Part 33

It was so reposeful to dispose of things in the large--to educate by the hundred thousand, to rest in the arms of creed, to stand at the lever of a great machine, to have your tailor plan your suits and the cook or the newspaper your meals, to have a dozen pigeon-holes into which you conveniently popped new acquaintances and had them off your mind forever. It was so much easier to force men to accept your own beliefs and plans than to take the trouble to acquaint yourself with theirs. It was so much more satisfying and final to follow mere logic and go to the end of the process than always to be engaged in that most laborious of tasks--thinking and forming judgments. To write a volume embodying all the facts was much easier than to write an essay presenting the essentials and their interpretation. A perfectly democratic or a perfectly absolute government was far less difficult to plan than the ideal commonwealth. It was much easier to act on insufficient premises than to travail with thought and find that after all there was no ground for action. It was easier to be an ignoramus or a pedant than a real scholar, a dogmatist or an atheist than a good preacher, a lecturer on education than a teacher, a slouch or a dandy than a well dressed man, a persecutor or a humanitarian than a saver of souls, a despot or an anarchist than a shepherd of the people, a censor or an abettor than a monitor and adviser, a total abstainer or a drunkard than a temperate man, a conservative or a radical than a patriot, a boor or a fop than a gentleman. It was easier to be a beast, or not to be at all, than to be a MAN.

The Essayist looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. Once more he had successfully pigeon-holed the hours of his morning.

THE GREEKS ON RELIGION AND MORALS

I

If any lesson can be learned from history, which historians tell us is not the case, it would seem to be that what we call "goodness" is on the whole ineradicable. By goodness the race survives. Every one of us, struggle as he may, is constrained in his degree to be less bad than he might be. Many of us confess freely that we do not know why this is so. We do not know whether there is a moral law. If there is a moral law, we do not know whether its origin is transcendental and arbitrary, biological and definitely ascertainable, or social and fluctuating. Moreover we do not so much as know whether we are free agents, choosing continually between good and evil, or automata, feeling, to be sure, the stress of conflicting forces, but bound mathematically to follow the line of their compromise. We are of course comfortably able to ignore all these considerations in our everyday trains of thought. Just as the schoolboy learns to say parrotwise that the sun sits still and swings us round, though he sees him every evening descend to rest in New Jersey like a tired commuter; and just as the uncompromising idealist behaves exactly like the man who believes in the knowable reality of the world; so the most convinced determinist must act from morning to night as though he were a free agent, and must judge his fellowmen as though they too were choosers. Moreover almost all of us adopt instinctively some concrete reason for the choices we assume we are making. These reasons being inevitably partial and ludicrously incommensurate with the cosmic results that we hang upon them, are constantly in process of giving way under the strain. The so-called "religious" reasons land us in the position of having to give an immoral basis for morality. Either they involve the doctrine of a future life, and so vitiate the moral impulse with egoism at its source, or, with a diminished confidence in the sureness of reward, which is all to the good, they tend to perpetuate affirmations that have lost their meaning, which is all to the bad. It seems to have been on the whole a misfortune that religion and morality, which historically and logically have neither more nor less to do with each other than marriage and love, should have become profoundly associated in Europe in the last two thousand years. The most pressing duty of the moralist--and every man is a moralist--is to dissolve the merger, and there are circumstances connected with its origin which may lessen our estimate of the inconvenience involved in the dissolution. The mythology, cult, doctrine, exegesis and ethics of Christianity are considerably more Greek than Hebraic in origin, and the Greeks in their prime had excellent ways of their own of dealing with all these matters. They managed to be profoundly religious while avoiding the two pits into which the Hebrews fell, first, the confounding of myth with history, and, second, the erection of morals on a supernatural, jural and egoistic basis. Let us then consider the Greeks.

II

The most remarkable fact in connection with the religion of the Greeks is its attitude towards the use of the reason. Of all the religions known to us this exercised the least restrictive power over the minds of those who entertained it. Over their conduct in matters of ritual it did of course exercise power both restrictive and positive, but the reason it left free. Greek religion is therefore recalcitrant to M. Reinach's definition of religion in general as "a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties." All that was obligatory was ritual; there was no confession of faith, the priests did not form a class with vested interests to maintain. The absence of dogma from a religion will not recommend it to everybody, but those who regard that as a fortunate circumstance will grant that the credit rests not with the religion itself but with the people who hold it. Just as any state can have as many paupers as it cares to pay for, so any body of religionists can have as many dogmas as it chooses to encourage. Greek religion began like any other with its terrors, its taboos and its magic. If it did not tie up its adherents hand and foot, as other primitive religions have done, that was due to the psychological idiosyncracy of the Greeks. When their time of expansion was over they became the patients and the agents of dogma, but in connection with a foreign religion. It might have been expected from the history of native religions in Greece, that the strong influence of Greek thought on early Christianity would have been anti-dogmatic. On the contrary, practically the whole dogmatic structure of the fathers, though Oriental in spirit, is Greek in form. The tradition of free thought could not stand before St. Paul, and Greek religion, which for fifteen hundred years had given the world a lesson in the true function and status of mythology, lent itself in its decay to the creation of a system which, in the hands of races of very different temperament, became dogma. But though Greek religion began with magic and ended with dogma, it very early rendered the one harmless, and never submitted to the other in connection with a native cult.

For the primitive Greek, as for the primitive Hebrew, the Latin, the Maori, the Melanesian, the American Indian, the world was full of a mysterious force, unaccountable, able either to curse or to bless; and man's very existence depended on his ability to learn the laws of this power's action, to direct it if possible, and if not, to placate it. As man proceeds along the well-worn path to animism, the force comes to be thought of as wielded by will and intelligence like his own. But he never leaves it behind him. After the gods are born, he worships them in terms of it. From his earliest ritualistic act, to the contemporary sacrament of the Christian church, holy water for instance has been the means of salvation. For unnumbered ages ritual has remained unchanged, but its psychology has changed. What is everywhere performed today with hope, originated everywhere in the dark past with fear.

The Eleusinian mysteries sprang doubtless from as primitive beginnings as any Greek ritual of which we have knowledge. Nevertheless they are free from many of the marks of primitive ritual. They show no cannibalism, probably no totemism, certainly no orgiastic excesses. If animal sacrifice was practised in the precincts, no blood was spilt in the hall of the mysteries. Moreover there was originally nothing either mystic or mysterious about them, in our sense. But a god came to be associated with them, a newcomer to Greece, who brought mystery and mysticism in his train, a god whose mission was to emotionalize religion. Dionysus, of Thracian origin, was, to begin with, a vegetation-power, the son of the earth-goddess. The vine with its strange psychic powers became the plant oftenest associated with him, but the plane and the pine were also his, and if he was Dionysus-the-Grape at Philippi, he was Dionysus-the-Ivy at Acharnania. Remnants of strong magic, compelling the earth to fertility, were present in his rites. Like other vegetation-powers he had a dark side; he suffered death and resurrection, and was powerful in the world of the dead. In the history of culture the ritual of Dionysus has a distinguished place as the putative father of tragedy. In the history of religion that ritual is chiefly remarkable for having brought into Greece, together with all the phenomena of auto-suggestion, a conception that was to have a portentous sequel, the conception of a sacramental meal consisting of the body and blood of the god himself, by partaking of which the communicant shared the divine nature. The whole aim of the Dionysiac method in its native Thrace was hypnosis; the wild Bacchic dance, the tossing of the head, the frantic clash of the tambourine, the harrowing cry of wind-instruments, the waving of torches in the night, the use of stimulants or narcotics, and finally the rending and devouring of the still quivering flesh of the animal which incarnated the god, were all means of so altering the psychic states of the participant that he was no longer conscious of the operation of his own will, but was filled with the god,--enthusiastic. The practical aim of the induced ecstasy was doubtless originally the acquisition of divine power for magical purposes. As the savage eats his brave enemy to acquire his bravery, so the early agrarian eats the vegetation-god to acquire his power of making things grow. But in classical times the phenomena of enthusiasm had taken on a significance that overshadowed the claims of vegetation-magic. Among a people temperamentally self-restrained, nothing is more curious than the psychology of self-abandonment. If we must select one aspect of the godhead as most expressive of the Greek mind, that aspect will unquestionably be Apollo, lucid, rational, self-possessed and civilized. The gulf between the two doctrines, between Apollo's "never too much" and Dionysus' exhortation to let yourself go, would have constituted heresy and schism in a dogmatic age.

But the Greek, seeing how true and how indispensable both are, made shift to bridge the gulf by the set of opinions associated with the name of Orpheus. The state of our knowledge of the origins of Orphism may be illustrated by the fact that Maass says Orpheus was a god and indigenous in Greece, Miss Harrison believes him to have been a man, probably a native of Crete whence he made his way to Greece by way of Thrace, while Reinach declares he was a fox-totem of the Bassarids. Fortunately it does not greatly matter. What is really important, not only for Hellenism but for Christianity, is the spirit of his doctrine, of which we can recover, not it is true, anything like expository teaching, but the traces of the color it laid on almost every fabric of Greek thought. No image could more justly picture it than the faded remnants of paint found on the remains of Greek buildings and sculptures. It is pretty nearly impossible to our imagination to tolerate the vision of a temple or a statue clad otherwise than in its original whiteness or in the beautiful tones bestowed by time and rust. And similarly the forms of Greek spiritual expression show to the soul's eye as logical, pure and monotone. But just as surely as the houses of the gods were painted gaudily with red and blue and green, as surely as their hair was ruddy and their cheeks glowing, so surely was their worship touched and tinted with the emotion that transcends and defies reason.

Orphism took up and developed the mystic elements of the Dionysiac cult, giving them a higher spiritual content and a more restrained expression. It was a scheme of salvation, based on the hope of life after death. The central fact of religious experience was communion with the god; by eating his body and drinking his blood the worshipper partook of his nature, of which immortality was an attribute. "To become Bacchus" was the aim of the partaker of the sacrament. But whereas the old Thracian ritual surrendered the worshipper to the god by means of drunkenness and frenzy, the new ritual induced ecstasy by the equally efficacious use of fasting, silence and quiet suggestion. Orphism though of foreign origin became a genuine Greek religion, and was the last. It was never adopted by the state, but remained in the hands of private congregations. Through these it permeated Greece. Thinkers and poets and the plain people were reached by its different methods of appeal. If we sum up its most striking characteristics, we cannot fail to see how strong was its influence on the world-religion that was to succeed it. Orphism took up the beliefs of paganism, and adapted them to its own ends. It gave them fresh life through its doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It taught that the soul after death rests for a time in a state of probation, and is finally, according to the works done in the body, either admitted to felicity or punished by reincarnation. Final felicity was to be obtained by ceremonial purity of life, reached through the use of sacraments necessary to salvation, and the chief of these sacraments was the symbolic and memorial partaking of the body and blood of a god slain by his enemies. By the proper use of sacraments, the living could improve the condition of the dead; unscrupulous priests sometimes traded on the simplicity of ignorant worshippers, and engaged for money to perform rites that should free the transgressor from the consequences of his transgression, whether he were alive or dead. The cult of Orpheus therefore summarizes an enormous range of human history. From the Mountain Mother of the Cretan seals and her son, through the patriarchal reign of Zeus, to Mary and the son of Mary, it follows certain apparently unchanging requirements of the soul.

The ceremony of the Eleusinia was a magnificent pageant, the culmination of the religious year. It was a strong appeal to eye and ear, and to the _psychologie de la foule_. It was probably accompanied neither by dogmatic exhortation nor by any appeal to the intellect. Aristotle analyzed the method in a sentence: "The initiated do not learn anything; rather they feel certain emotions, and are put into a certain frame of mind." This frame of mind was a hopeful one for this life and the next. On the supernatural side, the mystic felt that he was sure of the good-will of the great powers of the underworld, having done them honor, eaten of their food and enrolled himself as their friend and follower. On the natural side, he had felt the benefit--on which all ritual is based--of performing, in unison with others, after preparation both bodily and mental, and with the moving accompaniments of beautiful and impressive sights and sounds, certain acts entirely apart from the ordinary routine of life, and venerable with the usage of the past. But it is to be noted that although the door was open for communication between religion and morals, the original conception of purity was formal and ceremonial, a survival of magic. We may picture Greek morals as standing with one foot on a religious, the other on a social basis; but if, as in the usual posture of Greek sculpture, the weight of the body is thrown chiefly on one foot, that is the social one. When foreign cults began to make their way into Greece, they generally followed the form of the mystery. Isis, Serapis and Mithras, oriental in origin but Hellenized in ritual, were centers for religions of the personal, mystic and consolatory type. All these oriental cults brought with them a tendency to take literally what the Greeks had taken loosely, and Mithraism brought a high development of the tendency to base morality on the egoistic motive.

Bearing in mind the wide prevalence of these and similar rites on the shores of the Mediterranean during the first century of our era, we are in a position to understand a situation which Archdeacon Cheetham and Dr. Hatch discussed fifteen years ago. In apostolic times the Christian sacraments were of the most informal character possible. A man could be baptized at any time in any place by anyone. "Lo, here is water; what hindereth me to be baptized?" For the years immediately succeeding the apostolic, we have no evidence, and by the time evidence begins again, a great change is visible. Baptism no longer follows at once on conversion, but is preceded by a probationary term, as was initiation. It can no longer be performed anywhere at any time, but only in the great churches and at one of the great festivals, generally Easter-even or Pentecost. Similarly, once in the year, on the 16th of Boedromion, the candidates for initiation used to go down to the sea in a body to be purified by immersion. And baptism is no longer a simple thing done in the sight of all men but a mystery--so Justin Martyr calls it--and the officiant is a "mystagogos." The baptized are now called "initiate," the unbaptized "uninitiate." Before the Lord's supper, the priest now asks, as the mystagogos used to ask, "Is there anyone who has a quarrel with any?" And until infant baptism removed the distinction, the "uninitiate" were directed to withdraw before the consummation of the mystery, as for unnumbered ages they had been bidden to withdraw from the crowning rites of the Eleusinia. It is clear that the founders of Christian mysticism, Clement for instance and Dionysius the Areopagite, did consciously all in their power to emphasize the resemblances between the new and the old. Gregory of Nyssa calls baptism "the mystic bath," Athanasius calls unction "the mystic oil," Gregory of Nazianzen calls the elements "mystic food." Secret formulas, the idea of which comes from the mysteries, are called by the old name, "what must not be spoken." Clement speaks the technical language of the mysteries. "O truly sacred mysteries! O stainless light! My way is lighted with torches, and I survey the heavens and God! I am become holy while I am being initiated! The Lord is my hierophant!"

During the last ten years the researches of Reitzensteim and Cumont have corrected the first impression that the influence of mystic cult and language was late and self-conscious. The very origin of the Christian sacraments, the very theology of Saint Paul, are now believed by many scholars to reflect the Hermitic and Gnostic versions of the mysteries.

III

The doctrine of the early church underwent as great a modification as its cult. The studies of Hatch were directed by the reflection expressed in the first paragraph of his _Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages on the Christian Church_. "It is impossible for anyone, whether he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers." The simple first formula of the creed dealt with matters of fact only, "Jesus Christ and him crucified." At the end of the second century it included various philosophical ideas, the creation of the world out of nothing, the Word, the revelation of the Creator to the world, of the Word or Son to the Father and of both to men. The Word--the _logos_ of Heraclitus and Philo--threatened to supplant the Messiah, and originated the endless and bitter controversies of the early church about the Trinity and the Incarnation. Christian scholars take pleasure and apparently pride in deriving the philosophical and ontological elements of their faith from the Greeks. Dr. Caird says, "In this case we can see that conquered Greece laid spiritual fetters on its victor. Greece provided Christianity with the weapons of culture which enabled it to subdue the minds of its opponents, but at the same time it did much to determine the main bias and direction of the religious consciousness which was established by its means. It gave its own form to the life and doctrines of the Church."

The very word "faith" changed its meaning under Greek influence. When the Hebrews spoke of having faith in Jehovah they meant that they had confidence in his character and good intentions. They used the word as people used it when they said that they had faith in Mr. Gladstone. Of course the formula assumed the existence of Jehovah, as of Mr. Gladstone, but that was supposed to be an object of knowledge, not of faith. The disciples again meant by faith the knowledge, direct or based on direct evidence, of certain historical facts. It was the Greeks, with their reliance on the processes of reason, who developed the doctrine that since the reflective action of the mind is at least as authoritative as the reports of the senses, the results of its cogitations are the objects of positive knowledge and faith is the evidence of things not seen. In a word the reasoned monotheism of the Greeks, originating, as far as we are concerned, with Plato, afforded a dialectic basis for the naive monotheism of the Hebrews. A passage from the writings of Hippolytus, of the third Christian century, puts the matter clearly before us: "The one God, the first and sole and universal Maker and Lord, had nothing coaeval with him, ... but he was one, alone by himself.... This supreme and only God begets Reason first, having formed the thought of him, not reason as a spoken word, but as an internal mental process of the universe.... The cause of the things that came into being was the Reason, bearing in himself the active will of Him who begat him ... so that when the Father bade the world come into being, the Reason brought each thing to perfection thus pleasing God." Obviously persons interested in tracing the pedigree of the God of Hippolytus will do well to turn not to _Genesis_ but to Plato's _Timaeus_.