anomalous survivals; (2) that “a very extreme distortion of their Gods will not offend many who would feel outraged at any open denial of them”; (3) that all Greeks longed for despotic power for themselves, and that “no Athenian, however he sympathized with Prometheus, would think of blaming Zeus for ... crushing all resistance to his will.” But even if these answers—of which the last is the most questionable—be accepted, “the question of the poet’s intention is far more difficult, and will probably never be satisfactorily answered.” Finally, we have this summing-up: “Æschylus was, indeed, essentially a theologian ... but, what is more honourable and exceptional, he was so candid and honest a theologian that he did not approach men’s difficulties for the purpose of refuting them or showing them weak and groundless. On the contrary, though an orthodox and pious man, though clearly convinced of the goodness of Providence, and of the profound truth of the religion of his fathers, he was ever stating boldly the contradictions and anomalies in morals and in myths, and thus naturally incurring the odium and suspicion of the professional advocates of religion and their followers. He felt, perhaps instinctively, that a vivid dramatic statement of these problems in his tragedies was better moral education than vapid platitudes about our ignorance, and about our difficulties being only caused by the shortness of our sight” (Hist. of Greek Lit. i, 260–61, 273–74).
Here, despite the intelligent handling, the enigma is merely transferred from the great tragedian’s work to his character: it is not solved. No solution is offered of the problem of the pantheism of the fragment above cited, which is quite irreconcilable with any orthodox belief in Greek religion, though such sayings are at times repeated by unthinking believers, without recognition of their bearing. That the pantheism is a philosophical element imported into the Greek world from the Babylonian through the early Ionian thinkers seems to be the historical fact (cp. Whittaker, as last cited): that the [133]importation meant the dissolution of the national faith for many thinking men seems to be no less true. It seems finally permissible, then, to suggest that the “piety” of Æschylus was either discontinuous or a matter of artistic rhetoric and public spirit, and that the Prometheus is a work of profound and terrible irony, unburdening his mind of reveries that religion could not conjure away. The discussion on the play has unduly ignored the question of its date. It is, in all probability, one of the latest of the works of Æschylus (K. O. Müller, Lit. of Anc. Greece, p. 327; Haigh, Tragic Drama, p. 109). Müller points to the employment of the third actor—a late development—and Haigh to the overshadowing of the choruses by the dialogue; also to the mention (ll. 366–72) of the eruption of Etna, which occurred in 475 B.C. This one circumstance goes far to solve the dispute. Written near the end of the poet’s life the play belongs to the latest stages of his thinking; and if it departs widely in its tone from the earlier plays, the reasonable inference is that his ideas had undergone a change. The Agamemnon, with its desolating problem, seems to be also one of his later works. Rationalism, indeed, does not usually emerge in old age, though Voltaire was deeply shaken in his theism by the earthquake of Lisbon; but Æschylus is unique even among men of genius; and the highest flight of Greek drama may well stand for an abnormal intellectual experience.
In this primary entrance of critical doubt into drama we have one of the sociological clues to the whole evolution of Greek thought. It has been truly said that the constant action of the tragic stage, the dramatic putting of arguments and rejoinders, pros and cons—which in turn was a fruit of the actual daily pleadings in the Athenian dikastery—was a manifold stimulus alike to ethical feeling and to intellectual effort, such as no other ancient civilization ever knew. “The appropriate subject-matter of tragedy is pregnant not only with ethical sympathy, but also with ethical debate and speculation,” to an extent unapproached in the earlier lyric and gnomic poetry and the literature of aphorism and precept. “In place of unexpanded results, or the mere communication of single-minded sentiment, we have even in Æschylus, the earliest of the great tragedians, a large latitude of dissent and debate—a shifting point of view—a case better or worse—and a divination of the future advent of sovereign and instructed reason. It was through the intermediate stage of tragedy that Grecian literature passed into the Rhetoric, Dialectics, and Ethical speculation which marked the fifth century B.C.”66 [134]
This development was indeed autochthonous, save insofar as the germ of the tragic drama may have come from the East in the cult of Dionysos, with its vinous dithyramb: the “Greek intellect” assuredly did wonderful things at Athens, being placed, for a time, in civic conditions peculiarly fitted for the economic evocation of certain forms of genius. But the above-noted developments in Pindar and in Æschylus had been preceded by the great florescence of early Ionian philosophy in the sixth century, a growth which constrains us to look once more to Asia Minor for a vital fructification of the Greek inner life, of a kind that Athenian institutions could not in themselves evoke. For while drama flourished supremely at Athens, science and philosophy grew up elsewhere, centuries before Athens had a philosopher of note; and all the notable beginnings of Hellenic freethought occurred outside of Hellas proper.
The Greeks varied from the general type of culture-evolution seen in India, Persia, Egypt, and Babylon, and approximated somewhat to that of ancient China, in that their higher thinking was done not by an order of priests pledged to cults, but by independent laymen. In Greece, as in China, this line of development is to be understood as a result of early political conditions—in China, those of a multiplicity of independent feudal States; in Greece, those of a multiplicity of City States, set up first by the geographical structure of Hellas, and reproduced in the colonies of Asia Minor and Magna Graecia by reason of the acquired ideal and the normal state of commercial competition. To the last, many Greek cults exhibited their original character as the sacra of private families. Such conditions prevented the growth of a priestly caste or organization.67 Neither China nor Pagan Greece was imperialized till there had arisen enough of rationalism to prevent the rise of a powerful priesthood; and the later growth of a priestly system in Greece in the Christian period is to be explained in terms first of a positive social degeneration, accompanying a complete transmutation of political life, and secondly of the imposition of a new cult, on the popular plane, specially [135]organized on the model of the political system that adopted it. Under imperialism, however, the two civilizations ultimately presented a singular parallel of unprogressiveness.
In the great progressive period, the possible gains from the absence of a priesthood are seen in course of realization. For the Greek-speaking world in general there was no dogmatic body of teaching, no written code of theology and moral law, no Sacred Book.68 Each local cult had its own ancient ritual, often ministered by priestesses, with myths, often of late invention, to explain it;69 only Homer and Hesiod, with perhaps some of the now lost epics, serving as a general treasury of myth-lore. The two great epopees ascribed to Homer, indeed, had a certain Biblical status; and the Homerids or other bards who recited them did what in them lay to make the old poetry the standard of theological opinion; but they too lacked organized influence, and could not hinder higher thinking.70 The special priesthood of Delphi, wielding the oracle, could maintain their political influence only by holding their function above all apparent self-seeking or effort at domination.71 It only needed, then, such civic conditions as should evolve a leisured class, with a bent towards study, to make possible a growth of lay philosophy.
Those conditions first arose in the Ionian cities; because there first did Greek citizens attain commercial wealth,72 as a result of adopting the older commercial civilization whose independent cities they conquered, and of the greater rapidity of development which belongs to colonies in general.73 There it was that, in matters of religion and philosophy, the comparison of their own cults with those of their foreign neighbours first provoked their critical reflection, as the age of primitive warfare passed away. And there it was, accordingly, that on a basis of primitive Babylonian science there originated with Thales of Miletos (fl. 586 B.C.), a Phoenician by descent,74 the higher science and philosophy of the Greek-speaking race.75 [136]
It is historically certain that Lydia had an ancient and close historical connection with Babylonian and Assyrian civilization, whether through the “Hittites” or otherwise (Sayce, Anc. Emp. of the East, 1884, pp. 217–19; Curtius, Griech. Gesch. i, 63, 207; Meyer, Gesch. des Alterth. i, 166, 277, 299, 305–10; Soury, Bréviaire de l’hist. du matérialisme, 1881, pp. 30, 37 sq. Cp. as to Armenia, Edwards, The Witness of Assyria, 1893, p. 144); and in the seventh century the commercial connection between Lydia and Ionia, long close, was presumably friendly up to the time of the first attacks of the Lydian Kings, and even afterwards (Herodotos i, 20–23), Alyattes having made a treaty of peace with Miletos, which thereafter had peace during his long reign. This brings us to the time of Thales (640–548 B.C.). At the same time, the Ionian settlers of Miletos had from the first a close connection with the Karians (Herod. i, 146, and above pp. 120–21), whose near affinity with the Semites, at least in religion, is seen in their practice of cutting their foreheads at festivals (id. ii, 61; cp. Grote, ed. 1888, i, 27, note; E. Curtius, i, 36, 42; Busolt, i, 33; and Spiegel, Eranische Alterthumskunde, i, 228). Thales was thus in the direct sphere of Babylonian culture before the conquest of Cyrus; and his Milesian pupils or successors, Anaximandros and Anaximenes, stand for the same influences. Herakleitos in turn was of Ephesus, an Ionian city in the same culture-sphere; Anaxagoras was of Klazomenai, another Ionian city, as had been Hermotimos, of the same philosophic school; the Eleatic school, founded by Xenophanes and carried on by Parmenides and the elder Zeno, come from the same matrix, Elea having been founded by exiles from Ionian Phokaia on its conquest by the Persians; and Pythagoras, in turn, was of the Ionian city of Samos, in the same sixth century. Finally, Protagoras and Demokritos were of Abdera, an Ionian colony in Thrace; Leukippos, the teacher of Demokritos, was either an Abderite, a Milesian, or an Elean; and Archelaos, the pupil of Anaxagoras and a teacher of Sokrates, is said to have been a Milesian. Wellhausen (Israel, p. 473 of vol. of Prolegomena, Eng. tr.) has spoken of the rise of philosophy on the “threatened and actual political annihilation of Ionia” as corresponding to the rise of Hebrew prophecy on the menace and the consummation of the Assyrian conquest. As regards Ionia, this may hold in the sense that the stoppage of political freedom threw men back on philosophy, as happened later at Athens. But Thales philosophized before the Persian conquest.
Thales, like Homer, starts from the Babylonian conception of a beginning of all things in water; but in Thales the immediate [137]motive and the sequel are strictly cosmological and neither theological nor poetical, though we cannot tell whether the worship of a God of the Waters may not have been the origin of a water-theory of the cosmos. The phrase attributed to him, “that all things are full of Gods,”76 clearly meant that in his opinion the forces of things inhered in the cosmos, and not in personal powers who spasmodically interfered with it.77 It is probable that, as was surmised by Plutarch, a pantheistic conception of Zeus existed for the Ionian Greeks before Thales.78 To the later doxographists he “seems to have lost belief in the Gods.”79 From the mere second-hand and often unintelligent statements which are all we have in his case, it is hard to make sure of his system; but that it was pantheistic80 and physicist seems clear. He conceived that matter not only came from but was resolvable into water; that all phenomena were ruled by law or “necessity”; and that the sun and planets (commonly regarded as deities) were bodies analogous to the earth, which he held to be spherical but “resting on water.”81 For the rest, he speculated in meteorology and in astronomy, and is credited with having predicted a solar eclipse 82—a fairly good proof of his knowledge of Chaldean science83—and with having introduced geometry into Greece from Egypt.84 To him, too, is ascribed a wise counsel to the Ionians in the matter of political federation,85 which, had it been followed, might have saved them from the Persian conquest; and he is one of the many early moralists who laid down the Golden Rule as the essence of the moral law.86 With his maxim, “Know thyself,” he seems to mark a broadly new departure in ancient thought: the balance of energy is shifted from myth and theosophy, prophecy and poesy, to analysis of consciousness and the cosmic process.
From this point Greek rationalism is continuous, despite reactions, till the Roman conquest, Miletos figuring long as a [138]general source of skepticism. Anaximandros (610–547 B.C.), pupil and companion of Thales, was like him an astronomer, geographer, and physicist, seeking for a first principle (for which he may or may not have invented the name87); rejecting the idea of a single primordial element such as water; affirming an infinite material cause, without beginning and indestructible,88 with an infinite number of worlds; and—still showing the Chaldean impulse—speculating remarkably on the descent of man from something aquatic, as well as on the form and motion of the earth (figured by him as a cylinder89), the nature and motions of the solar system, and thunder and lightning.90 It seems doubtful whether, as affirmed by Eudemus, he taught the doctrine of the earth’s motion; but that this doctrine was derived from the Babylonian schools of astronomy is so probable that it may have been accepted in Miletos in his day. Only by inferring a prior scientific development of remarkable energy can we explain the striking force of the sayings of Anaximandros which have come down to us. His doctrine of evolution stands out for us to-day like the fragment of a great ruin, hinting obscurely of a line of active thinkers. The thesis that man must have descended from a different species because, “while other animals quickly found food for themselves, man alone requires a long period of suckling: had he been originally such as he is now, he could never have survived,” is a quite masterly anticipation of modern evolutionary science. We are left asking, how came an early Ionian Greek to think thus, outgoing the assimilative power of the later age of Aristotle? Only a long scientific evolution can readily account for it; and only in the Mesopotamian world could such an evolution have taken place.91
Anaximenes (fl. 548 B.C.), yet another Milesian, pupil or at least follower in turn of Anaximandros, speculates similarly, making his infinite and first principle the air, in which he conceives the earth to be suspended; theorizes on the rainbow, earthquakes, the nature and the revolution of the heavenly bodies (which, with the earth, he supposed to be broad and flat); and affirms the eternity of [139]motion and the perishableness of the earth.92 The Ionian thought of the time seems thus to have been thoroughly absorbed in problems of natural origins, and only in that connection to have been concerned with the problems of religion. No dogma of divine creation blocked the way: the trouble was levity of hypothesis or assent. Thales, following a Semitic lead, places the source of all things in water. Anaximandros, perhaps following another, but seeking a more abstract idea, posited an infinite, the source of all things; and Anaximenes in turn reduces that infinite to the air, as being the least material of things. He cannot have anticipated the chemical conception of the reduction of all solids to gases: the thesis was framed either à priori or in adaptation of priestly claims for the deities of the elements; and others were to follow with the guesses of earth and fire and heat and cold. Still, the speculation is that of bold and far-grasping thinkers, and for these there can have been no validity in the ordinary God-ideas of polytheism.
There is reason to think that these early “schools” of thought were really constituted by men in some way banded together,93 thus supporting each other against the conservatism of religious ignorance. The physicians were so organized; the disciples of Pythagoras followed the same course; and in later Greece we shall find the different philosophic sects formed into societies or corporations. The first model was probably that of the priestly corporation; and in a world in which many cults were chronically disendowed it may well have been that the leisured old priesthoods, philosophizing as we have seen those of India and Egypt and Mesopotamia doing, played a primary part in initiating the work of rational secular thought.
The recent work of Mr. F. M. Cornford, From Philosophy to Religion (1912), puts forth an interesting and ingenious theory to the effect that early Greek philosophy is a reduction to abstract terms of the practice of totemistic tribes. On this view, when the Gods are figured in Homer as subject to Moira (Destiny), there has taken place an impersonation of Nomos, or Law; and just as the divine cosmos or polity is a reflection of the earthly, so the established conception of the absolute compulsoriness of tribal law is translated into one of a Fate which overrules the Gods (p. 40 sq.). So, when Anaximandros posits the doctrine of four elements [he did not use the word, by the way; that comes later; see Burnet, ch. i, p. 56, citing [140]Diels], “we observe that this type of cosmic structure corresponds to that of a totemic tribe containing four clans” (p. 62). On the other hand, the totemistic stage had long before been broken down. The “notion of the group-soul” had given rise to the notion of God (p. 90); and the primitive “magical group” had dissolved into a system of families (p. 93), with individual souls. On this prior accumulation of religious material early philosophy works (p. 138).
It does not appear why, thus recognizing that totemism was at least a long way behind in Thales’s day, Mr. Cornford should trace the Ionian four elements straight back to the problematic four clans of the totemistic tribe. Dr. Frazer gives him no data whatever for Aryan totemism; and the Ionian cities, like those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, belong to the age of commerce and of monarchies. It would seem more plausible, on Mr. Cornford’s own premises, to trace the rival theories of the four elements to religious philosophies set up by the priests of four Gods of water, earth, air, and fire. If the early philosophers “had nothing but theology behind them” (p. 138), why not infer theologies for the old-established deities of Mesopotamia? Mr. Cornford adds to the traditional factors that of “the temperaments of the individual philosophers, which made one or other of those schemes the more congenial to them.” Following Dr. F. H. Bradley, he pronounces that “almost all philosophic arguments are invented afterwards, to recommend, or defend from attack, conclusions which the philosopher was from the outset bent on believing before he could think of any arguments at all. That is why philosophical reasonings are so bad, so artificial, so unconvincing.”
Upon this very principle it is much more likely that the philosophic cults of water, earth, air, and fire originated in the worships of Gods of those elements, whose priests would tend to magnify their office. It is hard to see how “temperament” could determine a man’s bias to an air-theory in preference to a water-theory. But if the priests of Ea the Water-God and those of Bel the God of Air had framed theories of the kind, it is conceivable that family or tribal ties and traditions might set men upon developing the theory quasi-philosophically when the alien Gods came to be recognized by thinking men as mere names for the elements.94 (Compare Flaubert’s Salammbô as to the probable rivalry of priests of the Sun and Moon.) A pantheistic view, again, arose as we saw among various priesthoods in the monarchies where syncretism arose out of political aggregations.
What is clear is that the religious or theistic basis had ceased to [141]exist for many educated Greeks in that environment. The old God-ideas have disappeared, and a quasi-scientific attitude has been taken up. It is apparently conditioned, perhaps fatally, by prior modes of thought; but it operates in disregard of so-called religious needs, and negates the normal religious conception of earthly government or providence. Nevertheless, it was not destined to lead to the rationalization of popular thought; and only in a small number of cases did the scientific thinkers deeply concern themselves with the enlightenment of the mass.
In another Ionian thinker of that age, indeed, we find alongside of physical and philosophical speculation on the universe the most direct and explicit assault upon popular religion that ancient history preserves. Xenophanes of Kolophon (? 570–470), a contemporary of Anaximandros, was forced by a Persian invasion or by some revolution to leave his native city at the age of twenty-five; and by his own account his doctrines, and inferribly his life, had gone “up and down Greece”—in which we are to include Magna Graecia—for sixty-seven years at the date of writing of one of his poems.95 This was presumably composed at Elea (Hyela or Velia), founded about 536 B.C., on the western Italian coast, south of Paestum, by unsubduable Phokaians seeking a new home after the Persian conquest, and after they had been further defeated in the attempt to live as pirates in Corsica.96 Thither came the aged Xenophanes, perhaps also seeking freedom. He seems to have lived hitherto as a rhapsode, chanting his poems at the courts of tyrants as the Homerids did the Iliad. It is hard indeed to conceive that his recitations included the anti-religious passages which have come down to us; but his resort in old age to the new community of Elea is itself a proof of a craving and a need for free conditions of life.97
Setting out on his travels, doubtless, with the Ionian predilection for a unitary philosophy, he had somewhere and somehow attained a pantheism which transcended the concern for a “first principle”—if, indeed, it was essentially distinct from the doctrine of Anaximandros.98 “Looking wistfully upon the whole heavens,” says Aristotle,99 “he affirms that unity is God.” From the scattered [142]quotations which are all that remain of his lost poem, On Nature (or Natural Things),100 it is hard to deduce any full conception of his philosophy; but it is clear that it was monistic; and though most of his later interpreters have acclaimed him as the herald of monotheism, it is only in terms of pantheism that his various utterances can be reconciled. It is clearly in that sense that Aristotle and Plato101 commemorate him as the first of the Eleatic monists. Repeatedly he speaks of “the Gods” as well as of “God”; and he even inculcates the respectful worship of them.102 The solution seems to be that he thinks of the forces and phenomena of Nature in the early way as Gods or Powers, but resolves them in turn into a whole which includes all forms of power and intelligence, but is not to be conceived as either physically or mentally anthropomorphic. “His contemporaries would have been more likely to call Xenophanes an atheist than anything else.”103
The common verdict of the historians of philosophy, who find in Xenophanes an early and elevated doctrine of “Monotheism,” is closely tested by J. Freudenthal, Ueber die Theologie des Xenophanes, 1886. As he shows, the bulk of them (cited by him, pp. 2–7) do violence to Xenophanes’s language in making him out the proclaimer of a monotheistic doctrine to a polytheistic world. That he was essentially a pantheist is now recognized by a number of writers. Cp. Windelband, as cited, p. 48; Decharme, as cited, p. 46 sq. Bréton, Poésie philos. en Grèce, pp. 47, 64 sq., had maintained the point, against Cousin, in 1882, before Freudenthal. But Freudenthal in turn glosses part of the problem in ascribing to Xenophanes an acceptance of polytheism (cp. Burnet, p. 142), which kept him from molestation throughout his life; whereas Anaxagoras, who had never attacked popular belief with the directness of Xenophanes, was prosecuted for atheism. Anaxagoras was of a later age, dwelling in an Athens in which popular prejudice took readily to persecution, and political malice resorted readily to religious pretences. Xenophanes could hardly have published with impunity in Periklean Athens his stinging impeachments of current God-ideas; and it remains problematic whether he ever proclaimed them in face of the multitude. It is only from long subsequent students that we get them as quotations from his poetry; there is no record of their effect on his contemporaries. That his God-idea was pantheistic is sufficiently established by his attacks on anthropomorphism, taken in connection with his doctrine of the All.
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Whether as teaching meant for public currency or as a philosophic message for the few, the pantheism of Xenophanes expressed itself in an attack on anthropomorphic religion, no less direct and much more ratiocinative than that of any Hebrew prophet upon idolatry. “Mortals,” he wrote, in a famous passage, “suppose that the Gods are born, and wear man’s clothing,104 and have voice and body. But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and make works of art as men do, they would paint their Gods and give them bodies like their own—horses like horses, cattle like cattle.” And again: “Ethiopians make their Gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have reddish hair and blue eyes; so also they conceive the spirits of the Gods to be like themselves.”105 On Homer and Hesiod, the myth-singers, his attack is no less stringent: “They attributed to the Gods all things that with men are of ill-fame and blame; they told of them countless nefarious things—thefts, adulteries, and deception of each other.”106 It is recorded of him further that, like Epicurus, he absolutely rejected all divination.107 And when the Eleans, perhaps somewhat shaken by such criticism, asked him whether they should sacrifice and sing a dirge to Leukothea, the child-bereft Sea-Goddess, he bade them not to sing a dirge if they thought her divine, and not to sacrifice if she were human.108
Beside this ringing radicalism, not yet out of date, the physics of the Eleatic freethinker is less noticeable. His resort to earth as a material first principle was but another guess or disguised theosophy added to those of his predecessors, and has no philosophic congruity with his pantheism. It is interesting to find him reasoning from fossil-marks that what was now land had once been sea-covered, and been left mud; and that the moon is probably inhabited.109 Yet, with all this alertness of speculation, Xenophanes sounds the note of merely negative skepticism which, for lack of fruitful scientific research, was to become more and more common in Greek thought:110 “no man,” he avows in one verse, “knows truly anything, and no man ever will.”111 More fruitful was his pantheism or pankosmism. [144]“The All (οὖλος)” he declared, “sees, thinks, and hears.”112 “It was thus from Xenophanes that the doctrine of Pankosmism first obtained introduction into Greek philosophy, recognizing nothing real except the universe as an indivisible and unchangeable whole.”113 His negative skepticism might have guarded later Hellenes against baseless cosmogony-making if they had been capable of a systematic intellectual development. His sagacity, too, appears in his protest114 against that extravagant worship of the athlete which from first to last kept popular Greek life-philosophy unprogressive. But here least of all was he listened to.
It is after a generation of such persistent questioning of Nature and custom by pioneer Greeks that we find in Herakleitos of Ephesus (fl. 500 B.C.)—still in the Ionian culture-sphere—a positive and unsparing criticism of the prevailing beliefs. No sage among the Ionians (who had already produced a series of powerful thinkers) left a deeper impression than he of massive force and piercing intensity: above all of the gnomic utterances of his age, his have the ring of character and the edge of personality; and the gossiping Diogenes, after setting out by calling him the most arrogant of men, concedes that the brevity and weight of his expression are not to be matched. It was due rather to this, probably, than to his metaphysic—though that has an arresting quality—that there grew up a school of Herakliteans calling themselves by his name. And though doubt attaches to some of his sayings, and even to his date, there can be small question that he was mordantly freethinking, though a man of royal descent. He has stern sayings about “bringing forth untrustworthy witnesses to confirm disputed points,” and about eyes and ears being “bad witnesses for men, when their souls lack understanding.”115 “What can be seen, heard, and learned, this I prize,” is one of his declarations; and he is credited with contemning book-learning as having failed to give wisdom to Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hekataios.116 The belief in progress, he roundly insists, stops progress.117 From his cryptic utterances it maybe gathered that he too was a pantheist;118 and from his insistence on the immanence of strife in all things,119 as from others of his sayings, that he was of the Stoic mood. It was [145]doubtless in resentment of immoral religion that he said120 Homer and Archilochos deserved flogging; as he is severe on the phallic worship of Dionysos,121 on the absurdity of prayer to images, and on popular pietism in general.122 One of his sayings, ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων,123 “character is a man’s dæmon,” seems to be the definite assertion of rationalism in affairs as against the creed of special providences.
A confusion of tradition has arisen between the early Herakleitos, “the Obscure,” and the similarly-named writer of the first century of our era, who was either one Herakleides or one using the name of Herakleitos. As the later writer certainly allegorized Homer—reducing Apollo to the Sun, Athenê to Thought, and so on—and claimed thus to free him from the charge of impiety, it seems highly probable that it is from him that the scholiast on the Iliad, xv, 18, cites the passage scolding the atheists who attacked the Homeric myths. The theme and the tone do not belong to 500 B.C., when only the boldest—as Herakleitos—would be likely to attack Homer, and when there is no other literary trace of atheism. Grote, however (i, 374, note), cites the passages without comment as referring to the early philosopher, who is much more probably credited, as above, with denouncing Homer himself. Concerning the later Herakleitos or Herakleides, see Dr. Hatch’s Hibbert Lectures on The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 1890, pp. 61, 62.
But even apart from the confusion with the late Herakleides, there is difficulty in settling the period of the Ephesian thinker. Diogenes Laërtius states that he flourished about the 69th Olympiad (504–500 B.C.). Another account, preserved by Eusebius, places him in the 80th or 81st Olympiad, in the infancy of Sokrates, and for this date there are other grounds (Ueberweg, i, 40); but yet other evidences carry us back to the earlier. As Diogenes notes five writers of the name—two being poets, one a historian, and one a “serio-comic” personage—and there is record of many other men named Herakleitos and several Herakleides, there is considerable room for false attributions. The statement of Diogenes that the Ephesian was “wont to call opinion the sacred disease” (i, 6, § 7) is commonly relegated to the spurious sayings of Herakleitos, and it suggests the last mentioned of his namesakes. But see Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures on Indian Religion, p. 6, for the opinion that it is genuine, and that by “opinion” was meant “religion.” [146]The saying, says Dr. Müller, “seems to me to have the massive, full, and noble ring of Herakleitos.” It is hardly for rationalists to demur.
Much discussion has been set up by the common attribution to Herakleitos in antiquity of the doctrine of the ultimate conflagration of all things. But for this there is no ground in any actual passage preserved from his works; and it appears to have been a mere misconception of his doctrine in regard to Fire. His monistic doctrine was, in brief, that all the opposing and contrasted things in the universe, heat and cold, day and night, evil and good, imply each other, and exist only in the relation of contrast; and he conceived fire as something in which opposites were solved.124 Upon this stroke of mysticism was concentrated the discussion which might usefully have been turned on his criticism of popular religion; his negative wisdom was substantially ignored, and his obscure speculation, treated as his main contribution to thought, was misunderstood and perverted.
A limit was doubtless soon set to free speech even in Elea; and the Eleatic school after Xenophanes, in the hands of his pupil Parmenides (fl. 500 B.C.), Zeno (fl. 464), Melissos of Samos (fl. 444), and their successors, is found turning first to deep metaphysic and then to verbal dialectic, to discussion on being and not being, the impossibility of motion, and the trick-problem of Achilles and the tortoise. It is conceivable that thought took these lines because others were socially closed. Parmenides, a notably philosophic spirit (whom Plato, meeting him in youth, felt to have “an exceptionally wonderful depth of mind,” but regarded as a man to be feared as well as reverenced),125 made short work of the counter-sense of not being, but does not seem to have dealt at close quarters with popular creeds. Melissos, a man of action, who led a successful sally to capture the Athenian fleet,126 was apparently the most pronounced freethinker of the three named,127 in that he said of the Gods “there was no need to define them, since there was no knowledge of them.”128 Such utterance could not be carried far in any Greek community; and there lacked the spirit of patient research which [147]might have fruitfully developed the notable hypothesis of Parmenides that the earth is spherical in form.129 But he too was a loose guesser, adding categories of fire and earth and heat and cold to the formative and material “principles” of his predecessors; and where he divagated weaker minds could not but lose themselves. From Melissos and Parmenides there is accordingly a rapid descent in philosophy to professional verbalism, popular life the while proceeding on the old levels.
It was in this epoch of declining energy and declining freedom that there grew up the nugatory doctrine, associated with the Eleatic school,130 that the only realities are mental,131 a formula which eluded at once the problems of Nature and the crudities of religion, and so made its fortune with the idle educated class. Meant to support the cause of reason, it was soon turned, as every slackly-held doctrine must be, to a different account. In the hands of Plato it developed into the doctrine of ideas, which in the later Christian world was to play so large a part, as “Realism,” in checking scientific thought; and in Greece it fatally fostered the indolent evasion of research in physics.132 Ultimately this made for supernaturalism, which had never been discarded by the main body even of rationalizing thinkers.133 Thus the geographer and historian Hekataios of Miletos (fl. 500 B.C.), living at the great centre of rationalism, while rejecting the mass of Greek fables as “ridiculous,” and proceeding in a fashion long popular to translate them into historical facts, yet affected, in the poetic Greek fashion, to be of divine descent.134 At the same time he held by such fables as that of the floating island in the Nile and that of the supernormal Hyperboreans. This blending of old and new habits of mind is indeed perhaps the strongest ground for affirming the genuineness of his fragments, which has been disputed.135 But from his time forward there are many signs of a broad movement of criticism, doubt, inquiry, and reconstruction, involving an extensive discussion of historical as well as religious tradition.136 There had begun, in short, for the rapidly-developing Greeks, a “discovery of man” such as is ascribed in later times to the age of the Italian Renaissance. In the next generation came the father of humanists, Herodotos, who [148]implicitly carries the process of discrimination still further than did Hekataios; while Sophocles [496–405 B.C.], without ever challenging popular faith, whether implicitly as did Æschylus, or explicitly as did Euripides, “brought down the drama from the skies to the earth; and the drama still follows the course which Sophocles first marked out for it. It was on the Gods, the struggles of the Gods, and on destiny that Æschylus dwelt; it is with man that Sophocles is concerned.”137
Still, there was only to be a partial enlightenment of the race, such as we have seen occurring, perhaps about the same period, in India. Sophocles, even while dramatizing the cruel consequences of Greek religion, never made any sign of being delivered from the ordinary Greek conceptions of deity, or gave any help to wiser thought. The social difference between Greece and the monarchic civilizations was after all only one of degree: there, as elsewhere, the social problem was finally unsolved; and the limits to Greek progress were soon approached. But the evolution went far in many places, and it is profoundly interesting to trace it.
Compared with the early Milesians and with Xenophanes, the elusive Pythagoras (fl. 540–510 B.C.) is not so much a rationalistic as a theosophic freethinker; but to freethought his name belongs insofar as the system connected with it did rationalize, and discarded mythology. If the biographic data be in any degree trustworthy, it starts like Milesian speculation from oriental precedents.138 Pythagoras was of Samos in the Ægean; and the traditions have it that he was a pupil of Pherekydes the Syrian, and that before settling at Krôton, in Italy, he travelled in Egypt, and had intercourse with the Chaldean Magi. Some parts of the Pythagorean code of life, at least, point to an eastern derivation.
The striking resemblance between the doctrine and practice of the Pythagoreans and those of the Jewish Essenes has led Zeller to argue (Philos. der Griechen, Th. iii, Abth. 2) that the latter were a branch of the former. Bishop Lightfoot, on the other hand, noting that the Essenes did not hold the specially prominent Pythagorean doctrines of numbers and of the transmigration of souls, traces Essenism to Zoroastrian influence (Ed. of Colossians, App. on the Essenes, pp. 150–51; rep. in Dissertations on the Apostolic Age, 1892, pp. 369–72). This [149]raises the issue whether both Pythagoreanism and Essenism were not of Persian derivation; and Dr. Schürer (Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, Eng. tr. Div. II, vol. ii, p. 218) pronounces in favour of an oriental origin for both. The new connection between Persia and Ionia just at or before the time of Pythagoras (fl. 530 B.C.) squares with this view; but it is further to be noted that the phenomenon of monasticism, common to Pythagoreans and Essenes, arises in Buddhism about the Pythagorean period; and as it is hardly likely that Buddhism in the sixth century B.C. reached Asia Minor, there remains the possibility of some special diffusion of the new ideal from the Babylonian sphere after the conquest by Cyrus, there being no trace of a Persian monastic system. The resemblances to Orphicism likewise suggest a Babylonian source, as does the doctrine of numbers, which is not Zoroastrian. As to Buddhism, the argument for a Buddhist origin of Essenism shortly before our era (cp. A. Lillie, Buddhism in Christendom and The Influence of Buddhism on Primitive Christianity; E. Bunsen, The Angel-Messiah; or, Buddhists, Essenes, and Christians—all three to be read with much caution) does not meet the case of the Pythagorean precedents for Essenism. Prof. Burnet (Early Greek Philos. 2nd ed. p. 102) notes close Indian parallels to Pythagoreanism, but overlooks the intermediate Persian parallels, and falls back very unnecessarily on the bald notion that “the two systems were independently evolved from the same primitive systems.”
As regards the mystic doctrine that numbers are, as it were, the moving principle in the cosmos—another thesis not unlikely to arise in that Babylonian world whence came the whole system of numbers for the later ancients139—we can but pronounce it a development of thought in vacuo, and look further for the source of Pythagorean influence in the moral and social code of the movement, in its science, in its pantheism,140 its contradictory dualism,141 and perhaps in its doctrine of transmigration of souls. On the side of natural science, its absurdities142 point to the fatal lack of observation which so soon stopped progress in Greek physics and biology.143 Yet in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, and the science of sound the school seems to have done good scientific work; being indeed praised by the critical Aristotle for doing special service in that way.144 It is recorded that Philolaos, the successor of Pythagoras, [150]was the first to teach openly (about 460 B.C.) the doctrine of the motion of the earth145—which, however, as above noted, was also said to have been previously taught by Anaximandros146 (from whom some incline to derive the Pythagorean theory of numbers in general147) and by Hiketas or Iketas (or Niketas) of Syracuse.148 Ekphantos, of that city, is also credited with asserting the revolution of the earth on its axis; and he too is grouped with the Pythagoreans, though he seems to have had a pantheism of his own.149 Philolaos in particular is said to have been prosecuted for his teaching,150 which for many was a blasphemy; and it may be that this was the reason of its being specially ascribed to him, though current in the East long before his day. In the fragments ascribed to him is affirmed, in divergence from other Pythagoreans, the eternity of the earth; and in other ways he seems to have been an innovator.151 In any case, the Pythagorean conception of the earth’s motion was a speculative one, wide of the facts, and not identical with the modern doctrine, save insofar as Pythagoras—or Philolaos—had rightly conceived the earth as a sphere.152
It is noteworthy, however, that in conjecturing that the whole solar system moves round a “central fire,” Pythagoras carried his thought nearly as far as the moderns. The fanciful side of his system is seen in his hypothesis of a counter-earth (Anti-chthon) invented to bring up the number of celestial bodies in our system to ten, the “complete” number. (Berry, as cited.) Narrien (p. 163) misses this simple explanation of the idea.
As to politics, finally, it seems hard to solve the anomaly that Pythagoras is pronounced the first teacher of the principle of community of goods,153 and that his adherents at Krôton formed an aristocratic league, so detested by the people for its anti-democratism that its members were finally massacred in their meeting-place, their leader, according to one tradition, being slain with them, while according to a better grounded account he had withdrawn and died at Metapontion. The solution seems to be [151]that the early movement was in no way monastic or communistic; that it was, however, a secret society; that it set up a kind of puritanism or “methodism” which repelled conservative people; and that, whatever its doctrines, its members were mostly of the upper class.154 If they held by the general rejection of popular religion attributed to Pythagoras, they would so much the more exasperate the demos; for though at Krôton, as in the other Grecian colonial cities, there was considerable freedom of thought and speech, the populace can nowhere have been freethinking.155 In any case, it was after its political overthrow, and still more in the Italian revival of the second century B.C., that the mystic and superstitious features of Pythagoreanism were most multiplied; and doubtless the master’s teachings were often much perverted by his devotees. It was only too easy. He had laid down, as so many another moralist, that justice consisted in reciprocity; but he taught of virtue in terms of his theory of numbers156—a sure way of putting conduct out of touch with reality. Thus we find some of the later Pythagoreans laying it down as a canon that no story once fully current concerning the Gods was to be disbelieved157—the complete negation of philosophical freethought and a sharp contradiction of the other view which represented the shade of Pythagoras as saying that he had seen in Tartaros the shade of Homer hanged to a tree, and that of Hesiod chained to a pillar of brass, for the monstrous things they had ascribed to the Gods.158 It must have taken a good deal of decadence to bring an innovating sect to that pass; and even about 200 B.C. we find the freethinking Ennius at Rome calling himself a Pythagorean;159 but the course of things in Magna Graecia was mostly downward after the sixth century; the ferocious destruction of Sybaris by the Krotoniates helping to promote the decline.160 Intellectual life, in Magna Graecia as in Ionia, obeyed the general tendency.
An opposite view of the Pythagorean evolution is taken by Professor Burnet. He is satisfied that the long list of the Pythagorean taboos, which he rightly pronounces to be “of [152]a thoroughly primitive type” (p. 105), and not at all the subtle “symbols” which they were latterly represented to be, were really the lore of Pythagoras. It is not easy thus to conceive a thinker of the great Ionian age as holding by thoroughly primitive superstitions. Perhaps the solution lies in Aristotle’s statement that Pythagoras was first a mathematician, and only in later life a Pherekydean miracle-monger (Burnet, p. 107, note 3). He may actually have started the symbolic view of the taboos which he imposed.
Before the decadence comes, however, the phenomenon of rationalism occurs on all sides in the colonial cities, older and younger alike; and direct criticism of creed kept pace with the indirect. About 520 B.C. Theagenes of Rhegion, in Southern Italy, had begun for the Greeks the process of reducing the unacceptable God-stories in Homer and Hesiod—notably the battle of the Gods in the Iliad—to mere allegories of the cosmic elements161—a device natural to and practised by liberal conservatives in all religious systems under stress of skeptical attack, and afterwards much employed in the Hellenic world.162 Soon the attack became more stringent. At Syracuse we find the great comic dramatist Epicharmos, about 470 B.C., treating the deities on the stage in a spirit of such audacious burlesque163 as must be held to imply unbelief. Aristophanes, at Athens, indeed, shows a measure of the same spirit while posing as a conservative in religion; but Epicharmos was professedly something of a Pythagorean and philosopher,164 and was doubtless protected by Hiero, at whose court he lived, against any religious resentment he may have aroused. The story of Simonides’s answer to Hiero’s question as to the nature of the Gods—first asking a day to think, then two days, then four, then avowing that meditation only made the problem harder165—points to the prevalent tone among the cultured.
At last the critical spirit finds utterance, in the great Periklean period, at Athens, but first by way of importation from Ionia, where Miletos had fallen in the year 494. Anaxagoras of Klazomenai (fl. 480–450 B.C.; d. 428) is the first freethinker historically known to have been legally prosecuted and condemned166 for his freethought; [153]and it was in the Athens of Perikles, despite Perikles’s protection, that the attack was made. Coming of the Ionian line of thinkers, and himself a pupil of Anaximenes of Miletos, he held firmly by the scientific view of the cosmos, and taught that the sun, instead of being animated and a deity as the Athenians believed, was “a red-hot mass many times larger than the Peloponnesos”167—and the moon a fiery (or earthy) solid body having in it plains and mountains and valleys—this while asserting that infinite mind was the source and introducer of all the motion in the infinite universe;168 infinite in extent and infinitely divisible. This “materialistic” doctrine as to the heavenly bodies was propounded, as Sokrates tells in his defence, in books that in his day anyone could buy for a drachma; and Anaxagoras further taught, like Theagenes, that the mythical personages of the poets were mere abstractions invested with name and gender.169 Withal he was no brawler; and even in pious Athens, where he taught in peace for many years, he might have died in peace but for his intimacy with the most renowned of his pupils, Perikles.
The question of the deity of the sun raised an interesting sociological question. Athenians saw no blasphemy in saying that Gê (Gaia) or Dêmêter was the earth: they had always understood as much; and the earth was simply for them a Goddess; a vast living thing containing the principle of life. They might similarly have tolerated the description of the sun as a kind of red-hot earth, provided that its divinity were not challenged. The trouble lay rather in the negative than in the positive assertion, though the latter must for many have been shocking, inasmuch as they had never been wont to think about the sun as they did about the earth.
It is told of Perikles (499–429 B.C.) by the pious Plutarch, himself something of a believer in portents, that he greatly admired Anaxagoras, from whom he “seems to have learned to despise those superstitious fears which the common phenomena of the heavens produce in those who, ignorant of their cause, and knowing nothing about them, refer them all to the immediate action of the Gods.”170 And even the stately eloquence and imperturbable bearing of the great statesman are said to have been learned from the Ionian master, whom he followed in “adorning his oratory with apt illustrations from physical science.”171 The old philosopher, however, [154]whom men called “Nous” or Intelligence because of the part the name played in his teaching, left his property to go to ruin in his devotion to ideas; and it is told, with small probability, that at one time, old and indigent, he covered his head with his robe and decided to starve to death; till Perikles, hearing of it, hastened to beseech him to live to give his pupil counsel.172
At length it occurred to the statesman’s enemies to strike at him through his guide, philosopher, and friend. They had already procured the banishment of another of his teachers, Damon, as “an intriguer and a friend of despotism”;173 and one of their fanatics, Diopeithes, a priest and a violent demagogue,174 laid the way for an attack on Anaxagoras by obtaining the enactment of a law that “prosecutions should be laid against all who disbelieved in religion and held theories of their own about things on high.”175 Anaxagoras was thus open to indictment on the score alike of his physics and of his mythology; though, seeing that his contemporary Diogenes of Apollonia (who before Demokritos taught “nothing out of nothing: nothing into nothing,” and affirmed the sphericity of the earth) was also in some danger of his life at Athens,176 it is probable that the prosecution was grounded on his physicist teaching. Saved by Perikles from the death punishment, but by one account fined five talents,177 he either was exiled or chose to leave the intolerant city; and he made his home at Lampsakos, where, as the story runs, he won from the municipality the favour that every year the children should have a holiday in the month in which he died.178 It is significant of his general originality that he was reputed the first Greek who wrote a book in prose.179
Philosophically, however, he counted for less than he did as an innovating rationalist. His doctrine of Nous amounted in effect to a reaffirmation of deity; and he has been not unjustly described180 as the philosophic father of the dualistic deism or theism which, whether from within or from without the Christian system, has been the prevailing form of religious philosophy in the modern world. It was, in fact, the only form of theistic philosophy capable of winning any wide assent among religiously biassed minds; and it is the more remarkable that such a theist should have been prosecuted [155]because his notion of deity was mental, and excluded the divinization of the heavenly bodies.
In the memorable episode of his expulsion from Athens we have a finger-post to the road travelled later by Greek civilization. At Athens itself the bulk of the free population was ignorant and bigoted enough to allow of the law being used by any fanatic or malignant partisan against any professed rationalist; and there is no sign that Perikles dreamt of applying the one cure for the evil—the systematic bestowal of rationalistic instruction on all. The fatal maxim of ancient skepticism, that religion is a necessary restraint upon the multitude, brought it about that everywhere, in the last resort, the unenlightened multitude became a restraint upon reason and freethought.181 In the more aristocratically ruled colonial cities, as we have seen, philosophic speech was comparatively free: it was the ignorant Athenian democracy that brought religious intolerance into Greek life, playing towards science, in form of law, the part that the fanatics of Egypt and Palestine had played towards the worshippers of other Gods than their own.
With a baseness of which the motive may be divided between the instincts of faction and of faith, the anti-Periklean party carried their attack yet further; and on their behalf a comic playwright, Hermippos, brought a charge of impiety against the statesman’s unwedded wife, Aspasia.182 There can be no doubt that that famous woman cordially shared the opinions and ideals of her husband, joining as she habitually did in the philosophic talk of his home circle. As a Milesian she was likely enough to be a freethinker; and all that was most rational in Athens acknowledged her culture and her charm.183 Perikles, who had not taken the risk of letting Anaxagoras come to trial, himself defended Aspasia before the dikastery, his indignation breaking through his habitual restraint in a passion of tears, which, according to the jealous Æschines,184 won an acquittal.
Placed as he was, Perikles could but guard his own head and heart, leaving the evil instrument of a religious inquisition to subsist. How far he held with Anaxagoras we can but divine.185 There is probably no truth in Plutarch’s tale that “whenever he ascended [156]the tribune to speak he used first to pray to the Gods that nothing unfitted for the occasion might fall from his lips.”186 But as a party leader he, as a matter of course, observed the conventions; and he may have reasoned that the prosecutions of Anaxagoras and Aspasia, like that directed against Pheidias, stood merely for contemporary political malice, and not for any lasting danger to mental freedom. However that might be, Athens continued to remain the most aggressively intolerant and tradition-mongering of Hellenic cities. So marked is this tendency among the Athenians that for modern students Herodotos, whose history was published in 445 B.C., is relatively a rationalist in his treatment of fable,187 bringing as he did the spirit of Ionia into things traditional and religious. But even Herodotos remains wedded to the belief in oracles or prophecies, claiming fulfilment for those said to have been uttered by Bakis;188 and his small measure of spontaneous skepticism could avail little for critical thought. To no man, apparently, did it occur to resist the religious spirit by systematic propaganda: that, like the principle of representative government, was to be hit upon only in a later age.189 Not by a purely literary culture, relating life merely to poetry and myth, tradition and superstition, were men to be made fit to conduct a stable society. And the spirit of pious persecution, once generated, went from bad to worse, crowning itself with crime, till at length the overthrow of Athenian self-government wrought a forlorn liberty of scientific speech at the cost of the liberty of political action which is the basis of all sound life.
Whatever may have been the private vogue of freethinking at Athens in the Periklean period, it was always a popular thing to attack it. Some years before or after the death of Perikles there came to Athens the alien Hippo, the first specifically named atheist190 of Greek antiquity. The dubious tradition runs that his tomb bore the epitaph: “This is the grave of Hippo, whom destiny, in destroying him, has made the equal of the immortal Gods.”191 If, as seems likely, he was the Hippo of Rhegion mentioned by Hippolytos,192 he speculated as to physical origins in the manner of Thales, making water generate fire, and that in turn produce the world.193 But this [157]is uncertain. Upon him the comic muse of Athens turned its attacks very much as it did upon Socrates. The old comic poet Kratinos, a notorious wine-bibber, produced a comedy called The Panoptai (the “all-seers” or “all eyes”), in which it would appear that the chorus were made to represent the disciples of Hippo, and to wear a mask covered with eyes.194 Drunkenness was a venial fault in comparison with the presumption to speculate on physics and to doubt the sacred lore of the populace. The end of the rule of ignorance was that a theistic philosopher who himself discouraged scientific inquiry was to pay a heavier penalty than did the atheist Hippo.
While Athens was gaining power and glory and beauty without popular wisdom, the colonial city of Abdera, in Thrace, founded by Ionians, had like others carried on the great impulse of Ionian philosophy, and had produced in the fifth century some of the great thinkers of the race. Concerning the greatest of these, Demokritos, and the next in importance, Protagoras, we have no sure dates;195 but it is probable that the second, whether older or younger, was influenced by the first, who indeed has influenced all scientific philosophy down to our own day. How much he learned from his master Leukippos cannot now be ascertained.196 The writings which went under his name appear to have been the productions of the whole Abderite school;197 and Epicurus declared that Leukippos was an imaginary person.198 What passes for his teaching was constructive science of cardinal importance; for it is the first clear statement of the atomic theory; the substitution of a real for an abstract foundation of things. Whoever were the originator of the theory, there is no doubt as to the assimilation of the principle by Demokritos, who thus logically continued the non-theistic line of thought, and developed one of the most fruitful of all scientific principles. That this idea again is a direct development from Babylonian science is not impossible; at least there seems to be no doubt that Demokritos had travelled far and wide,199 whether or not he had been brought up, as the tradition goes, by Persian magi;200 and that he told how the cosmic views of Anaxagoras, [158]which scandalized the Athenians, were current in the East.201 But he stands out as one of the most original minds in the whole history of thought. No Greek thinker, not Aristotle himself, has struck so deep as he into fundamental problems; though the absurd label of “the laughing philosopher,” bestowed on him by some peculiarly unphilosophic mind, has delayed the later recognition of his greatness, clear as it was to Bacon.202 The vital maxim, “Nothing from nothing: nothing into nothing,” derives substantially from him.203
His atomic theory, held in conjunction with a conception of “mind-stuff” similar to that of Anaxagoras, may be termed the high-water mark of ancient scientific thought; and it is noteworthy that somewhat earlier in the same age Empedokles of Agrigentum, another product of the freer colonial life, threw out a certain glimmer of the Darwinian conception—perhaps more clearly attained by Anaximandros—that adaptations prevail in nature just because the adaptations fit organisms to survive, and the non-adapted perish.204 In his teaching, too, the doctrine of the indestructibility of matter is clear and firm;205 and the denial of anthropomorphic deity is explicit.206 But Empedokles wrought out no solid system: “half-mystic and half-rationalist, he made no attempt to reconcile the two inconsistent sides of his intellectual character”;207 and his explicit teaching of metempsychosis208 and other Pythagoreanisms gave foothold for more delusion than he ever dispelled.209 On the whole, he is one of the most remarkable personalities of antiquity, moving among men with a pomp and gravity which made them think of him as a God, denouncing their sacrifices, and no less their eating of flesh; and checking his notable self-exaltation by recalling the general littleness of men. But he did little to enlighten them; and Aristotle passed on to the world a fatal misconception of his thought by ascribing to him the notion of automatism where he was asserting a “necessity” in terms of laws which he avowedly could not explain.210 Against such misconception he should have provided. Demokritos, however, shunned dialectic and discussion, and founded no school;211 and although his atomism was later adopted by Epicurus, it was no [159]more developed on a basis of investigation and experiment than was the biology of Empedokles. His ethic, though wholly rationalistic, leant rather to quietism and resignation than to reconstruction,212 and found its application only in the later static message of Epicurus. Greek society failed to set up the conditions needed for progress beyond the point gained by its unguided forces.
Thus when Protagoras ventured to read, at the house of the freethinking Euripides, a treatise of his own, beginning with the avowal that he offered no opinion as to the existence of the Gods, life being too short for the inquiry,213 the remark got wind, and he had to fly for his life, though Euripides and perhaps most of the guests were very much of the same way of thinking.214 In the course of his flight, the tradition goes, the philosopher was drowned;215 and his book was publicly burned, all who possessed copies being ordered by public proclamation to give them up—the earliest known instance of “censorship of the press.”216 Partisan malice was doubtless at work in his case as in that of Anaxagoras; for the philosophic doctrine of Protagoras became common enough. It is not impossible, though the date is doubtful, that the attack on him was one of the results of the great excitement in Athens in the year 415 B.C. over the sacrilegious mutilation of the figures of Hermes, the familial or boundary-God, in the streets by night. It was about that time that the poet Diagoras of Melos was proscribed for atheism, he having declared that the non-punishment of a certain act of iniquity proved that there were no Gods.217 It has been surmised, with some reason, that the iniquity in question was the slaughter of the Melians by the Athenians in 416 B.C.,218 and the Athenian resentment in that case was personal and political rather than religious.219 For some time after 415 the Athenian courts made strenuous efforts to punish every discoverable case of impiety; and parodies of the Eleusinian mysteries (resembling the mock Masses of Catholic Europe) were alleged against Alkibiades and others.220 Diagoras, who was further charged with divulging the Eleusinian and other mysteries, and with making firewood of an image of Herakles, telling the God thus to perform his thirteenth labour by cooking [160]turnips,221 became thenceforth one of the proverbial atheists of the ancient world,222 and a reward of a silver talent was offered for killing him, and of two talents for his capture alive;223 despite which he seems to have escaped. But no antidote to the bane of fanaticism was found or sought; and the most famous publicist in Athens was the next victim.
The fatality of the Athenian development is seen not only in the direct hostility of the people to rational thought, but in their loss of their hold even on their public polity. For lack of political judgment, moved always by the passions which their literary culture cherished, they so mishandled their affairs in the long and demoralizing Peloponnesian war that they were at one time cowed by their own aristocracy, on essentially absurd pretexts, into abandoning the democratic constitution. Its restoration was followed at the final crisis by another tyranny, also short-lived, but abnormally bloody and iniquitous; and though the people at its overthrow showed a moderation in remarkable contrast to the cruelty and rapacity of the aristocrats, the effect of such extreme vicissitude was to increase the total disposition towards civic violence and coercion. And while the people menaced freethinking in religion, the aristocracies opposed freethinking in politics. Thus under the Thirty Tyrants all intellectual teaching was forbidden; and Kritias, himself accused of having helped Alkibiades to parody the mysteries, sharply interdicted the political rationalism of Sokrates,224 who according to tradition had been one of his own instructors.
It was a result of the general movement of mind throughout the rest of the Hellenic world that freethinkers of culture were still numerous. Archelaos of Miletos, the most important disciple of Anaxagoras; according to a late tradition, the master of Sokrates; and the first systematic teacher of Ionic physical science in Athens, taught the infinity of the universe, grasped the explanation of the nature of sound, and set forth on purely rationalistic lines the social origin and basis of morals, thus giving Sokrates his practical lead.225 [161]Another disciple of Anaxagoras, Metrodoros of Lampsakos (not to be confounded with Metrodoros of Chios, and the other Metrodoros of Lampsakos who was the friend of Epicurus, both also freethinkers), carried out zealously his master’s teaching as to the deities and heroes of Homer, resolving them into mere elemental combinations and physical agencies, and making Zeus stand for mind, and Athenê for art.226 And in the belles lettres of Athens itself, in the dramas of Euripides [480–406 B.C.], who is said to have been the ardent disciple of Anaxagoras,227 to have studied Herakleitos,228 and to have been the friend of Sokrates and Protagoras, there emerge traces enough of a rationalism not to be reconciled with the old belief in the Gods. If Euripides has nowhere ventured on such a terrific paradox as the Prometheus, he has in a score of passages revealed a stress of skepticism which, inasmuch as he too uses all the forms of Hellenic faith,229 deepens our doubt as to the beliefs of Æschylus. Euripides even gave overt proof of his unbelief, beginning his Melanippe with the line: “Zeus, whoever Zeus be, for I know not, save by report,” an audacity which evoked a great uproar. In a later production the passage was prudently altered;230 but he never put much check on his native tendency to analyse and criticize on all issues—a tendency fostered, as we have seen,231 by the constant example of real and poignant dialectic in the Athenian dikastery, and the whole drift of the Athenian stage. In his case the tendency even overbalances the artistic process;232 but it has the advantage of involving a very bold handling of vital problems. Not satisfied with a merely dramatic presentment of lawless Gods, Euripides makes his characters impeach them as such,233 or, again, declare that there can be no truth in the “miserable tales of poets” which so represent them.234 Not content with putting aside as idle such a fable as that of the sun’s swerving from his course in horror at the crime of Atreus,235 and that of the Judgment of Paris,236 he [162]attacks with a stringent scorn the whole apparatus of oracles, divination, and soothsaying.237 And if the Athenian populace cried out at the hardy opening of the Melanippe, he nonetheless gave them again and again his opinion that no man knew anything of the Gods.238 Of orthodox protests against freethinking inquiry he gives a plainly ironical handling.239 As regards his constructive opinions, we have from him many expressions of the pantheism which had by his time permeated the thought of perhaps most of the educated Greeks.240
Here again, as in the case of Æschylus, there arises the problem of contradiction; for Euripides, too, puts often in the mouths of his characters emphatic expressions of customary piety. The conclusion in the two cases must be broadly the same—that whereas an unbelieving dramatist may well make his characters talk in the ordinary way of deity and of religion, it is unintelligible that a believing one should either go beyond the artistic bounds of his task to make them utter an unbelief which must have struck the average listener as strange and noxious, or construct a drama of which the whole effect is to insist on the odiousness of the action of the Supreme God. And the real drift of Euripides is so plain that one modern and Christian scholar has denounced him as an obnoxious and unbelieving sophist who abused his opportunity as a producer of dramas under religious auspices to “shake the ground-works of religion”241 and at the same time of morals;242 while another and a greater scholar, less vehement in his orthodoxy, more restrainedly condemns the dramatist for employing myths in which he did not believe, instead of inventing fresh plots.243 Christian scholars are thus duly unready to give him credit for his many-sided humanity, nobly illustrated in his pleas for the slave and his sympathy with suffering barbarians.244 Latterly the recognition of Euripides’s freethinking has led to the description of him as “Euripides the Rationalist,” in a treatise which represents him as a systematic assailant of the religion of his day. Abating somewhat of that thesis, which imputes more of system to the Euripidean [163]drama than it possesses, we may sum up that the last of the great tragedians of Athens, and the most human and lovable of the three, was assuredly a rationalist in matters of religion. It is noteworthy that he used more frequently than any other ancient dramatist the device of a deus ex machina to end a play.245 It was probably because for him the conception had no serious significance.246 In the Alkestis its [non-mechanical] use is one of the most striking instances of dramatic irony in all literature. The dead Alkestis, who has died to save the life of her husband, is brought back from the Shades by Herakles, who figures as a brawling bully. Only the thinkers of the time could realize the thought that underlay such a tragi-comedy.
Dr. Verrall’s Euripides the Rationalist, 1897, is fairly summed up by Mr. Haigh (Tragic Drama of the Greeks, pp. 262, 265, notes): “He considers that Euripides was a skeptic of the aggressive type, whose principal object in writing tragedy was to attack the State religion, but who, perceiving that it would be dangerous to pose as an open enemy, endeavoured to accomplish his ends by covert ridicule.... His plays ... contain in reality two separate plots—the ostensible and superficial plot, which was intended to satisfy the orthodox, and the rationalized modification which lay half concealed beneath it, and which the intelligent skeptic would easily detect.” For objections to this thesis see Haigh, as cited; Jevons, Hist. of Greek Lit. p. 222, note; and Dr. Mozley’s article in the Classical Review, Nov. 1895, pp. 407–13. As to the rationalism of Euripides in general see many of the passages cited by Bishop Westcott in his Essays in the Hist. of Relig. Thought in the West, 1891, pp. 102–27. And cp. Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, pp. 46–49; Grote, Hist. i, 346–48; Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 231; Murray, Anc. Greek Lit. pp. 256, 264–66.
Over the latest play of Euripides, the Bacchæ, as over one of the last plays of Æschylus, the Prometheus, there has been special debate. It was probably written in Macedonia (cp. ll., 408, 565), whither the poet had gone on the invitation of King Archelaos, when, according to the ancient sketch of his life, “he had to leave Athens because of the malicious exultation over him of nearly all the city.” The trouble, it is conjectured, “may have been something connected with his prosecution for impiety, the charge on which Socrates was put to death a few years after” (Murray, Euripides translated into English Rhyming Verse, 1902, introd. essay, p. lii). Inasmuch as the play glorifies Dionysos, and the “atheist” Pentheus (l. 995) [164]who resists him is slain by the maddened Bacchantes, led by his own mother, it is seriously argued that the drama “may be regarded as in some sort an apologia and an eirenicon, or as a confession on the part of the poet that he was fully conscious that in some of the simple legends of the popular faith there was an element of sound sense (!) which thoughtful men must treat with forbearance, resolved on using it, if possible, as an instrument for inculcating a truer morality, instead of assailing it with a presumptuous denial” (J. E. Sandys, The Bacchæ of Euripides, 1880, introd. pp. lxxv–vi). Here we have the conformist ethic of the average English academic brought to bear on, and ascribed to, the personality of the Greek dramatist.
An academic of the same order, Prof. Mahaffy, similarly suggests that “among the half-educated Macedonian youth, with whom literature was coming into fashion, the poet may have met with a good deal of that insolent second-hand skepticism which is so offensive to a deep and serious thinker, and he may have wished to show them that he was not, as they doubtless hailed him, the apostle of this random speculative arrogance” (Euripides in Class. Writ. Ser. 1879, p. 85). As against the eminently “random” and “speculative arrogance” of this particular passage—a characteristic product of the obscurantist functions of some British university professors in matters of religion, and one which may fitly be pronounced offensive to honest men—it may be suggested on the other hand that, if Euripides got into trouble in Athens by his skepticism, he would be likely in Macedonia to encounter rather a greater stress of bigotry than a freethinking welcome, and that a non-critical presentment of the savage religious legend was forced on him by his environment.
Much of the academic discussion on the subject betrays a singular slowness to accept the dramatic standpoint. Even Prof. Murray, the finest interpreter of Euripides, dogmatically pronounces (introd. cited p. lvii) that “there is in the Bacchæ real and heartfelt glorification of Dionysus,” simply because of the lyrical exaltation of the Bacchic choruses. But lyrical exaltation was in character here above all other cases; and it was the dramatist’s business to present it. To say that “again and again in the lyrics you feel that the Mænads are no longer merely observed and analysed: the poet has entered into them and they into him,” is nothing to the purpose. That the words which fall from the Chorus or its Leader are at times “not the words of a raving Bacchante, but of a gentle and deeply musing philosopher,” is still nothing to the purpose. The same could be said of Shakespeare’s handling of Macbeth. What, in sooth, would the real words of a raving Bacchante be like? If Milton lent dignity to Satan in Puritan England, was Euripides to do [165]less for Dionysos in Macedonia? That he should make Pentheus unsympathetic belongs to the plot. If he had made a noble martyr of the victim as well as an impassive destroyer of the God, he might have had to leave Macedonia more precipitately than he left Athens.
Prof. Murray recognizes all the while that “Euripides never palliates things. He leaves this savage story as savage as he found it”; that he presents a “triumphant and hateful Dionysus,” who gives “a helpless fatalistic answer, abandoning the moral standpoint,” when challenged by the stricken Agavê, whom the God has moved to dismember her own son; and that, in short, “Euripides is, as usual, critical or even hostile to the myth that he celebrates” (as cited, pp. liv-lvi). To set against these solid facts, as does Mr. Sandys (as cited, pp. lxxiii-iv), some passages in the choruses (ll. 395, 388, 427, 1002), and in a speech of Dionysos (1002), enouncing normal platitudes about the wisdom of thinking like other people and living a quiet life, is to strain very uncritically the elastic dramatic material. So far from being “not entirely in keeping” with the likely sentiments of a chorus of Asiatic women, the first-cited passages—telling that cleverness is not wisdom, and that true wisdom acquiesces in the opinions of ordinary people—are just the kind of mock-modest ineptitudes always current among the complacent ignorant; and the sage language ascribed to the heartless God is simply a presentment of deity in the fashion in which all Greeks expected to have it presented.
The fact remains that the story of the Bacchæ, in which the frenzied mother helps to tear to pieces her own son, and the God can but say it is all fated, is as revolting to the rational moral sense as the story of the Prometheus. If this be an eirenicon, it is surely the most ironical in literary history. To see in the impassive delineation of such a myth an acceptance by the poet of popular “sound sense,” and “a desire to put himself right with the public in matters on which he had been misunderstood,” seems possible only to academics trained to a particular handling of the popular creed of their own day. This view, first put forward by Tyrwhitt (Conjecturæ in Æschylum, etc. 1822), was adopted by Schoone (p. 20 of his ed. cited by Sandys). Lobeck, greatly daring wherever rationalism was concerned, suggested that Euripides actually wrote against the rationalists of his time, in commendation of the Bacchic cult, and to justify the popular view in religious matters as against that of the cultured (Aglaophamus—passages quoted by Sandys, p. lxxvi). Musgrave, following Tyrwhitt, makes the play out to be an attack on Kritias, Alkibiades, and other freethinkers, including even Sokrates! K. O. Müller, always ineptly conventional in such matters, finds Euripides in this play “converted into a positive believer, or, in other words, convinced that [166]religion should not be exposed to the subtilties of reasoning; that the understanding of man cannot subvert ancestral traditions which are as old as time,” and so on; and in the Polonius-platitudes of Tiresias and the worldly-wise counsels of Cadmus he finds “great impressiveness” (Hist. Lit. Anc. Greece, p. 379).
The bulk of the literature of the subject, in short, suggests sombre reflections on the moral value of much academic thinking. There are, however, academic suffrages on the side of common sense. Mr. Haigh (Tragic Drama of the Greeks, pp. 313–14) gently dismisses the “recantation” theory; Hartung points out (Euripides restitutus, 1844, ii, 542, cited by Sandys) that Euripides really treats the legend of Pentheus very much as he treats the myth of Hippolytos thirty years earlier, showing no change of moral attitude. E. Pfander (cited by Sandys) took a similar view; as did Mr. Tyrrell in his edition of the play (1871), though the latter persisted in taking the commonplaces of the chorus about true wisdom (395) for the judgments of the dramatist. Euripides could hardly have been called “the philosopher of the stage” (Athenæus, iv, 48) on the strength of sentiments which are common to the village wiseacres of all ages. The critical method which ascribes to Euripides a final hostility to rationalism would impute to Shakespeare the religion of Isabella in Measure for Measure, when the talk of the Duke as a friar counselling a condemned man is wholly “pagan” or unbelieving.
In his admirable little book, Euripides and his Age (1913), Prof. Murray repeats his account of the Bacchæ with some additions and modifications. He adheres to the “heartfelt glorification of Dionysus,” but adds (p. 188): “No doubt it is Dionysus in some private sense of the poet’s own ... some spirit of ... inspiration and untrammelled life. The presentation is not consistent, however magical the poetry.” As to the theory that “the veteran free-lance of thought ... now saw the error of his ways and was returning to orthodoxy,” he pronounces that “Such a view strikes us now as almost childish in its incompetence” (p. 190). He also reminds us that “the whole scheme of the play is given by the ancient ritual.... All kinds of small details which seemed like ... rather fantastic invention on the part of Euripides are taken straight from Æschylus or the ritual, or both.... The Bacchæ is not free invention; it is tradition” (pp. 182–84). And in sum: “It is well to remember that, for all his lucidity of language, Euripides is not lucid about religion” (p. 190).
In conclusion we may ask, How could he be? He wrote plays for the Greek stage, which had its very roots in religious tradition, and was run for the edification of a crudely believing [167]populace. It is much that in so doing Euripides could a hundred times challenge the evil religious ethic given him for his subject-matter; and his lasting vogue in antiquity showed that he had a hold on the higher Greek conscience which no other dramatist ever possessed.
But while Euripides must thus have made a special appeal to the reflecting minority even in his own day, it is clear that he was not at first popular with the many; and his efforts, whatever he may have hoped to achieve, could not suffice to enlighten the democracy. The ribald blasphemies of his enemy, the believing Aristophanes,247 could avail more to keep vulgar religion in credit than the tragedian’s serious indictment could effect against it; and they served at the same time to belittle Euripides for the multitude in his own day. Aristophanes is the typical Tory in religion; non-religious himself, like Swift, he hates the honestly anti-religious man; and he has the crowd with him. The Athenian faith, as a Catholic scholar remarks,248 “was more disposed to suffer the buffooneries of a comedian than the serious negation of a philosopher.” The average Greek seemed to think that the grossest comic impiety did no harm, where serious negation might cause divine wrath.249 And so there came no intellectual salvation for Athens from the drama which was her unique achievement. The balance of ignorance and culture was not changed. Evidently there was much rationalism among the studious few. Plato in the Laws250 speaks both of the man-about-town type of freethinker and of those who, while they believe in no Gods, live well and wisely and are in good repute. But with Plato playing the superior mind and encouraging his fellow-townsmen to believe in the personality of the sun, moon, and planets, credulity could easily keep the upper hand.251 The people remained politically unwise and religiously superstitious, the social struggle perpetuating the division between leisure and toil, even apart from the life of the mass of slaves; while the eternal pre-occupation of militarism left even the majority of the upper class at the intellectual level natural to military life in all ages. There came, however, a generation of great intellectual [168]splendour following on that of the supreme development of drama just before the fall of Greek freedom. Athens had at last come into the heritage of Greek philosophic thought; and to the utterance of that crowning generation the human retrospect has turned ever since. This much of renown remains inalienable from the most renowned democracy of the ancient world.
The wide subject of the teaching of Sokrates, Plato, and Aristotle must here be noticed briefly, with a view only to our special inquiry. All three must be inscribed in any list of ancient freethinkers; and yet all three furthered freethought only indirectly, the two former being in different degrees supernaturalists, while the last touched on religious questions only as a philosopher, avoiding all question of practical innovation.
The same account holds good of the best of the so-called Sophists, as Gorgias the Sicilian (? 485–380), who was a nihilistic skeptic; Hippias of Elis, who, setting up an emphatic distinction between Nature and Convention, impugned the political laws and prejudices which estranged men of thought and culture; and Prodikos of Kos (fl. 435), author of the fable of Herakles at the Parting of the Ways, who seems to have privately criticized the current Gods as mere deifications of useful things and forces, and was later misconceived as teaching that the things and forces were Gods. Cp. Cicero, De nat. Deorum, i, 42; Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Mathematicos, ix, 52; Ueberweg, vol. i, p. 78; Renouvier, i, 291–93. Cicero saw very well that if men came to see in Dêmêtêr merely a deification of corn or bread, in Dionysos wine, in Hephaistos fire, and in Poseidon only water, there was not much left in religion. On the score of their systematic skepticism, that is, their insistence on the subjectivity of all opinion, Prof. Drews pronounces the Sophists at once the “Aufklärer” and the Pragmatists of ancient Greece (Gesch. des Monismus, p. 209). But their thought was scarcely homogeneous.
1. Sokrates [468–399] was fundamentally and practically a freethinker, insofar as in most things he thought for himself, definitely turning away from the old ideal of mere transmitted authority in morals.252 Starting in all inquiries from a position of professed ignorance, he at least repudiated all dogmatics.253 Being, however, preoccupied with public life and conduct, he did not carry [169]his critical thinking far beyond that sphere. In regard to the extension of solid science, one of the prime necessities of Greek intellectual life, he was quite reactionary, drawing a line between the phenomena which he thought intelligible and traceable and those which he thought past finding out. “Physics and astronomy, in his opinion, belonged to the divine class of phenomena in which human research was insane, fruitless, and impious.”254 Yet at the same time he formulated, apparently of his own motion, the ordinary design argument.255 The sound scientific view led up to by so many previous thinkers was set forth, even in religious phraseology, by his great contemporary Hippokrates,256 and he opposed it. While partially separating himself in practice from the popular worships, he held by the belief in omens, though not in all the ordinary ones; and in one of the Platonic dialogues he is made to say he holds by the ordinary versions of all the myths, on the ground that it is a hopeless task to find rational explanations for them.257 He hoped, in short, to rationalize conduct without seeking to rationalize creed—the dream of Plato and of a thousand religionists since.
He had indeed the excuse that the myth-rationalizers of the time after Hekataios, following the line of least psychic resistance, like those of England and Germany in the eighteenth century, explained away myths by reducing them to hypothetical history, thus asking credence for something no better verified than the myth itself. But the rationalizers were on a path by which men might conceivably have journeyed to a truer science; and Sokrates, by refusing to undertake any such exploration,258 left his countrymen to that darkening belief in tradition which made possible his own execution. There was in his cast of mind, indeed—if we can at all accept Plato’s presentment of him—something unfavourable to steady conviction. He cannot have had any real faith in the current religion; yet he never explicitly dissented. In the Republic he accepts the new festival to the Thracian Goddess Bendis; and there he is made by Plato to inculcate a quite orthodox acceptance of the Delphic oracle as the source of all religious practice. But it is impossible to say how much of the teaching of the Platonic Sokrates is Sokratic. And as to Plato there remains the problem of how far his conformities were prudential, after the execution of Sokrates for blasphemy. [170]
The long-debated issue as to the real personality of Sokrates is still open. It is energetically and systematically handled by Prof. August Döring in Die Lehre des Sokrates als sociales Reformsystem (1895), and by Dr. Hubert Röck in Der unverfälschte Sokrates (1903). See, in particular, Döring, pp. 51–79, and Röck, pp. 357–96. From all attempts to arrive at a conception of a consistent Sokrates there emerges the impression that the real Sokrates, despite a strong critical bent of mind, had no clearly established body of opinions, but was swayed in different directions by the itch for contradiction which was the driving power of his dialectic. For the so-called Sokratic “method” is much less a method for attaining truth than one for disturbing prejudice. And if in Plato’s hands Sokrates seldom reaches a conclusion that his own method might not overthrow, we are not entitled to refuse to believe that this was characteristic of the man.
Concerning Sokrates we have Xenophon’s circumstantial account259 of how he reasoned with Aristodemos, “surnamed the Little,” who “neither prayed nor sacrificed to the Gods, nor consulted any oracle, and ridiculed those who did.” Aristodemos was a theist, believing in a “Great Architect” or “Artist,” or a number of such powers—on this he is as vague as the ancient theists in general—but does not think the heavenly powers need his devotions. Sokrates, equally vague as to the unity or plurality of the divine, puts the design argument in the manner familiar throughout the ages,260 and follows it up with the plea, among others, that the States most renowned for wisdom and antiquity have always been the most given to pious practices, and that probably the Gods will be kind to those who show them respect. The whole philosopheme is pure empiricism, on the ordinary plane of polytheistic thought, and may almost be said to exhibit incapacity for the handling of philosophic questions, evading as it does even the elementary challenge of Aristodemos, against whom Sokrates parades pious platitudes without a hint of “Sokratic” analysis. Unless such a performance were regarded as make-believe, it is difficult to conceive how Athenian pietists could honestly arraign Sokrates for irreligion while Aristodemos and others of his way of thinking went unmolested.
Taken as illustrating the state of thought in the Athenian community, the trial and execution of Sokrates for “blasphemy” and “corrupting the minds of the young” go far to prove that there [171]prevailed among the upper class in Athens nearly as much hypocrisy in religious matters as exists in the England of to-day. Doubtless he was liable to death from the traditionally orthodox Greek point of view,261 having practically turned aside from the old civic creed and ideals; but then most educated Athenians had in some degree done the same.262 Euripides, as we have seen, is so frequently critical of the old theology and mythology in his plays that he too could easily have been indicted; and Aristophanes, who attacked Euripides in his comedies as scurrilously as he did Sokrates, would no doubt have been glad to see him prosecuted.263 The psychology of Aristophanes, who freely ridiculed and blasphemed the Gods in his own comedies while reviling all men who did not believe in them, is hardly intelligible save in the light of parts of the English history of our own time, when unbelieving indifferentists on the Conservative side have been seen ready to join in turning the law against a freethinking publicist for purely party ends. In the case of Sokrates the hostility was ostensibly democratic, for, according to Æschines, Sokrates was condemned because he had once given lessons to Kritias,264 one of the most savage and unscrupulous of the Thirty Tyrants. Inasmuch as Kritias had become entirely alienated from Sokrates, and had even put him to silence, such a ground of hostility would only be a fresh illustration of that collective predilection of men to a gregarious iniquity which is no less noteworthy in the psychology of groups than their profession of high moral standards. And such proclivities are always to be reckoned with in such episodes. Anytos, the leading prosecutor, seems to have been a typical bigot, brainless, spiteful, and thoroughly self-satisfied. Not only party malice, however, but the individual dislikes which Sokrates so industriously set up,265 must have counted for much in securing the small majority of the dikastery that pronounced him guilty—281 to 276; and his own clear preference for death over any sort of compromise did the rest.266 He was old, and little [172]hopeful of social betterment; and the temperamental obstinacy which underlay his perpetual and pertinacious debating helped him to choose a death that he could easily have avoided. But the fact remains that he was not popular; that the mass of the voters as well as of the upper class disliked his constant cross-examination of popular opinion,267 which must often have led logical listeners to carry on criticism where he left off; and that after all his ratiocination he left Athens substantially irrational, as well as incapable of justice, on some essential issues. His dialectic method has done more to educate the later world than it did for Greece.
Upon the debate as to the legal punishability of Sokrates turns another as to the moral character of the Athenians who forced him to drink the hemlock. Professor Mahaffy, bent on proving the superiority of Athenian culture and civilization to those of Christendom, effectively contrasts the calm scene in the prison-chamber of Sokrates with the hideous atrocities of the death penalty for treason in the modern world and the “gauntness and horror of our modern executions” (Social Life in Greece, 3rd. ed. pp. 262–69); and Mr. Bleeckly (Socrates and the Athenians, 1884, pp. 55–63) similarly sets against the pagan case that of the burning of heretics by the Christian Church, and in particular the auto da fé at Valladolid in 1559, when fifteen men and women—the former including the conscientious priests who had proposed to meet the hostility of Protestant dissent in the Netherlands by reforms in the Church: the latter including delicately-nurtured ladies of high family—were burned to death before the eyes of the Princess Regent of Spain and the aristocracy of Castile. It is certainly true that this transaction has no parallel in the criminal proceedings of pagan Athens. Christian cruelty has been as much viler than pagan, culture for culture, as the modern Christian environment is uglier than the Athenian. Before such a test the special pleaders for the civilizing power of Christianity can but fall back upon alternative theses which are the negation of their main case. First we are told that “Christianity humanizes men”; next that where it does not do so it is because they are too inhuman to be made Christians.
But while the orthodoxy of pagan Athens thus comes very well off as against the frightful crime-roll of organized Christianity, the dispassionate historian must nonetheless note the dehumanizing power of religion in Athens as in Christendom. The pietists of Athens, in their less brutish way, were as hopelessly [173]denaturalized as those of Christian Europe by the dominion of a traditional creed, held as above reason. It matters not whether or not we say with Bishop Thirlwall (Hist. of Greece, 2nd ed. iv, 556) that “there never was a case in which murder was more clearly committed under the forms of legal procedure than in the trial of Socrates,” or press on the other side the same writer’s admission that in religious matters in Athens “there was no canon, no book by which a doctrine could be tried; no living authority to which appeal could be made for the decision of religious controversies.” The fact that Christendom had “authorities” who ruled which of two sets of insane dogmas brought death upon its propounder, does not make less abominable the slaying of Bruno and Servetus, or the immeasurable massacre of less eminent heretics. But the less formalized homicides sanctioned by the piety of Periklean Athens remain part of the proof that unreasoning faith worsens men past calculation. If we slur over such deeds by generalities about human frailty, we are but asserting the impossibility of rationally respecting human nature. If, putting aside all moral censure, we are simply concerned to trace and comprehend causation in human affairs, we have no choice but to note how upon occasion religion on one hand, like strong drink on another, can turn commonplace men into murderers.
In view of the limitations of Sokrates, and the mental measure of those who voted for putting him to death, it is not surprising that through all Greek history educated men (including Aristotle) continued to believe firmly in the deluge of Deukalion268 and the invasion of the Amazons269 as solid historical facts. Such beliefs, of course, are on all fours with those current in the modern religious world down till the present century: we shall, in fact, best appraise the rationality of Greece by making such comparisons. The residual lesson is that where Greek reason ended, modern social science had better be regarded as only beginning. Thukydides, the greatest of all the ancient historians, and one of the great of all time, treated human affairs in a spirit so strictly rationalistic that he might reasonably be termed an atheist on that score even if he had not earned the name as a pupil of Anaxagoras.270 But his task was to chronicle a war which proved that the Greeks were to the last children of instinct for the main purposes of life, and that the rule of reason which they are credited with establishing271 was only an [174]intermittent pastime. In the days of Demosthenes we still find them politically consulting the Pythian oracle, despite the consciousness among educated men that the oracle is a piece of political machinery. We can best realize the stage of their evolution by first comparing their public religious practice with that of contemporary England. No one now regards the daily prayers of the House of Commons as more than a reverent formality. But Nikias at Syracuse staked the fortunes of war on the creed of omens. We can perhaps finally conceive with fair accuracy the subordination of Greek culture and politics to superstition by likening the thought-levels of pre-Alexandrian Athens to those of England under Cromwell.
2. The decisive measure of Greek accomplishment is found in the career of Plato [429–347]. One of the great prose writers of the world, he has won by his literary genius—that is, by his power of continuous presentation as well as by his style—no less than by his service to supernaturalist philosophy in general, a repute above his deserts as a thinker. In Christian history he is the typical philosopher of Dualism,272 his prevailing conception of the universe being that of an inert Matter acted on or even created by a craftsman-God, the “Divine Artificer,” sometimes conceived as a Logos or divine Reason, separately personalized. Thus he came to be par excellence the philosopher of theism, as against Aristotle and those of the Pythagoreans who affirmed the eternity of the universe.273 In the history of freethought he figures as a man of genius formed by Sokrates and reflecting his limitations, developing the Sokratic dialectic on the one hand and finally emphasizing the Sokratic dogmatism to the point of utter bigotry. If the Athenians are to be condemned for putting Sokrates to death, it must not be forgotten that the spirit, if not the letter, of the Laws drawn up by Plato in his old age fully justified them.274 That code, could it ever have been put in force, would have wrought the death of every honest freethinker as well as most of the ignorant believers within its sphere. Alone among the great serious writers of Greece does he implicate Greek thought in the gospel of intolerance passed on to modern Europe from antiquity. It is recorded of him275 that he wished to [175]burn all the writings of Demokritos that he could collect, and was dissuaded only on the score of the number of copies.
What was best in Plato, considered as a freethinker, was his early love of ratiocination, of “the rendering and receiving of reasons.” Even in his earlier dialogues, however, there are signs enough of an arbitrary temper, as well as of an inability to put science in place of religious prejudice. The obscurantist doctrine which he put in the mouth of Sokrates in the Phædrus was also his own, as we gather from the exposition in the Republic. In that brilliant performance he objects, as so many believers and freethinkers had done before him, to the scandalous tales in the poets concerning the Gods and the sons of Gods; but he does not object to them as being untrue. His position is that they are unedifying.276 For his own part he proposes that his ideal rulers frame new myths which shall edify the young: in his Utopia it is part of the business of the legislator to choose the right fictions;277 and the systematic imposition of an edifying body of pious fable on the general intelligence is part of his scheme for the regeneration of society.278 Honesty is to be built up by fraud, and reason by delusion. What the Hebrew Bible-makers actually did, Plato proposed to do. The one thing to be said in his favour is that by thus telling how the net is to be spread in the sight of the bird he put the decisive obstacle—if any were needed—in the way of his plan. It is, indeed, inconceivable that the author of the Republic and the Laws dreamt that either polity as a whole would ever come into existence. His plans of suppressing all undesirable poetry, arranging community of women, and enabling children to see battles, are the fancy-sketches of a dilettant. He had failed completely as a statesman in practice; as a schemer he does not even posit the first conditions of success.
As to his practical failure see the story of his and his pupils’ attempts at Syracuse (Grote, History, ix, 37–123). The younger Dionysios, whom they had vainly attempted to make a model ruler, seems to have been an audacious unbeliever to the extent of plundering the temple of Persephone at Lokris, one of Jupiter in the Peloponnesos, and one of Æsculapius at Epidaurus. Clement of Alexandria (Protrept. c. 4) states that he plundered “the statue of Jupiter in Sicily.” Cicero (De nat. Deorum, iii, 33, 34) and Valerius Maximus (i, 1) tell the story of the elder Dionysios; but of him it cannot be true. In his day the [176]plunder of the temples of Dêmêtêr and Persephone in Sicily by the Carthaginians was counted a deadly sin. See Freeman, History of Sicily, iv, 125–47, and Story of Sicily, pp. 176–80. In Cicero’s dialogue it is noted that after all his impieties Dionysios [the elder, of whom the stories are mistakenly told] died in his bed. Athenæus, however, citing the biographer Klearchos, tells that the younger Dionysios, after being reduced to the rôle of a begging priest of Kybelê, ended his life very miserably (xii, 60).
Nonetheless, the prescription of intolerance in the Laws279 classes Plato finally on the side of fanaticism, and, indeed, ranks him with the most sinister figures on that side, since his earlier writing shows that he would be willing to punish men alike for repeating stories which they believed, and for rejecting what he knew to be untruths.280 By his own late doctrine he vindicated the slayers of his own friend. His psychology is as strange as that of Aristophanes, but strange with a difference. He seems to have practised “the will to believe” till he grew to be a fanatic on the plane of the most ignorant of orthodox Athenians; and after all that science had done to enlighten men on that natural order the misconceiving of which had been the foundation of their creeds, he inveighs furiously in his old age against the impiety of those who dared to doubt that the sun and moon and stars were deities, as every nurse taught her charges.281 And when all is said, his Gods satisfy no need of the intelligence; for he insists that they only partially rule the world, sending the few good things, but not the many evil282—save insofar as evil may be a beneficent penalty and discipline. At the same time, while advising the imprisonment or execution of heretics who did not believe in the Gods, Plato regarded with even greater detestation the man who taught that they could be persuaded or propitiated by individual prayer and sacrifice.283 Thus he would have struck alike at the freethinking few and at the multitude who held by the general religious beliefs of Greece, dealing damnation on all save his own clique, in a way that would have made Torquemada blench.284 In the face of such teaching as this, it may well be said that “Greek philosophy made incomparably greater advances in the earlier polemic period [of the Ionians] than after its friendly return to [177]the poetry of Homer and Hesiod”285—that is, to their polytheistic basis. It is to be said for Plato, finally, that his embitterment at the downward course of things in Athens is a quite intelligible source for his own intellectual decadence: a very similar spectacle being seen in the case of our own great modern Utopist, Sir Thomas More. But Plato’s own writing bears witness that among the unbelievers against whom he declaimed there were wise and blameless citizens;286 while in the act of seeking to lay a religious basis for a good society he admitted the fundamental immorality of the religious basis of the whole of past Greek life.
3. Aristotle [384–322], like Sokrates, albeit in a very different way, rendered rather an indirect than a direct service to Freethought. Where Sokrates gave the critical or dialectic method or habit, “a process of eternal value and of universal application,”287 Aristotle supplied the great inspiration of system, partly correcting the Sokratic dogmatism on the possibilities of science by endless observation and speculation, though himself falling into scientific dogmatism only too often. That he was an unbeliever in the popular and Platonic religion is clear. Apart from the general rationalistic tenor of his works,288 there was a current understanding that the Peripatetic school denied the utility of prayer and sacrifice;289 and though the essentially partisan attempt of the anti-Macedonian party to impeach him for impiety may have turned largely on his hyperbolic hymn to his dead friend Hermeias (who was a eunuch, and as such held peculiarly unworthy of being addressed as on a level with semi-divine heroes),290 it could hardly have been undertaken at all unless he had given solider pretexts. The threatened prosecution he avoided by leaving the city, dying shortly afterwards. Siding as he did with the Macedonian faction, he had put himself out of touch with the democratic instincts of the Athenians, and so doubly failed to affect their thinking. But nonetheless the attack upon him by the democrats was a political stratagem. The prosecution for blasphemy had now become a recognized weapon in politics for all who had more piety than principle, and perhaps for some who had neither. And Aristotle, well aware of the temper of the [178]population around him, had on the whole been so guarded in his utterance that a fantastic pretext had to be fastened on for his undoing.
Prof. Bain (Practical Essays, p. 273), citing Grote’s remark on the “cautious prose compositions of Aristotle,” comments thus: “That is to say, the execution of Sokrates was always before his eyes; he had to pare his expressions so as not to give offence to Athenian orthodoxy. We can never know the full bearings of such a disturbing force. The editors of Aristotle complain of the corruption of his text: a far worse corruption lies behind. In Greece Sokrates alone had the courage of his opinions. While his views as to a future life, for example, are plain and frank, the real opinion of Aristotle on the question is an insoluble problem.” (See, however, the passage in the Metaphysics cited below.)
The opinion of Grote and Bain as to Aristotle’s caution is fully coincided in by Lange, who writes (Gesch. des Mater. i, 63): “More conservative than Plato and Sokrates, Aristotle everywhere seeks to attach himself as closely as possible to tradition, to popular notions, to the ideas embodied in common speech, and his ethical postulates diverge as little as may be from the customary morals and laws of Greek States. He has therefore been at all times the favourite philosopher of conservative schools and movements.”
It is clear, nevertheless, if we can be sure of his writings, that he was a monotheist, but a monotheist with no practical religion. “Excluding such a thing as divine interference with Nature, his theology, of course, excludes the possibility of revelation, inspiration, miracles, and grace.”291 In a passage in the Metaphysics, after elaborating his monistic conception of Nature, he dismisses in one or two terse sentences the whole current religion as a mass of myth framed to persuade the multitude, in the interest of law and order.292 His influence must thus have been to some extent, at least, favourable to rational science, though unhappily his own science is too often a blundering reaction against the surmises of earlier thinkers with a greater gift of intuition than he, who was rather a methodizer than a discoverer.293 What was worst in his thinking was its tendency to [179]apriorism, which made it in a later age so adaptable to the purposes of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus his doctrines of the absolute levity of fire and of nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum set up a hypnotizing verbalism, and his dictum that the earth is the centre of the universe was fatally helpful to Christian obscurantism. For the rest, while guiltless of Plato’s fanaticism, he had no scheme of reform whatever, and was as far as any other Greek from the thought of raising the mass by instruction. His own science, indeed, was not progressive, save as regards his collation of facts in biology; and his political ideals were rather reactionary; his clear perception of the nature of the population problem leaving him in the earlier attitude of Malthus, and his lack of sympathetic energy making him a defender of slavery when other men had condemned it.294 He was in some aspects the greatest brain of the ancient world; and he left it, at the close of the great Grecian period, without much faith in man, while positing for the modern world its vaguest conception of Deity. Plato and Aristotle between them had reduced the ancient God-idea to a thin abstraction. Plato would not have it that God was the author of evil, thus leaving evil unaccounted for save by sorcery. Aristotle’s God does nothing at all, existing merely as a potentiality of thought. And yet upon those positions were to be founded the theisms of the later world. Plato had not striven, and Aristotle had failed, to create an adequate basis for thought in real science; and the world gravitated back to religion.
[In previous editions I remarked that “the lack of fresh science, which was the proximate cause of the stagnation of Greek thought, has been explained like other things as a result of race qualities: ‘the Athenians,’ says Mr. Benn (The Greek Philosophers, i, 42), ‘had no genius for natural science: none of them were ever distinguished as savans.... It was, they thought, a miserable trifling [and] waste of time.... Pericles, indeed, thought differently....’ On the other hand, Lange decides (i, 6) “that with the freedom and boldness of the Hellenic spirit was combined ... the talent for scientific deduction. These contrary views,” I observed, “seem alike arbitrary. If Mr. Benn means that other Hellenes had what the Athenians lacked, the answer is that only special social conditions could have set up such a difference, and that it could not be innate, but must be a mere matter of usage.” Mr. Benn has explained to me that he does not dissent from this view, and that I had not rightly gathered his from the passage I quoted. In his later work, The Philosophy of Greece [180]considered in relation to the character and history of its people (1898), he has pointed out how, in the period of Hippias and Prodikos, “at Athens in particular young men threw themselves with ardour into the investigation of” problems of cosmography, astronomy, meteorology, and comparative anatomy (p. 138). The hindering forces were Athenian bigotry (pp. 113–14, 171) and the mischievous influence of Sokrates (pp. 165, 173).
Speaking broadly, we may say that the Chaldeans were forward in astronomy because their climate favoured it to begin with, and religion and their superstitions did so later. Hippokrates of Kos became a great physician because, with natural capacity, he had the opportunity to compare many practices. The Athenians failed to carry on the sciences, not because the faculty or the taste was lacking among them, but because their political and artistic interests, for one thing, preoccupied them—e.g., Sokrates and Plato; and because, for another, their popular religion, popularly supported, menaced the students of physics. But the Ionians, who had savans, failed equally to progress after the Alexandrian period; the explanation being again not stoppage of faculty, but the advent of conditions unfavourable to the old intellectual life, which in any case, as we saw, had been first set up by Babylonian contacts. (Compare, on the ethnological theorem of Cousin, G. Bréton, Essai sur la poésie philos. en Grèce, p. 10.) On the other hand, Lange’s theory of gifts “innate” in the Hellenic mind in general is the old racial fallacy. Potentialities are “innate” in all populations, according to their culture stage, and it was their total environment that specialized the Greeks as a community.]
The overthrow of the “free” political life of Athens was followed by a certain increase in intellectual activity, the result of throwing back the remaining store of energy on the life of the mind. By this time an almost open unbelief as to the current tales concerning the Gods would seem to have become general among educated people, the withdrawal of the old risk of impeachment by political factions being so far favourable to outspokenness. It is on record that the historian Ephoros (of Cumæ in Æolia: fl. 350 B.C.), who was a pupil of Isocrates, openly hinted in his work at his disbelief in the oracle of Apollo, and in fabulous traditions generally.295 In other directions there were similar signs of freethought. The new schools of philosophy founded by Zeno the Stoic (fl. 280: d. 263 or 259) [181]and Epicurus (341–270), whatever their defects, compare not ill with those of Plato and Aristotle, exhibiting greater ethical sanity and sincerity if less metaphysical subtlety. Of metaphysics there had been enough for the age: what it needed was a rational philosophy of life. But the loss of political freedom, although thus for a time turned to account, was fatal to continuous progress. The first great thinkers had all been free men in a politically free environment: the atmosphere of cowed subjection, especially after the advent of the Romans, could not breed their like; and originative energy of the higher order soon disappeared. Sane as was the moral philosophy of Epicurus, and austere as was that of Zeno, they are alike static or quietist,296 the codes of a society seeking a regulating and sustaining principle rather than hopeful of new achievement or new truth. And the universal skepticism of Pyrrho has the same effect of suggesting that what is wanted is not progress, but balance. It is significant that he, who carried the Sokratic profession of Nescience to the typical extreme of doctrinal Nihilism, was made high-priest of his native town of Elis, and had statues erected in his honour.297
Considered as freethinkers, all three men tell at once of the critical and of the reactionary work done by the previous age. Pyrrho, the universal doubter, appears to have taken for granted, with the whole of his followers, such propositions as that some animals (not insects) are produced by parthenogenesis, that some live in the fire, and that the legend of the Phœnix is true.298 Such credences stood for the arrest of biological science in the Sokratic age, with Aristotle, so often mistakenly, at work; while, on the other hand, the Sokratic skepticism visibly motives the play of systematic doubt on the dogmas men had learned to question. Zeno, again, was substantially a monotheist; Epicurus, adopting but not greatly developing the science of Demokritos,299 turned the Gods into a far-off band of glorious spectres, untroubled by human needs, dwelling for ever in immortal calm, neither ruling nor caring [182]to rule the world of men.300 In coming to this surprising compromise, Epicurus, indeed, probably did not carry with him the whole intelligence even of his own school. His friend, the second Metrodoros of Lampsakos, seems to have been the most stringent of all the censors of Homer, wholly ignoring his namesake’s attempts to clear the bard of impiety. “He even advised men not to be ashamed to confess their utter ignorance of Homer, to the extent of not knowing whether Hector was a Greek or a Trojan.”301 Such austerity towards myths can hardly have been compatible with the acceptance of the residuum of Epicurus. That, however, became the standing creed of the sect, and a fruitful theme of derision to its opponents. Doubtless the comfort of avoiding direct conflict with the popular beliefs had a good deal to do with the acceptance of the doctrine.
This strange retention of the theorem of the existence of anthropomorphic Gods, with a flat denial that they did anything in the universe, might be termed the great peculiarity of average ancient rationalism, were it not that what makes it at all intelligible for us is just the similar practice of modern non-Christian theists. The Gods of antiquity were non-creative, but strivers and meddlers and answerers of prayer; and ancient rationalism relieved them of their striving and meddling, leaving them no active or governing function whatever, but for the most part cherishing their phantasms. The God of modern Christendom had been at once a creator and a governor, ruling, meddling, punishing, rewarding, and hearing prayer; and modern theism, unable to take the atheistic or agnostic plunge, relieves him of all interference in things human or cosmic, but retains him as a creative abstraction who somehow set up “law,” whether or not he made all things out of nothing. The psychological process in the two cases seems to be the same—an erection of æsthetic habit into a philosophic dogma, and an accommodation of phrase to popular prejudice.
Whatever may have been the logical and psychological crudities of Epicureanism, however, it counted for much as a deliverance of men from superstitious fears; and nothing is more remarkable in the history of ancient philosophy than the affectionate reverence paid to the founder’s memory302 on this score through whole centuries. The powerful Lucretius sounds his highest note of praise in telling [183]how this Greek had first of all men freed human life from the crashing load of religion, daring to pass the flaming ramparts of the world, and by his victory putting men on an equality with heaven.303 The laughter-loving Lucian two hundred years later grows gravely eloquent on the same theme.304 And for generations the effect of the Epicurean check on orthodoxy is seen in the whole intellectual life of the Greek world, already predisposed in that direction.305 The new schools of the Cynics and the Cyrenaics had alike shown the influence in their perfect freedom from all religious preoccupation, when they were not flatly dissenting from the popular beliefs. Antisthenes, the founder of the former school (fl. 400 B.C.), though a pupil of Sokrates, had been explicitly anti-polytheistic, and an opponent of anthropomorphism.306 Aristippos of Cyrene, also a pupil of Socrates, who a little later founded the Hedonic or Cyrenaic sect, seems to have put theology entirely aside. One of the later adherents of the school, Theodoros, was like Diagoras labelled “the Atheist”307 by reason of the directness of his opposition to religion; and in the Rome of Cicero he and Diagoras are the notorious atheists of history.308 To Theodoros, who had a large following, is attributed an influence over the thought of Epicurus,309 who, however, took the safer position of a verbal theism. The atheist is said to have been menaced by Athenian law in the time of Demetrius Phalereus, who protected him; and there is even a story that he was condemned to drink hemlock;310 but he was not of the type that meets martyrdom, though he might go far to provoke it.311 Roaming from court to court, he seems never to have stooped to flatter any of his entertainers. “You seem to me,” said the steward of Lysimachos of Thrace to him on one occasion, “to be the only man who ignores both Gods and kings.”312
In the same age the same freethinking temper is seen in Stilpo of Megara (fl. 307), of the school of Euclides, who is said to have [184]been brought before the Areopagus for the offence of saying that the Pheidian statue of Athênê was “not a God,” and to have met the charge with the jest that she was in reality not a God but a Goddess; whereupon he was exiled.313 The stories told of him make it clear that he was an unbeliever, usually careful not to betray himself. Euclides, too, with his optimistic pantheism, was clearly a heretic; though his doctrine that evil is non-ens314 later became the creed of some Christians. Yet another professed atheist was the witty Bion of Borysthenes, pupil of Theodoros, of whom it is told, in a fashion familiar to our own time, that in sickness he grew pious through fear.315 Among his positions was a protest or rather satire against the doctrine that the Gods punished children for the crimes of their fathers.316 In the other schools, Speusippos (fl. 343), the nephew of Plato, leant to monotheism;317 Strato of Lampsakos, the Peripatetic (fl. 290), called “the Naturalist,” taught sheer pantheism, anticipating Laplace in declaring that he had no need of the action of the Gods to account for the making of the world;318 Dikaiarchos (fl. 326–287), another disciple of Aristotle, denied the existence of separate souls, and the possibility of foretelling the future;319 and Aristo and Cleanthes, disciples of Zeno, varied likewise in the direction of pantheism; the latter’s monotheism, as expressed in his famous hymn, being one of several doctrines ascribed to him.320
Contemporary with Epicurus and Zeno and Pyrrho, too, was Evêmeros (Euhemerus), whose peculiar propaganda against Godism seems to imply theoretic atheism. As an atheist he was vilified in a manner familiar to modern ears, the Alexandrian poet Callimachus labelling him an “arrogant old man vomiting impious books.”321 His lost work, of which only a few extracts remain, undertook to prove that all the Gods had been simply famous men, deified after death; the proof, however, being by way of a fiction about old inscriptions found in an imaginary island.322 As above noted,323 the idea may have been borrowed from skeptical Phoenicians, the principle having already been monotheistically applied by the Bible-making Jews,324 though, on the other hand, it had been [185]artistically and to all appearance uncritically acted on in the Homeric epopees. It may or may not then have been by way of deliberate or reasoning Evêmerism that certain early Greek and Roman deities were transformed, as we have seen, into heroes or hetairai.325 In any case, the principle seems to have had considerable vogue in the later Hellenistic world; but with the effect rather of paving the way for new cults than of setting up scientific rationalism in place of the old ones. Quite a number of writers like Palaiphatos, without going so far as Evêmeros, sought to reduce myths to natural possibilities and events, by way of mediating between the credulous and the incredulous.326 Their method is mostly the naïf one revived by the Abbé Banier in the eighteenth century of reducing marvels to verbal misconceptions. Thus for Palaiphatos the myth of Kerberos came from the facts that the city Trikarenos was commonly spoken of as a beautiful and great dog; and that Geryon, who lived there, had great dogs called Kerberoi; Actæon was “devoured by his dogs” in the sense that he neglected his affairs and wasted his time in hunting; the Amazons were shaved men, clad as were the women in Thrace, and so on.327 Palaiphatos and the Herakleitos who also wrote De Incredibilibus agree that Pasiphae’s bull was a man named Tauros; and the latter writer similarly explains that Scylla was a beautiful hetaira with avaricious hangers-on, and that the harpies were ladies of the same profession. If the method seems childish, it is to be remembered that as regards the explanation of supernatural events it was adhered to by German theologians of a century ago; and that its credulity in incredulity is still to be seen in the current view that every narrative in the sacred books is to be taken as necessarily standing for a fact of some kind.
One of the inferrible effects of the Evêmerist method was to facilitate for the time the adoption of the Egyptian and eastern usage of deifying kings. It has been plausibly argued that this practice stands not so much for superstition as for skepticism, its opponents being precisely the orthodox believers, and its promoters those who had learned to doubt the actuality of the traditional Gods. Evêmerism would clinch such a tendency; and it is noteworthy that Evêmeros lived at the court of Kassander (319–296 B.C.) in a period in which every remaining member of the family of the deified Alexander had perished, mostly by violence; while the contemporary [186]Ptolemy I of Egypt received the title of Sotêr, “Saviour,” from the people of Rhodes.328 It is to be observed, however, that while in the next generation Antiochus I of Syria received the same title, and his successor Antiochus II that of Theos, “God,” the usage passes away; Ptolemy III being named merely Evergetês, “the Benefactor” (of the priests), and even Antiochus III only “the Great.” Superstition was not to be ousted by a political exploitation of its machinery.329
In Athens the democracy, restored in a subordinate form by Kassander’s opponent, Demetrius Poliorkêtes (307 B.C.), actually tried to put down the philosophic schools, all of which, but the Aristotelian in particular, were anti-democratic, and doubtless also comparatively irreligious. Epicurus and some of his antagonists were exiled within a year of his opening his school (306 B.C.); but the law was repealed in the following year.330 Theophrastos, the head of the Aristotelian school, was indicted in the old fashion for impiety, which seems to have consisted in denouncing animal sacrifice.331 These repressive attempts, however, failed; and no others followed at Athens in that era; though in the next century the Epicureans seem to have been expelled from Lythos in Crete and from Messenê in the Peloponnesos, nominally for their atheism, in reality probably on political grounds.332 Thus Zeno was free to publish a treatise in which, besides far out-going Plato in schemes for dragooning the citizens into an ideal life, he proposed a State without temples or statues of the Gods or law courts or gymnasia.333 In the same age there is trace of “an interesting case of rationalism even in the Delphic oracle.”334 The people of the island of Astypalaia, plagued by hares or rabbits, solemnly consulted the oracle, which briefly advised them to keep dogs and take to hunting. About the same time we find Lachares, temporarily despot at Athens, plundering the shrine of Pallas of its gold.335 Even in the general public there must have been a strain of surviving rationalism; for among the fragments of Menander (fl. 300), who, in general, seems to have [187]leant to a well-bred orthodoxy,336 there are some speeches savouring of skepticism and pantheism.337
It was in keeping with this general but mostly placid and non-polemic latitudinarianism that the New Academy, the second birth, or rather transformation, of the Platonic school, in the hands of Arkesilaos and the great Carneades (213–129), and later of the Carthaginian Clitomachos, should be marked by that species of skepticism thence called Academic—a skepticism which exposed the doubtfulness of current religious beliefs without going the Pyrrhonian length of denying that any beliefs could be proved, or even denying the existence of the Gods.
For the arguments of Carneades against the Stoic doctrine of immortality see Cicero, De natura Deorum, iii, 12, 17; and for his argument against theism see Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. ix, 172, 183. Mr. Benn pronounces this criticism of theology “the most destructive that has ever appeared, the armoury whence religious skepticism ever since has been supplied” (The Philosophy of Greece, etc., p. 258). This seems an over-statement. But it is just to say, as does Mr. Whittaker (Priests, Philosophers, and Prophets, 1911, p. 60; cp. p. 86), that “there has never been a more drastic attack than that of Carneades, which furnished Cicero with the materials for his second book, On Divination”; and, as does Prof. Martha (Études Morales sur l’antiquité, 1889, p. 77), that no philosophic or religious school has been able to ignore the problems which Carneades raised.
As against the essentially uncritical Stoics, the criticism of Carneades is sane and sound; and he has been termed by judicious moderns “the greatest skeptical mind of antiquity”338 and “the Bayle of Antiquity”;339 though he seems to have written nothing.340 There is such a concurrence of testimony as to the victorious power of his oratory and the invincible skill of his dialectic341 that he must be reckoned one of the great intellectual and rationalizing forces of his day, triumphing as he did in the two diverse arenas of Greece and Rome. His disciple and successor Clitomachos said of him, with Cicero’s assent, that he had achieved a labour of Hercules “in liberating our souls as it were of a fierce monster, credulity, conjecture, rash belief.”342 He was, in short, a mighty antagonist of thoughtless beliefs, clearing the ground for a rational life; and the [188]fact that he was chosen with Diogenes the Peripatetic and Critolaos the Stoic to go to Rome to plead the cause of ruined Athens, mulcted in an enormous fine, proved that he was held in high honour at home. Athens, in short, was not at this stage “too superstitious.” Unreasoning faith was largely discredited by philosophy.
On this basis, in a healthy environment, science and energy might have reared a constructive rationalism; and for a time astronomy, in the hands of Aristarchos of Samos (third century B.C.), Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the second keeper of the great Alexandrian library (2nd cent. B.C.), and above all of Hipparchos of Nikaia, who did most of his work in the island of Rhodes, was carried to a height of mastery which could not be maintained, and was re-attained only in modern times.343 Thus much could be accomplished by “endowment of research” as practised by the Ptolemies at Alexandria; and after science had declined with the decline of their polity, and still further under Roman rule, the new cosmopolitanism of the second century of the empire reverted to the principle of intelligent evocation, producing under the Antonines the “Second” School of Alexandria.
But the social conditions remained fundamentally bad; and the earlier greatness was never recovered. “History records not one astronomer of note in the three centuries between Hipparchos and Ptolemy”; and Ptolemy (fl. 140 C.E.) not only retrograded into astronomical error, but elaborated on oriental lines a baseless fabric of astrology.344 Other science mostly decayed likewise. The Greek world, already led to lower intellectual levels by the sudden ease and wealth opened up to it through the conquests of Alexander and the rule of his successors, was cast still lower by the Roman conquest. Pliny, extolling Hipparchos with little comprehension of his work, must needs pronounce him to have “dared a thing displeasing to God” in numbering the stars for posterity.345 In the air of imperialism, stirred by no other, original thought could not arise; and the mass of the Greek-speaking populations, rich and poor, gravitated to the level of the intellectual346 and emotional life of more or less well-fed slaves. In this society there rapidly [189]multiplied private religious associations—thiasoi, eranoi, orgeones—in which men and women, denied political life, found new bonds of union and grounds of division in cultivating worships, mostly oriental, which stimulated the religious sense and sentiment.347
Such was the soil in which Christianity took root and flourished; while philosophy, after the freethinking epoch following on the fall of Athenian power, gradually reverted to one or other form of mystical theism or theosophy, of which the most successful was the Neo-Platonism of Alexandria.348 When the theosophic Julian rejoiced that Epicureanism had disappeared,349 he was exulting in a symptom of the intellectual decline that made possible the triumph of the faith he most opposed. Christianity furthered a decadence thus begun under the auspices of pagan imperialism; and “the fifth century of the Christian era witnessed an almost total extinction of the sciences in Alexandria”350—an admission which disposes of the dispute as to the guilt of the Arabs in destroying the great library.
Here and there, through the centuries, the old intellectual flame burns whitely enough: the noble figure of Epictetus in the first century of the new era, and that of the brilliant Lucian in the second, in their widely different ways remind us that the evolved faculty was still there if the circumstances had been such as to evoke it. Menippos in the first century B.C. had played a similar part to that of Lucian, in whose freethinking dialogues he so often figures; but with less of subtlety and intellectuality. Lucian’s was indeed a mind of the rarest lucidity; and the argumentation of his dialogue Zeus Tragædos covers every one of the main aspects of the theistic problem. There is no dubiety as to his atheistic conclusion, which is smilingly implicit in the reminder he puts in the mouth of Hermes, that, though a few men may adopt the atheistic view, “there will always be plenty of others who think the contrary—the majority of the Greeks, the ignorant many, the populace, and all the barbarians.” But the moral doctrine of Epictetus is one of endurance and resignation; and the almost unvarying raillery of Lucian, making mere perpetual sport of the now moribund Olympian Gods, was hardly better fitted than the all-round skepticism of the school of Sextus Empiricus to inspire positive and progressive thinking.
This latter school, described by Cicero as dispersed and extinct [190]in his day,351 appears to have been revived in the first century by Ænesidemos, who taught at Alexandria.352 It seems to have been through him in particular that the Pyrrhonic system took the clear-cut form in which it is presented at the close of the second century by the accomplished Sextus “Empiricus”—that is, the empirical (i.e., experiential) physician,353 who lived at Alexandria and Athens (fl. 175–205 C.E.). As a whole, the school continued to discredit dogmatism without promoting knowledge. Sextus, it is true, strikes acutely and systematically at ill-founded beliefs, and so makes for reason;354 but, like the whole Pyrrhonian school, he has no idea of a method which shall reach sounder conclusions. As the Stoics had inculcated the control of the passions as such, so the skeptics undertook to make men rise above the prejudices and presuppositions which swayed them no less blindly than ever did their passions. But Sextus follows a purely skeptical method, never rising from the destruction of false beliefs to the establishment of true. His aim is ataraxia, a philosophic calm of non-belief in any dogmatic affirmation beyond the positing of phenomena as such; and while such an attitude is beneficently exclusive of all fanaticism, it unfortunately never makes any impression on the more intolerant fanatic, who is shaken only by giving him a measure of critical truth in place of his error. And as Sextus addressed himself to the students of philosophy, not to the simple believers in the Gods, he had no wide influence.355 Avowedly accepting the normal view of moral obligations while rejecting dogmatic theories of their basis, the doctrine of the strict skeptics had the effect, from Pyrrho onwards, of giving the same acceptance to the common religion, merely rejecting the philosophic pretence of justifying it. Taken by themselves, the arguments against current theism in the third book of the Hypotyposes356 are unanswerable; but, when bracketed with other arguments against the ordinary belief in causation, they had the effect of leaving theism on a par with that belief. Against religious beliefs in particular, therefore, they had no wide destructive effect.
Lucian, again, thought soundly and sincerely on life; his praise of the men whose memories he respected, as Epicurus and Demonax (if the Life of Demonax attributed to him be really his), is grave and heartfelt; and his ridicule of the discredited Gods was perfectly right [191]so far as it went. It is certain that the unbelievers and the skeptics alike held their own with the believers in the matter of right living.357 In the period of declining pagan belief, the maxim that superstition was a good thing for the people must have wrought a quantity and a kind of corruption that no amount of ridicule of religion could ever approach. Polybius (fl. 150 B.C.) agrees with his complacent Roman masters that their greatness is largely due to the carefully cultivated superstition of their populace, and charges with rashness and folly those who would uproot the growth;358 and Strabo, writing under Tiberius—unless it be a later interpolator of his work—confidently lays down the same principle of governmental deceit,359 though in an apparently quite genuine passage he vehemently protests the incredibility of the traditional tales about Apollo.360 So far had the doctrine evolved since Plato preached it. But to countervail it there needed more than a ridicule which after all reached only the class who had already cast off the beliefs derided, leaving the multitude unenlightened. The lack of the needed machinery of enlightenment was, of course, part of the general failure of the Græco-Roman civilization; and no one man’s efforts could have availed, even if any man of the age could have grasped the whole situation. Rather the principle of esoteric enlightenment, the ideal of secret knowledge, took stronger hold as the mass grew more and more comprehensively superstitious. Even at the beginning of the Christian era the view that Homer’s deities were allegorical beings was freshly propounded in the writings of Herakleides and Cornutus (Phornutus); but it served only as a kind of mystical Gnosis, on all fours with Christian Gnosticism, and was finally taken up by Neo-Platonists, who were no nearer rationalism for adopting it.361
So with the rationalism to which we have so many uneasy or hostile allusions in Plutarch. We find him resenting the scoffs of Epicureans at the doctrine of Providence, and recoiling from the “abyss of impiety”362 opened up by those who say that “Aphrodite is simply desire, and Hermes eloquence, and the Muses the arts and [192]sciences, and Athênê wisdom, and Dionysos merely wine, Hephaistos fire, and Dêmêtêr corn”;363 and in his essay On Superstition he regretfully recognizes the existence of many rational atheists, confessing that their state of mind is better than that of the superstitious who abound around him, with their “impure purifications and unclean cleansings,” their barbaric rites, and their evil Gods. But the unbelievers, with their keen contempt for popular folly, availed as little against it as Plutarch himself, with his doctrine of a just mean. The one effectual cure would have been widened knowledge; and of such an evolution the social conditions did not permit.
To return to a state of admiration for the total outcome of Greek thought, then, it is necessary to pass from the standpoint of simple analysis to that of comparison. It is in contrast with the relatively slight achievement of the other ancient civilizations that the Greek, at its height, still stands out for posterity as a wonderful growth. That which, tried by the test of ideals, is as a whole only one more tragic chapter in the record of human frustration, yet contains within it light and leading as well as warning; and for long ages it was as a lost Paradise to a darkened world. It has been not untruly said that “the Greek spirit is immortal, because it was free”:364 free not as science can now conceive freedom, but in contrast with the spiritual bondage of Jewry and Egypt, the half-barbaric tradition of imperial Babylon, and the short flight of mental life in Rome. Above all, it was ever in virtue of the freedom that the high things were accomplished; and it was ever the falling away from freedom, the tyranny either of common ignorance or of mindless power, that wrought decadence. There is a danger, too, of injustice in comparing Athens with later States. When a high authority pronounces that “the religious views of the Demos were of the narrowest kind,”365 he is not to be gainsaid; but the further verdict that “hardly any people has sinned more heavily against the liberty of science” is unduly lenient to Christian civilization. The heaviest sins of that against science, indeed, lie at the door of the Catholic Church; but to make that an exoneration of the modern “peoples” as against the ancient would be to load the scales. And even apart from the Catholic Church, which practically suppressed all science for a thousand years, the attitude of Protestant leaders and Protestant peoples, from Luther down to the second half of the [193]nineteenth century, has been one of hatred and persecution towards all science that clashed with the sacred books.366 In the Greek world there was more scientific discussion in the three hundred years down to Epicurus than took place in the whole of Christian Europe in thirteen hundred; and the amount of actual violence used towards innovators in the pagan period, though lamentable enough, was trifling in comparison with that recorded in Christian history, to say nothing of the frightful annals of witch-burning, to which there is no parallel in civilized heathen history. The critic, too, goes on to admit that, while “Sokrates, Anaxagoras, and Aristotle fell victims in different degrees to the bigotry of the populace,” “of course their offence was political rather than religious. They were condemned not as heretics, but as innovators in the state religion.” And, as we have seen, all three of the men named taught in freedom for many years till political faction turned popular bigotry against them. The true measure of Athenian narrowness is not to be reached, therefore, without keeping in view the long series of modern outrages and maledictions against the makers and introducers of new machinery, and the multitude of such episodes as the treatment of Priestley in Christian Birmingham, little more than a century ago. On a full comparison the Greeks come out not ill.
It was, in fact, impossible that the Greeks should either stifle or persecute science or freethought as it was either stifled or persecuted by ancient Jews (who had almost no science by reason of their theology) or by modern Christians, simply because the Greeks had no anti-scientific hieratic literature. It remains profoundly significant for science that the ancient civilization which on the smallest area evolved the most admirable life, which most completely transcended all the sources from which it originally drew, and left a record by which men are still charmed and taught, was a civilization as nearly as might be without Sacred Books, without an organized priesthood, and with the largest measure of democratic freedom that the ancient world ever saw. [194]
1 Cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 205, 207, 212. ↑
2 Cp. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 533. ↑
3 Cp. K. O. Müller, Literature of Ancient Greece, ed. 1847, p. 77. ↑
4 Duncker, Gesch. des Alterth. 2 Aufl. iii, 209–10, 252–54, 319 sq.; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterth. ii, 181, 365, 369, 377, 380, 535 (see also ii, 100, 102, 105, 106, 115 note, etc.); W. Christ, Gesch. der griech. Lit. 3te Aufl. p. 12; Gruppe, Die griech. Culte und Mythen, 1887, p. 165 sq. ↑
5 E. Curtius, Griech. Gesch. i, 28, 29, 35, 40, 41, 101, 203, etc.; Meyer, ii, 369. ↑
6 See the able and learned essay of S. Reinach, Le Mirage Orientate, reprinted from L’Anthropologie, 1893. I do not find that its arguments affect any of the positions here taken up. See pp. 40–41. ↑
7 Meyer, ii. 369; Benn, The Philosophy of Greece, 1898, p. 42. ↑
8 Cp. Bury, History of Greece, ed. 1906, pp. vi, 10, 27, 32–34, 40, etc.; Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, 1907, ch. ix; Maisch, Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. §§ 8, 9, 10, 60; H. R. Hall, The Oldest Civilization of Greece, 1901, pp. 31, 32. ↑
9 Cp. K. O. Müller, Hist. of the Doric Race, Eng. tr. 1830, i, 8–10; Busolt, Griech. Gesch. 1885, i, 33; Grote, Hist. of Greece, 10-vol. ed. 1888, iii, 3–5, 35–44; Duncker, iii, 136, n.; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 299–310 (§§ 250–58); E. Curtius, i, 29; Schömann, Griech. Alterthümer, as cited, i, 2–3, 89; Burrows, ch. ix. ↑
10 Cp. Meyer, ii, 97; and his art. “Baal” in Roscher’s Ausführl. Lex. Mythol. i, 2867. ↑
11 The fallacy of this tradition, as commonly put, was well shown by Renouvier long ago—Manuel de philosophie ancienne, 1844, i, 3–13. Cp. Ritter, as cited below. ↑
12 Cp. on one side, Ritter, Hist. of Anc. Philos. Eng. tr. i, 151; Renan, Études d’hist. religieuse, pp. 47–48; Zeller, Hist. of Greek Philos. Eng. tr. 1881, i, 43–49; and on the other, Ueberweg, Hist. of Philos. Eng. tr. i, 31, and the weighty criticism of Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 126–27 (Eng. tr. i, 9, note 5). ↑
13 Cp. Curtius, i, 125; Bury, introd. and ch. i. ↑
15 As to the primary mixture of “Pelasgians” and Hellenes, cp. Busolt, i, 27–32; Curtius, i, 27; Schömann, i, 3–4; Thirlwall, Hist. of Greece, ed. 1839, i, 51–52, 116. K. O. Müller (Doric Race, Eng. tr. i, 10) and Thirlwall, who follows him (i, 45–47), decide that the Thracians cannot have been very different from the Hellenes in dialect, else they could not have influenced the latter as they did. This position is clearly untenable, whatever may have been the ethnological facts. It would entirely negate the possibility of reaction between Greeks, Kelts, Egyptians, Semites, Romans, Persians, and Hindus. ↑
16 Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, 1912, p. 59. ↑
17 Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. ii, 583. ↑
18 The question is discussed at some length in the author’s Evolution of States, 1912. ↑
19 Lit. of Anc. Greece, pp. 41–47. The discussion of the Homeric problem is, of course, alien to the present inquiry. ↑
20 Introd. to Scientif. Mythol. Eng. tr. pp. 180, 181, 291. Cp. Curtius, i, 126. ↑
21 Cp. Curtius, i, 107, as to the absence in Homer of any distinction between Greeks and barbarians; and Grote, 10-vol. ed. 1888, iii, 37–38, as to the same feature in Archilochos. ↑
22 Duncker, Gesch. des Alt., as cited, iii. 209–10; pp. 257, 319 sq. Cp. K. O. Müller, as last cited, pp. 181, 193; Curtius, i, 43–49, 53, 54, 107, 365, 373, 377, etc.; Grote, iii, 39–41; and Meyer, ii, 104. ↑
23 Duncker, iii, 214; Curtius, i, 155, 121; Grote, iii, 279–80. ↑
24 Busolt, Griech. Gesch. 1885, i, 171–72. Cp. pp. 32–34; and Curtius, i, 42. ↑
25 On the general question cp. Gruppe, Die griechischen Culte und Mythen, pp. 151 ff., 157, 158 ff., 656 ff., 672 ff. ↑
26 Preller, Griech. Mythol. 2 Aufl. i, 260; Tiele, Outlines, p. 211; R. Brown, Jr., Semit. Influ. in Hellenic Mythol. 1898, p. 130; Murray, Hist. of Anc. Greek Lit. p. 35; H. R. Hall, Oldest Civilization of Greece, 1901, p. 290. ↑
27 See Tiele, Outlines, pp. 210, 212. Cp., again, Curtius, Griech. Gesch. i, 95, as to the probability that the “twelve Gods” were adjusted to the confederations of twelve cities; and again p. 126. ↑
28 “Even the title ‘king’ (Αναξ) seems to have been borrowed by the Greek from Phrygian.... It is expressly recorded that τύραννος is a Lydian word. Βασιλεύς (‘king’) resists all attempts to explain it as a purely Greek formation, and the termination assimilates it to certain Phrygian words.” (Prof. Ramsay, in Encyc. Brit. art. Phrygia). In this connection note the number of names containing Anax (Anaximenes, Anaximandros, Anaxagoras, etc.) among the Ionian Greeks. ↑
30 It is now agreed that this is merely a guess. The document, further, has been redacted and interpolated. ↑
31 Prehist. Antiq. of the Aryan Peoples, Eng. tr. p. 423. Wilamowitz holds that the verses Od. xi, 566–631, are interpolations made later than 600 B.C. ↑
32 Tiele, Outlines, p. 209; Preller, p. 263. ↑
33 Meyer says on the contrary (Gesch. des Alt. ii, 103, Anm.) that “Kronos is certainly a Greek figure”; but he cannot be supposed to dispute that the Greek Kronos cult is grafted on a Semitic one. ↑
34 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 54, 181. Cp. Cox, Mythol. of the Aryan Nations, p. 260, note. It has not, however, been noted in the discussions on Semelê that Semlje is the Slavic name for the Earth as Goddess. Ranke, History of Servia, Eng. tr. p. 43. ↑
36 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 367 sq.; Ancient Empires, p. 158. Note p. 387 in the Lectures as to the Assyrian influence, and p. 391 as to the Homeric notion in particular. Cp. W. Christ, Gesch. der griech. Literatur, § 68. ↑
37 It is unnecessary to examine here the view of Herodotos that many of the Greek cults were borrowed from Egypt. Herodotos reasoned from analogies, with no exact historical knowledge. But cp. Renouvier, Manuel, i, 67, as to probable Egyptian influence. ↑
38 Cp. Meyer, ii, §§ 453–60, as to the eastern initiative of Orphic theology. ↑
39 It is noteworthy that the traditional doctrine associated with the name of Orpheus included a similar materialistic theory of the beginning of things. Athenagoras, Apol. c. 19. Cp. Renouvier, Manuel de philos. anc. i, 69–72; and Meyer, ii, 743. ↑
40 Cp. Meyer, ii, 726. As to the oriental elements in Hesiod see further Gruppe, Die griechischen Culte und Mythen, 1887, pp. 577, 587, 589, 593. ↑
41 Cp. however, Bury (Hist. of Greece, pp. 6, 65), who assumes that the Greeks brought the hexameter with them to Hellas. Contrast Murray, Four Stages, p. 61. ↑
42 Mahaffy, History of Classical Greek Literature, 1880, i, 15. ↑
43 Id. p. 16. Cp. W. Christ, as cited, p. 79. ↑
48 In Od. xiv, 18, αντίθεοι means not “opposed to the Gods,” but “God-like,” in the ordinary Homeric sense of noble-looking or richly attired, as men in the presence of the Gods. Cp. vi, 241. Yet a Scholiast on a former passage took it in the sense of God-opposing. Clarke’s ed. in loc. Liddell and Scott give no use of ἄθεος, in the sense of denying the Gods, before Plato (Apol. 26 C. etc.), or in the sense of ungodly before Pindar (P. iv, 288) and Æschylus (Eumen. 151). For Sophocles it has the force of “God-forsaken”—Oedip. Tyr. 254 (245), 661 (640), 1360 (1326). Cp. Electra, 1181 (1162). But already before Plato we find the terms ἄπιστος and ἄθεος, “faithless” or “infidel” and “atheist,” used as terms of moral aspersion, quite in the Christian manner (Euripides, Helena, 1147), where there is no question of incredulity. ↑
49 Cp. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 2nd ed. i, 14–15. and cit. there from Professor Jebb. ↑
50 Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, ii, 724–27; Grote, as cited, i, 279–81. ↑
52 The tradition is confused. Stesichoros is said first to have aspersed Helen, whereupon she, as Goddess, struck him with blindness: thereafter he published a retractation, in which he declared that she had never been at Troy, an eidolon or phantasm taking her name; and on this his sight was restored. We can but divine through the legend the probable reality, the documents being lost. See Grote, as cited, for the details. For the eulogies of Stesichoros by ancient writers, see Girard, Sentiment religieux en Grèce, 1869, pp. 175–79. ↑
53 Cp. Meyer (1901), iii. § 244. ↑
56 He dedicated statues to Zeus, Apollo, and Hermes. Pausanias, ix, 16, 17. ↑
58 A ruler of Libyan stock, and so led by old Libyan connections to make friends with Greeks. He reigned over fifty years, and the Greek connection grew very close. Curtius, i, 344–45. Cp. Grote, i, 144–55. ↑
59 Grote, 10-vol. ed. 1888, i, 307, 326, 329, 413. Cp. i, 27–30; ii, 52; iii, 39–41, etc. ↑
60 K. O. Müller, Introd. to Mythology, p. 192. ↑
61 “Then one [of the Persians] who before had in nowise believed in [or, recognized the existence of] the Gods, offered prayer and supplication, doing obeisance to Earth and Heaven” (Persae, 497–99). ↑
62 Agamemnon, 370–372. This is commonly supposed to be a reference to Diagoras the Melian (below, p. 159). ↑
64 So Whittaker, Priests, Philosophers, and Prophets, 1911, pp. 42–43. ↑
65 So Buckley, in Bohn trans. of Æschylus, p. 100. He characterizes as a “skeptical formula” the phrase “Zeus, whoever he may be”; but goes on to show that such formulas were grounded on the Semitic notion that the true name of God was concealed from man. ↑
66 Grote, ed. 1888, vii, 8–21. See the whole exposition of the exceptionally interesting 67th chapter. ↑
67 Cp. Meyer, ii, 431; K. O. Müller, Introd. to Mythol. pp. 189–92; Duncker, p. 340; Curtius, i, 384; Thirlwall, i, 200–203; Burckhardt, Griech. Culturgesch. 1898, ii. 19. As to the ancient beginnings of a priestly organization, see Curtius, i, 92–94, 97. As to the effects of its absence, see Heeren, Polit. Hist. of Anc. Greece, Eng. tr. 1829, pp. 59–63; Burckhardt, as cited, ii, 31–32; Meyer, as last cited; Zeller, Philos. der Griechen, 3te Aufl. i, 44 sq. Lange’s criticism of Zeller’s statement (Gesch. des Materialismus, 3te Aufl. i, 124–26, note 2) practically concedes the proposition. The influence of a few powerful priestly families is not denied. The point is that they remained isolated. ↑
68 Cp. K. O. MÜller, Introd. to Mythol. p. 195; Curtius, i, 387, 389, 392; Duncker, iii, 519–21, 563; Thirlwall, i, 204; Barthélemy St. Hilaire, préf. to tr. of Metaphys. of Aristotle, p. 14. Professor Gilbert Murray, noting that Homer and Hesiod treated the Gods as elements of romance, or as facts to be catalogued, asks: “Where is the literature of religion: the literature which treated the Gods as Gods? It must,” he adds, “have existed”; and he holds that we “can see that the religious writings were both early and multitudinous” (Hist. of Anc. Greek Lit. p. 62; cp. Meyer and Mahaffy as cited above, pp. 125–26. “Writings” is not here to be taken literally; the early hymns were unwritten). The priestly hymns and oracles and mystery-rituals in question were never collected; but perhaps we may form some idea of their nature from the “Homeridian” and Orphic hymns to the Gods, and those of the Alexandrian antiquary Callimachus. It is further to be inferred that they enter into the Hesiodic Theogony. (Decharme, p. 3, citing Bergk.) ↑
69 Meyer, ii, 426; Curtius, i, 390–91, 417; Thirlwall, i, 204; Grote, i, 48–49. ↑
71 Cp. Curtius, i, 392–400, 416; Duncker, iii, 529. ↑
72 Curtius, i, 112; Meyer, ii, 366. ↑
73 Curtius, i, 201, 204, 205, 381; Grote, iii, 5; Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, 3te Aufl. i, 23 (Eng. tr. i, 23). ↑
74 Herodotos, i, 170; Diogenes Laërtius, Thales, ch. i. ↑
75 On the essentially anti-religious rationalism of the whole Ionian movement, cp. Meyer, ii, 753–57. ↑
76 The First Philosophers of Greece, by A. Fairbanks, 1898, pp. 2, 3, 6. This compilation usefully supplies a revised text of the ancient philosophic fragments, with a translation of these and of the passages on the early thinkers by the later, and by the epitomists. A good conspectus of the remains of the early Greek thinkers is supplied also in Grote’s Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates, ch. i; and a valuable critical analysis of the sources in Prof. J. Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy. ↑
77 Cp. Lange, Gesch. des Mat. i, 126 (Eng. tr. i, 8, n.). Mr. Benn (The Greek Philosophers, i, 8) and Prof. Decharme (p. 39) seem to read this as a profession of belief in deities in the ordinary sense. But cp. R. W. Mackay, The Progress of the Intellect, 1850, i, 338. Burnet (ch. i, § 11) doubts the authenticity of this saying, but thinks it “extremely probable that Thales did say that the magnet and amber had souls.” ↑
78 Mackay, as cited, p. 331. ↑
80 Diogenes Laërtius, Thales, ch. 9. ↑
83 Cp. Burnet, Early Greek Philos. 2nd. ed. introd. § 3. To Thales is ascribed by the Greeks the “discovery” of the constellation Ursus Major. Diog. ch. 2. As it was called “Phoenike” by the Greeks, his knowledge would be of Phoenician derivation. Cp. Humboldt, Kosmos, Bohn tr. iii, 160. ↑
84 Diog. Laërt. ch. 3. On this cp. Burnet, introd. § 6. ↑
85 Herod. i, 170. Cp. Diog. Laërt. ch. 3. ↑
88 Fairbanks, pp. 9–10. Mr. Benn (Greek Philosophers, i, 9) decides that the early philosophers, while realizing that ex nihilo nihil fit, had not grasped the complementary truth that nothing can be annihilated. But even if the teaching ascribed to Anaximandros be set aside as contradictory (since he spoke of generation and destruction within the infinite), we have the statement of Diogenes Laërtius (bk. ix, ch. 9, § 57) that Diogenes of Apollonia, pupil of Anaximenes, gave the full Lucretian formula. ↑
89 Diogenes Laërtius, however (ii, 2), makes him agree with Thales. ↑
90 Fairbanks, pp. 9–16. Diogenes makes him the inventor of the gnomon and of the first map and globe, as well as a maker of clocks. Cp. Grote, i, 330, note. ↑
91 See below, p. 158, as to Demokritos’ statement concerning the Eastern currency of scientific views which, when put by Anaxagoras, scandalized the Greeks. ↑
93 See Windelband, Hist. of Anc. Philos. Eng. tr. 1900, p. 25, citing Diels and Wilamowitz-Möllendorf. Cp. Burnet, introd. § 14. ↑
94 It will be observed that Mr. Cornford’s book, though somewhat loosely speculative is very freshly suggestive. It is well worth study, alongside of the work of Prof. Burnet, by those interested in the scientific presentation of the evolution of thought. ↑
95 Diog. Laërt. ix, 19; Fairbanks, p. 76. ↑
96 Herodotos, i, 163–67; Grote, iii, 421; Meyer, ii, § 438. ↑
97 Cp. Guillaume Bréton, Essai sur la poésie philosophique en Grèce, 1882, pp. 23–25. The life period of Xenophanes is still uncertain. Meyer (ii, § 466) and Windelband (Hist. of Anc. Philos. Eng. tr. p. 47) still adhere to the chronology which puts him in the century 570–470, making him a young man at the foundation of Elea. ↑
98 Cousin, developed by G. Bréton, work cited, p. 31 sq., traces Xenophanes’s doctrine of the unity of things to the school of Pythagoras. It clearly had antecedents. But Xenophanes is recorded to have argued against Pythagoras as well as Thales and Epimenides (Diog. Laërt. ix, 2, §§ 18, 20). ↑
99 Metaphysics, i, 5; cp. Fairbanks, pp. 79–80. ↑
100 One of several so entitled in that age. Cp. Burnet, introd. § 7. ↑
101 Metaph., as cited; Plato, Soph. 242 D. ↑
102 Long fragment in Athenæus, xi, 7; Burnet, p. 130. ↑
105 Fairbanks, p. 67, Fr. 5, 6; Clem. Alex. Stromata, bk. v, Wilson’s tr. ii, 285–86. Cp. bk. vii, c. 4. ↑
107 Cicero, De divinatione, i, 3, 5; Aetius, De placitis reliquiæ, in Fairbanks, p. 85. ↑
108 Aristotle, Rhetoric, ii, 23, § 27. A similar saying is attributed to Herakleitos, on slight authority (Fairbanks, p. 54). ↑
109 Cicero, Academica, ii, 39; Lactantius, Div. Inst. iii, 23. Anaxagoras and Demokritos held the same view. Diog. Laërt, bk. ii, ch. iii, iv (§ 8); Pseudo-Plutarch, De placitis philosoph. ii, 25. ↑
110 Cp. Mackay, Progress of the Intellect, i, 340. ↑
111 Diog. Laërt. in life of Pyrrho, bk. ix, ch. xi, 8 (§ 72). The passage, however, is uncertain. See Fairbanks, p. 70. ↑
112 Fairbanks. Fr. 1. Fairbanks translates with Zeller: “The whole [of God].” Grote: “The whole Kosmos, or the whole God.” It should be noted that the original in Sextus Empiricus (Adv. Math. ix, 144) is given without the name of Xenophanes, and the ascription is modern. ↑
113 Grote, as last cited, p. 18. ↑
114 Fairbanks, Fr. 19. In Athenæus, x, 413. ↑
115 Polybius, iv, 40; Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos, viii, 126; Fairbanks, pp. 25, 27; Frag. 4, 14. Cp. 92, 111, 113. ↑
119 Id. Frag. 43, 44, 46, 62. ↑
120 Diog. Laërt. last cited. This saying is by some ascribed to the later Herakleides (see Fairbanks, Fr. 119 and note); but it does not seem to be in his vein, which is wholly pro-Homeric. ↑
121 Clem. Alex. Protrept. ch. 2, Wilson’s tr. p. 41. The passage is obscure, but Mr. Fairbanks’s translation (Fr. 127) is excessively so. ↑
122 Clemens, as cited, p.32; Fairbanks, Fr. 124, 125, 130. Cp. Burnet, p. 139. ↑
125 Theaetetus, 180 D. See good estimates of Parmenides in Benn’s Greek Philosophers, i, 17–19, and Philosophy of Greece in Relation to the Character of its People, pp. 83–95; in J. A. Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets, 3rd ed. 1893, vol. i, ch. 6; and in Zeller, i, 580 sq. ↑
126 Plutarch, Perikles, ch. 26. ↑
127 Mr. Benn finally gives very high praise to Melissos (Philos. of Greece, pp. 91–92); as does Prof. Burnet (Early Gr. Philos. p. 378). He held strongly by the Ionian conception of the eternity of matter. Fairbanks, p. 125. ↑
128 Diog. Laërt. bk. ix, ch. iv, 3 (§ 24). ↑
129 Diog. Laërt. ix, 3 (§ 21). ↑
130 As to this see Windelband, Hist. Anc. Philos. pp. 91–92. ↑
131 Cp. Mackay, Progress of the Intellect, i. 340. ↑
132 “The difference between the Ionians and Eleatæ was this: the former endeavoured to trace an idea among phenomena by aid of observation; the latter evaded the difficulty by dogmatically asserting the objective existence of an idea” (Mackay, as last cited). ↑
133 Cp. Mackay, i, 352–53, as to the survival of veneration of the heavenly bodies in the various schools. ↑
135 Meyer, ii, 9, 759 (§§ 5, 465). ↑
137 Jevons, Hist. of Greek Lit. 1886, p. 210. ↑
138 Compare Meyer, ii, § 502, as to the close resemblances between Pythagoreanism and Orphicism. ↑
140 Fairbanks, pp. 145, 151, 155, etc. ↑
143 Prof. Burnet insists (introd. p. 30) that “the” Greeks must be reckoned good observers because their later sculptors were so. As well say that artists make the best men of science. ↑
144 Metaph. i, 5; Fairbanks, p. 136. “It is quite safe to attribute the substance of the First Book of Euclid to Pythagoras.” Burnet, Early Greek Philos. 2nd ed. p. 117. ↑
145 Diog. Laërt. Philolaos (bk. viii, ch. 7). ↑
146 L. U. K. Hist. of Astron. p. 20; A. Berry’s Short Hist. of Astron. 1898, p. 25; Narrien’s Histor. Acc. of the Orig. and Prog. of Astron. 1850, p. 163. ↑
147 See Benn, Greek Philosophers, i, 11. ↑
148 Diog. Laërt. in life of Philolaos; Cicero, Academica, ii, 39. Cicero, following Theophrastus, is explicit as to the teaching of Hiketas. ↑
149 Hippolytos, Ref. of all Heresies, i, 13. Cp. Renouvier, Manuel de la philos. anc. i, 201, 205, 238–39. ↑
150 Pseudo-Plutarch, De Placitis Philosoph. iii, 13, 14. ↑
151 Ueberweg, i, 49. Cp. Tertullian (Apol. ch. 11), who says Pythagoras taught that the world was uncreated; and the contrary statement of Aetius (in Fairbanks, pp. 146–47). ↑
152 Berry, Short Hist. of Astron. pp. 22, 25. The question is ably handled by Renouvier, Manuel, i, 199–205. ↑
153 Diog. Laërt., viii, i, 8. ↑
154 The whole question is carefully sifted by Grote, iv, 76–94. Prof. Burnet (Early Greek Philos. 2nd ed. pp. 96–98) sums up that the Pythagorean Order was an attempt to overrule or supersede the State. ↑
155 Cp. Burnet, p. 97, note 3. Prof. Burnet speaks of the Pythagorean Order as a “new religion” appealing to the people rather than the aristocrats, who were apt to be “freethinking.” But on the next page he pictures the “plain man” as resenting precisely the religious neology of the movement. The evidence for the adhesion of aristocrats seems pretty strong. ↑
157 Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates, ed. 1885, iv, 163. ↑
158 Diog. Laërt. bk. viii, ch. i, 19 (§ 21). ↑
159 Ennius, Fragmenta, ed. Hesselius, 1707, pp. 1, 4–7; Horace, Epist. ii, 1, 52; Persius, Sat. vi. ↑
161 Scholiast on Iliad, xx, 67; Tatian, Adv. Græcos, c. 48 (31); W. Christ, Gesch. der griech. Literatur, 3te Aufl. p. 63; Grote, ch. xvi (i, 374). ↑
163 K. O. Müller, Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 365–68; Mommsen, Hist. of Rome, Eng. tr. ed. 1894, iii, 113. ↑
165 Cicero, De natura Deorum, i, 22. ↑
166 Philolaos, as we saw, is said to have been prosecuted, but is not said to have been condemned. ↑
167 Fairbanks, pp. 245, 255, 261; Diog. Laërt. bk. ii, ch. iii, 4 (§ 8). ↑
168 Fairbanks, pp. 230–45. Cp. Grote, Plato, i, 54, and Ueberweg, i, 66, as to nature of the Nous of Anaxagoras. ↑
169 Grote, i, 374; Hesychius, s.v. Agamemnona; cp. Diog. Laërt. bk. ii, ch. iii, 7 (§ 11); Tatian, Adv. Græcos, c. 37 (21). ↑
170 Plutarch, Perikles, ch. 6. ↑
172 Id. c. 16. The old man is said to have uttered the reproach: “Perikles, those who want to use a lamp supply it with oil.” ↑
173 Plutarch, Perikles, ch. 4. ↑
174 Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iv, 277. ↑
175 Plutarch, Perikles, ch. 32. ↑
176 Diog. Laërt. bk. ix, ch. ix (§ 57), citing the Defence of Sokrates by Demetrius Phalereus. ↑
177 Id. bk. ii, ch. iii, 9 (§ 12), citing Sotion. Another writer of philosophers’ lives, Hermippus (same cit.), said he had been thrown into prison; and yet a third, Hieronymus, said he was released out of pity because of his emaciated appearance when produced in court by Perikles. ↑
178 Diog. Laërt. last cit. 10 (§ 14). ↑
180 Drews, Gesch. des Monismus im Altertum, p. 205. ↑
181 Even in the early progressive period “the same time which set up rationalism developed a deep religious influence in the masses.” (Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. ii, 728. Cp. iii, 425; also Grote, vii, 30; and Benn, Philosophy of Greece, 1898, pp. 69–70.) ↑
182 Plutarch, Perikles, ch. 32. ↑
183 Cp. Grote, v, 24; Curtius, ii, 208–209. ↑
184 Plutarch, as cited. Plutarch also states, however, that the only occasion on which Perikles gave way to emotion in public was that of the death of his favourite son. ↑
185 Holm (Griechische Geschichte, ii, 335) decides that Perikles sought to Ionise his fellow Athenians; and Dr. Burnet, coinciding (Early Greek Philosophy, 1892, p. 277), suggests that he and Aspasia brought Anaxagoras to Athens with that aim. ↑
187 “Der Kleinasiatische Rationalist Herodot” is the exaggerated estimate of A. Bauer, in Ilberg’s Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, ix (1902), 235, following Eduard Meyer (iv, § 448), who, however (§ 447), points to the lack of scientific thought or training in Herodotos as in Thukydides. Ignorance of Nature remained a Greek characteristic. ↑
188 Bk. viii, ch. 77. Cp. viii, 20, 96; ix, 43. ↑
189 Cp. Meyer, iv, § 446, as to the inadequacy of Athenian culture, and the unchanging ignorance of the populace on matters of physical science. ↑
190 Plutarch, Against the Stoics, ch. 31; Simplicius, Physica, i, 6. ↑
191 Clem. Alex. Protrept. c. 4. ↑
192 Refutation of all Heresies, i, 14. ↑
193 Cp. Aristotle, Metaphysics, i, 3; De anima, i, 2. ↑
194 Decharme, Critique des trad. relig. p. 137, citing scholiast on Aristoph., Clouds, 96. ↑
195 See the point discussed by Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 3te Aufl. i, 128–29, 131–32, notes 10 and 31 (Eng. tr. i, 15, 39). Ritter and Preller say “Protagoras floret circa a. 450–430”; “Democritus natus circa a. 460 floret a. 430–410, obit. circa a. 357.” ↑
196 Cp. Ueberweg, i, 68–69; Renouvier, Manuel de la philos. anc. i, 238. ↑
199 Lange, i, 10–11 (tr. p. 17); Clem. Alex. Stromata, i, 15; Diog. Laërt. bk. ix, § 35. ↑
200 On this also see Lange, i, 128 (tr. p. 15, note). ↑
201 Diog. Laërt. bk. ix, ch. vii, 2 (§ 34). Cp. Renouvier, i, 239–41. ↑
202 See in particular the De principiis atque originibus (Works, Routledge’s 1-vol. ed. 1905, pp. 649–50). ↑
203 Meyer, who dwells on his scientific shortcomings (Gesch. des Alt. v. § 910), makes no account of this, his vital doctrine. ↑
204 Fairbanks, pp. 189–91. The idea is not put by Empedokles with any such definiteness as is suggested by Lange, i, 23–25 (tr. pp. 33–35), and Ueberweg, Hist. of Philos. Eng. tr. i, 62, n. But Ueberweg’s exposition is illuminating. ↑
205 Fairbanks, pp. 136, 169. ↑
209 See a good study of Empedokles in J. A. Symonds’ Studies of the Greek Poets, 3rd ed. 1893, vol. i, ch. 7; and another in Renouvier, Manuel, i, 163–82. ↑
210 Cp. Grote, Plato, i, 73, and note. ↑
211 Cp. Renouvier, i, 239–62; Lange, p. 11 (tr. p. 17). ↑
213 Diogenes Laërtius, bk. ix, ch. viii, § 3 (51); cp. Grote, vii, 49, note. ↑
214 For a defence of Protagoras against Plato, see Grote, vii, 43–54. ↑
215 Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos, ix, 56. ↑
216 Beckmann, History of Inventions, Eng. tr. 1846, ii, 513. ↑
217 Diod. Sic. xiii, 6; Hesychius, cit. in Cudworth, ed. Harrison, i, 131. ↑
218 Ueberweg, i, 80; Thukydides, v, 116. The bias of Sextus Empiricus is further shown in his account of Diagoras as moved in his denunciation by an injury to himself. ↑
219 It is told by Sextus Empiricus (Adv. Math. ix, 53) that Diagoras is said to have invented the dithyramb (in praise of Iacchos), and to have begun a poem with the words, “All things come by the daimon and fortune.” But Sextus writes with a fixed skeptical bias. ↑
220 Grote, vi, 13, 32, 33, 42–45. ↑
221 Athenagoras, Apol., ch. 4; Clem. Alex., Protrept. ch. 2. See the documentary details in Meyer, iv, 105. ↑
222 Cicero, De natura Deorum, i, 1, 23, 42; iii, 37 (the last reference gives proof of his general rationalism); Lactantius, De irâ Dei, c. 9. In calling Sokrates “the Melian,” Aristophanes (Clouds, 830) was held to have virtually called him “the atheist.” ↑
223 Diod. xiii, 6; Suidas, s.v. Diagoras; Aristophanes, Birds, 1073. It is noteworthy that in their fury against Diagoras the Athenians put him on a level of common odium with the “tyrants” of past history. Cp. Burckhardt, Griechische Culturgeschichte, i, 355. ↑
224 Grote, vi, 476–77. As to the freethinking of Kritias, see Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Math. ix, 54. According to Xenophon (Memorabilia, i, 2), Kritias made his decree in revenge for Sokrates’s condemnation of one of his illicit passions. Prof. Decharme (pp. 122–24) gives a good account of him. ↑
225 Diog. Laërt. bk. ii, ch. iv; Hippolytos, Refutation of all Heresies, i, 8; Renouvier, Manuel, i, 233–37. ↑
226 Cp. Cudworth, Intellectual System, ed. Harrison, i, 32; Renouvier, Manuel, i, 233, 289; ii, 268, 292; Tatian, Adv. Græcos, c. 48 (31); Diog. Laërt. bk. ii, ch. iii, 7 (§ 11); Grote, i, 374, 395, note; Hatch, Infl. of Greek Ideas, p. 60. ↑
227 Haigh, Tragic Drama of the Greeks, p. 206. Cp. Burnett, p. 278. ↑
228 Diog. Laërt. bk. ii (§ 22). ↑
229 “He never so utterly abandoned the religion of his country as to find it impossible to acquiesce in at least some part of traditional religion.” Jevons, Hist. of Greek Lit. 1886. p. 222. ↑
230 Haigh, The Attic Theatre, 1889, p. 316. ↑
232 “He had also acquired in no small degree that love of dexterous argumentation and verbal sophistry which was becoming fashionable in the Athens of the fifth century. Not unfrequently he exhibits this dexterity when it is clearly out of place.” Haigh, Tragic Drama of the Greeks, p. 235. Cp. Jevons, Hist. of Greek Lit. p. 223. Schlegel is much more censorious. ↑
233 Ion., 436–51, 885–922; Andromache, 1161–65; Electra, 1245–46; Hercules Furens, 339–47; Iphigenia in Tauris, 35, 711–15. ↑
234 Hercules Furens, 344, 1341–46; Iphigenia in Tauris, 380–91. ↑
237 Ion, 374–78, 685; Helena, 744–57; Iphigenia in Tauris, 570–75; Electra, 400; Phœnissæ, 772; Fragm. 793; Bacchæ, 255–57; Hippolytus, 1059. It is noteworthy that even Sophocles (Œd. Tyr., 387) makes a character taunt Tiresias the soothsayer with venality. ↑
238 Philoctetes, fr. 793; Helena, 1137–43; Bellerophon, fr. 288. ↑
240 Helena, 1013; Fragm. 890, 905, 935; Troades, 848–88. ↑
241 A. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Literature, Bohn tr. p. 117. ↑
242 This charge is on a par with that of Hygiainon, who accused Euripides of impiety on the score that one of his characters makes light of oaths. Aristotle, Rhetoric, iii, 15. ↑
243 K. O. Müller, Hist. of the Lit. of Anc. Greece, 1847, p. 359. The complaint is somewhat surprising from such a source. The only play with an entirely invented plot mentioned by Aristotle is Agathon’s Flower (Aristotle, Poetic, ix); and such plays would not have been eligible for representation at the great festivals. ↑
244 Cp. Jevons, Hist. of Greek Lit. pp. 223–24. ↑
245 Haigh. The Attic Theatre, p. 191. Cp. Müller, pp. 362–64. ↑
246 See, however, the æsthetic theorem of Prof. Murray, Euripides and his Age, pp. 221–27. ↑
247 It seems arguable that the aversion of Aristophanes to Euripides was primarily artistic, arising in dislike of some of the features of his style. On this head his must be reckoned an expert judgment. The old criticism found in Euripides literary vices; the new seems to ignore the issue. But a clerical scholar pronounces that “Aristophanes was the most unreasoning laudator temporis acti. Genius and poet as he was, he was the sworn foe to intellectual progress.” Hence his hatred of Euripides and his championship of Æschylus. (Rev. Dr. W. W. Merry, introd. to Clar. Press ed. of The Frogs, 1892.) ↑
248 Girard, Essai sur Thucydide, 1884, pp. 258–59. ↑
249 Cp. Haigh, The Attic Theatre, p. 315. In the same way Ktesilochos, the pupil of Apelles, could with impunity make Zeus ridiculous by exhibiting him pictorially in child-bed, bringing forth Dionysos (Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxxv, 40. § 15). ↑
251 Cp. Benn, Philos. of Greece, p. 171. ↑
252 Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 227: Hegel, as there cited Grote, Plato, ed. 1885, i, 423. ↑
253 Cp. Owen, Evenings with the Skeptics, i, 181 sq., 291, 293, 299, etc. ↑
254 Grote, History, i, 334; Xenophon, Memorabilia, i, 1, §§ 6–9. ↑
255 Cp. Benn. The Philosophy of the Greeks, 1898, p. 160. ↑
256 Grote, i, 334–35; Hippocrates, De Aeribus, Aquis, Locis, c. 22 (49). ↑
257 Plato, Phædrus, Jowett’s tr. 3rd ed. i. 434; Grote, History, i, 393. ↑
258 Compare, however, the claim made for him, as promoting “objectivity,” by Prof. Drews, Gesch. des Monismus im Altertum, 1913. P. 213. ↑
260 “The predominatingly theistic character of philosophy ever since has been stamped on it by Socrates, as it was stamped on Socrates by Athens” (Benn, Philos. of Greece, p. 168). ↑
261 Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, as cited, p. 231. The case against Sokrates is bitterly urged by Forchhammer, Die Athenen und Sokrates, 1837; see in particular pp. 8–11. Cp. Grote, Hist. vii, 81. ↑
262 “Had not all the cultivated men of the time passed through a school of rationalism which had entirely pulled to pieces the beliefs and the morals of their ancestors?” Zeller, as last cited, pp. 231–33. Cp. Haigh, Tragic Drama, p. 261. ↑
263 See Aristophanes’s Frogs, 888–94. ↑
264 Æschines, Timarchos, cited by Thirlwall, iv, 277. Cp. Xenophon, Mem. i, 2. ↑
265 “Nothing could well be more unpopular and obnoxious than the task which he undertook of cross-examining and convicting of ignorance every distinguished man whom he could approach.” Grote, vii. 95. Cp. pp. 141–44. Cp. also Trevelyan’s Life of Macaulay, ed. 1881, p. 316: and Renouvier, Manuel de la philos. anc. 1, iv, § iii. See also, however, Benn, Phil. of Greece, pp. 162–63. For a view of Sokrates’s relations to his chief accuser, which partially vindicates or whitewashes the latter, see Prof. G. Murray’s Anc. Greek Lit. pp. 176–77. There is a good monograph by H. Bleeckly, Socrates and the Athenians: An Apology, 1884, which holds the balances fairly. ↑
266 On the desire of Sokrates to die see Grote, vii, 152–64. ↑
267 The assertion of Plutarch that after his death the prosecutors of Sokrates were socially excommunicated, and so driven to hang themselves (Moralia: Of Envy and Hatred), is an interesting instance of moral myth-making. It has no historic basis; though Diogenes (ii, 23 § 43) and Diodorus Siculus (xiv, 37), late authorities both, allege an Athenian reaction in Sokrates’ favour. Probably the story of the suicide of Judas was framed in imitation of Plutarch’s. ↑
269 Id. i, 194. Not till Strabo do we find this myth disbelieved; and Strabo was surprised to find most men holding by the old story while admitting that the race of Amazons had died out. Id. p. 197. ↑
270 Life of Thukydides, by Marcellinus, ch. 22, citing Antyllas. Cp. Girard, Essai sur Thucydide, p. 239; and the prefaces of Hobbes and Smith to their translations. ↑
272 “His writings,” remarks Dr. Hatch, “contain the seeds of nearly all that afterwards grew up on Christian soil” (Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 1890, p. 182). ↑
273 Clem. Alex. Stromata, v, 14; Fairbanks, pp. 146–47; Grote, Plato, ch. 38. ↑
274 Cp. Grote, Plato, iv, 162, 381. Professor Bain, however (Practical Essays, 1884, p. 273), raises an interesting question by his remark, as to the death of Sokrates: “The first person to feel the shock was Plato. That he was affected by it to the extent of suppressing his views on the higher questions we can infer with the greatest probability. Aristotle was equally cowed.” ↑
275 Diog. Laër. bk. ix, ch. vii, § 8 (40). ↑
276 Republic, bk. ii, 377, to iii, 393; Jowett’s tr. 3rd ed. iii, 60 sq., 68 sq. In bk. x, it is true, he does speak of the poets as unqualified by knowledge and training to teach truth (Jowett’s tr. iii, 311 sq.); but Plato’s “truth” is not objective, but idealistic, or rather fictitious-didactic. ↑
277 Id. Jowett. pp. 59, 69, etc. ↑
278 Id. bk. iii; Jowett, pp. 103–105. ↑
279 Laws, x; Jowett, v, 295–98. ↑
280 Received myths are forbidden; and the preferred fictions are to be city law. Cp. the Laws, ii, iii; Jowett, v, 42, 79. ↑
281 Laws, Jowett’s tr. 3rd ed. v, 271–72. Cp. the comment of Benn, i, 271–72. ↑
282 Republic, bk. ii, 379; Jowett, iii, 62. ↑
283 Laws, x, 906–907, 910; Jowett, v, 293–94, 297–98. ↑
284 On the inconsistency of the whole doctrine see see Grote’s Plato, iv, 379–97. ↑
285 Ueberweg, Hist. of Philos. Eng. tr. i, 25. Cp. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, i, 38–39 (tr. i, 52–54), and the remarkable verdict of Bacon (De Augmentis, bk. iii, ch. 4; Works, 1-vol. ed. 1905, p. 471; cp. Advancement of Learning, bk. ii, p. 96) as to the superiority of the natural philosophy of Demokritos over those of Plato and Aristotle. Bacon immediately qualifies his verdict; but he repeats it, as regards both Aristotle and Plato, in the Novum Organum, bk. i, aph. 96. See, however, Mr. Benn’s final eulogy of Plato as a thinker, i, 273, and Murray’s Anc. Greek Lit. pp. 311–13. ↑
286 Laws, x, 908; Jowett, v, 295. ↑
287 Grote, History, vii, 168. ↑
288 Cp. Grote, Aristotle, 2nd ed. p. 10. ↑
289 Origen, Against Celsus, ii, 13; cp. i, 65; iii, 75; vii, 3. ↑
290 Grote, Aristotle, p. 13. ↑
291 Benn, Greek Philosophers, i, 352. Mr. Benn refutes Sir A. Grant’s view that Aristotle’s creed was a “vague pantheism”; but that phrase loosely conveys the idea of its non-religiousness. It might be called a Lucretian monotheism. Cp. Benn, i, 294; and Drews, Gesch. des Monismus, p. 257. ↑
292 Metaphysics, xi (xii), 8, 13 (p. 1074, b). The passage is so stringent as to raise the question how he came to run the risk in this one case. It was probably a late writing, and he may have taken it for granted that the Metaphysics would never be read by the orthodox. ↑
293 Cp. the severe criticisms of Benn, vol. i, ch. vi; Berry, Short Hist. of Astron. p. 33; and Lange, Ges. des Mater. i, 61–68, and notes, citing Eucken and Cuvier. Aristotle’s science is very much on a par with that of Bacon, who saw his imperfections, but fell into the same kinds of error. Both insisted on an inductive method; and both transgressed from it. See, however, Lange’s summary, p. 69, also p. 7, as to the unfairness of Whewell; and ch. v of Soury’s Bréviaire de l’histoire du Matérialisme, 1881, especially end. ↑
295 Strabo, bk. ix, ch. iii, § 11. Strabo reproaches Ephoros with repeating the current legends all the same; but it seems clear that he anticipated the critical tactic of Gibbon. ↑
296 As to the Stoics, cp. Zeller, § 34, 4; Benn, The Philosophy of Greece, pp. 255–56. As to Epicurus, cp. Benn, p. 261. ↑
297 Diog. Laërt. bk. ix, ch. xi, 5, § 64. The lengthy notice given by Diogenes shows the impression Pyrrho’s teaching made. See a full account of it, so far as known, in the Rev. J. Owen’s Evenings with the Skeptics, 1881, i, 287 sq., and the monograph of Zimmerman, there cited. ↑
298 These propositions occur in the first of the ten Pyrrhonian tropoi or modes (Diog. Laërt. bk. ix, ch. xi, 9), of which the authorship is commonly assigned to Ænesidemos (fl. 80–50). Cp. Owen, Evenings with the Skeptics, i, 290, 322–23. But as given by Diogenes they seem to derive from the early Pyrrhonian school. ↑
299 Thus, where Democritos pronounced the sun to be of vast size, Epicurus held it to be no larger than it seemed (Cicero, De Finibus, i, 6)—a view also loosely ascribed to Herakleitos (Diog. Laërt. bk. ix, ch. i, 6, § 7). See, however, Wallace’s Epicureanism (“Ancient Philosophies” series), 1889, pp. 176 sq., 186 sq., 266, as to the scientific merits of the system. ↑
300 The Epicurean doctrine on this and other heads is chiefly to be gathered from the great poem of Lucretius. Prof. Wallace’s excellent treatise gives all the clues. See p. 202 as to the Epicurean God-idea. ↑
301 Grote, History, i, 395, note; Plutarch, Non posse suaviter vivi sec. Epicur. ↑
302 Compare Wallace, Epicureanism, pp. 64–71, and ch. xi; and Mackintosh, On the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, 4th ed. p. 29. ↑
303 De rerum natura, i, 62–79. ↑
304 Alexander seu Pseudomantis, cc. 25, 38, 47, 61, cited by Wallace, pp. 249–50. ↑
305 The repute of the Epicureans for irreligion appears in the fact that when Romanized Athens had consented to admit foreigners to the once strictly Athenian mysteries of Eleusis, the Epicureans were excluded. ↑
306 Cicero, De natura Deorum, i, 13; Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata, v, 14; Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Mathematicos, ix, 51, 55. ↑
307 Diog. Laërt. bk ii, ch. viii, §§ 7, 11–14 (86, 97–100). He was also nicknamed “the God.” Id. and ch. xii, 5 (§ 116). ↑
308 Cicero, De natura Deorum, i, 1, 23, 42. ↑
309 Diogenes, as last cited, § 12 (97). ↑
310 Id. §§ 15, 16 (101–102). ↑
311 Professor Wallace’s account of the court of Lysimachos of Thrace as a “favourite resort of emancipated freethinkers” (Epicureanism, p. 42) is hardly borne out by his authority, Diogenes Laërtius, who represents Lysimachos as unfriendly towards Theodoros. Hipparchia the Cynic, too, opposed rather than agreed with the atheist. ↑
312 Diog., last cit. Cp. Cicero, Tusculans, ii, 43. Philo Judæus (Quod Omnis Probus Liber, c. 18; cp. Plutarch, De Exilio, c. 16) has a story of his repelling taunts about his banishment by comparing himself to Hercules, who was put ashore by the alarmed Argonauts because of his weight. But he is further made to boast extravagantly, and in doing so to speak as a believer in myths and deities. The testimony has thus little value. ↑
313 Diog. bk. ii, ch. xii, § 5 (116). ↑
315 Id. ch. xii, § 5 (117) and bk. iv, ch. vii, §§ 4, 9, 10 (52, 54, 55). ↑
316 Plutarch, De defectu orac. ch. 19. Bion seems to have made an impression on Plutarch, who often quotes him, though it be but to contradict him. ↑
317 Cicero, De natura Deorum, i, 13. ↑
318 Id. ib.; Academics, iv, 38. ↑
319 Cicero, Tusculans, i, 10, 31; Academics, ii, 39; and refs. in ed. Davis. ↑
320 Sir A. Grant’s tr. of the hymn is given in Capes’s Stoicism (“Chief Ancient Philosophies” series), 1880, p. 41; and the Greek text by Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, p. 262. Cp. Cicero, De nat. Deor. i, 14. ↑
321 Pseudo-Plutarch, De placitis philosoph. i, 7. ↑
322 Eusebius, Præp. Evang. bk. ii, ch. 2; Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, ch. 23. ↑
324 It may be noted that Diogenes of Babylon, a follower of Chrysippos, applied the principle to Greek mythology. Cicero, De nat. Deor. i, 15. ↑
326 See Grote, i, 371–74 and notes. ↑
327 Palaiphatos, De Incredibilibus: De Actæone, De Geryone, De Cerbero, De Amazonibus, etc. ↑
328 E. R. Bevan (art. “The Deification of Kings in the Greek Cities” in Eng. Histor. Rev. Oct. 1901, p. 631) argues that the practice was not primarily eastern, but Greek. See, however, Herodotos, vii, 136; Arrian, Anabas. Alexand. iv, 11; Q. Curtius, viii, 5–8; and Plutarch, Artaxerxes, ch. 22, as to the normal attitude of the Greeks, even as late as Alexander. ↑
329 See Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, chs. 22, 23, for the later Hellenistic tone on the subject of apotheosis apart from the official practice of the empire. ↑
330 Gibbon, ch. xl. Bohn ed. iv, 353, and note. ↑
331 Mahaffy, Greek Life, pp. 133–35; Diog. Laërt. bk. ii, ch. v, 5 (§ 38). ↑
332 Wallace, Epicureanism (pp. 245–46), citing Suidas, s.v. Epicurus. ↑
333 Diogenes Laërtius, bk. vii, ch. i, 28 (§ 33); cp. Origen, Against Celsus, bk. i, ch. 5; Clemens Alex, Stromata, bk. v, ch. ii. ↑
334 Mahaffy, as cited, p. 135, n.; Athenæus, ix, 63 (p. 400). ↑
335 (297 B.C.) Burckhardt, Griechische Culturgeschichte, i, 213; Pausanias, i, 29. ↑
336 Cp. G. Guizot, Ménandre, 1855, pp. 324–27, and App. ↑
337 Cp. Guizot, pp. 327–31, and the fragments cited by Justin Martyr, De Monarchia, ch. 5. ↑
338 Whittaker, as cited, p. 85. ↑
339 Martha, as cited, p. 78. ↑
340 Diog. Laërt. bk. iv, ch. ix, 8 (§ 65). ↑
341 Diog. Laërt. bk. iv, ch. ix, 4, 5 (§ 63); Noumenios in Euseb. Præp. Evang. xiv, 8; Cicero, De Oratore, ii, 38; Lucilius, cited by Lactantius, Div. Inst. ↑
342 Cicero, Academics, ii, 34. ↑
343 Berry, Short Hist. of Astron. pp. 34–62; Narrien, Histor. Account, as cited, ch. xi; L. U. K. Hist. of Astron. ch. vi. It is noteworthy that Hipparchos, like so many of his predecessors, had some of his ideas from Babylonia. Strabo, proœm., § 9. ↑
344 Ptolemy normally lumps unbelief in religion with all the vices of character. Cp. the Tetrabiblos, iii, 18 (paraphrase of Proclus). ↑
346 Lucian’s dialogue Philopseudes gives a view of the superstitions of average Greeks in the second century of our era. Cp. Mr. Williams’s note to the first Dialogue of the Dead, in his tr. p. 87. ↑
347 See M. Foucart’s treatise, Des assoc. relig. chez les Grecs, 1873, 2e ptie. ↑
348 On the early tendency to orthodox conformity among the unbelieving Alexandrian scholars, see Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pp. 260–61. ↑
349 Frag. cited by Wallace, p. 258. ↑
350 Rev. Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, p. 79. ↑
351 De Oratore, iii, 17; De Finibus, ii, 12, 13. ↑
352 See Saisset, Le Scepticisme, 1865, pp. 22–27, for a careful discussion of dates. ↑
353 His own claim was to be of the “methodical” school. Hypotyp. i, 34. ↑
354 See his doctrine expounded by Owen, Evenings with the Skeptics, i, 332 sq. ↑
356 These seem to be derived from Carneades. Cp. Ueberweg, i, 217. ↑
357 “The general character of the Greek Skeptics from Sokrates to Sextos is quite unexceptionable” (Owen, Evenings, i, 352). ↑
358 Polybius, bk. vi, ch. lvi. Cp. bk. xvi, Frag. 5 (12), where he speaks impatiently of the miracle-stories told of certain cults, and, repeating his opinion that some such stories are useful for preserving piety among the people, protests that they should be kept within bounds. ↑
359 Bk. i, ch. ii, § 8. Plutarch (Isis and Osiris, ch. 8) puts the more decent principle that all the apparent absurdities have good occult reasons. ↑
360 Bk. ix, ch. iii, § 12. Cp. bk. x, ch. iii, § 23. The hand of an interpolator frequently appears in Strabo (e.g., bk. ix, ch. ii, § 40; ch. iii, § 5); and the passage cited in bk. i is more in the style of the former than of the latter. ↑
361 See Dr. Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas upon the Christian Church, 1890, pp. 60–64, notes; also above, pp. 143 and 161, note. ↑
362 De defect. orac. c. 19; Isis and Osiris, ch. 67. ↑
363 De Amore, c. 13; Isis and Osiris, chs. 66, 67; and De defect. orac. c. 13. ↑
364 Schmidt, Gesch. der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit im erst. Jahr., 1847, p. 22. ↑
365 Burnet, Early Greek Philos. 1892, p. 276. Cp. 2nd ed. p. 294. ↑
366 It is to be presumed that Dr. Burnet, when penning his estimate, had not in memory such a record as Dr. A. D. White’s History of the Warfare between Science and Theology. ↑
The Romans, so much later than the Greeks in their intellectual development, were in some respects peculiarly apt—in the case of their upper class—to accept freethinking ideas when Greek rationalism at length reached them. After receiving from their Greek neighbours in Southern Italy, in the pre-historic period, the germs of higher culture, in particular the alphabet, they rather retrograded than progressed for centuries, the very alphabet degenerating for lack of literary activity1 in the absence of any culture class, and under the one-idea’d rule of the landowning aristocracy, whose bent to military aggression was correlative to the smallness of the Roman facilities for commerce. In the earlier ages nearly everything in the nature of written lore was a specialty of a few priests, and was limited to their purposes, which included some keeping of annals.2 The use of writing for purposes of family records seems to have been the first literary development among the patrician laity.3 In the early republican period, however, the same conditions of relative poverty, militarism, and aristocratic emulation prevented any development even of the priesthood beyond the rudimentary stage of a primitive civic function; and the whole of these conditions in combination kept the Roman Pantheon peculiarly shadowy, and the Roman mythology abnormally undeveloped.
The character of the religion of the Romans has been usually explained in the old manner, in terms of their particular “genius” and lack of genius. On this view the Romans primordially tended to do whatever they did—to be slightly religious in one period, and highly so in another. Teuffel [195]quite unconsciously reduces the theorem to absurdity in two phrases: “As long as the peculiar character of the Roman nation remained unaltered” ... (Hist. of Roman Lit. ed. Schwabe, Eng. tr. 1900, i, 2): “the peculiar Roman character had now come to an end, and for ever” (id. p. 123). By no writer has the subject been more unphilosophically treated than by Mommsen, whose chapter on Roman religion (vol. i, ch. xii) is an insoluble series of contradictions. (See the present writer’s Christianity and Mythology, pp. 115–17.) M. Boissier contradicts himself hardly less strangely, alternately pronouncing the Latin religion timid and confident, prostrate and dignified (La religion romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins, 4e édit. i, 7, 8, 26, 28). Both writers ascribe every characteristic of Roman religion to the character of “the Romans” in the lump—a method which excludes any orderly conception. It must be abandoned if there is to be any true comprehension of the subject.
Other verdicts of this kind by Ihne, Jevons, and others, will no better bear examination. (See Christianity and Mythology, pt. i, ch. iii, § 3.) Dr. Warde Fowler, the latest English specialist to handle the question, confidently supports the strange thesis (dating from Schwartz) that the multitude of deities and daimons of the early Latins were never thought of as personal, or as possessing sex, until Greek mythology and sculpture set the fashion of such conceptions, whereupon “this later and foreign notion of divinity so completely took possession of the minds of the Romans of the cosmopolitan city that Varro is the only writer who has preserved the tradition of the older way of thinking” (The Religious Experience of the Roman People, 1911, p. 147). That is to say, the conception of the Gods in the imageless period was an “older way of thinking,” in which deities called by male and female names, and often addressed as Pater and Mater, were not really thought of as anthropomorphic at all! How the early Romans conceived their non-imaged deities Dr. Fowler naturally does not attempt to suggest. We get merely the unreasoned and unexplained negative formula that “we may take it as certain that even the greater deities of the calendar, Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and Vesta, were not thought of as existing in any sense in human form, nor as personal beings having any human characteristics. The early Romans were destitute of mythological fancy....”
Either, then, the early Romans were psychologically alien to every other primitive or barbaric people, as known to modern anthropology, or, by parity of reasoning, all anthropomorphism is the spontaneous creation of sculptors, who had no ground whatever in previous psychosis for making images of Gods. The Greeks, on this view, had no anthropomorphic notion of their [196]deities until suddenly sculptors began to make images of them, whereupon everybody promptly and obediently anthropomorphized!
The way out of this hopeless theorem is indicated for Dr. Fowler by his own repeated observation that the Roman jus divinum, in which he finds so little sign of normal “mythological fancy,” represented the deliberately restrictive action of an official priesthood for whom all religio was a kind of State magic or “medicine.” He expressly insists (p. 24) on “the wonderful work done by the early authorities from the State in eliminating from their rule of worship (jus divinum) almost all that was magical, barbarous, or, as later Romans would have called it, superstitious” (Lect. ii, p. 24; cp. Lect. iii.). He even inclines to the view that the patrician religion “was really the religion of an invading race, like that of the Achæans in Greece, engrafted on the religion of a primitive and less civilized population” (pp. viii, 23). This thesis is not necessary to the rebuttal of his previous negation; but it obviously resists it, unless we are to make the word “Roman” apply only to patricians. An invading tribe might, in the case of Rome as in that of the Homeric Greeks, abandon ordinary and localized primitive beliefs which it had held in its previous home, and thereafter be officially reluctant to recognize the local superstitions of its conquered plebs.
But the Roman case can be understood without assuming any continuity of racial divergence. Livy shows us that the Latin peasantry were, if possible, more given to superstitious fears and panics than any other, constantly reporting portents and prodigia which called for State ritual, and embarrassing military policy by their apprehensions. A patrician priesthood, concerned above all things for public polity, would in such circumstances naturally seek to minimize the personal side of the popular mythology, treating all orders of divinity as mere classes of powers to be appeased. The fact (id. p. 29) that among the early Romans, as among other primitives, women were rigidly excluded from certain sacra points to a further ground for keeping out of official sight the sex life of the Gods. But the very ritual formula of the Fratres Arvales, Sive deus sive dea (p. 149), proves that the deities were habitually thought of as personal, and male or female.
Dr. Fowler alternately and inconsistently argues that the “vulgar mind was ready to think of God-couples” (p. 152), and that the conjunctions of masculine and feminine names in the Roman Pantheon “do not represent popular ideas of the deities, but ritualistic forms of invocation” (p. 153). The answer is that the popular mind is the matrix of mythology, and that if a State ritual given to minimizing mythology recognized a given habit of myth-making it was presumably abundant outside. In [197]short, the whole academic process of reducing early Roman religion to something unparalleled in anthropology is as ill-founded in the data as it is repugnant to scientific thought.
The differentiation of Greek and Roman religion is to be explained by the culture-history of the two peoples; and that, in turn, was determined by their geographical situation and their special contacts. Roman life was made systematically agricultural and militarist by its initial circumstances, where Greek life in civilized Asia Minor became industrial, artistic, and literary. The special “genius” of Homer, or of various members of an order of bards developed by early colonial-feudal Grecian conditions, would indeed count for much by giving permanent artistic definiteness of form to the Greek Gods, where the early Romans, leaving all the vocal arts mainly to the conservative care of their women and children as something beneath adult male notice, missed the utilization of poetic genius among them till they were long past the period of romantic simplicity (cp. Mommsen, bk. i, ch. 15; Eng. tr. 1894, vol. i, pp. 285–300). Hence the comparative abstractness of their unsung Gods (cp. Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, i, 225–28, and refs.; Boissier, La religion romaine, as cited, i, 8), and the absence of such a literary mythology as was evolved and preserved in Greece by local patriotisms under the stimulus of the great epopees and tragedies. The doctrine that “the Italian is deficient in the passion of the heart,” and that therefore “Italian” literature has “never produced a true epos or a genuine drama” (Mommsen, ch. 15, vol. i, p. 284), is one of a thousand samples of the fallacy of explaining a phenomenon in terms of itself. Teuffel with equal futility affirms the contrary: “Of the various kinds of poetry, dramatic poetry seems after all to be most in conformity with the character of the Roman people” (as cited, p. 3; cp. p. 28 as to the epos). On the same verbalist method, Mommsen decides as to the Etruscan religion that “the mysticism and barbarism of their worship had their foundation in the essential character of the Etruscan people” (ch. 12, p. 232). Schwegler gives a more objective view of the facts, but, like other German writers whom he cites, errs in speaking of early deities like Picus as “only aspects of Mars,” not realizing that Mars is merely the surviving or developed deity of that type. He also commits the conventional error of supposing that the early Roman religion is fundamentally monotheistic or pantheistic, because the multitudinous “abstract” deities are “only” aspects of the general force of Nature. The notion that the Romans did not anthropomorphize their deities like all other peoples is a surprising fallacy.
Thus when Rome, advancing in the career of conquest, had [198]developed a large aristocratic class, living a city life, with leisure for intellectual interests, and had come in continuous contact with the conquered Grecian cities of Southern Italy, its educated men underwent a literary and a rationalistic influence at the same time, and were the more ready to give up all practical belief in their own slightly-defined Gods when they found Greeks explaining away theirs. Here we see once more the primary historic process by which men are led to realize the ill-founded character of their hereditary creeds: the perception is indirectly set up by the reflective recognition of the creeds of others, and all the more readily when the others give a critical lead. Indeed, Greek rationalism was already old when the Romans began to develop a written and artistic literature: it had even taken on the popular form given to it by Evêmeros a century before the Romans took it up. Doubtless there was skepticism among the latter before Ennius: such a piece of religious procedure as the invention of a God of Silver (Argentinus), son of the God of Copper (Æsculanus), on the introduction of a silver currency, 269 B.C., must have been smiled at by the more intelligent.4
Mommsen states (ii, 70) that at this epoch the Romans kept “equally aloof from superstition and unbelief,” but this is inaccurate on both sides. The narrative of Livy exhibits among the people a boundless and habitual superstition. The records of absurd prodigies of every sort so throng his pages that he himself repeatedly ventures to make light of them. Talking oxen, skies on fire, showers of flesh, crows and mice eating gold, rivers flowing blood, showers of milk—such were the reports chronically made to the Roman government by its pious subjects, and followed by anxious religious ceremonies at Rome (cp. Livy, iii, 5, 10; x, 27; xi, 28–35; xxiv, 44; xxvii, 4, 11, 23, etc., etc. In the index to Drakenborch’s Livy there are over five columns of references to prodigia). On the other hand, though superstition was certainly the rule, there are traces of rationalism. On the next page after that cited, Mommsen himself admits that the faith of the people had already been shaken by the interference allowed to the priestly colleges in [199]political matters; and in another chapter (bk. ii, ch. 13; vol. ii, 112) he recalls that a consul of the Claudian gens had jested openly at the auspices in the first Punic war, 249 B.C. The story is told by Cicero, De natura Deorum, ii, 3, and Suetonius, Tiberius, c. 2. The sacred poultry, on being let out of their coop on board ship, would not feed, so that the auspices could not be taken; whereupon the consul caused them to be thrown into the water, etiam per jocum Deos inridens, saying they might drink if they would not eat. His colleague Junius in the same war also disregarded the auspices; and in both cases, according to Balbus the Stoic in Cicero’s treatise, the Roman fleets were duly defeated; whereupon Claudius was condemned by the people, and Junius committed suicide. Cp. Valerius Maximus, l. i, c. iv, § 3.
Such stories would fortify the age-long superstition as to auspices and omens, which was in full force among Greek commanders as late as Xenophon, when many cultured Greeks were rationalists. But it was mainly a matter of routine, in a sphere where freethought is slow to penetrate. There was probably no thought of jesting when, in the year 193 B.C., after men had grown weary alike of earthquakes and of the religious services prescribed on account of them; and after the consuls had been worn out by sacrifices and expiations, it was decreed that “if on any day a service had been arranged for a reported earthquake, no one should report another on that day” (Livy, xxxiv, 55). Cato, who would never have dreamt of departing from a Roman custom, was the author of the saying (Cicero, De Div. ii, 24) that haruspices might well laugh in each other’s faces. He had in view the Etruscan practice, being able to see the folly of that, though not of his own. Cp. Mommsen, iii, 116. As to the Etruscan origin of the haruspices, in distinction from the augurs, see Schwegler, i, 276, 277; Ihne, Eng. ed. i, 82–83, note; and O. Müller as there cited.
But it is with the translation of the Sacred History of Evêmeros by Ennius, about 200 B.C., that the literary history of Roman freethought begins. In view of the position of Ennius as a teacher of Greek and belles lettres (he being of Greek descent, and born in Calabria), it cannot be supposed that he would openly translate an anti-religious treatise without the general acquiescence of his aristocratic patrons. Cicero says of him that he “followed” as well as translated Evêmeros;5 and his favourite Greek dramatists were the freethinking Euripides and Epicharmos, from both of whom he translated.6 The popular superstitions, in particular those of soothsaying [200]and divination, he sharply attacked.7 If his patrons all the while stood obstinately to the traditional usages of official augury and ritual, it was in the spirit of political conservatism that belonged to their class and their civic ideal, and on the principle that religion was necessary for the control of the multitude. In Etruria, where the old culture had run largely to mysticism and soothsaying on quasi-oriental lines, the Roman government took care to encourage it, by securing the theological monopoly of the upper-class families,8 and thus set up a standing hot-bed of superstition. In the same spirit they adopted from time to time popular cults from Greece, that of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods being introduced in the year 204 B.C. The attempt (186 B.C.) to suppress the Bacchic mysteries, of which a distorted and extravagant account9 is given by Livy, was made on grounds of policy and not of religion; and even if the majority of the senate had not been disposed to encourage the popular appetite for emotional foreign worships, the multitude of their own accord would have introduced the latter, in resentment of the exclusiveness of the patricians in keeping the old domestic and national cults in their own hands.10 As now eastern conquests multiplied the number of foreign slaves and residents in Rome, the foreign worships multiplied with them; and with the worships came such forms of freethought as then existed in Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt. In resistance to these, as to the orgiastic worships, political and religious conservatism for a time combined. In 173 B.C. the Greek Epicurean philosophers Alkaios and Philiskos were banished from the city,11 a step which was sure to increase the interest in Epicureanism. Twelve years later the Catonic party carried a curt decree in the Senate against the Greek rhetors,12 uti Romae ne essent; and in 155 the interest aroused by Carneades and the other Athenian ambassadors led to their being suddenly sent home, on [201]Cato’s urging.13 It seems certain that Carneades made converts to skepticism, among them being the illustrious Scipio Æmilianus.14 In the sequel the Greeks multiplied, especially after the fall of Macedonia,15 and in the year 92 we find the censors vetoing the practices of the Latin rhetors as an unpleasing novelty,16 thus leaving the Greeks in possession of the field.17 But, the general social tendency being downwards, it was only a question of time when the rationalism should be overgrown by the superstition. In 137 there had been another vain edict against the foreign soothsayers and the worshippers of Sabazius;18 but it was such cults that were to persist, while the old Roman religion passed away,19 save insofar as it had a non-literary survival among the peasantry.
While self-government lasted, rationalism among the cultured classes was fairly common. The great poem of Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, with its enthusiastic exposition of the doctrine of Epicurus, remains to show to what a height of sincerity and ardour a Roman freethinker could rise. No Greek utterance that has come down to us makes so direct and forceful an attack as his on religion as a social institution. He is practically the first systematic freethinking propagandist; so full is he of his purpose that after his stately prologue to alma Venus, who is for him but a personification of the genetic forces of Nature, he plunges straight into his impeachment of religion as a foul tyranny from which thinking men were first freed by Epicurus. The sonorous verse vibrates with an indignation such as Shelley’s in Queen Mab: religion is figured as horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans; a little further on its deeds are denounced as scelerosa atque impia, “wicked and impious,” the religious term being thus turned against itself; and a moving picture of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia justifies the whole. “To so much of evil could religion persuade.” It is with a bitter consciousness of the fatal hold of the hated thing on most men’s ignorant imagination that he goes on to speak of the fears20 so assiduously wrought upon by the vates, and to set up with strenuous speed the vividly-imagined system of Epicurean science by which he [202]seeks to fortify his friend against them. That no thing comes from nothing, or lapses into nothing; that matter is eternal; that all things proceed “without the Gods” by unchanging law, are his insistent themes; and for nigh two thousand years a religious world has listened with a reluctant respect. His influence is admitted to have been higher and nobler than that of the religion he assailed.
“Lucretius was the first not only to reveal a new power, beauty, and mystery in the world, but also to communicate to poetry a speculative impulse, opening up, with a more impassioned appeal than philosophy can do, the great questions underlying human life—such as the truth of all religious tradition, the position of man in the universe, and the attitude of mind and course of conduct demanded by that position.” (Sellar, Roman Poets of the Republic: Virgil, 1877, p. 199.)
“In the eyes of Lucretius all worship seemed prompted by fear and based on ignorance of natural law.... But it is nevertheless true that Lucretius was a great religious poet. He was a prophet, in deadly earnest, calling men to renounce their errors both of thought and conduct.... We may be certain that he was absolutely convinced of the truth of all that he wrote.” (W. Warde Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, 1909, pp. 327–28.)
And yet throughout the whole powerful poem we have testimony to the pupillary character of Roman thought in relation to Grecian. However much the earnest student may outgo his masters in emphasis and zeal of utterance, he never transcends the original irrationality of asserting that “the Gods” exist; albeit it is their glory to do nothing. It is in picturing their ineffable peace that he reaches some of his finest strains of song,21 though in the next breath he repudiates every idea of their control of things cosmic or human. He swears by their sacred breasts, proh sancta deum pectora, and their life of tranquil joy, when he would express most vehemently his scorn of the thought that it can be they who hurl the lightnings which haply destroy their own temples and strike down alike the just and the unjust. It is a survival of a quite primitive conception of deity,22 alongside of an advanced anti-religious criticism.
The explanation of the anomaly seems to be twofold. In the first place, Roman thought had not lived long enough—it never did live long enough—to stand confidently on its own feet and criticize its Greek teachers. In Cicero’s treatise On the Nature of the Gods, the Epicurean and the Stoic in turn retail their doctrine as they had [203]it from their school, the Epicurean affirming the existence and the inaction of the Gods with equal confidence, and repeating without a misgiving the formula about the Gods having not bodies but quasi-bodies, with not blood but quasi-blood; the Stoic, who stands by most of the old superstitions, professing to have his philosophical reasons for them. Each sectarian derides the beliefs of the other; neither can criticize his own creed. It would seem as if in the habitually militarist society, even when it turns to philosophy, there must prevail a militarist ethic and psychosis in the intellectual life, each man choosing a flag or a leader and fighting through thick and thin on that side henceforth. On the other hand, the argumentation of the high-priest Cotta in the dialogue turns to similar purpose the kindred principle of civic tradition. He argues in turn against the Epicurean’s science and the Stoic’s superstition, contesting alike the claim that the Gods are indifferent and the claim that they govern; and in the end he brazenly affirms that, while he sees no sound philosophic argument for religious beliefs and practices, he thinks it is justifiable to maintain them on the score of prescription or ancestral example. Here we have the senatorial or conservative principle,23 availing itself of the skeptical dialectic of Carneades. In terms of that ideal, which prevailed alike with believers and indifferentists,24 and mediated between such rival schools as the Epicurean and Stoic, we may partly explain the Epicurean theorem itself. For the rest, it is to be understood as an outcome partly of surviving sentiment and partly of forced compromise in the case of its Greek framers, and of the habit of partizan loyalty in the case of its Roman adherents.
In the arguments of Cotta, the unbelieving high-priest, we presumably have the doctrine of Cicero himself,25 who in the Academica avows his admiration of Carneades’s reasoning, and in the De Divinatione follows it, but was anchored by officialism to State usage. With his vacillating character, his forensic habit, and his genius for mere speech, he could not but betray his own lack of intellectual conviction; and such weakness as his found its natural support in the principle of use and wont, the practice and tradition of the commonwealth. On that footing he had it in him to boast [204]like any pedigreed patrician of the historic religiousness of Rome, he himself the while being devoid of all confident religious belief. His rhetoric on the subject can hardly be otherwise estimated than as sheer hustings hypocrisy. Doubtless he gave philosophic colour to his practice by noting the hopeless conflict of the creeds of the positive sects, very much as in our own day conservative dialectic finds a ground for religious conformity in the miscarriages of the men of science.26 But Cicero does not seem even to have had a religious sentiment to cover the nakedness of his political opportunism. Not only does he in the Tusculan Disputations put aside in the Platonic fashion all the Homeric tales which anthropomorphize and discredit the Gods;27 but in his treatise On Divination he shows an absolute disbelief in all the recognized practices, including the augury which he himself officially practised; and his sole excuse is that they are to be retained “on account of popular opinion and of their great public utility.”28 As to prodigies, he puts in germ the argument later made famous by Hume: either the thing could happen (in the course of nature) or it could not; if it could not, the story is false; if it could, non esse mirandum—there is no miracle.29 In his countless private letters, again, he shows not a trace of religious feeling,30 or even of interest in the questions which in his treatises he declares to be of the first importance.31 Even the doctrine of immortality, to which he repeatedly returns, seems to have been for him, as for so many Christians since, only a forensic theme, never a source of the private consolation he ascribed to it.32 In Cicero’s case, in fine, we reach the conclusion that either the noted inconstancy of his character pervaded all his thinking, or that his gift for mere utterance, and his demoralizing career as an advocate, overbore in him all sincere reflection. But, indeed, the practical subversion of all rational ethic in the public life of late republican Rome, wherein men claimed to be free and self-governing, yet lived by oppressing the rest of the world, was on all hands fatal to the moral rectitude which inspires a critical philosophy.
Modern scholarship still clings to the long-established view that Cicero was practically right, and that Lucretius was practically wrong. Augustus, says Dr. Warde Fowler, was fortunate in finding in Virgil “one who was in some sense a [205]prophet as well as a poet, who could urge the Roman by an imaginative example to return to a living pietas—not merely to the old religious forms, but to the intelligent sense of duty to God and man which had built up his character and his empire. In Cicero’s day there was also a great poet, he too in some sense a prophet; but Lucretius could only appeal to the Roman to shake off the slough of his old religion, and such an appeal was at the time both futile and dangerous. Looking at the matter historically, and not theologically, we ought to sympathize with the attitude of Cicero and Scaevola towards the religion of the State. It was based on a statesmanlike instinct; and had it been possible for that instinct to express itself practically in a positive policy like that of Augustus, it is quite possible that much mischief might have been averted” (Social Life at Rome, pp. 325–26).
It is necessary to point out (1) that the early Roman’s “sense of duty to God and man” was never of a kind that could fitly be termed “intelligent”; and (2) that it was his character that made his creed, and not his creed his character, though creed once formed reacts on conduct. Further, it may be permitted to suggest that we might consider historical problems morally, and to deprecate the academic view that “statesmanship” is something necessarily divorced from veracity. The imperfect appeal of Lucretius to the spirit of truth in an ignorant and piratical community, living an increasingly parasitic life, was certainly “futile”; but it is a strange sociology that sees in it something “dangerous,” while regarding the life of perpetual conquest and plunder as a matter of course, and the practice of systematic deceit as wholesome.
The summary of the situation is that Cicero’s policy of religious make-believe could no more have “saved” Rome than Plato’s could have saved Athens, or than that of Augustus did save the empire. It went downhill about as steadily after as before him; and it continued to do so under Christianity as under paganism. The decline was absolutely involved in the policy of universal conquest; and neither creeds nor criticism of creeds could have “averted” the result while the cause subsisted. But there is something gratuitously anti-rational in the thesis that such a decay might have been prevented by a politic manipulation of beliefs known to be false, and that some regeneration was really worked in Rome by the tale of pious Æneas. In his Religious Experience of the Roman People (1911) Dr. Fowler is more circumspect.
In the upper-class Rome of Cicero’s day his type seems to have been predominant,33 the women alone being in the mass orthodox,34 [206]and in their case the tendency was to add new superstitions to the old. Among public men there subsisted a clear understanding that public religion should continue for reasons of State. When we find an eminent politician like the elder M. Æmilius Scaurus prosecuted in the year 103 B.C. on a charge of neglecting certain religious ceremonies connected with his offices, we know that there had been neither conscientious abstention on his part nor sincere religious resentment on the other side, but merely a resort by political enemies, after Greek precedent, to a popular means of blackening an antagonist; for the same Scaurus, who was a member of the college of augurs, had actually rebuilt or restored the temple of Fides, said to have been founded by Numa, and that of Mens (Prudence), which had been set up after the great defeat of the Romans at the Trasimene lake;35 the early and the late procedure alike illustrating the political and pragmatic character of the State religion.36 In the supreme figure of Julius Cæsar we see the Roman brain at its strongest; and neither his avowed unbelief in the already popular doctrine of immortality,37 nor his repeatedly expressed contempt for the auspices,38 withheld him from holding and fulfilling the function of high pontiff. The process of skepticism had been rapid among the men of action. The illiterate Marius carried about with him a Syrian prophetess; of Sulla, who unhesitatingly plundered the temple of Delphi, it was said that he carried a small figure of Apollo as an amulet;39 of Cæsar, unless insofar as it may be true that in his last years, like Napoleon, he grew to believe in omens as his powers failed, under the stress of perpetual conflict,40 it cannot be pretended that he was aught but a convinced freethinker.41 The greatest and most intellectual man of action in the ancient world had no part in the faith which was supposed to have determined the success of the most powerful of all the ancient nations. [207]
Dean Merivale, noting that Cæsar “professed without reserve the principles of the unbelievers,” observes that, “freethinker as he was, he could not escape from the universal thraldom of superstition in which his contemporaries were held” (Hist. of the Romans under the Empire, ed. 1865, ii, 424). The reproach, from a priest, is piquant, but misleading. All the stories on which it is founded apply to the last two or three years of Cæsar’s life; and supposing them to be all true, which is very doubtful, they would but prove what has been suggested above—that the overstrained soldier, rising to the dizzy height of a tremendous career, partly lost his mental balance, like so many another. (Cp. Mackail, Latin Literature, 1895, p. 80.) Such is the bearing of the doubtful story (Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxviii, 2) that after the breaking down of a chariot (presumably the casualty which took place in his fourfold triumph; see Dio Cassius, xlviii, 21) he never mounted another without muttering a charm. M. Boissier (i, 70) makes the statement of Pliny apply to Cæsar’s whole life; but although Pliny gives no particulars, even Dean Merivale (p. 372) connects it with the accident in the triumph. To the same time belongs the less challengeable record (Dio Cassius, lx, 23) of his climbing on his knees up the steps of the Capitol to propitiate Nemesis. The very questionable legend, applied so often to other captains, of his saying, I have thee, Africa, when he stumbled on landing (Sueton. Jul. 59), is a proof not of superstition but of presence of mind in checking the superstitious fears of the troops, and was so understood by Suetonius; as was the rather flimsy story of his taking with him in Africa a man nicknamed Salutio (Sueton. ibid.) to neutralize the luck of the opposing Cornelii. The whole turn given to the details by the clerical historian is arbitrary and unjudicial. Nor is he accurate in saying that Cæsar “denied the Gods” in the Senate. He actually swore by them, per Deos immortales, in the next sentence to that in which he denied a future state. The assertion of the historian (p. 423), that in denying the immortality of the soul Cæsar denied “the recognized foundation of all religion,” is a no less surprising error. The doctrine never had been so recognized in ancient Rome. A Christian ecclesiastic might have been expected to remember that the Jewish religion, believed by him to be divine, was devoid of the “recognized foundation” in question, and that the canonical book of Ecclesiastes expressly discards it. Of course Cæsar offered sacrifices to Gods in whom he did not believe. That was the habitual procedure of his age.
It is significant that the decay of rationalism in Rome begins and proceeds with the Empire. Augustus, whose chosen name was [208]sacerdotal in its character,42 made it part of his policy to restore as far as possible the ancient cults, many of which had fallen into extreme neglect, between the indifference of the aristocratic class43 and the devotion of the populace, itself so largely alien, to the more attractive worships introduced from Egypt and the East. That he was himself a habitually superstitious man seems certain;44 but even had he not been, his policy would have been natural from the Roman point of view. A historian of two centuries later puts in the mouth of Mæcenas an imagined counsel to the young emperor to venerate and enforce the national religion, to exclude and persecute foreign cults, to put down alike atheism and magic, to control divination officially, and to keep an eye on the philosophers.45 What the empire sought above all things was stability; and a regimen of religion, under imperial control, seemed one of the likeliest ways to keep the people docile. Julius himself had seemed to plan such a policy,46 though he also planned to establish public libraries,47 which would hardly have promoted faith among the educated.
Augustus, however, aimed at encouraging public religion of every description, repairing or rebuilding eighty-two temples at Rome alone, giving them rich gifts, restoring old festivals and ceremonies, reinstituting priestly colleges, encouraging special foreign worships, and setting up new civic cults; himself playing high pontiff and joining each new priesthood, to the end of making his power and prestige so far identical with theirs;48 in brief, anticipating the later ruling principle of the Church of Rome. The natural upshot of the whole process was the imperial apotheosis, or raising of each emperor to Godhead at death. The usage of deifying living rulers was long before common in Egypt and the east,49 and had been adopted by the conquering Spartan Lysander in Asia Minor as readily as by the conquering Alexander. Julius Cæsar seems to have put it aside as a nauseous flattery;50 but Augustus wrought it [209]into his policy. It was the consummation at once of the old political conception of religion and of the new autocracy.
In a society so managed, all hope of return to self-government having ceased, the level of thought sank accordingly. There was practically no more active freethought. Livy, indeed, speaks so often of the contempt shown in his own day for tales of prodigies, and of what he calls contempt for the Gods,51 that there can be no question of the lack of religion among the upper classes at the beginning of the empire. But even in Livy’s day unbelief had ceased to go beyond a shrugging of the shoulders. Horace, with his credat Judæus Apella, and his frank rejection of the fear of the Deos tristes,52 was no believer, but he was not one to cross the emperor,53 and he was ready to lend himself to the official policy of religion.54 Ovid could satirize55 the dishonest merchant who prayed to the Gods to absolve his frauds; but he hailed Augustus as the sacred founder and restorer of temples,56 prayed for him as such, busied himself with the archæology of the cults, and made it, not quite without irony, a maxim to “spare an accepted belief.”57 Virgil, at heart a pantheist with rationalistic leanings,58 but sadly divided between Lucretius and Augustus, his poetical and his political masters,59 tells all the transition from the would-be scientific to the newly-credulous age in the two wistful lines:—
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas ...
Fortunatus et ille, Deos qui novit agrestes60
—“happy he who has been able to learn the causes of things; fortunate also he who has known the rural Gods.” The Gods, rural and other, entered on their due heritage in a world of decadence; Virgil’s epic is a religious celebration of antiquity; and Livy’s history is written in the credulous spirit, or at least in the tone, of an older time, with a few concessions to recent common sense.61 In the next generation Seneca’s monotheistic aversion to the popular superstitions is the high-water mark of the period, and represents the elevating power of the higher Greek Stoicism. On this score he belongs to the freethinking age, while his theistic [210]apriorism belongs to the next.62 All the while his principle of conformity to all legal observances63 leaves him powerless to modify the environment.
As the empire proceeds, the echoes of the old freethought become fewer and fewer. It is an entire misconception to suppose that Christianity came into the Roman world as a saving counter-force to licentious unbelief. Unbelief had in large part disappeared before Christianity made any headway; and that creed came as one of many popular cults, succeeding in terms of its various adaptations to the special conditions, moral and economic. It was easy for the populace of the empire to deify a ruler: as easy as for those of the East to deify Jesus; or for the early Romans to deify Romulus; at Rome it was the people, now so largely of alien stock, who had most insisted on deifying Cæsar.64 But the upper class soon kept pace with them in the zest for religion. In the first century, the elder Pliny recalls the spirit of Lucretius by the indignant eloquence with which he protests against the burdensome belief in immortality;65 and the emphasis with which he scouts alike the polytheism of the multitude, the universal worship of Fortune, and the idea that man can know the infinite divinity which is the universe;66 but, though Seneca and others reject the fear of future torment, Pliny is the last writer to repudiate with energy the idea of a future state.67 A number of epitaphs still chime with his view; but already the majority are on the other side;68 and the fear of hell was normally as active as the hope of heaven; while the belief in an approaching end of the world was proportionally as common as it was later under Christianity.69 And though Pliny, discussing the bases of magic, of which he recognized the fraudulence, ranks among them the influences of religion, as to which he declared mankind to be still in extreme darkness,70 we have seen how he in turn, on theistic grounds, frowned upon Hipparchos for daring to number the stars.71 Thus, whatever may be the truth as to the persecutions of the Christians in the first two centuries of the empire, the motive was in all cases certainly political or moral, as in the earlier case of the Bacchic mysteries, not rationalistic hostility to its doctrines as apart from Christian attacks on the established worships. [211]
Some unbelievers there doubtless were after Petronius, whose perdurable maxim that “Fear first made Gods in the world,”72 adopted in the next generation by Statius,73 was too pregnant with truth to miss all acceptance among thinking men. The fact that Statius in his verse ranked Domitian with the Gods made its truth none the less pointed. The Alexandrian rationalist Chaeremon, who had been appointed one of the tutors of Nero, had explained the Egyptian religion as a mere allegorizing of the physical order of the universe.74 It has been remarked too that in the next century the appointment of the freethinking Greek Lucian by Marcus Aurelius to a post of high authority in Egypt showed that his writings gave no great offence at court,75 where, indeed, save under the two great Antonines, religious seriousness was rare. These, however, were the exceptions: the whole cast of mind developed under the autocracy, whether in the good or in the bad, made for belief and acquiescence or superstition rather than for searching doubt and sustained reasoning.
The statement of Mosheim or of his commentators (Eccles. Hist. 1 Cent. Pt. I, ch. i, § 21, note; Murdock’s trans. Reid’s ed.) that Juvenal (Sat. xiii, 86) “complains of the many atheists at Rome” is a perversion of the passage cited. Juvenal’s allusion to those who put all things down to fortune and deny a moral government of the world begins with the phrase “sunt qui,” “there are (those) who”; he makes far more account of the many superstitious, and never suggests that the atheists are numerous in his day. Neither does he “complain”; on the contrary, his allusion to the atheists as such is non-condemnatory as compared with his attacks on pious rogues, and is thus part of the ground for holding that he was himself something of a freethinker—one of the last among the literary men. In the tenth Satire (346 sqq.) he puts the slightly theistic doctrine, sometimes highly praised (ed. Ruperti, 1817, in loc.), that men should not pray for anything, but leave the decision to the Gods, to whom man is dearer than to himself. There too occurs the famous doctrine (356) that if anything is to be prayed for it should be the mens sana in corpore sano, and the strong soul void of the fear of death. The accompanying phrase about offering “the intestines and the sacred sausages of a whitish pig” is flatly contemptuous of religious ceremonial; and the closing lines, placing the source [212]of virtue and happiness within, are strictly naturalistic. In the two last:—
Nullum numen habes, si sit prudentia; nos [or sed] te
Nos facimus, Fortuna, Deam, cœloque locamus,
the frequent reading abest for habes seems to make the better sense: “No divinity is wanting, if there be prudence; but it is we, O fortune, who make thee a Goddess, and throne thee in heaven.” In any case, the insistence is on man’s lordship of himself. (The phrase occurs again in Sat. xiv, 315.) But the worship of Fortune—which Pliny declares to be the prevailing faith of his day (Hist. Nat. II, v (vii), 7)—was itself a cult like another, with temples and ritual; and the astrology which, he adds, is beginning to supersede Fortune-worship among the learned and the ignorant alike, was but a reversion to an older Eastern religion. His own preference is for sun-worship, if any; but he falls back on the conviction that the power of God is limited, and that God is thus seen to be simply Nature (id. 8).
The erroneous notion that the Roman aristocracy ran mainly to atheism was widely propagated by Voltaire, who made it part of his argument against the atheism of his own day (Jenni; art. Athéisme, in the Dict. Philos., etc.). It will not bear examination. As regards the general tone of Roman literature from the first century onwards, the summing-up of Renan is substantially just: “The freethinkers ... diminish little by little, and disappear.... Juvenal alone continues in Roman society, down to the time of Hadrian, the expression of a frank incredulity.... Science dies out from day to day. From the death of Seneca, it may be said that there is no longer a thoroughly rationalistic scholar. Pliny the Elder is inquisitive, but uncritical. Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, avoid commenting on the inanity of the most ridiculous inventions. Pliny the Younger (Ep. vii, 27) believes in puerile stories of ghosts; Epictetus (xxxi, 5) would have all practise the established worship. Even a writer so frivolous as Apuleius feels himself bound to take the tone of a rigid conservative about the Gods (Florida, i, 1; De Magia, 41, 55, 56, 63). A single man, about the middle of this century, seems entirely exempt from supernatural beliefs; that is Lucian. The scientific spirit, which is the negation of the supernatural, exists only in a few; superstition invades all, enfeebling all reason” (Les Évangiles, ed. 1877, pp. 406–407).
That the mental paralysis connects causally with the political conditions will perhaps not now be denied. A censorship of the written word belongs congenitally to autocracy; and only the personal magnanimity of Cæsar and the prudence of Augustus delayed its development in Rome. Soon it became an irresistible terrorism. Even Cæsar, indeed, so far forgot one of the great rules [213]of his life as to impeach before the Senate the tribunes who had quite justifiably prosecuted some of the people who had hailed him as king;76 and the fact that the Senate was already slavish enough to eject them gives the forecast of the future. Augustus long showed a notable forbearance to all manner of verbal opposition, and even disparagement; but at length he also began to prosecute for private aspersions,77 and even to suppress histories of a too critical stamp. Tiberius began his reign with the high-pitched sentiment that “in a free State tongue and mind should be free”;78 and for a time he bore himself with an exemplary restraint; but he too, in turn, took the colour of his place, and became murderously resentful of any semblance of aspersion on himself.79 The famous sentiment ascribed to him in the Annals of Tacitus, Deorum injuriae diis curae80—“the Gods’ wrongs are the Gods’ business”—is not noted by Suetonius, and has an un-Roman sound. What Suetonius tells is81 that he was “very negligent concerning the Gods and religions,” yet addicted to the astrologers, and a believer in fate. The fact remains that while, as aforesaid, there must have been still a number of unbelievers, there is no sign after Lucretius of any Roman propaganda against religion; and the presumption is that the Augustan policy of promoting the old cults was extended to the maintenance of the ordinary Roman view that disrespect to the Gods was a danger to the State. In the reign of Nero we find trace of a treatise De religionis erroribus by Fabricius Vejento,82 wherein was ridiculed the zeal of the priests to proclaim mysteries which they did not understand; but, whether or not its author was exiled and the book burnt on their protest, such literature was not further produced.83
There was, in fact, no spirit left for a Lucretian polemic against false beliefs. Everything in the nature of a searching criticism of life was menaced by the autocracy; Nero decreeing that no man should philosophize at Rome,84 after slaying or banishing a series of [214]philosophers;85 Domitian crucifying the very scribes who copied the work of Hermogenes of Tarsus, in which he was obliquely criticized.86 When men in the mass crouched before such tyranny, helplessly beholding emperor after emperor overtaken by the madness that accrues to absolute power, they were disabled for any disinterested warfare on behalf of truth. All serious impeachment of religion proceeds upon an ethical motive; and in imperial Rome there was no room for any nobility of ethic save such as upbore the Stoics in their austere pursuit of self-control, in a world too full of evil to be delighted in.
Thus it came about that the Cæsars, who would doubtless have protected their co-operating priesthoods from any serious attack on the official religion,87 had practically no occasion to do so. Lucian’s jests were cast at the Gods of Greece, not at those of the Roman official cults; hence his immunity. What the Cæsars were concerned to do was rather to menace any alien religion that seemed to undermine the solidarity of the State; and of such religions, first the Jewish, and later the Christian, were obvious examples. Thus we have it that Tiberius “put down foreign religions” (externas ceremonias), in particular the Egyptian and Judaic rites; pulling down the temple of Isis, crucifying her priests, expelling from Rome all Jews and proselytes, and forcing the Jewish youth to undergo military service in unhealthy climates.88 Even the astrologers, in whose lore he believed, he expelled until they promised to renounce their art—a precedent partly set up by Augustus,89 and followed with varying severity by all the emperors, pagan and Christian alike.
And still the old Italian religion waned, as it must. On the one hand, the Italic population was almost wholly replaced or diluted by alien stocks, slave or free, with alien cults and customs; on the other, the utter insincerity of the official cults, punctiliously conserved by well-paid, unbelieving priests, invited indifference. In the nature of things, an unchanging creed is moribund; life means adaptation to change; and it was only the alien cults that in Rome adapted themselves to the psychic mutation. Among the educated, who had read their Lucretius, the spectacle of the innumerable cults of the empire conduced either to entire but tacit unbelief, or to a species of vaguely rationalistic90 yet sentimental monotheism, in [215]which Reason sometimes figured as universal Deity.91 Among the uneducated the progression was constant towards one or other of the emotional and ritualistic oriental faiths, so much better adapted to their down-trodden life.
One element of betterment there was in the life of declining Rome, until the Roman ideals were superseded by oriental. Even the Augustan poets, Horace and Ovid, had protested like the Hebrew prophets, and like Plato and like Cicero, against the idea that rich sacrifices availed with the Gods above a pure heart; and such doctrine, while paganism lasted, prevailed more and more.92 At the same time, Horace rejects the Judæo-Stoic doctrine, adopted in the gospels, that all sins are equal, and lays down the rational moral test of utility—Utilitas justi propè mater et aequi.93 The better and more thoughtful men who grew up under the autocracy, though inevitably feebler and more credulous in their thinking than those of the later commonwealth, developed at length a concern for conduct, public and private, which lends dignity to the later philosophic literature, and lustre to the imperial rule of the Antonines. This concern it was that, linking Greek theory to Roman practice, produced a code of rational law which could serve Europe for a thousand years. This concern too it was, joined with the relatively high moral quality of their theism, that ennobled the writing of Seneca94 and Epictetus and Maximus of Tyre; and irradiates the words as well as the rule of Marcus Aurelius. In them was anticipated all that was good95 in the later Christian ethic, even as the popular faiths anticipated the Christian dogmas; and they cherished a temper of serenity that the Fathers fell far short of. To compare their pages with those of the subsequent Christian Fathers—Seneca with Lactantius, “the Christian Cicero”; Maximus with Arnobius; Epictetus with Tertullian; the admirable Marcus, and his ideal of the “dear city of Zeus,” with the shrill polemic of Augustine’s City of God and the hysteria of the Confessions—is to [216]prove a rapid descent in magnanimity, sanity, self-command, sweetness of spirit, and tolerance. What figures as religious intolerance in the Cæsars was, as we have seen, always a political, never a religious, animosity. Any prosecution of Christians under the Antonines was certainly on the score of breach of law, turbulence, or real or supposed malpractices, not on that of heresy—a crime created only by the Christians themselves, in their own conflicts.
The scientific account of the repellent characteristics of the Fathers, of course, is not that their faith made them what they were, but that the ever-worsening social and intellectual conditions assorted such types into their ecclesiastical places, and secured for them their influence over the types now prevailing among the people. They too stand for the intellectual dissolution wrought by imperialism. When all the higher forms of intellectual efficiency were at an end, it was impossible that on any religious impulse whatever there should be generated either a higher code of life or a saner body of thought than those of the higher paganism of the past. Their very arguments against paganism are largely drawn from old “pagan” sources. Those who still speak of the rise of Christianity in the ancient world as a process of “regeneration” are merely turning historical science out of doors. The Christian Fathers had all the opportunity that a life of quasi-intellectual specialism could supply; and their liberty of criticism as regarded the moribund pagan creeds was a further gymnastic; but nothing could countervail the insanity of their intellectual presuppositions, which they could not transcend.
Inheriting the Judaic hypnotism of the Sacred Book, they could reason only as do railers; and the moral readjustment which put them in revolt against the erotic element in pagan mythology was a mere substitution of an ascetic neurosis for the old disease of imagination. Strictly speaking, their asceticism, being never rationalized, never rose to the level of ethic as distinguished from mere taboo or sacrosanct custom. As we shall see, they could not wholly escape the insurgence of the spirit of reason; but they collectively scouted it with a success attained by no other ostensibly educated priesthood of antiquity. They intellectually represent, in fact, the consummation of the general Mediterranean decadence.
For the rest, the “triumph” of the new faith was simply the survival of the forms of thought, and, above all, of the form of religious community, best fitted to the political and intellectual environment. The new Church organization was above all things a great economic endowment for a class of preachers, polemists, and [217]propagandists; and between the closing of the old spheres of public life and the opening of the new,96 the new faith was established as much by political and economic conditions as by its intellectual adaptation to an age of mental twilight.
Of the religion of the educated pagans in its last forms, then, it is finally to be said that it was markedly rationalistic as compared with the Christianity which followed, and has been on that ground stigmatized by Christian orthodoxy down till our own day. The religion of Marcus Aurelius is self-reverence, self-study, self-rule, plus faith in Deity; and it is not to be gainsaid that, next to his adoptive father Antoninus Pius, he remains the noblest monarch in ancient history; the nearest parallel being the more superstitious but still noble Julian, the last of the great pagan rulers. In such rulers the antique philosophy was in a measure justified of its children; and if it never taught them to grapple with the vast sociological problem set up by the Empire, and so failed to preserve the antique civilization, it at least did as much for them in that regard as the new faith did for its followers. [218]
1 Mommsen, History of Rome, bk. i, ch. 14 (Eng. tr. 1894, vol. i, pp. 282–83). Mommsen’s view of the antiquity of writing among the Latins (p. 280) is highly speculative. He places its introduction about or before 1000 B.C.; yet he admits that they got their alphabet from the Greeks, and he can show no Greek contacts for that period. Cp. pp. 167–68 (ch. x). Schwegler (Römische Geschichte, 1853, i, 36) more reasonably places the period after that of the Etruscan domination, while recognizing the Greek origin of the script. Cp. Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Eng. tr. 1906, pp. 26–28; Pelham, Outlines of Roman History, 1893, p. 32. ↑
2 Schwegler, i, ch. i, § 12; Teuffel, Hist. of Roman Lit. ed. Schwabe, Eng. tr. 1900, i, 100–101, 104–10. ↑
4 Mommsen, bk. ii, ch. 8. Eng. tr. ii, 70. Such creation of deities by mere abstraction of things and functions had been the rule in the popular as distinguished from the civic religion. Cp. Augustine, De civitate Dei, iv, 16, 23; vi, 9, etc. It was the concomitant of the tendency noted by Livy: adeo minimis etiam rebus prava religio inserit deos (xxvii, 23). But the practice was not peculiar to the Romans, for among the Greeks were Gods or Goddesses of Wealth, Peace, Mercy, Shame, Fortune, Rumour, Energy, Action, Persuasion, Consolation, Desire, Yearning, Necessity, Force, etc. See Pausanias passim. The inference is that the more specific deities in all religions, with personal names, are the product of sacerdotal institutions or of poetic or other art. M. Boissier (i, 5), like Ihne, takes it for granted that the multitude of deified abstractions had no legends; but this is unwarranted. They may have had many; but there were no poets to sing, or priests to preserve and ritualize them. ↑
6 Mr. Schuckburgh (History of Rome, 1894, p. 401, note) cites a translated passage in his fragments (Cicero, De Div. ii, 50; De nat. Deorum, iii, 32), putting the Epicurean view that the Gods clearly did not govern human affairs, “which he probably would have softened if he had not agreed with it.” Cp. Mommsen, iii, 113 (bk. ii, ch. 13). ↑
7 Fragmenta, ed. Hesselius, p. 226; Cicero, De Divinatione, i, 58. ↑
8 Mommsen, i, 301; ii, 71; iii, 117 (bk. i, ch. 15; bk. ii, ch. 8; bk. iii, ch. 13). Cicero, De Div. i, 41. ↑
9 Livy, xxix, 18. Dr. Warde Fowler (Religious Experience of the Roman People, p. 346) censures Mr. Heitland for calling Livy’s story “an interesting romance” (Hist. of Rom. Rep. ii, 229 note); remarking that “it is the fashion now to reject as false whatever is surprising,” and adding (p. 347): “It is certain, from the steps taken by the government ... that it is in the main a true account.” It may suffice to ask whether Dr. Fowler believes in all or any of the prodigia mentioned by Livy because the government “took steps” about them. ↑
10 Cp. Boissier, La religion romaine, i, 39, 346. ↑
12 Aulus Gellius (xv, 11) says the edict was de philosophis et de rhetoribus Latinis, but the senatus-consultum, as given by him, does not contain the adjective; and he goes on to tell that aliquot deinde annis post—really sixty-nine years later—the censors fulminated against homines qui NOVUM genus disciplinæ instituerunt ... eos sibi nomen imposuisse Latinas rhetoras. The former victims, then, were presumably Greek. Cp. Shuckburgh, p. 520; and Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, 1866, ii, 146. Professor Pelham (Outlines of Roman History, 1893, p. 179, note) mistakenly cites the senatus-consultum as containing the word “Latini.” The reading Latinis in Gellius’s own phrase has long been suspected. See ed. Frederic and Gronov, 1706. ↑
14 Cicero, De. Repub., passim, ed. Halm. ↑
16 Suetonius, De claris rhetoribus. ↑
17 See in Cicero, De Oratore, iii, 24, the account by the censor Crassus of his reasons for preferring the Greek rhetors. ↑
18 Valerius Maximus, i, 3, 1. ↑
19 The culture history of the republican period, as partially recovered by recent archæology, shows a process of dissolution and replacement from a remote period. Cp. Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Eng. tr. 1906, ch. ii, notably p. 18. ↑
20 De rerum natura, i, 50–135; cp. v, 1166. ↑
21 ii, 646–50 (the passage cited by Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons in one of the Bradlaugh debates, with a confession of its noble beauty); and again ii, 1090–1105, and iii, 18–22. ↑
22 See Christianity and Mythology, pp. 52–57. ↑
23 See the account of the doctrine of the high-priest Scaevola, preserved by Augustine, De civ. Dei, iv, 27. He and Varro (id. iv, 31; vi, 5–7) agreed in rejecting the current myths, but insisted on the continued civic acceptance of them. On the whole question compare Boissier, La religion romaine, i, 47–63. ↑
24 Thus the satirist Lucilius, who ridiculed the popular beliefs, was capable, in his capacity of patriot, of crying out against the lack of respect shown to religion and the Gods (Boissier, pp. 51–52). The purposive insincerity set up in their thinking by such men must, of course, have been injurious to character. ↑
25 Cp. the De Divinatione, i, 2. ↑
26 E.g., Mr. A. J. Balfour’s Foundations of Belief. ↑
28 De Divinatione, ii, 33, 34, cp. ii, 12; and De nat. Deorum, i, 22. It is not surprising that in a later age, when the remaining pagans had no dialectic faculty left, the Christian Fathers, by using Cicero as a weapon against the cults, could provoke them into calling him impious (Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, iii, 6, 7). ↑
33 “It seems to me that, on the whole, among the educated and the rich, the indifferent must have been in the majority” (Boissier, p. 61). ↑
35 Cp. Long, Decline of Roman Republic, i, 438; ii, 38–40. Long remarks that Domitius, the accuser of Scaurus (who had prevented his election to the college of augurs), “used the name of religion for the purpose of damaging a political enemy; and the trick has been repeated, and is repeated, up to the present day. The Romans must have kept records of many of these trials. They were the great events of the times ...; and so we learn that three tribes voted against Scaurus, and thirty-two voted for him; but in each of these thirty-two tribes there was only a small majority of votes (pauca puncta) in favour of Scaurus.” ↑
36 See Long, i, 56, for a cynical estimate of the mode of manipulation of the Sibylline and other sacred books. ↑
37 Sallust, Bellum Catilin. c. 51. ↑
38 Suetonius, Julius, cc. 59, 77; Cicero, De Divinatione, ii, 24. Cp. Merivale, History of the Romans under the Empire, ed. 1865, ii, 424. ↑
39 Plutarch, Sulla, c. 29; Marius, c. 16. Long (Decline of Roman Republic, ii, 369) says of Sulla that, “though he could rob a temple when he wanted money, he believed in the religion of his time. We should call him superstitious; and a man who is superstitious is capable of any crime, for he believes that the Gods can be conciliated by prayers and presents.” ↑
40 Compare the fears which grew upon Cromwell in his last days. ↑
41 Pompeius, on the other hand, had many seers in his camp; but after his overthrow expressed natural doubts about Providence. Cicero, De Div. ii, 24, 47; Plutarch, Pompeius, c. 75. ↑
43 See Augustine’s citation from Varro, De civ. Dei, vi, 2. Cp. Sueton. Aug. 29. ↑
44 The only record to the contrary is the worthless scandal as to his “suppers of the Twelve Gods” (Sueton. Aug. 70). The statement of W. A. Schmidt that “none of the Julians was orthodox” (Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert, 1847, p. 175) is somewhat overstrained. ↑
46 E.g., his encouragement of a new college of priests founded in his honour. Dio, xliv, 6. ↑
47 Sueton. Julius, 44, 56. The first public library actually opened in Rome was founded by Asinius Pollio under Augustus, and was placed in the forecourt of the temple of Liberty: Augustus founded two others; Tiberius a fourth, in his palace; Vespasian a fifth, in the temple of Peace; Domitian a sixth, on the Capitol. W. A. Schmidt, Gesch. der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit, pp. 151–52, and refs. ↑
48 Boissier, pp. 67–108; Suetonius, Aug. xxix–xxxi. ↑
49 L’Abbé Beurlier, Le Culte Impérial, 1891, introd. and ch. 1; Boissier, ch. 2. Cp. p. 185, note, above. ↑
50 It would seem that the occasion on which he enraged the Senate by not rising to receive them (Sueton. Jul. 78) was that on which they came to announce that they had made him a God, Jupiter Julius, with a special temple and a special priest. See Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, v, 418. He might very well have intended to rebuke their baseness. But cp. Boissier, i, 122, citing Dio, xlvi, 6. ↑
51 iii, 46; x, 40; xliii, 13. ↑
53 As to the conflict between Horace’s bias and his policy, cp. Boissier, i. 193–201. ↑
57 Fasti, iv, 204. The preceding phrase, pro magno teste vetustas creditur, certainly has an ironic ring. ↑
60 Georgics, ii, 490, 493. Diderot originated the idea that the first of these lines and the two which follow it in Virgil had reference to Lucretius. Grimm, Correspondance Littéraire, ed. 1829–30, vi, 21–25. It is acquiesced in by W. Warde Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, 1909, p. 327. Sellar (Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil, 1877. p. 201) is doubtful on the point. ↑
65 The same note occurs in Virgil, Æneid, vi, 719–21. ↑
66 Hist. Nat. ii, 1, 5 (7). Pliny identifies nature and deity: “Per quæ declaratur haud dubie naturæ potentia, idque esse quod Deum vocamus” (last cit., end). ↑
67 Hist. nat. vii, 55 (56). Cp. Boissier, i, 300. ↑
69 See the praiseworthy treatise of Mr. J. A. Farrer, Paganism and Christianity, 1891, chs. 5, 6, and 7. ↑
70 “... vires religionis, ad quas maxime etiamnum caligat humanum genus.” Hist. nat. xxx, 1. ↑
72 Primus in orbe deos fecit timor. Frag. 22, ed. Burmanni. The whole passage is noteworthy. See also his Satyricon, c. 137, as to his estimate of sacerdotal sincerity. ↑
74 Porphyry, Epistle to Anebo (with Jamblichus). Chaeremon, however, is said to have regarded comets as divine portents. Origen, Ag. Celsus, bk. i, ch. 59. ↑
75 Prof. C. Martha, Les moralistes sous l’empire romain, ed. 1881, p. 341. ↑
76 W. A. Schmidt, who cites this act (Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit, pp. 31–33) as the beginning of the end of free speech in Rome, does not mention the detail given by Dio (xliv, 10), that Cæsar suspected the tribunes of having set on some of the people to hail him as king. But the unproved suspicion does not justify his course, which was a bad lapse of judgment, even if the suspicion were just. From this point a conspiracy against his life was natural. Cp. Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, v, 432–33. as to the facts. ↑
77 See W. A. Schmidt, pp. 34–108, for a careful analysis of the evolution. As to the book-censure, see pp. 101–104. ↑
78 Suetonius, Tiberius, c. 28. ↑
80 Annals, i, 73. That such a phrase should have been written by an emperor in an official letter, and yet pass unnoticed through antiquity save in one historical work, recovered only in the Renaissance, is one of the minor improbabilities that give colour to the denial of the genuineness of the Annals. ↑
82 Petronius, Satyricon, ad init. ↑
83 In the Annals (xiv, 50) it is stated that the book attacked senators and pontiffs; that it was condemned to be burned, and Vejento to be exiled; and that the book was much sought and read while forbidden; but that it fell into oblivion when all were free to read it. Here, again, there is no other ancient testimony. Vejento is heard of, however, in Juvenal, iv, 113, 123–29. ↑
84 Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, iv. 47. ↑
86 Suetonius, Domitian, c. 10. ↑
88 Suetonius, Tiberius, c. 36; Josephus, Antiquities, xviii, 3, §§ 4, 5. Josephus specifies isolated pretexts, which Suetonius does not mention. They are not very probable. ↑
89 Who destroyed 2,000 copies of prophetical books. Suetonius, Aug. c. 31. ↑
90 See, in the next chapter, as to the rationalistic mythology of Macrobius. ↑
91 Cp. Propertius, ii, 14, 27 sqq.; iii, 23, 19–20; iv, 3, 38; Tibullus, iv, 1, 18–23; Juvenal, as before cited, and xv, 133, 142–46. ↑
92 Plato, 2 Alcib.; Cicero, Pro Cluentio, c. 68; Horace, Carm. iii, 23, 17; Ovid, Heroides, Acont. Cydipp. 191–92; Persius, Sat. ii, 69; Seneca, De Beneficiis, i, 6. Cp. Diod. Sic. xii, 20; Varro, in Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, vii, 1. ↑
93 1 Sat. iii, 96–98. Cp. Cicero, De Finibus, iv, 19, 27, 28; Matt. v. 19–28; James, ii, 10. Lactantius, again (Div. Inst. iii, 23). denounces the doctrine of the equality of offences as laid down by Zeno, giving no sign of knowing that it is also set forth in his own sacred books. ↑
94 On Seneca’s moral teaching, cp. Martha, Les Moralistes sous l’empire romain, pp. 57–66; Boissier, La religion romaine, ii, 80–82. M. Boissier further examines fully the exploded theory that Seneca received Christian teaching. On this compare Bishop Lightfoot, Dissertations on the Apostolic Age, pp. 237–92. ↑
95 Seneca was so advanced in his theoretic ethic as to consider all war on a level with homicide. Epist. xcv, 30. ↑
96 It is to be noted that preaching had begun among the moralists of Rome in the first century, and was carried on by the priests of Isis in the second; and that in Egypt monasticism had long been established. Martha, as cited, p. 67; Boissier, i, 356–59. Cp. Mosheim, 2 Cent. pt. ii, c. iii, §§ 13, 14, as to monasticism. ↑
The Christian gospels, broadly considered, stand for a certain measure of freethinking reaction against the Jewish religion, and are accordingly to be reckoned with in the present inquiry; albeit their practical outcome was only an addition to the world’s supernaturalism and traditional dogma. To estimate aright their share of freethought, we have but to consider the kind and degree of demand they made on the reason of the ancient listener, as apart, that is, from the demand made on their basis for the recognition of a new Deity. When this is done it will be found that they express in parts a process of reflection which outwent even critical common sense in a kind of ecstatic Stoicism, an oriental repudiation of the tyranny of passions and appetites; in other parts a mysticism that proceeds as far beyond the credulity of ordinary faith. Socially considered, they embody a similar opposition between an anarchistic and a partly orthodox or regulative ideal. The plain inference is that they stand for many independent movements of thought in the Græco-Roman world. It is actually on record that the reduction of the whole law to love of one’s neighbour1 was taught before the Christian era by the famous Rabbi Hillel;2 and the gospel itself3 shows that this view was current. In another passage4 the reduction of the ten commandments to five again indicates a not uncommon disregard for the ecclesiastical side of the law. But the difference between the two passages points of itself to various forces of relative freethought.
Any attentive study of the gospels discloses not merely much glossing and piecing and interpolating of documents, but a plain medley of doctrines, of ideals, of principles; and to accept the mass of disconnected utterances ascribed to “the Lord,” many of them associated with miracles, as the oral teaching of any one man, is a proceeding so uncritical that in no other study could it now be [219]followed. The simple fact that the Pauline Epistles (by whomsoever written) show no knowledge of any Jesuine miracles or teachings whatever, except as regards the Last Supper (1 Cor. xi, 24–25—a passage obviously interpolated), admits of only three possible interpretations: (1) the Jesus then believed in had not figured as a teacher at all; or (2) the writer or writers gave no credit or attached no importance to reports of his teachings. Either of these views (of which the first is plainly the more plausible) admits of (3) the further conclusion that the Pauline Jesus was not the Gospel Jesus, but an earlier one—a fair enough hypothesis; but on that view the mass of Dominical utterances in the gospels is only so much the less certificated. When, then, it is admitted by all open-minded students that the events in the narrative are in many cases fictitious, even when they are not miraculous, it is wholly inadmissible that the sayings should be trustworthy, as one man’s teachings.
Analysing them in collation, we find even in the Synoptics, and without taking into account the Fourth Gospel, such wide discrepancies as the following:—
1. The doctrine: “the Kingdom of God is among you” (Lk. xvii, 21), side by side with promises of the speedy arrival of the Son of Man, whose coming = the Kingdom of God (cp. Mt. iii, 2, 3; iv, 17; Mk. i, 15).
2. The frequent profession to supersede the Law (Mt. v, 21, 33, 38, 43, etc.); and the express declaration that not one jot or tittle thereof is to be superseded (Mt. v, 17–20).
3. Proclamation of a gospel for the poor and the enslaved (Lk. iv, 18); with the tacit acceptance of slavery (Lk. xvii, 7, 9, 10; where the word translated “servant” in the A.V., and let pass by McClellan, Blackader, and other reforming English critics, certainly means “slave”).
4. Stipulation for the simple fulfilment of the Law as a passport to eternal life, with or without further self-denial (Mt. xix, 16–21; Lk. x, 28; xviii, 22); on the other hand a stipulation for simple benevolence, as in the Egyptian ritual (Mt. xxv; cp. Lk. ix, 48); and yet again stipulations for blind faith (Mt. x, 15) and for blood redemption (Mt. xxvi, 28).
5. Alternate promise (Mt. vi, 33; xix, 29) and denial (Mt. x, 34–39) of temporal blessings.
6. Alternate commands to secrecy (Mt. xii, 16; viii, 4; ix, 30; Mk. iii, 12; v, 43; vii, 36) and to publicity (Mt. vii, 7–8; Mk. v, 19) concerning miracles, with a frequent record of their public performance.
7. Specific restriction of salvation to Israelites (Mt. x, 5, 6; xv, 24; xix, 28); equally specific declaration that the Kingdom of God shall be to another nation (Mt. xxii, 43); no less specific [220]assurance that the Son of Man (not the Twelve as in Mt. xix, 28) shall judge all nations, not merely Israel (Mt. xxv, 32; cp. viii, 11).
8. Profession to teach all, especially the simple and the childlike (Mt. xviii, 3; xi, 25, 28–30; Mk. x, 15); on the contrary, a flat declaration (Mt. xiii, 10–16; Mk. iv, 11; Lk. viii, 10; cp. Mk. iv, 34) that the saving teaching is only for the special disciples; yet again (Mt. xv, 16; Mk. vi, 52; viii, 17, 18) imputations of lack of understanding to them.
9. Companionship of the Teacher with “publicans and sinners” (Mt. ix, 10); and, on the other hand, a reference to the publicans as falling far short of the needed measure of loving-kindness (Mt. v, 46).
10. Explicit contrarieties of phrase, not in context (Mt. xii, 30; Lk. xi, 50).
11. Flat contradictions of narrative as to the Teacher’s local success (Mt. xiii, 54–58; Lk. iv, 23).
12. Insistence that the Messiah is of the Davidic line (Mt. i; xxi, 15; Lk. i, 27; ii, 4), and that he is not (Mt. xxii, 43–45; Mk. xii, 35–37; Lk. xx).
13. Contradictory precepts as to limitation and non-limitation of forgiveness (Mt. xviii, 17, 22).
Such variously serious discrepancies count for more than even the chronological and other divergences of the records concerning the Birth, the Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, as proofs of diversity of source; and they may be multiplied indefinitely. The only course for criticism is to admit that they stand for the ideas of a variety of sects or movements, or else for an unlimited manipulation of the documents by individual hands. Many of them may very well have come from various so-called “Lords” and “Messiahs”; but they cannot be from a single teacher.
There remains open the fascinating problem as to whether some if not all of the more notable teachings may not be the utterances of one teacher of commanding originality, whose sectaries were either unable to appreciate or unable to keep separate his doctrine.5 Undoubtedly some of the better teachings came first from men of superior capacity and relatively deep ethical experience. The veto on revenge, and the inculcation of love to enemies, could not come from commonplace minds; and the saying preserved from the Gospel According to the Hebrews, “Unless ye cease from sacrificing the wrath shall not cease from you,” has a remarkable ring.6 But [221]when we compare the precept of forgiveness with similar teachings in the Hebrew books and the Talmud,7 we realize that the capacity for such thought had been shown by a number of Jewish teachers, and that it was a specific result of the long sequence of wrong and oppression undergone by the Jewish people at the hands of their conquerors. The unbearable, consuming pain of an impotent hate, and the spectacle of it in others—this experience among thoughtful men, and not an unconditioned genius for ethic in one, is the source of a teaching which, categorically put as it is in the gospels, misses its meaning with most who profess to admire it; the proof being the entire failure of most Christians in all ages to act on it. To say nothing of similar teaching in Old Testament books and in the Talmud, we have it in the most emphatic form in the pre-Christian “Slavonic Enoch.”8
A superior ethic, then, stands not for one man’s supernormal insight, but for the acquired wisdom of a number of wise men. And it is now utterly impossible to name the individual framers of the gospel teachings, good or bad. The central biography dissolves at every point before critical tests; it is a mythical construction.9 Of the ideas in the Sermon on the Mount, many are ancient; of the parabolic and other teachings, some of the most striking occur only in the third gospel, and are unquestionably late. And when we are asked to recognize a unique personality behind any one doctrine, such as the condemnation of sacrifice in the uncanonical Hebrew Gospel, we can but answer (1) that on the face of the case this doctrine appears to come from a separate circle; (2) that the renunciation of sacrifice was made by many Greek and Roman writers,10 and by earlier teachers among the Hebrews;11 and (3) that in the Talmud, and in such a pre-Christian document as the “Slavonic Enoch,” there are teachings which, had they occurred in the gospels, would have been confidently cited as unparalleled in ancient literature. The Talmudic teachings, so vitally necessary in Jewry, that “it is better to be persecuted than persecutor,” and that, “were the persecutor a just man and the persecuted an impious, God would still be on the side of the persecuted,”12 are not equalled for practical purposes by any in the Christian sacred books; and the Enochic beatitude, “Blessed is he who looks to raise his own hand for labour,”13 is no less remarkable. But it is impossible to associate [222]these teachings with any outstanding personality, or any specific movements; and to posit a movement-making personality in the sole case of certain scattered sayings in the gospels is critically inadmissible.
There is positively no ground for supposing that any selected set of teachings constituted the basis or the original propaganda of any single Christian sect, primary or secondary; and the whole known history of the cult tells against the hypothesis that it ever centred round those teachings which to-day specially appeal to the ethical rationalist. Such teachings are more likely to be adventitious than fundamental, in a cult of sacrificial salvation. When an essentially rationalistic note is struck in the gospels, as in the insistence14 that a notable public catastrophe is not to be regarded in the old Jewish manner as a punishment for sin, it is cancelled in the next sentence by an interpolation which unintelligently reaffirms the very doctrine denied.15 So with the teaching16 that the coming worship is to be neither Judaic nor Samaritan: the next sentence reaffirms Jewish particularism in the crudest way. The main movement, then, was clearly superstitious.
It remains to note the so-far rationalistic character of such teachings as the protests against ceremonialism and sabbatarianism, the favouring of the poor and the outcast, the extension of the future life to non-Israelites, and the express limitation of prayer (Mt. vi, 9; Lk. xi, 2) to a simple expression of religious feeling—a prescription which has been absolutely ignored through the whole history of the Church, despite the constant use of the one prayer prescribed—itself a compilation of current Jewish phrases.
The expression in the Dominical prayer translated “Give us this day [or day by day] our daily bread” (Mt. vi, 11; Lk. xi, 3) is pointless and tautological as it stands in the English and other Protestant versions. In verse 8 is the assurance that the Father knows beforehand what is needed; the prayer is, therefore, to be a simple process of communion or advocation, free of all verbiage; then, to make it specially ask for the necessary subsistence, without which life would cease, and further to make the demand each day, when in the majority of cases there would be no need to offer such a request, is to stultify the whole. If the most obvious necessity is to be urged, why not all the less obvious? The Vulgate translation, “Give us to-day our super-substantial bread,” though it has the air of providing for the Mass, is presumptively the original sense; and is virtually supported by [223]McClellan (N. T. 1875, ii, 645–47), who notes that the repeated use of the article, τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον, implies a special meaning, and remarks that of all the suggested translations “daily” is “the very one which is mostly manifestly and utterly condemned.” Compare the bearing of the verses Mt. vi, 25–26, 31–34, which expressly exclude the idea of prayer for bread, and Lk. xi, 13. The idea of a super-substantial bread seems already established in Philo, De Legum Allegor. iii, 55–57, 59–61. Naturally the average theologian (e.g., Bishop Lightfoot, cited by McClellan) clings to the conception of a daily appeal to the God for physical sustenance; but in so doing he is utterly obscuring the original doctrine.
Properly interpreted, the prayer forms a curious parallel to the close of the tenth satire of Juvenal, above cited, where all praying for concrete boons is condemned, on the ground that the Gods know best, and that man is dearer to them than to himself; but where there is permitted (of course, illogically) an appeal for soundness of mind and spiritual serenity. The documents would be nearly contemporary, and, though independent, would represent kindred processes of ethical and rational improvement on current religious practice. On the other hand, the prayer, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”—which again rings alien to the context—would have been scouted by Juvenal as representing a bad survival of the religion of fear. Several early citations and early MSS., it should be noted, give a briefer version of the prayer, beginning, “Father, hallowed be thy name,” and dropping the “Thy will be done” clause, as well as the “deliver us from evil,” though including the “lead us not into temptation.”
It may or may not have been that this rationalization of religion was originally preached by the same sect or school as gave the exalted counsel to resist not evil and to love enemies—a line of thought found alike in India and in China, and, in the moderate form of a veto on retaliation, in Greece and Rome.17 But it is inconceivable that the same sect originally laid down the doctrines of the blood sacrifice and the final damnation of those who did not accept the Messiah (Mt. x). The latter dogmas, with the myths, naturally became the practical creed of the later Church, for which the counsel of non-solicitous prayer and the love of enemies were unimaginable ideals.18 Equally incapable of realization by a State [224]Church was the anti-Pharisaical and “Bohemian” attitude ascribed to the founder, and the spirit of independence towards the reigning powers. For the rest, the occult doctrine that a little faith might suffice to move mountains—a development from the mysticisms of the Hebrew prophets—could count for nothing save as an incitement to prayer in general. The freethinking elements in the gospels, in short, were precisely those which historic Christianity inevitably cast aside.
Already in the Epistles the incompatibility of the original critical spirit with sectarian policy has become clear. Paul—if the first epistle to the Thessalonians be his—exhorts his converts to “prove all things, hold fast what is good”;19 and by way of making out the Christist case against unpliable Jews he argues copiously in his own way; but as soon as there is a question of “another Jesus”20 being set up, he is the sectarian fanatic pure and simple, and he no more thinks of applying the counsel of criticism to his dogma21 than of acting on his prescription of love in controversy. “Reasonings” (λογισμοὺς) are specially stigmatized: they must be “cast down.”22 The attitude towards slavery now becomes a positive fiat in its support;23 and all political freethinking is superseded by a counsel of conformity.24 The slight touch of rationalism in the Judaic epistle of James, where the principle of works is opposed to that of faith, is itself quashed by an anti-rational conception of works.25 From a sect so taught, freethinking would tend to disappear. It certainly obtruded itself early, for we have the Pauline complaint26 that “some among you say there is no rising from the dead”; but men of that way of thinking had no clear ground for belonging to the community, and would soon be preached out of it, leaving only so much of the spirit of criticism as produced heresies within the sphere of supernaturalism.
When the new creed, spreading through the Empire, comes actively in contact with paganism, the rationalistic principle of [225]anti-idolatry, still preserved by the Jewish impulse, comes into prominence; and insofar as they criticized pagan myths and pagan image-worship, the early Christians may be said to have rationalized.27 Polytheists applied the term “atheistical” alike to them28 and the Jews.29 As soon as the cult was joined by lettered men, the primitive rationalism of Evêmeros was turned by them to account; and a series of Fathers, including Clement of Alexandria, Arnobius, Lactantius, and Augustine, pressed the case against the pagan creeds with an unflagging malice which, if exhibited by later rationalists towards their own creed, Christians would characterize in strong terms. But the practice of criticism towards other creeds was, with the religious as with the philosophical sects, no help to self-criticism. The attitude of the Christian mass towards pagan idols and the worship of the Emperor was rather one of frenzy30 than of intellectual superiority;31 and the Fathers never seem to have found a rationalistic discipline in their polemic against pagan beliefs. Where the unbelieving Lucian brightly banters, they taunt and asperse, in the temper of barbarians deriding the Gods of the enemy. None of them seems to realize the bearing against his own creed of the pagan argument that to die and to suffer is to give proof of non-deity.32 In the end, the very image-worship which had been the main ground of their rational attack on paganism became the universal usage of their own Church; and its worship of saints and angels, of Father, Son, and Virgin Mother, made it more truly a polytheism than the creed of the later pagans had been.33 It is therefore rather to the heresies within the Church than to its attacks on the old polytheism that we are to look for early Christian survivals of ancient rationalism; and for the most part, after the practically rationalistic refusal of the early Ebionites to accept the doctrine of the Virgin Birth,34 these heresies were but combinations of other theosophies with the Christian.
Already in the spurious Epistles to Timothy we have allusion to the “antitheses of the gnosis”35 or pretended occult knowledge; and [226]to early Gnostic influences may be attributed those passages in the gospel, above cited, which affirm that the Messiah’s teaching is not for the multitude but for the adepts.36 All along, Gnosticism37 stood for the influence of older systems on the new faith; an influence which among Gentiles, untrained to the cult of sacred books, must have seemed absolutely natural. In the third century Ammonios Saccas, of Alexandria, said to have been born of Christian parents, set up a school which sought to blend the Christian and the pagan systems of religion and philosophy into a pantheistic whole, in which the old Gods figured as subordinate dæmons or as allegorical figures, and Christ as a reformer.38 The special leaning of the school to Plato, whose system, already in vogue among the scholars of Alexandria, had more affinity than any of its rivals39 to Christianity, secured for it adherents of many religious shades,40 and enabled it to develop an influence which permanently affected Christian theology; this being the channel through which the doctrine of the Trinity entered. According to Mosheim, almost no other philosophy was taught at Alexandria down to the sixth century.41 Only when the regulative zeal of the Church had begun to draw the lines of creed definitely42 on anti-philosophic lines did the syncretic school, as represented by Plotinus, Porphyry, and Hierocles,43 declare itself against Christianity.
Among the Church sects, as distinguished from the philosophic, the syncretic tendency was hardly less the vogue. Some of the leading Fathers of the second century, in particular Clement of Alexandria and Origen, show the Platonic influence strongly,44 and are given, the latter in particular, to a remarkably free treatment of the sacred books, seeing allegory wherever credence had been made difficult by previous science,45 or inconvenient by accepted dogma. But in the multiplicity of Gnostic sects is to be seen the main proof [227]of the effort of Christians, before the complete collapse of the ancient civilization, to think with some freedom on their religious problems.46 In the terms of the case—apart from the Judaizing of the Elcesaites and Clemens Romanus—the thought is an adaptation of pagan speculation, chiefly oriental and Egyptian; and the commonest characteristics are: (1) in theology, an explanation of the moral confusion of the world by assuming two opposed Powers,