Part 13
The hand is but dust, yet the thoughts that it recorded are fresh and living as ever. Since he passed from this world, how little progress have we made in philosophy and morality! Here in this little book are rules for the conduct of life which might shame almost any Christian. Here are meditations which go to the root of things, and explore the dim secret world which surrounds us, and return again, as all our explorations do, unsatisfied. All these centuries have passed, and we still ask the same questions and find no answer. Where he is now he knows the secret, or he is beyond the desire to know it. The mystery is solved for him which we are guessing, and his is either a larger, sweeter life, growing on and on—or everlasting rest. A stoic, he found comfort in his philosophy, as great perhaps as we Christians find in our faith. He believed in his gods as we believe in ours. How could they satisfy a mind like his? How could these impure and passionate existences, given to human follies and weaknesses, to low intrigues, to vulgar jealousies, to degraded loves, satisfy a nature so high, so self-denying, so earnest, so pure? Yet they were his gods; to them he sacrificed, in them he trusted, looking forward to a calm future with a serenity at least equal to ours, undisturbed by misgivings; believing in justice, and in unjust gods; believing in purity, and in impure gods.
“No!” said a mild voice, “I did not believe in impure and unjust gods.”
And looking up, I saw before me the calm face of the emperor and philosopher of whom I was thinking. There he stood before me as I knew him from his busts and statues, with his full brow and eyes, his sweet mouth, his curling hair, now a little grizzled with age, and a deep meditative look of tender earnestness upon his face.
I know not why I was not startled to see him there, but I was not. It seemed to me natural, as events seem in a dream. The realities, as we call those facts which are merely visionary and transitory, vanished; and the unrealities, as we call those of thought and being, usurped their place. Nothing seemed more fitting than that he should be there. To the mind all things are possible and simple, and there is no time or space in thought which annihilates them.
I arose to greet my guest with the reverence due to such a presence.
“Do not disturb yourself,” he said, smiling; “I will sit here, if you please;” and so speaking, he took the seat opposite me at the fire. “Sit you,” he continued, “and I will endeavor to answer some of the questions you were asking of yourself.”
“Had I known your presence I should hardly, perhaps, have dared to ask such questions, or at least in such a form,” I said.
“Why not ask them of me if you ask them of yourself?” he responded. “They were just and natural in themselves, and the forms of things are of little use to one who cares for the essence—just as the forms of the divinities I believed in are of no consequence compared to their essences. What we call thoughts are but too often mere formulas, which by dint of repetition we finally get to believe are in themselves truths, while they are in fact mere dead husks, having no life in them, and which by their very rigidity prevent life. No single statement, however plausible, can contain truth, which is infinite in form and in spirit. If we are to talk together, let us free ourselves, if we can, from formulas, since they only check growth in the spirit, and, so to speak, are mere inns at which we rest for a moment on account of our weariness and weakness. If we stay permanently in them we narrow our minds, dwarf our experience, and make no more progress. For what is truth but a continual progression towards the divine?”
“Yet would you say that formulas are of no use? that we should not sum up in them the best of our thought?”
“Undoubtedly they are useful. They are trunks in which we pack our goods; but as we acquire more goods, we must have larger and ever larger trunks. It is only dead formulas which kill, and the tendency of formulas is to die and thus to repress thought. Look at the nutshell that holds the precious germ of the future tree. It is a necessary prison of a moment; but as that germ quickens and spreads, the shell must give way, or death is the consequence. The infinite truth can be comprehended in no formula and no system. All attempts to do this have resulted in the same end—death. Every religious creed should be living, but every Church formalizes it into barren words and shapes, and erelong, Faith—that is, the living, aspiring principle—dies, wrapped up in its formal observances or rigid statements, and becomes like the dead mummies of the Egyptians—the form of life, not the reality.”
“Too true,” I answered, “all history proves it. Every real and thinking man feels it. As habits get the better of our bodies, so conventions and formulas get the better of our minds. But pray continue; I only listen; and pardon me for interrupting you.”
“What I say has direct relation to the questions you were asking when I entered. There is a grain, often many grains, of truth in every system of religion, but complete Truth in none. If we wait until we attain the perfect before adhering to one, we shall never arrive at any. Each age has its religious ideas, which are the aggregate of its moral perceptions influenced by its imaginative bias, and these are shapen into formulas or systems, which serve as inns, or churches, or temples of worship. These begin by representing the highest reach of the best thought of the age, but they soon degenerate into commonplaces, thought moving on beyond them, and of its very vitality of nature seeking beyond them. At these inns the common mass put up, and the host or priest controls them while they are there, and society organizes them, and so a certain good is attained. In what you call the ancient days, when I lived on the earth, I found a system already built and surrounded by strong bulwarks of power. To strike at that was to strike at the existence of society. A religious revolution is a social revolution; one cannot alter a faith without altering everything out of which it is moulded. To do that, more evil might result than good. Man’s nature is such that if you throw down the temple of his worship at once, assaulting its very foundations, you do not improve his faith; you but too often annihilate it, so implanted is it in old prejudices, in the forms stamped on the heart in youth, and in the habits of thought. It is only by gradual changes that any real good can be done—by enlarging and developing the principles of truth which already exist, and not by overthrowing the whole system at once.”
“But in the religious system to which you gave your adherence,” I exclaimed, “what was there grand and inspiring? What truth was there out of which you could hope to develop a true system? for certainly you could not believe in the divinities of your day.”
“Reverence to the gods that were,” he answered, “to a power above and beyond us; recognition of divine powers and attributes. This lay as the corner-stone of our worship, as it does of yours.”
“Almost,” I cried, “it seems to me worse to worship such gods as yours than to worship none at all. Their attributes were at best only human, their conduct was low and unworthy, their passions were sensual and debased. Any good man would be ashamed to do the acts calmly attributed to the divinities you worshiped. This, in itself, must have had a degrading influence on the nation. How could man be ashamed of any act allowed and attributed to the gods?”
“Your notions on this point are natural,” he calmly answered, “but they are completely mistaken. There is no doubt that in every system of religion the tendency is to humanize and, to a certain extent, degrade God. To attribute to Him our own passions is universal, with the mass. To deify man or to humanize God is the rule. You deify that beautiful character named Christ, and you humanize God by representing Him as inspired with anger and cruelty beyond anything in our system. You attribute to Him a scheme of the universe which is to me abhorrent. Will you excuse me if I state thus plainly how it strikes one who belonged to a different age and creed, and who therefore cannot enter into the deep-grained prejudices and ideas of your century and faith?”
“Speak boldly,” I said. “Do not fear to shock me. I am so deeply planted that I do not fear to be uprooted in my faith. And, besides, that is not truth which does not court assault, sure to be strengthened by it. If you can overthrow my faith, overthrow it.”
“_That_ I should be most unwilling to do,” he answered. “No word would I say to produce such a result. In your faith there is a noble and beautiful truth, which sheds a soft lustre over life; and in my own day the pure and philosophic spirit of Jesus of Nazareth was recognized by me and reverenced. ’T is not of Him I would speak, but rather of the general scheme of the regulation of this world by God that I alluded to; and I yet pause, fearing to shock you by a simple statement of this creed.”
“I pray you do not hesitate; speak! I am ready and anxious to hear you.”
“It is only in answer to what you say of the acts and passions attributed by us to our divinities, as constituting a clear reason why we should not reverence them, that I speak. You attribute to your God omnipotence, omniscience, and infinite love. Yet in his omnipotence He made first a world, and then placed in it man and woman, whom He also made and pronounced good. In this, according to your belief, He was mistaken. The man and woman proved immediately not to be good; and He, omnipotent as He was, was foiled by another power named Satan, who upset at once his whole scheme. After infinite consideration and in pity for man, He could or did invent no better scheme of redeeming him than for Himself, or an emanation from Himself, to take the form of man, and to suffer death through his wickedness and at his hands. Thus man, by adding to the previous fault the crime of killing God on the earth, acquired a claim to be saved from the consequences of his first fault. A new crime affords a cause of pardon for a previous fault of disobedience. What was this first fault, which induced God to drive the first man and woman out of the Paradise He had made for them? Simply that they ate an apple when they were prohibited. Is any pagan legend more absurd than this? Then for the justice of God, on what principle of right can the subsequent crime and horror—without example—of killing God, or a person, as you say, of the Trinity, afford a reason for removing from man a penalty previously incurred? When one remembers that you assume God to be omniscient as well as omnipotent, and that He might have made any other scheme, by simply forgiving man, or obliging him to redeem himself by doing good and acting virtuously, instead of committing a crime and a horror, this belief becomes still more strange. Nor can you explain it yourself; you only say it is a mystery which is beyond your reason, but none the less true. Yet though it offends all sense of justice and right in my mind, you believe it and adhere to it as a corner-stone of your faith. Are you sure I do not offend you?”
“Pray go on,” I said. “When you have said it is a mystery, you have said all. Shall man, with his deficient reason, pretend to understand God? This is a truth revealed to us by his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who was himself in a human form; and when God reveals to us a mystery, shall we not believe it? Shall we measure Him by our feeble wits?”
“I do not mean to argue with you. This is furthest from my intention; though I might say this holds good of us in the ancient days, as well as with you now. I only wish, however, to show you that you believe what you acknowledge to be beyond reason—a mystery, as you call it. You believe this, and yet you despise the pagan for believing what his gods told him, simply because it was unreasonable or ridiculous.”
“The question,” I said, “is very different; but let it pass. Pray go on.”
“Your God is a God of infinite love, you say. Yet in the opinion of many of you, at least, this infinitely loving God, omnipotent, and having the power to make man as He chose,—omniscient, and knowing how to make him good and happy if He wished to,—has chosen in his love to make him weak and impotent, to endow him with passions which are temptations to evil, to afflict him with disease and pain, to render him susceptible to torments of every kind and sufferings beyond his power to avoid, however he strive to be good and virtuous and obedient; and then at the last, after a life of suffering and struggle here, either to save him and make him eternally happy, or, if He so elect, without any reason intelligible to you or any one, to plunge him into everlasting torment, from which he can never free himself. Now, I ask you in what respect is such a God better than Jupiter, who, even according to the lowest popular notions, whatever were his passions, was at least placable; who, whatever were his follies, was not a demon like this? And when one takes into consideration the fact that there is not a humane man living who would not be ashamed to do to his own child, however vicious, what he calmly attributes to this all-loving God, the belief in such a God seems all the more extraordinary.”
“It is a mystery,” I said, “that one like you, born in another age and tinctured with another creed, could not be expected to understand. It would be useless for me to attempt it, and certainly not now, when I so greatly prefer hearing you to speaking myself. My purpose is not now to defend my religion, but to listen to your defense of yours.”
“Well, then, allow us to have our mystery too. If you cannot explain all, neither could we; but neither with us nor with you was that a reason for not believing at all. It was the mystery itself, perhaps, that attracted us and attracts you. The love of the unintelligible is at the root of all systems of religion. If man is unintelligible to us, shall not God be? Man has always invested his gods with his own passions, and his gods are for the most part his own shadows cast out into infinite space, enlarged, gigantic, and mysterious. Man cannot, with the utmost exercise of his faculties, get out of himself any more than he can leap over his own shadow. He cannot comprehend (or inclose within himself) God, who comprehends and incloses him; and therefore he vaguely magnifies his own powers, and calls the result God. God the infinite Spirit made man; but man in every system of religion makes God. In our own reason He is the best that we can imagine—that is, our own selves purged of evil and extended. We cannot stretch beyond ourselves.”
“Ay, but your gods were not the best you could conceive. They were lower of nature than man himself in some particulars, and were guilty of acts that you yourself would reprove.”
“This is because you consider them purely in their mythical history, according to the notions of the common ignorant mass; not looking behind those acts which were purely typical, often simply allegorical, to the ideas which they represented and of which they were incarnations. You cannot believe that so low a system as this satisfied the spiritual needs of those august and refined souls who still shine like planets in the sky of thought. Do you suppose that Plato and Epictetus, that Zeno and Socrates, that Seneca and Cicero, with their expanded minds, accepted these low formulas of Divinity? As well might I suppose that the low superstitions of the Christian Church, in which the vulgar believe, represent the highest philosophy of the best thinkers. Yet for long centuries of superstition the Church has been accepted by you just as it stands, with its saints and their miracles, and its singular rites and ceremonies. Nor has any effort been made to cleanse the bark of St. Peter of the barnacles and rubbish which encumber and defile it. Religious faith easily degenerates into superstition in the common mind. And why has the superstition been accepted? Simply because it is so deeply ingrained into the belief of the unthinking mass, that there might be danger of destroying all faith by destroying the follies and accidents which had become imbedded in it. Not only for this; by means of these very superstitions men may be led and governed, and leaders will not surrender or overthrow means of power. Yet the best minds,” he continued, “did what they could in ancient days to purify and refine the popular faith, and sought even to elevate men’s notions of the gods by educating their sense of the beautiful, and by presenting to them images of the gods unstained by low passions and glorious in their forms.”
“But surely your idea of Jupiter or Zeus,” I answered, “was most unworthy when compared with that which we entertain of the infinite God, the source of all created things, the sole and supreme Creator. The Hebrews certainly attained a far loftier conception in their Jehovah than you in your Jupiter.”
“What matter names?” he replied; “Zeus, Jehovah, God, are all mere names, and the ideas they represented were only differenced by the temperaments and character of the various peoples who worshiped them.”
“But the Jehovah of the Jews was not merely the head ruler of many gods, but a single universal God, one and infinite!”
“No! I think not. The Jehovah of the Jews underwent many changes and developments with the growth of the Hebrew people; and in many of their writings He is represented as a passionate, vindictive, and even unreasonable and unjust God, whose passions were modified by human arguments. And, so far from being a universal God of all, He was specially the God of the Hebrews, and is so constantly represented in their Scriptures. He comes down upon earth and interferes personally in the doings of men, and talks with them, and discusses questions with them, and sometimes even takes their advice. In process of time this notion is modified, and assumes a nobler type; but He is never the Universal Father, nor the God whose essence is Love,—never, that is, until the coming of Christ, who first enunciated the idea that God is love,—rejoicing over the saving of man, far and above all human passions. ‘Vengeance is mine’ was the original idea of Jehovah; and He was feared and worshiped by the Jews as their peculiar God, whose chosen people they were. As for his unity, whatever may have been the popular superstitions of the Greeks and Romans, God is recognized by the greatest and purest minds as one and indivisible, the Father of all, who commands all, who creates all, who is invisible and omnipotent. Do you not remember the fragment of the Sibylline verses preserved by Lactantius,[25] S. Theophilus Antiochenus, and S. Justinus, where it is said that Zeus was one being alone, self-creating, from whom all things are made, who beholds all mortals, but whom no mortal can behold?—
Εἷς δ’ ἔστ’ αὐτογενής· ἑνὸς ἔκγονα πάντα τέτυκται, Ἐν δ’ αὐτοῖς αὐτὸς περιγίγνεται· οὐδέ τις αὐτὸν Εἰσοράᾳ θνητῶν, αὐτὸς δέ γε πάντας ὁρᾶται.
So, also, Pindar cries out:—
‘Τί Θεός;’ τί τὸ πᾶν.
So again, in the same spirit, the Appian hymn says of Zeus:—
Ἓν κράτος, εἷς δαίμων γένετο μέγας οὐρανὸν αἴθων Ἓν δὲ τὰ πάντα τέτυκται· ἐν ᾧ τάδε πάντα κυκλεῖται.
And Euripides exclaims, ‘Where is the house, the fabric reared by man, that could contain the immensity of God?’
Ποῖος δ’ ἂν οἶκος, τεκτόνων πλασθεὶς ὑπὸ Δέμας, τὸ Θεῖον περιβάλλοι τοίχων πτυχαῖς,
and adds that the true God needs no sacrifices on his altar. And Æschylus, in like manner, says:—
Ζεύς ἐστιν αἰθὴρ, Ζεὺς δὲ γῆ, Ζεὺς δ’ οὐρανὸς, Ζεύς τοι τὰ πάντα, χὥτι τῶν δ’ ὑπέρτερον.
And Sophocles, also in similar lines, proclaims the unity and universality of God. And Theocritus, in his ‘Idylls,’ echoes the same sentiment. The same cast of thought, the same lofty idea of God, is found among the ancient Romans. Lucan exclaims in his ‘Pharsalia:’—
‘Jupiter est quod cumque vides, quo cumque moveris.’
Valerius Soranus makes him the one universal, omnipotent God, the Father and Mother of us all:—
‘Jupiter omnipotens, regum rerumque deumque _Progenitor genetrix_que deum deus unus et omnes.’[26]
Can any statement be larger and more inclusive than this?[27] Such indeed was the true philosophic idea of Jupiter, as entertained by the best and most exalted in ancient days. You must go to the highest sources to learn what the highest notions of Deity are among any people, and not grope among the popular superstitions and myths. Then, again, what nobler expressions of our relation to an infinite and universal spirit of God are to be found than in Epictetus and Seneca? ‘God is near you, is with you, is within you,’ Seneca writes. ‘A sacred spirit dwells within us, the observer and guardian of all our evil and all our good. There is no good man without God.’ And again: ‘Even from a corner it is possible to spring up into heaven. Rise, therefore, and form thyself into a fashion worthy of God.’ And again: ‘It is no advantage that conscience is shut up within us. We lie open to God.’ And still again: ‘Do you wish to render the gods propitious? Be virtuous.’ One might cite such passages for hours from the writings of these men. Can you, then, think that our notions of God and duty were so low and so debased?
“Look, too, at our arts. Art and religion with us and the Greeks went hand in hand. If you seek the true spirit of religion among any people, you will always find it in the productions of their art. In sculpture, the most ideal of the plastic arts, you will see the real features of the gods. They are grand, calm, serene, dignified, and above the taint of human passion; claiming reverence and love in their beauty and perfection beyond the human. Here there is nothing mean or low. So godlike are they even in the poorer specimens of their noble figures that have come down to you, that you yourselves recognize in them ideal grace and power. Read the reflection of our faith in their forms and features, and you will find in it nothing vulgar, nothing degrading. The best personifications of your own divinities in art look poor beside them. God himself in your pictures is feeble compared with the divine Jupiter of Phidias; the Madonna weak and tame beside the august grandeur of his Athene. Christ in your art is pitiable beside the splendor of Apollo; so far from being the highest type of even man, he is almost the weakest, composed of pale negatives, and with nothing very positive and grand; while your saints are affected, cowardly, and cringing, compared with the heroic demigods of Greece. In art, at least, the ancient deities still live and command reverence from a serene world beyond change. Would you know what our faith was, look at the great works of art and at the best thoughts of the greatest minds we owned, and not at the corrupted text of popular superstition. These, indeed, were worthy of reverence. They lifted the thoughts and cleared the spirit, and filled it with a sense of beauty and of power. Who could look at that magnificent impersonation of Zeus at Olympia, by Phidias, so grand, so simple, so serene, with its golden robes and hair, its divine expression of power and sweetness, its immense proportions, its perfection of workmanship, and not feel that they were in the presence of an august, tremendous, and impassionate power?”
“Ah!” I exclaimed, “that truly I wish I could have seen—what majesty, what beauty, it must have had!”
“Ay!” he answered. “No one could see it and not be enlarged in spirit by it.”
“Was, then, the Athena of the Parthenon,” I asked, “equal in merit?”