Part 7

The above is some slight illustration of the development of the Greek concept of purity and of its ethical influence. It remains to trace its action in a very important department of law--the law of homicide. Perhaps the most significant distinction between the code of a civilised and that of a savage or {140} barbaric community lies in their respective attitudes towards manslaughter or murder: in the latter society it is mainly an affair between the families concerned, to be settled by the were-gilt or the blood-feud: in the former the whole community feels itself to be deeply concerned. Our Teutonic ancestors, at the time of Tacitus and for centuries after, remained at the lower stage, though we discern that the legal genius of the Icelanders was impelling them towards the higher even before Christianity reached them. What is strange is that some societies appear to have attained a high general level of civilisation without making this momentous advance: the Homeric world, for instance, was scarcely abreast with the early Icelandic in this respect, although we may see signs that the higher idea was ready to emerge in the later Homeric period.[140.1] Then follows a blank in {141} our record which may be tentatively filled up by the interpretation of mythology, until in the developed Attic law--which we know better than the law of any other Greek state--we find the modern idea fully recognised and applied to a criminal code, probably from the sixth century onward, though traces of legal barbarism still survive. We would gladly discover the constructive forces, spiritual or political, that brought this great reform about. The anthropology of our contemporary savage societies has not yet supplied us with analogies that we could apply to Greek history: a few savage states have indeed spontaneously achieved the great advance from the blood-feud to a public law of homicide, but there is no record showing how they have achieved it. Some writers have supposed that the emergence of criminal law in general is always due to some great increase of power in the central government, probably to the development of the monarchy. But as a universal axiom this cannot be accepted; for, as {142} Steinmetz in his treatise on “The Development of Punishment”[142.1] has shown, such a suggested cause is not found operative in the backward communities of modern times that have developed a public criminal law. Nor would it be reasonable to urge that the central authority was stronger in Greece of the seventh century than in the earlier monarchical period. Probably Steinmetz is right in his belief that among savage societies the earliest criminal law arises from some intense feeling of hatred or dread excited by acts that violate religious feeling or secular interests. One of the earliest crimes to be punished by death at the hands of the society is incest: the horror that it excites among savages is a feeling that we may call religious. We may not be able to show indeed that the primitive ideas of purity would explain the earliest complicated codes of human marriage: but the circles of kinship that are thus established seem certainly to have been consecrated {143} at a very early time by the concept of purity that came to be attached to them.[143.1] Now it is probable that a similar religious feeling was operative in the case of homicide.

If in any given society the primitive belief in the impurity of bloodshed became intensified beyond a certain point, homicide might easily come to be regarded no longer as a matter to be settled by the families of the slayer and the slain, but as the deep concern of the people of the land. We have seen that it was just this religious concept of impurity that brought the act under the cognisance of the national religious law of Israel: the people are terrified because the soil has been made impure and their god has been stained. In the Zend-Avesta we find that {144} the slaying of a water-dog was an impure act against God, and was avenged by the whole community; and sacrifice was offered to appease the holy soul of the dog.[144.1] These facts then offer some analogy for the theory that I would suggest, namely, that the civilised law in Greece concerning homicide arose in the post-Homeric period through an intensification of the feeling concerning the impurity of bloodshed and owing to the greater hold that the terrors of the ghostly world had come to gain over the later Hellenic imagination; for the ghost or the Erinys of the dead is the embodiment of the miasma that arises from the slaying; and the ghost knows how to drive it home, and is no respecter of persons, but can make a whole area uninhabitable. The religious phenomenon and the legal fact that I would connect as cause and effect are not found in the Homeric period: both are found coexisting in the later. And much legendary evidence accords with this hypothesis. {145} Perhaps the earliest indication of the emergence of the idea in Greek society that certain kinds of homicide concern the State, is found in the legends about exile and excommunication for the shedding of kindred blood, the exile, for instance, of Bellerophon and Ixion. Such exile is not the ordinary flight of the homicide to avoid the avenger of blood; for in the cases where a man is of the same kin as the slain, there is no family avenger, but the whole community in horror cast him out lest the curse should infect themselves. Kinsmen’s blood was more sacred than other, therefore the shedding it spread the greater impurity over the land. And the Greek legends suggest that this offence was one of the earliest in the legal history of the race which awoke the religious conscience of the State.[145.1] {146} Now if we assume that the old ideas associated with kinship came to be extended to the whole community of the polis--as might easily happen through the intermarriage of the γένη--then a similar miasma would be caused by the slaying of a citizen as by kindred murder: the State would feel the supernatural peril of the act and would take cognisance.

The reasons for supposing that this was the actual order in the Hellenic evolution of the homicide law may appear to rest on mere legends, but legends are often direct and firsthand evidence of early thought, and the stories about the slayers of kindred who were driven out of the communities and who were the first applicants for the ritual of purification, such as Ixion, Orestes, Theseus, accord well with the early belief that the Erinyes were the ghostly avengers of kindred slaughter. Then we find that in the Aithiopis, the poem of Arctinos of Miletus, Achilles has to leave the army and retire to Lesbos for {147} purification, although Thersites, whom he has slain, is no real kinsman of his: whence we may draw the conclusion that the State of Miletus, in the eighth century, had come to take cognisance of the slaying of any citizen. And the Argives, in the fifth or fourth century, offer atonement to Zeus Meilichios for a civic massacre, the god who has a legendary association with purification for the shedding of kindred blood. By the fifth century in Athens the religious feeling concerning the sacredness of all life within the city had so deepened that even the slaying of a slave caused a miasma and was a State offence.[147.1]

Now when we examine certain details of Attic law, together with certain expressions of sentiment concerning homicide in the classical writers of Attica, we see the clear imprint of its origin. Accidental homicide was as gravely regarded by the Athens of the fourth century as by the old Hebrew code: such homicides must fly over the border, but if they went by {148} a certain road, the State refused to allow the avenger of blood to follow them: they must remain in exile until they have won the forgiveness of one of the kinsmen of the dead.[148.1] We may suppose that the kinsmen are regarded as taking up the feud of the ghost, who is likely to be vindictive, even when the slaying was accidental. Finally, when the pardoned homicide returns he must go through elaborate purifications. These latter were to wipe off the miasma, not to ease what we might call the burden of conscience. And the community were obliged to expel temporarily even a perfectly innocent man, because of their fear of the wrath of the dead. This dread of the ghost is appealed to by an Attic orator as a motive that should influence the judges to condemn the prisoner.[148.2] The first legal preliminary in a case of murder, which reveals clearly the religious origin of the State law, was the solemn proclamation, made by one of the relatives holding {149} a spear at the funeral, that the murderer should keep aloof from all the holy and public places of the community.[149.1] And Antiphon strongly expresses the popular sentiment that the unpunished murderer pollutes the public altars and vitiates the atmosphere of the city:[149.2] and the whole of Plato’s legislation[149.3] concerning homicide is based on the idea of the miasma arising from bloodshed, and is quite in accord with Attic law. The exile of the murderer purges the city as well as his execution; therefore the accused was allowed to go out of the country before the verdict.[149.4] The contagion was worse under a roof than in the open air; therefore the Athenian judges insisted on trying homicide in an unroofed court, “lest they should be under one roof with the slayer.”[149.5] Also it is part of primitive animistic belief that such miasma could cleave to things which had caused the death of a man: hence the {150} inanimate object such as an axe or bar of iron might be solemnly tried and, if found guilty, would be thrown into the sea to rid the State of infection:[150.1] the same superstition explains the old English law that a waggon which ran over a man and caused his death should be given to God--“deodand”: that is, it was to become a perquisite of the King, who represented God.

So far we seem to discern clearly the concept of purity evolving State law in a very vital matter. And this is a great achievement. But it might easily evolve law which from our point of view would be unjust and superstitious. The terrors of the ghost, the inequitable wrath of a pure god, the insistence on the ritualistic view of impurity, might retard progress and prevent the evolution of the highest law which regards extenuating circumstances and admits justifiable homicide. Such law is not heard of in the Mosaic books, but it {151} existed in the Attic code,[151.1] which specially on this account may be called civilised. The court which tried admitted cases of homicide where the plea of justification was raised was the Delphinion, and its foundation legend claimed that it was instituted to try Theseus for slaying the Pallantids who attacked him, and that the plea of justifiable homicide was allowed.[151.2] The name of the court shows that its patron is the pure god, and points to Crete and Delphi, the chief centres of the ritual of purification. Now it is quite possible that this momentous advance in law may have been prompted by the healthy rationalism of the early Greek mind, to some extent by secular utilitarian thought, which reacted on the religious view of purity. We shall then say that the religion adapted itself dexterously to a secular movement, as it usually did in Greece. Or it may {152} be the truth that the advance was due to a spontaneous movement within the religion itself, beginning perhaps in the seventh century, and to the growing consciousness that the purity or impurity of an act depended on motive and will. If this idea penetrated at an early time, as it certainly did at a later, into the sacerdotal circle, then the priest of Apollo might grant or withhold purification according to the degree of justification the homicide might prove:[152.1] in this case a court would be established at the instigation of the purifying god to consider the circumstances. This explanation must remain a hypothesis, but it is one that assumes the action of real forces.

Enough has been said to illustrate the intimate association of the idea of purity with legal progress,[152.2] and it only remains to indicate {153} very briefly its impress and effect on religious institutions. One of the methods most frequently employed to attain mental purity or freedom from the evil spirit is fasting; from all human societies, primitive and advanced, we could gather a copious stock of illustration. And mankind has, on the whole, agreed as to the occasions at which the ritual is desirable; in spring before the crops and the first-fruits appear, before the warriors go forth to battle, before any kind of intimate communion with God, when the family is in mourning for a kinsman and evil influences are abroad, fasting has been practised as a mode of purging the body and safeguarding it against spiritual harm or preparing it for the privilege of divine intercourse. It has been held necessary before any mystic initiation,[154.1] {154} the early Christian Church prescribing it for the days preceding the Easter communion; also before the individual can attain the divine afflatus of prophecy or the supernatural potency for expelling evil spirits or working wonder-cures. “Such kind goeth not forth save by prayer and fasting.” The psychological basis of the ritual is the belief that certain foods, and finally all food, are liable to engender evil influences in the body; and, moreover, the experience that the abstinence generates a peculiar mental condition of exaltation, ecstasy, and supra-normal self-confidence: other ideas, such as the discipline of self-denial, that come to gather round the practice are of later growth.

From the same primitive view of the relations between our body and the spiritual world has arisen the enforcement of celibacy upon the priesthood. To trace the phenomenon, {155} which is commonly or exceptionally found in all human societies, throughout the history of the churches, would require a separate chapter. It is not a late growth in religion, nor of necessity a sign of high development. And here again the original psychological motive is not a spirit of self-mortification, but the belief that the chaste body is the purer abode for the Divine Spirit, and the mental experience that such self-abnegation usually engenders a stronger consciousness of religious power. There are signs that the idea is losing its hold on the modern consciousness, but we see the deep impress it has made upon some of the ideas and dogmas of our religion. The institution of a sacerdotal rule of celibacy corresponds to the view prevalent in any given society of the priestly function; it is likely to be enforced when the priest is invested with a specially prophetic and mystic character, and is required to mediate between the society and God by means of frequent communion with the {156} divinity: it is rare when the civic and semi-secular view of the sacerdotal office prevails, rare therefore among the Northern Aryans and in the pre-Christian Greek and Roman states, although the Hellenic ritual generally required virginity, or at least a prolonged chastity, in the prophetess and occasionally in the ordinary priest. It was common in the ecstatic religions of Anatolia, and in the worship of Cybele was pushed to an unnatural extreme. It is interesting again to trace the association between the Phrygian-Christian heresy of Montanism and the older Phrygian paganism; and we have noted that Montanus, its founder, the champion of celibacy, is reported to have been in his unconverted days a priest of Cybele.

Again, the baptismal rite is a form of purification of world-wide prevalence, as has been already intimated. The washing of the new-born has been generally interpreted as a purgation of dangerous and evil influence among the lower as well as the higher races. An interesting form of such lustration is {157} recorded of the old Aztec home-life: the midwife washed the infant with the prayer, “May this water purify and whiten thy heart: may it wash away all that is evil.”[157.1] The adult, before initiation into any mystic society, usually needed elaborate purification; and this often took the form of baptism with water and occasionally with blood: and in certain of the Mediterranean religions the lustration was not merely regarded as a washing away of the old sin, but as a spiritual rebirth.[157.2] In the Isis rites the baptism with water was supposed to raise the mortal to the divinity: in the description of the baptismal purification of Setis I. the words occur: “I have purified thee with life and power, so as to make thee young, like thy father Ra.” And the gods themselves were believed to be reborn through the sprinkling of lustral water over their images.[157.3] We discover the same theories held by the {158} early Church concerning the Christian rite: the font washes away the taint of the flesh, while at the same time the divine potency of the water revivifies and recreates the catechumen, who dies to the old life and is born again; so that the font, which itself was exorcised and purified in the early period, was in some sense the womb of spiritual life, and the rite is both an exorcism and a communion. Very soon in the history of the Church it came to be regarded as of such serious and critical significance that the catechumen must prepare himself for it by prior purifications and exorcisms: such ceremonies as the breathing on his forehead by the priest, the sacramental partaking of the salt, the anointing with oil, together with the utterance of a prayer that “the enemy might be put to flight,” have an obvious cathartic significance.[158.1]

We must also regard confession as a kind of purification; for the “speaking out” of {159} sin would be regarded as a real purgation and deliverance at that period of thought when words might be viewed as things, or at least as controlling things. This was its meaning in the preliminary ritual of the Samothracian Mysteries, in the Mexican religion[159.1] where it was associated with purification and the concept of rebirth, and finally in the early Christian Church, where it was specially imposed upon the priest before the Easter communion as part of the purificatory preparation.[159.2] An interesting formula of confession is found among the Babylonian liturgical tablets: the penitent prays to the god and the goddess--“Let the seven winds carry away my sighs… let the bird bear my wickedness to the heavens: let the fish carry off my misery, let the river sweep it away. Let the beast of the field take it from me. Let the waters of the river wash me clean.” Here the purificatory confessional {160} works partly by prayer to the high god, partly by the old idea of the magic transference of sin into an alien substance.[160.1]

These are examples of practices in the advanced religions aiming at the purging of internal and spiritual sin. But the older and more materialistic view of impurity as a physical taint or as the miasma of an evil spirit, has not wholly faded even from historic Christianity: the ceremony of the churching of women, though transformed into a thanksgiving service, has descended from an old cathartic ritual that purged away the dangerous pollution of child-birth: and the consecration of churches was originally merely a special application of the old-world practice of purifying the house against demons, as we may see from the legendary example given in the apocryphal “Acts of St Thomas.”[160.2]

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The facts which I have collected and exposed, incomplete as the statement is, may justify what was said at the outset of the inquiry, that the aboriginal idea of purity has struck deep roots in the soil on which much of our ethical thought and feeling, many of our legal and religious institutions, have grown and developed. The concept, owing perhaps to its immemorial continuity of life and deep primeval instinctiveness, if the word may pass, is liable to fantastic exaggerations. It has sometimes proved itself an insurmountable barrier to moral and legal progress. When it has crystallised into a hard “pharisaic” form, it has arrested and imprisoned the life of a hitherto progressive people. On the other hand, though its innate quality, so to speak, is never secular-utilitarian, its contributions to our civilisation have been, as we have seen, of inestimable service. It has engendered the modern horror of murder {162} and bloodshed, and the ideal of the chaste life: we owe to it in great degree the delicate sensitiveness of spiritually gifted characters. For good and for evil, it has been an instinctive religious force more potent than any other of these in the mental evolution of man.

LECTURE IV. THE EVOLUTION OF PRAYER FROM LOWER TO HIGHER FORMS

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There is no part of the religious service of mankind that so clearly reveals the various views of the divine nature held by the different races at the different stages of their development as the formulæ of prayer, or reflects so vividly the material and psychologic history of man. The historic material at our disposal is unfortunately modern, not reaching back, that is to say, to a period earlier than some four thousand years before Christ; but this can be supplemented, as usually happens, by the evidence gathered from the lower societies, as well as by the observation of practices that frequently accompany and are very closely blended with prayer even in the higher religions, {164} and that we may with confidence believe to have descended from an immemorial antiquity. The question as to the origin of prayer is one of great difficulty and of the deepest significance for the history and philosophy of religion; for it inevitably involves the questions concerning the origin of the belief in a personal divinity, concerning the relation of magic to religion, of the spell-ritual which commands or constrains to a prayer-ritual of humiliation and entreaty. Even if I had an original and matured judgment to put before you on questions of such importance, a single lecture would be a very inadequate space for its exposition.[164.1] Therefore, though I may indicate, I will not attempt in this lecture to decide on, the question of origin. I will content myself with arranging the phenomena according as they appear from our point of view to belong to a lower stratum of religion or a higher; such an {165} arrangement begs no question, and agrees with our experience that in all religions, whether savage or civilised, lower and higher elements are able to coexist. I will first give a general sketch of the facts, with some interpretation of them, and will follow this with an illustrative selection of the prayers of primitive and advanced communities.