Part 4

And is it nothing more than a coincidence that in the same city of Ephesus, where during St Paul’s visit the fanatics raised a tumult in behalf of their Virgin Artemis, some six centuries later the people with equal ecstasy hailed the decision of the Synod that proclaimed the Virgin-Mother of God (θεοτόκος)? The mention of Ephesus suggests another consideration of the greatest importance for the study of the development and propagation of the Christian dogma concerning the virginity of the Mother of God. The Virgin-birth, an idea which has long been a stumbling-block to science, and which has recently been pronounced by some to be unessential to Christianity, was a dogma that could easily be understood and even eagerly accepted by the converts of Anatolia[69.2] and the {70} Greek world. In Ephesus itself the ancient goddess had been imagined in some sense as a maternal or generative divinity, yet also as a virgin, in whose ritual, conducted partly by a priesthood of monks, a strong rule of austerity and chastity was enforced.[70.1] The great Phrygian Mother was herself, according to a native legend, miraculously conceived, and there are grounds for suggesting that she was occasionally regarded as a virgin.[70.2] The evidence indeed concerning such ideas in the pre-Christian cults is always confused, casual, and often contradictory, with no power apparently in themselves to develop a fixed dogma of faith. It would be in fact unreasonable to maintain that the Christian doctrines concerning the Virgin-Mother could have been evoked merely by the spontaneous demand of the Anatolian or Greek converts. But we may affirm that when that doctrine was {71} presented to them, their own traditions had prepared their imaginations to receive it as congenial. We meet in the late pagan literature passages in praise of virginity as a divine quality quite as ecstatic and extravagant as many in the Christian fathers.[71.1] Many of the nations had long cherished the ideal of a virgin goddess; most had been devotees of the Divine Mother. The successful propagation of Christianity may have owed much to the means which it possessed for satisfying these two sentiments and for reconciling them in a primary article of faith. Then, we must certainly ascribe the exaltation of Mary in the Church of the first six centuries to the enthusiasm engendered by the older goddess-worships. Alexandria may have contributed much more than we have already noted; and more than one writer has explored the deep indebtedness of the developed Mariolatry to the older figure of {72} Isis.[72.1] The extravagance of an enthusiasm that was rooted in old pagan sentiment occasionally engendered heresies. Besides the records concerning the Montanist, of which the significance has already been noticed, most interesting and valuable for our purpose is the sermon of Epiphanius against the heresy of the Collideriani,[72.2] wild women who devoted themselves to the worship of Mary, and whose orgiastic service he describes and reprobates: in their processions they appear to have drawn the Virgin round in a car strewn with raiment, and they solemnised a sacrament with bread: and he adds that they came from Thrace, the immemorial home of fanatic women and of the goddess “Artemis the Queen,” to whom also offerings of corn were made.[72.3] The procession of a goddess in a car was probably part of an old Thrako-Phrygian {73} ceremonial, and we hear of a sacramental eating of bread in the service of Cybele.

We may finally note that the enthusiastic literature devoted to the pre-Christian Divine Mother and Maid and to the Virgin-Mother of God is the same in quality and tone. The prayer addressed to Isis in the story of Apuleius reminds us of a Christian hymn of praise; and the older liturgical or literary expressions would naturally colour the later.[73.1]

Another question with which the comparative study of Christianity is concerned touches the evolution of the Trinitarian idea.[73.2] Here {74} again it is necessary carefully to sift the phenomena of the contiguous religions, to consider whether they present such a conception at all, and whether in any of them it had gained sufficient vividness and power to be likely to evoke a dogma of religious metaphysic. Moreover, to understand the complete genesis of the Christian doctrine, we must trace out the idea of divine emanations in the Mediterranean and the East; for the religions of the Iranian and even the Greek world present us with parallels to the process whereby the Holy Spirit becomes in relation to the personal God a distinct though closely attached personality. In the Zoroastrian ritual the Fravashi or Soul of Ahura receives reverence,[74.1] and in Greek speculation and even cult the θεοῦ Πρόνοια or Divine Providence is sometimes regarded as an individual and {75} personal power;[75.1] nor is the conception of a plurality of beings within the limits of the same personality unfamiliar to primitive thought. The subject is one of the most intricate in the field of religious study, and the more hopeful investigation of it would demand anthropological study in its widest sense, combined with a knowledge of the later Greek metaphysic which has clearly left its impress on our doctrine.

I will close these illustrations with the most obvious example of the contribution of anthropological study to our knowledge of actual Christendom. One of the most fruitful offshoots of the older Hellenic system was hero-worship, which itself may have arisen as a development of ancestor-cult. At first confined to the mythic figures of the past, it came to be applied to founders of colonies, legislators, and even to athletes; in its final development in the last centuries before Christ it was chiefly consecrated to kings and dynasts, {76} the founders of religious societies, men of science, and political benefactors. The divine worship of the mortal, an idea abhorrent to Judaism, and not accepted by the severer Zoroastrian, was part of the state system of earlier and later Egypt, and was finally imposed on the Greco-Roman world. The soil in which it had most rankly flourished was Greek, and Greece and Anatolia were crowded with chapels consecrated to recently living men or to faded figures who were supposed to have once lived on earth, some of them perhaps actual ancestors, some imaginary personages of the epic or legendary world, some merely functional divinities of subordinate departments, like the hero of the ploughshare or the tutelary hero of the potters. This growth of polytheism had struck its roots so deeply that Christianity, in spite of its monotheistic ideal, was unable to eradicate it. The ancient hero may sometimes be lurking under the later disguise of the saint: the mediæval guild, like the Attic fraternity of potters, {77} had its sacred tutelary patron; and it is curious to observe that in the matter of canonisation the Pope came to play exactly the same part as the Delphic oracle had played in the public consecration of the hero-cult: the divine authorisation is given or withheld by the vicar or agent of God. The importance of this inherited tradition in determining our religious estimate of historical Christendom is of the highest: for whatever may have been or may be the orthodox dogma of the Church concerning the status of the saint, such worship inevitably means polytheism from the point of view of the popular faith: and we gather that in many outlying communities of Christendom, as of the ancient Greek world, the lower cult overshadows the higher. And this is one of the most salient and sure examples that we can quote of the direct influence of the older religions upon the later. This special influence is mainly Greek, though the pagan North, the Celtic and Lithuanian, and perhaps the {78} Teutonic peoples, have contributed much to the tradition of saint-worship.

The illustrations given may suffice as a sketch of the various applications of a comparative method to the problems that the phenomena of Christianity offer to the student. In the choice of illustration I may seem to have ignored the strength of the Judaic element in determining the evolution; but I have considered it unnecessary to touch on this, as it has long been the familiar theme of scientific theology. I have also ventured to suggest that our own religious history should be traced back to the period of our ancestral paganism. And I would strongly recommend to the student of comparative religion in England a devoted attention to the world of the Norse Saga: for this has been strangely and fatally neglected by our English system of culture, with grievous loss to our poetic imagination, and to our knowledge of the early law and the religious institutions and temperament of our ancestors. Such a work {79} as Golther’s _Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie_ shows us what a harvest may be reaped in that field for the science of religion. The subject in its own right claims our interest, and certain phenomena in the old Teutonic religion, its fatalistic ideas, its eschatologic beliefs concerning a “day of judgment,” demand consideration in the light of more advanced creeds. On the other hand it may be wrong to attribute to it any direct influence on the inner development of Northern Christianity; for there may be reason for the view that, when the new religion conquered the Teutonic North, it found there in some sense a religious vacuum, the old ritual and faith having lost its vitality and hold; and certainly our ancestral paganism made no such struggle to survive as did the Greco-Roman. Nevertheless the history of its institutions may be necessary, as has been suggested already, to explain the struggle between Church and State in Teutonic lands; and, further, it is only the pages of the Norse Saga-book that can yield us {80} an answer to the question whether we may not have inherited from remote times a certain average racial law of religious temperament resulting in a characteristic attitude towards matters of religion that may have determined our religious history. If the answer were affirmative and definite, the fact would have a practical no less than a speculative importance. At least we shall not know ourselves completely in this or in other matters if we continue to think that Greece and Rome and Palestine are our sole intellectual and spiritual ancestors; in fact we may say that no account of the history of Christianity in any European State can be real and complete unless we can get back to the pre-Christian past of that community.

Yet, while making full allowance for the influence of special ancestral traditions, those who work on the lines which have been indicated in the illustrations of method which I have selected, will acquire the ever-growing conviction that Hellas has dominated the {81} creed as she has dominated the intellectual history of Christendom; that the new faith, in spite of its fierce or contemptuous intolerance of the past, was only able to transform but not to abolish the Mediterranean tradition: that in fact Sir Henry Maine’s often quoted aphorism, while by no means wholly true, was truer in respect of religious history than he himself was aware.

I have been speaking hitherto mainly on the relations of anthropology to the comparative study of religion. And it may be well now to point out that anthropology, as I have tried to define and distinguish its functions, though an essential part, is only a part of the whole. For we must know not only the past but the present conditions, not only the embryology but the perfected growth. And, again, we compare religions not merely to test theories of origin, ancestry, and indebtedness, but also to form the proper estimate of each one, and to correct the one-sided judgment that is always quick to pronounce this phenomenon {82} or feature in any particular system as unique. If the comparison reveals more divergences than parallels, the result is no less important. And the comparative method should be applied not merely to ritual, liturgy, hieratic institutions, legends, and dogmas, but also to the varying phenomena and expressions of the religious temperament in the various races. Only the study of the latter can enable us to test the living force of a faith, the degree with which it possesses the national mind; and such a study is only possible when a nation has produced a rich religious literature or monuments of art embodying the public and private worship and religious sentiment. We know what we have gained by the discovery of the sacred books of the East, by the interpretation of the Babylonian inscriptions, and from their revelation to us in the Vedic, Iranian, and Mesopotamian cult-centres of a fervour as deep and passionate as any that we find in Hebraic or Christian writings. On the other hand, when a religion has passed away, {83} as is the case with that of pre-Hellenic Rome, without leaving any articulate expression of its inner life, our knowledge of it can be superficial only, confined to mere ritual, fragments of liturgies, and the externals of cult.

A dispassionate and uncontroversial study of that which is at least one of the greatest forces in human society cannot but be interesting, and fruitful also for other branches of inquiry, such as the history of early law and morals, of which in many primitive communities the religion is the only record. It may even solve certain problems concerning the early migrations of races, as I have been convinced by the investigation of various Greek cults. In England the trained workers in this field are still unfortunately few, perhaps because a certain latent prejudice, born of religious partisanship, is not yet extinct, and may act somewhat as a deterrent. I have avoided hitherto alluding to any of the practical and controversial considerations {84} which the methodical pursuit and propagation of this science may excite, though I am well aware that its practical effects may be of high importance; but they are not immediately our concern at present. There is, however, one such consideration that it is pertinent to touch on before concluding the survey of the methods and functions of this branch of historical inquiry, which deals much with origins and with the evolution of higher forms of religion from the lower. Discoveries of origins may appear to affect the validity of a creed or certain articles of creed. That this is actually the case in regard to the great problem with which the illustrations I have put before you are mainly concerned, namely, the genesis of Christianity, has been recently frankly admitted by a leading dignitary of the Roman Church: who, moved by a rumour of anthropological research, has promptly turned it to the profit of his cause by maintaining that the Roman ritual and communion gains in force and validity by {85} the discovery that it has inherited and absorbed the religious thought and practice of ancient Greece and Rome. On the other hand, others may find the exposition of the so-called pagan elements in the essence of Christianity repugnant to their sentiment; and hence are inclined to accept the dictum “that origin does not affect validity.” I imagine the facts of religious psychology make somewhat against this aphorism. But it only concerns the science of comparative religion, because in the history of creeds validity has been very often found to maintain itself mainly by an appeal to origin; and as our science, to reiterate, is much concerned with origins, it is indirectly concerned with those claims of validity that support themselves by such an appeal.

Another cause of the paucity of workers in this field is the complexity and difficulty of the subject, which can be handled successfully only by the advanced and mature student. The pre-requisites of competence are an {86} exact philological as well as an archæological training, with a view to the proper appreciation both of texts and monuments; secondly, a general acquaintance with the problems and history of philosophy, and especially of ethics, and with the history of early social institutions and law; thirdly, a comprehensive study of anthropology. To this must be added a sympathetic and minute knowledge of at least two of the great world-religions, whereby alone a critical insight into the essential and significant phenomena of the religious experiences of our race can be obtained. The comparative science of religion has now become possible, thanks partly to the labours of philological specialists in the ancient languages of Europe and Asia, and partly to the organisation of anthropological travel.

Let me conclude with remarking that subdivision of labour is imperative in this field: and it is especially in Oxford that the opportunities for the requisite preliminary {87} training are plentiful. It would be a gain for more than science if we could see a group of mature students organised here exploring the various departments of this complex subject in co-operation and with mutual assistance.

LECTURE III. THE RITUAL OF PURIFICATION AND THE CONCEPTION OF PURITY: THEIR INFLUENCE ON RELIGION, MORALITY, AND SOCIAL CUSTOM

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Among all the varied religious acts of man, there is probably none that has been so widely prevalent throughout the different races of mankind as the ritual of purification, nor does any idea seem to have possessed so strong a legislative power in the various departments of our life as the concept of purity. We can trace it back to instincts that we appear to share with the higher animals, and we can track it upwards through the complex rites of the higher religions. The record presents us with a vast mass of phenomena which, as far as I am able to discover, have not yet been reduced to system or unified by any constructive {89} theory of evolution. In this lecture I venture to attempt the systematisation of the subject, first giving a brief summary of the main facts which are well known to the students of primitive anthropology and comparative religion and which confront us in nearly all the societies that have been explored.

In the stage of our conscious life which we may call, relatively to man’s growth, primeval, certain bodily acts and states and certain material substances are regarded as unclean and impure, likely to imprint a stain upon the person. It is impossible here to attempt to enumerate all the examples, and it is enough to mention a few that are salient and typical. The generative processes of life, the states and activities of the male and especially the female organism connected with them, the bodily changes incident on puberty, are among the most familiar phenomena with which the idea of impurity in some peculiar sense has been universally associated. A chief centre or {90} “nidus” of impurity is child-birth; but still more dangerously impure is its counterpart, death and all the phenomena of death. In respect of child-birth the idea is fading away from our civilised consciousness; but it has left a deep deposit in our conscious or subconscious self in regard to death. The material substance that has been most generally felt to be impure is blood; the curious feeling that the mere mention of the word often excites in certain modern people is a faint reflex of the savage mental state in respect to the thing; and the influence of this disposition upon advanced society raises the most interesting question in which comparative law, ethics, and religion are jointly concerned, and which will be considered later. To continue our enumeration we may not find that the objects of the inanimate world outside ourselves are usually regarded by primitive thought as in themselves impure, but all or most of them are capable of catching the infection from ourselves, from death or child-birth {91} for instance: hence it may be necessary to break or destroy or purify the utensils and furniture of the house where a death or a birth has occurred. At a somewhat more advanced stage, certain food-stuffs come to rank as impure, and a complicated code of “tapu” is established for specially sanctified persons. Then we are confronted, but not apparently in the most primitive period, with the distinction between pure and impure animals, which also dictates certain rules and practices of diet.

On the other hand certain natural things may come to be regarded as specially “pure,” whether on the ground of a certain intrinsic quality, because for instance they are bright and lustrous, or from the fact that they were habitually used for cathartic or cleansing processes, as fire, water, odorous wood or spices, or substances which emitted a pungent odour such as sulphur. Such objects “are used in ritual,” says Jamblichus,[91.1] {92} “because they are specially full of the divine nature.” But the psychic phenomena and the corresponding acts with which we are dealing may be well suspected of descending from an age at which no definite concept of a divine nature had as yet arisen, an age not yet perhaps even animistic, for in their crudest form they do not seem necessarily to imply any articulate system of belief in a world of ghosts and spirits. And this reflection brings us to the first question of importance, what this primitive concept of purity and impurity really is, and what were the sensations from which it was evolved. Nothing is more difficult to describe than simple sensations, but it is possible to distinguish one from another. And we must distinguish between the modern feeling about cleanliness and the primitive feelings which we are considering. That “cleanliness is next to godliness” is an aphorism suggested no doubt by sensations fundamentally akin to these; but many a savage who is most particular about “impurity” {93} cares little or nothing for what we call “cleanliness.” We consider that the cleansing acts we ourselves perform are purely hygienic or pleasure-giving, partly connected with the instinct of self-preservation, and some of them we find performed by other animals than man.

But the savage ritual of purification does not by any means tend necessarily to self-preservation, but at times may lead to self-destruction, and no hygienic or utilitarian or secular considerations will carry us far in explaining the cathartic code of Leviticus or the Zend-Avesta, or Buddhism, or the impurity of tabooed animals. These codes, while some of their prescriptions may be such as modern utilitarian ideas might dictate, are obviously instinct with religious or superstitious beliefs, and to explain the distinction between the pure and the impure animals would need a long excursus into primitive religion; the distinction is certainly not one between wholesome and unwholesome, or pleasant and unpleasant, meat.

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