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The Everlasting Man
G.K. Chesterton
(1925)
This book needs a preliminary note that its scope be not misunderstood. The view
suggested is historical rather than theological, and does not deal directly with a
religious change which has been the chief event of my own life; and about which I am
already writing a more purely controversial volume. It is impossible, I hope, for any
Catholic to write any book on any subject, above all this subject, without showing that he
is a Catholic; but this study is not specially concerned with the differences between a
Catholic and a Protestant. Much of it is devoted to many sorts of Pagans rather than any
sort of Christians; and its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side by side
with similar myths, and his religion side by side with similar religions, are only
repeating a very stale formula contradicted by a very striking fact. To suggest this I
have not needed to go much beyond matters known to us all; I make no claim to learning;
and have to depend for some things, as has rather become the fashion, on those who are
more learned. As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of
history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage and
constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and intensely
interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur to
do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.
There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to
walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such
a journey in a story I once wrote. It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic to
another story that I never wrote. Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best
book I have ever written. It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will
use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth. I conceived it as a
romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides, like those along which the ancient White
Horses of Wessex are scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose
farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find something, such
as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was far enough from home he looked back
and saw that his own farm and kitchen-garden, shining flat on the hill-side like the
colours and quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some such gigantic figure, on which
he had always lived, but which was too large and too close to be seen. That, I think, is a
true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today; and that is the
point of this book.
The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really
inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the
popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground,
in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has
taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus they make current
and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They will complain of parsons dressing
like parsons; as if we should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared
us were plain clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be
interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle; though they do not call an editor's
office a coward's castle. It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it would
be much truer of journalist. The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as
he came out of church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him.
They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press about why the churches are
empty, without even going there to find out if they are empty, or which of them are empty.
Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most insipid curate in a three-act
farce, and move us to comfort him after the manner of the curate in the Bab Ballads; 'Your
mind is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.' So we may truly say to the very feeblest
cleric: 'Your mind is not so blank as that of Indignant Layman or Plain Man or Man in the
Street, or any of your critics in the newspapers; for they have not the most shadowy
notion of what they want themselves. Let alone of what you ought to give them.' They will
suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented the War, which they
themselves did not want to prevent; and which nobody had ever professed to be able to
prevent, except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan sceptics who are
the chief enemies of the Church. It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was
always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should
have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view
that the Church was discredited by the War--they might as well say that the Ark was
discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is
right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.
But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition they are in a state of
reaction against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well
with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But
these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley
from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They
cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and
they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of
a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith
and have lost the light of the faith.
Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the
next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages
that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be
something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his
judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic,
entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a
sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he
has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not
judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic
Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as
a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded
in setting up the Church there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because
his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the Twelve
Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them
as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as featureless idols
merely made to be battered by iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by
empty-handed cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult;
the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral
staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the
prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika.
Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose
their temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere,
an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that,
it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or
to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes than to
be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops. It would be better to walk past a
church as if it were a pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to
go inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction has thus
become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the
Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as
much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.
But with this we come to the final and vital point I shall try to show in these pages
that when we do make this imaginative effort to see the whole thing from the outside, we
find that it really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside. It is exactly
when the boy gets far enough off to see the giant that he sees that he really is a giant.
It is exactly when we do at last see the Christian Church afar under those clear and level
eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church of Christ. To put it shortly, the
moment we are really impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it. But this
second proposition requires more serious discussion; and I shall here set myself to
discuss it.
As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something solid in the solitary
and unique character of the divine story, it struck me that there was exactly the same
strange and yet solid character in the human story that had led up to it; because that
human story also had a root that was divine. I mean that just as the Church seems to grow
more remarkable when it is fairly compared with the common religious life of mankind, so
mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable when we compare it with the common life of
nature. And I have noticed that most modern history is driven to something like sophistry,
first to soften the sharp transition from animals to men, and then to soften the sharp
transition from heathens to Christians. Now the more we really read in a realistic spirit
of those two transitions the sharper we shall find them to be. It is because the critics
are not detached that they do not see this detachment; it is because they are not looking
at things in a dry light that they cannot see the difference between black and white. It
is because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt that they have a motive
for making out that all the white is dirty grey and the black not so black as it is
painted. I do not say there are not human excuses for their revolt; I do not say it is not
in some ways sympathetic; what I say is that it is not in any way scientific. An
iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is
not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics
and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religion are in the least
impartial. Why should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world is
at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope? I do not
pretend to be impartial in the sense that the final act of faith fixes a man's mind
because it satisfies his mind. But I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than
they are; in the sense that I can tell the story fairly, with some sort of imaginative
justice to all sides; and they cannot. I do profess to be impartial in the sense that I
should be ashamed to talk such nonsense about the Lama of Thibet as they do about the Pope
of Rome, or to have as little sympathy with Julian the Apostate as they have with the
Society of Jesus. They are not impartial; they never by any chance hold the historical
scales even; and above all they are never impartial upon this point of evolution and
transition. They suggest everywhere the grey gradations of twilight, because they believe
it is the twilight of the gods. I propose to maintain that whether or no it is the
twilight of gods, it is not the daylight of men.
I maintain that when brought out into the daylight these two things look altogether
strange and unique; and that it is only in the false twilight of an imaginary period of
transition that they can be made to look in the least like anything else. The first of
these is the creature called man and the second is the man called Christ. I have therefore
divided this book into two parts: the former being a sketch of the main adventure of the
human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the second a summary of the real
difference that was made by it becoming Christian. Both motives necessitate a certain
method, a method which is not very easy to manage, and perhaps even less easy to define or
defend.
In order to strike, in the only sane or possible sense, the note of impartiality, it is
necessary to touch the nerve of novelty. I mean that in one sense we see things fairly
when we see them first. That, I may remark in passing, is why children generally have very
little difficulty about the dogmas of the Church. But the Church, being a highly practical
thing for working and fighting, is necessarily a thing for men and not merely for
children. There must be in it for working purposes a great deal of tradition, of
familiarity, and even of routine. So long as its fundamentals are sincerely felt, this may
even be the saner condition. But when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must
try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity
of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere
custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural. Things that may well
be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when
familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here
considered, whatever our view of them, contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be
an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of imagination; the imagination
that can see what is there.
The only way to suggest the point is by an example of something, indeed of almost
anything, that has been considered beautiful or wonderful. George Wyndham once told me
that he had seen one of the first aeroplanes rise for the first time and it was very
wonderful but not so wonderful as a horse allowing a man to ride on him. Somebody else has
said that a fine man on a fine horse is the noblest bodily object in the world. Now, so
long as people feel this in the right way, all is well. The first and best way of
appreciating it is to come of people with a tradition of treating animals properly; of men
in the right relation to horses. A boy who remembers his father who rode a horse, who rode
it well and treated it well, will know that the relation can be satisfactory and will be
satisfied. He will be all the more indignant at the ill-treatment of horses because he
knows how they ought to be treated; but he will see nothing but what is normal in a man
riding on a horse. He will not listen to the great modern philosopher who explains to him
that the horse ought to be riding on the man. He will not pursue the pessimist fancy of
Swift and say that men must be despised as monkeys and horses worshipped as gods. And
horse and man together making an image that is to him human and civilised, it will be
easy, as it were, to lift horse and man together into something heroic or symbolical; like
a vision of St. George in the clouds. The fable of the winged horse will not be wholly
unnatural to him: and he will know why Ariosto set many a Christian hero in such an airy
saddle, and made him the rider of the sky. For the horse has really been lifted up along
with the man in the wildest fashion in the very word we use when we speak 'chivalry.' The
very name of the horse has been given to the highest mood and moment of the man; so that
we might almost say that the handsomest compliment to a man is to call him a horse.
But if a man has got into a mood in which he is not able to feel this sort of wonder,
then his cure must begin right at the other end. We must now suppose that he has drifted
into a dull mood, in which somebody sitting on a horse means no more than somebody sitting
on a chair. The wonder of which Wyndham spoke, the beauty that made the thing seem an
equestrian statue, the meaning of the more chivalric horseman, may have become to him
merely a convention and a bore. Perhaps they have been merely a fashion; perhaps they have
gone out of fashion; perhaps they have been talked about too much or talked about in the
wrong way; perhaps it was then difficult to care for horses without the horrible risk of
being horsy. Anyhow, he has got into a condition when he cares no more for a horse than
for a towel-horse. His grandfather's charge at Balaclava seems to him as dull and dusty as
the album containing such family portraits. Such a person has not really become
enlightened about the album; on the contrary, he has only become blind with the dust. But
when he has reached that degree of blindness, he will not be able to look at a horse or a
horseman at all until he has seen the whole thing as a thing entirely unfamiliar and
almost unearthly.
Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towards us, with
lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of the prehistoric creatures. We
must see for the first time the strangely small head set on a neck not only longer but
thicker than itself, as the face of a gargoyle is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the one
disproportionate crest of hair running along the ridge of that heavy neck like a beard in
the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid club of horn, alone amid the feet of so many
cattle; so that the true fear is to be found in showing, not the cloven, but the uncloven
hoof. Nor is it mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster; for in a sense a
monster means what is unique, and he is really unique. But the point is that when we thus
see him as the first man saw him, we begin once more to have some imaginative sense of
what it meant when the first man rode him. In such a dream he may seem ugly, but he does
not seem unimpressive; and certainly that two-legged dwarf who could get on top of him
will not seem unimpressive. By a longer and more erratic road we shall come back to the
same marvel of the man and the horse; and the marvel will be, if possible, even more
marvellous. We shall have again a glimpse of St. George; the more glorious because St.
George is not riding on the horse, but rather riding on the dragon.
In this example, which I have taken merely because it is an example, it will be noted
that I do not say that the nightmare seen by the first man of the forest is either more
true or more wonderful than the normal mare of the stable seen by the civilised person who
can appreciate what is normal. Of the two extremes, I think on the whole that the
traditional grasp of truth is the better. But I say that the truth is found at one or
other of these two extremes, and is lost in the intermediate condition of mere fatigue and
forgetfulness of tradition. In other words, I say it is better to see a horse as a monster
than to see it only as a slow substitute for a motor-car. If we have got into that state
of mind about a horse as something stale, it is far better to be frightened of a horse
because it is a good deal too fresh.
Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that
is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always to have
regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic
view of human nature will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view,
and will be satisfied. But if he has lost the pose to strike wherever possible this note
of what is new and strange, and for that reason the style even on so serious a subject may
sometimes be deliberately grotesque and fanciful. I do desire to help the reader to see
Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background
of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the
background of natural things. And I say that in both cases, when seen thus, they stand out
from their background like supernatural things. They do not fade into the rest with the
colours of impressionism; they stand out from the rest with the colours of heraldry; as
vivid as a red cross on a white shield or a black lion on a ground of gold. So stands the
Red Clay against the green field of nature, or the White Christ against the red clay of
his race.
But in order to see them clearly we have to see them as a whole. We have to see how
they developed as well as how they began; for the most incredible part of the story is
that things which began thus should have developed thus. Anyone who chooses to indulge in
mere imagination can imagine that other things might have happened or other entities
evolved. Anyone thinking of what might have happened may conceive a sort of evolutionary
equality; but anyone facing what did happen must face an exception and a prodigy. If there
was ever a moment when man was only an animal, we can if we choose make a fancy picture of
his career transferred to some other animal. An entertaining fantasia might be made in
which elephants built in elephantine architecture, with towers and turrets like tusks and
trunks, cities beyond the scale of any colossus. A pleasant fable might be conceived in
which a cow had developed a costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers. We
could imagine a Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman, a quadrumanous creature
carving and painting with his hands and cooking and carpentering with his feet. But if we
are considering what did happen, we shall certainly decide that man has distanced
everything else with a distance like that of the astronomical spaces and a speed like that
of the still thunderbolt of the light. And in the same fashion, while we can if we choose
see the Church amid a mob of Mithraic or Manichean superstitions squabbling and killing
each other at the end of the Empire, while we can if we choose imagine the Church killed
in the struggle and some other chance cult taking its place, we shall be the more
surprised (and possibly puzzled) if we meet it two thousand years afterwards rushing
through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought and everlasting enthusiasm; a thing
without rival or resemblance; and still as new as it is old.
Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote, there is a small
star, which astronomers may some day discover. At least I could never observe in the faces
or demeanour of most astronomers or men of science any evidence that they have discovered
it; though as a matter of fact they were walking about on it all the time. It is a star
that brings forth out of itself very strange plants and very strange animals; and none
stranger than the men of science. That at least is the way in which I should begin a
history of the world, if I had to follow the scientific custom of beginning with an
account of the astronomical universe. I should try to see even this earth from the
outside, not by the hackneyed insistence of its relative position to the sun, but by some
imaginative effort to conceive its remote position for the dehumanised spectator. Only I
do not believe in being dehumanised in order to study humanity. I do not believe in
dwelling upon the distances that are supposed to dwarf the world; I think there is even
something a trifle vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size. And as the
first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange planet so as to make it
significant, I will not stoop to the other trick of making it a small planet in order to
make it insignificant. I would rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet
at all, in the sense in which we know that it is a place; and a very extraordinary place
too. That is the note which I wish to strike from the first, if not in the astronomical,
then in some more familiar fashion.
One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant
Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark
that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea
of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it
was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of
course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really
was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this
nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.' My remark was strictly pious and
proper confessing the divine purpose even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless
manifestations. In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is
something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not
seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at the beginning and
the short word at the end; whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning and
gave him a sort of shock. I have noticed that if you put a word like God into the same
sentence with a word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like
pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to
matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians. But so
long as you begin with a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very
probably the editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long title and
he was rather a busy man.
But this little incident has always lingered in my mind as a sort of parable. Most
modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution, and with a rather wordy
exposition of evolution, for much the same reason that operated in this case. There is
something slow and soothing and gradual about the word and even about the idea. As a
matter of fact, it is not, touching these primary things, a very practical word or a very
profitable idea. Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get
an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is
really far more logical to start by saying 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth'
even if you only mean 'In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable
process.' For God is by its nature a name of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man
could imagine how a world was created any more than he could create one. But evolution
really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the
impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under
a sort of illusion that they have read the Origin of Species.
But this notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent of a slope, is a great
part of the illusion. It is an illogicality as well as an illusion; for slowness has
really nothing to do with the question. An event is not any more intrinsically
intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does
not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The
Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval
gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended
with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather
more creepy and uncanny. The medieval wizard may have flown through the air from the top
of a tower; but to see an old gentleman walking through the air, in a leisurely and
lounging manner, would still seem to call for some explanation. Yet there runs through all
the rationalistic treatment of history this curious and confused idea that difficulty is
avoided, or even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere delay or on something dilatory in
the processes of things. There will be something to be said upon particular examples
elsewhere; the question here is the false atmosphere of facility and ease given by the
mere suggestion of going slow; the sort of comfort that might be given to a nervous old
woman travelling for the first time in a motor-car.
Mr. H. G. Wells has confessed to being a prophet; and in this matter he was a prophet
at his own expense. It is curious that his first fairy-tale was a complete answer to his
last book of history. The Time Machine destroyed in advance all comfortable conclusions
founded on the mere relativity of time. In that sublime nightmare the hero saw trees shoot
up like green rockets, and vegetation spread visibly like a green conflagration, or the
sun shoot across the sky from east to west with the swiftness of a meteor. Yet in his
sense these things were quite as natural when they went swiftly; and in our sense they are
quite as supernatural when they go slowly. The ultimate question is why they go at all;
and anybody who really understands that question will know that it always has been and
always will be a religious question; or at any rate a philosophical or metaphysical
question. And most certainly he will not think the question answered by some substitution
of gradual for abrupt change; or, in other words by a merely relative question of the same
story being spun out or rattled rapidly through, as can be done with any story at a cinema
by turning a handle.
Now what is needed for these problems of primitive existence is something more like a
primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the first things, I would ask the reader to
make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity. And by simplicity I do not mean
stupidity, but rather the sort of clarity that sees things like life rather than words
like evolution. For this purpose it would really be better to turn the handle of the Time
Machine a little more quickly and see the grass growing and the trees springing up into
the sky, if that experiment could contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of
the whole affair. What we know, in a sense in which we know nothing else, is that the
trees and the grass did grow and that number of other extraordinary things do in fact
happen; that queer creatures support themselves in the empty air by beating it with fans
of various fantastic shapes; that other queer creatures steer themselves about alive under
a load of mighty waters; that other queer creatures walk about on four legs, and that the
queerest creature of all walks about on two. These are things and not theories; and
compared with them evolution and the atom and even the solar system are merely theories.
The matter here is one of history and not of philosophy so that it need only be noted that
no philosopher denies that a mystery still attaches to the two great transitions: the
origin of the universe itself and the origin of the principle of life itself. Most
philosophers have the enlightenment to add that a third mystery attaches to the origin of
man himself. In other words, a third bridge was built across a third abyss of the
unthinkable when there came into the world what we call reason and what we call will. Man
is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution. That he has a backbone or other parts
upon a similar pattern to birds and fishes is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning of
the fact. But if we attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing on his hind
legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic and subversive than if he were
standing on his head.
I will take one example to serve for an introduction to the story of man. It
illustrates what I mean by saying that a certain childish directness is needed to see the
truth about the childhood of the world. It illustrates what I mean by saying that a
mixture of popular science and journalistic jargon have confused the facts about the first
things, so that we cannot see which of them really comes first. It illustrates, though
only in one convenient illustration, all that I mean by the necessity of seeing the sharp
differences that give its shape to history, instead of being submerged in all these
generalisations about slowness and sameness. For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells's
phrase, an outline of history. But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini's phrase, that
this evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd outline. But, above all, it
illustrates what I mean by saying that the more we really look at man as an animal, the
less he will look like one.
To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions
to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as
a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into
account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand,
his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general
with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never
happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive
diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere,
have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are
always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and
knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would
seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on
being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never
comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very
refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have
been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romance of
the hippopotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy. The
cave-man may have been no better that the cave-bear; but the child she-bear, so famous in
hymnology, is not trained with any such bias for spinsterhood. In short these details of
the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either the revolutionary or the static
hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for them, but
unfortunately I have never been able to find it. But the curious thing is this: that while
ten thousand tongues of more or less scientific or literary gossip seemed to be talking at
once about this unfortunate fellow, under the title of the cave-man, the one connection in
which it is really relevant and sensible to talk about him as the cave-man has been
comparatively neglected. People have used this loose term in twenty loose ways, but they
have never even looked at their own term for what could really be learned from it.
In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man except what he
did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real evidence of what he did in the
cave. It is little enough, like all the prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the
real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club. And it will be
valuable to our sense of reality to consider quite simply what that real evidence is, and
not to go beyond it. What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory club
notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head. The cave was not a
Bluebeard's Chamber filled with the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with
female skulls all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs. It was something quite
unconnected, one way or the other, with all the modern phrases and philosophical
implications and literary rumours which confuse the whole question for us. And if we wish
to see as it really is this authentic glimpse of the morning of the world, it will be far
better to conceive even the story of its discovery as some such legend of the land of
morning. It would be far better to tell the tale of what was really found as simply as the
tale of heroes finding the Golden Fleece or the Gardens of the Hesperides, if we could so
escape from a fog of controversial theories into the clear colours and clean-cut outlines
of such a dawn. The old epic poets at least knew how to tell a story, possibly a tall
story but never a twisted story, never a story tortured out of its own shape to fit
theories and philosophies invented centuries afterwards. It would be well if modern
investigators could describe their discoveries in the bald narrative style of the earliest
travellers, and without any of these long allusive words that are full of irrelevant
implication and suggestion. Then we might realise exactly what we do know about the
cave-man, or at any rate about the cave.
A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills and passed into a sort of
subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of such sealed and secret corridors of rock.
They crawled through cracks that seemed almost impassable, they crept through tunnels that
might have been made for moles, they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells, they seemed
to be burying themselves alive seven times over beyond the hope of resurrection. This is
but the commonplace of all such courageous exploration; but what is needed here is some
one who shall put such stories in the primary light, in which they are not commonplace.
There is, for instance, something strangely symbolic in the accident that the first
intruders into that sunken world were a priest and a boy, the types of the antiquity and
of youth of the world. But here I am even more concerned with the symbolism of the boy
than with that of the priest. Nobody who remembers boyhood needs to be told what it might
be to a boy to enter like Peter Pan under a roof of the roots of all the trees and go
deeper and deeper, till he reach what William Morris called the very roots of the
mountains. Suppose somebody, with that simple and unspoilt realism that is a part of
innocence, to pursue that journey to its end, not for the sake of what he could deduce or
demonstrate in some dusty magazine controversy, but simply for the sake of what he could
see. What he did see at last was a cavern so far from the light of day that it might have
been the legendary Domdaniel cavern, that was under the floor of the sea. This secret
chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its
walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they
followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the
movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and
they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic
limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which
any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will
allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and
adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult
things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his
head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But
there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in
rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had
watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense
it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who
is really natural.
Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing whatever in the
atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and pessimistic atmosphere of that
journalistic cave of the winds, that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes
concerning the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of
the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the
ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science. When
novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they
never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the
realist of the sex novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain; he felt
the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the novelist's readers would be very much
disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room
wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts of the
cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,' he does not refer to
the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle
swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these
mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did
any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as commonly presented
to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline
of truth. The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion and a
misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse
for a very modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can
surely be a cad without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next
to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall.
But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular moral here to be drawn
from them. That moral is something much larger and simpler, so large and simple that when
it is first stated it will sound childish. And indeed it is in the highest sense childish;
and that is why I have in this apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a child.
It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy in the cavern; and is perhaps too
big to be seen. If the boy was one of the flock of the priest, it may be presumed that he
had been trained in a certain quality of common sense; that common sense that often comes
to us in the form of tradition. In that case he would simply recognise the primitive man's
work as the work of a man, interesting but in no way incredible in being primitive. He
would see what was there to see; and he would not be tempted into seeing what was not
there, by any evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation. If he had heard of such
things he would admit, of course, that the speculations might be true and were not
incompatible with the facts that were true. The artist may have had another side to his
character besides that which he has alone left on record in his works of art. The
primitive man may have taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals;
all we can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be true that
when the cave-man's finished jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case may be, he
loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to watch the deer as they come down to
drink at the brook. These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common
sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what the facts have to
teach; and the pictures in the cave are very nearly all the facts there are. So far as
that evidence goes, the child would be justified in assuming that a man had represented
animals with rock and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of
trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had drawn a stag just as
the child had drawn a horse; because it was fun. The man had drawn a stag with his head
turned as the child had drawn a pig with his eyes shut; because it was difficult. The
child and the man, being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men; and the
brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than when it bridges
only the chasm of class. But anyhow he would see no evidence of the cave man of crude
evolutionism; because there is none to be seen. If somebody told him that the pictures had
all been drawn by St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals, there
would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.
Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the cave was a cr�che, in
which the babies were put to be specially safe, and that coloured animals were drawn on
the walls to amuse them; very much as diagrams of elephants and giraffes adorn a modern
infant school. And though this was but a jest, it does draw attention to some of the other
assumptions that we make only too readily. The pictures do not prove even that the
cave-men lived in caves, any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long
after that suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove that the
Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground. The cave might have had a special
purpose like the cellar; it might have been a religious shrine or a refuge in war or the
meeting place of a secret society or all sorts of things. But it is quite true that its
artistic decoration has much more of the atmosphere of a nursery than of any of these
nightmares of anarchical fury and fear. I have conceived a child as standing in the cave;
and it is easy to conceive any child, modern or immeasurably remote, as making a living
gesture as if to pat the painted beasts upon the wall. In that gesture there is a
foreshadowing, as we shall see later, of another cavern and another child.
But suppose the boy had not been taught by a priest but by a professor, by one of the
professors who simplify the relation of men and beasts to a mere evolutionary variation.
Suppose the boy saw himself, with the same simplicity and sincerity, as a mere Mowgli
running with the pack of nature and roughly indistinguishable from the rest save by a
relative and recent variation. What would be for him the simplest lesson of that strange
stone picture-book? After all, it would come back to this; that he had dug very deep and
found the place where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer. But he would dig a good
deal deeper before he found a place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man. That
sounds like a truism, but in this connection it is really a very tremendous truth. He
might descend to depths unthinkable, he might sink into sunken continents as strange as
remote stars, he might find himself in the inside of the world as far from men as the
other side of the moon; he might see in those cold chasms or colossal terraces of stone,
traced in the faint hieroglyphic of the fossil, the ruins of lost dynasties of biological
life, rather like the ruins of successive creations and separate universes than the stages
in the story of one. He would find the trail of monsters blindly developing in directions
outside all our common imagery of fish and bird; groping and grasping and touching life
with every extravagant elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle; growing a forest of
fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and the finger. But nowhere would he find
one finger that had traced one significant line upon the sand; nowhere one claw that had
even begun to scratch the faint suggestion of a form. To all appearance, the thing would
be as unthinkable in all those countless cosmic variations of forgotten aeons as it would
be in the beasts and birds before our eyes The child would no more expect to see it than
to see the cat scratch on the wall a vindictive caricature of the dog. The childish common
sense would keep the most evolutionary child from expecting to see anything like that; yet
in the traces of the rude and recently evolved ancestors of humanity he would have seen
exactly that. It must surely strike him as strange that men so remote from him should be
so near, and that beasts so near to him should be so remote. To his simplicity it must
seem at least odd that he could not find any trace of the beginning of any arts among any
animals. That is the simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the coloured pictures; only
it is too simple to be learnt. It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes
in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to
say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke
to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and
disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.
That is the sort of simple truth with which a story of the beginnings ought really to
begin. The evolutionist stands staring in the painted cavern at the things that are too
large to be seen and too simple to be understood. He tries to deduce all sorts of other
indirect and doubtful things from the details of the pictures, because he can not see the
primary significance of the whole; thin and theoretical deductions about the absence of
religion or the presence of superstition; about tribal government and hunting and human
sacrifice and heaven knows what. In the next chapter I shall try to trace in a little more
detail the much disputed question about these prehistoric origins of human ideas and
especially of the religious idea. Here I am only taking this one case of the cave as a
sort of symbol of the simpler sort of truth with which the story ought to start. When all
is said, the main fact that the record of the reindeer men attests, along with all other
records, is that the reindeer man could draw and the reindeer could not. If the reindeer
man was as much an animal as the reindeer, it was all the more extraordinary that he could
do what all other animals could not. If he was an ordinary product of biological growth,
like any other beast or bird, then it is all the more extraordinary that he was not in the
least like any other beast or bird. He seems rather more supernatural as a natural product
than as a supernatural one.
But I have begun this story in the cave, like the cave of the speculations of Plato,
because it is a sort of model of the mistake of merely evolutionary introductions and
prefaces. It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere
matter of development and degree. For in the plain matter like the pictures there is in
fact not a trace of any such development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men
finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well.
The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better
in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an
Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this notion of
reproducing things in shadow or representative shape is that it exists nowhere in nature
except in man; and that we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something
separate from nature. In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as
man, a thing standing absolute and alone. How he came there, or indeed how anything else
came there, is a thing for theologians and philosophers and scientists and not for
historians. But an excellent test case of this isolation and mystery is the matter of the
impulse of art. This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was
a creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be made in any other image
but the image of man. But the truth is so true that, even in the absence of any religious
belief, it must be assumed in the form of some moral or metaphysical principle. In the
next chapter we shall see how this principle applies to all the historical hypotheses and
evolutionary ethics now in fashion; to the origins of tribal government or mythological
belief. But the clearest and most convenient example to start with is this popular one of
what the cave-man really did in his cave. It means that somehow or other a new thing had
appeared in the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a mirror. It is like a
mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It is like a mirror because in it alone
all the other shapes can be seen like shining shadows in a vision. Above all, it is like a
mirror because it is the only thing of its kind. Other things may resemble it or resemble
each other in various ways; other things may excel it or excel each other in various ways;
just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round like a mirror or a cupboard may be
larger than a mirror. But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is
the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God These are the
only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road.
It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for all what is meant by
saying that man is at once the exception to everything and the mirror and the measure of
all things. But to see man as he is, it is necessary once more to keep close to that
simplicity that can clear itself of accumulated clouds of sophistry. The simplest truth
about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on
the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing
alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair
advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his
own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of
cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial
crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild
limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called
laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe
hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his
thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence
of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these
things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same
sense unique. This is realised by the whole popular instinct called religion, until
disturbed by pedants, especially the laborious pedants of the Simple Life. The most
sophistical of all sophists are gymnosophists.
It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense to call man a
common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing straight to see him as an
animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of
proportion which is the principle of all reality. It is reached by stretching a point, by
making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain light and shade, by bringing into
prominence the lesser or lower things which may happen to be similar. The solid thing
standing in the sunlight, the thing we can walk round and see from all sides, is quite
different. It is also quite extraordinary, and the more sides we see of it the more
extraordinary it seems. It is emphatically not a thing that follows or flows naturally
from anything else. If we imagine that an inhuman or impersonal intelligence could have
felt from the first the general nature of the non-human world sufficiently to see that
things would evolve in whatever way they did evolve, there would have been nothing
whatever in all that natural world to prepare such a mind for such an unnatural novelty.
To such a mind, man would most certainly not have seemed something like one herd out of a
hundred herds finding richer pasture, or one swallow out of a hundred swallows making a
summer under a strange sky. It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the same
dimension. We might as truly say that it would not be in the same universe. It would be
more like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows suddenly jump over the moon or one pig out
of a hundred pigs grow wings in a flash and fly. It would not be a question of the cattle
finding their own grazing ground but of their building their own cattle-sheds, not a
question of one swallow making a summer but of his making a summer house. For the very
fact that birds do build nests is one of those similarities that sharpen the startling
difference. The very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get
any farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind; it proves it more completely
than if he built nothing at all. If he built nothing at all, he might possibly be a
philosopher of the Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to all but the mind within.
But when he builds as he does build and is satisfied and sings aloud with satisfaction,
then we know there is really an invisible veil like a pane of glass between him and us,
like the window on which a bird will beat in vain. But suppose our abstract onlooker saw
one of the birds begin to build as men build. Suppose in an incredibly short space of time
there were seven styles of architecture for one style of nest. Suppose the bird carefully
selected forked twigs and pointed leaves to express the piercing piety of Gothic, but
turned to broad foliage and black mud when he sought in a darker mood to call up the heavy
columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest indeed one of the hanging gardens of
Babylon. Suppose the bird made little clay statues of birds celebrated in letters or
politics and stuck them up in front of the nest. Suppose that one bird out of a thousand
birds began to do one of the thousand things that man had already done even in the morning
of the world; and we can be quite certain that the onlooker would not regard such a bird
as a mere evolutionary variety of the other birds; he would regard it as a very fearful
wild-fowl indeed; possibly as a bird of ill-omen, certainly as an omen. That bird would
tell the augurs, not of something that would happen, but of some thing that had happened.
That something would be the appearance of a mind with a new dimension of depth; a mind
like that of man. If there be no God, no other mind could conceivably have foreseen it.
Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence that this thing was evolved
at all. There is not a particle of roof that this transition came slowly, or even that it
came naturally. In a strictly scientific sense, we simply know nothing whatever about how
it grew, or whether it grew, or what it is. There may be a broken trail of stone and bone
faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly
suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in
what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the
appearance of a transaction outside of time. It has therefore nothing to do with history
in the ordinary sense. The historian must take it or something like it for granted; it is
not his business as a historian to explain it. But if he cannot explain it as a historian,
he will not explain it as a biologist. In neither case is there any disgrace to him in
accepting it without explaining it; for it is a reality, and history and biology deal with
realities. He is quite justified in calmly confronting the pig with wings and the cow that
jumped over the moon, merely because they have happened. He can reasonably accept man as a
freak, because he accepts man as a fact. He can be perfectly comfortable in a crazy and
disconnected world, or in a world that can produce such a crazy and disconnected thing.
For reality is a thing in which we can all repose, even if it hardly seems related to
anything else. The thing is there; and that is enough for most of us. But if we do indeed
want to know how it can conceivably have come there, if we do indeed wish to see it
related realistically to other things, if we do insist on seeing it evolved before our
very eyes from an environment nearer to its own nature, then assuredly it is to very
different things that we must go. We must stir very strange memories and return to very
simple dreams, if we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster. We shall
have discovered very different causes before he becomes a creature of causation; and
invoked other authority to turn him into something reasonable, or even into anything
probable. That way lies all that is at once awful and familiar and forgotten, with
dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. We can accept man as a fact, if we are content
with an unexplained fact. We can accept him as an animal, if we can live with a fabulous
animal. But if we must needs have sequence and necessity, then indeed we must provide a
prelude and crescendo of mounting miracles, that ushered in with unthinkable thunders in
all the seven heavens of another order, a man may be an ordinary thing.
Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly been noticed.
The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by incessantly adding to its data.
In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can always increase evidence
by experiment. But it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the
first men make. An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an aeroplane,
even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But
he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake
in his calculations, the aeroplane will correct it by crashing to the ground. But if he
has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal
ancestor falling off the tree. He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and
watch him to see whether he does really practice cannibalism or carry off his mate on the
principles of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a pack of
hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct. If he sees a
particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get other birds and see if they behave
in that way; but if he finds a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he
cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones. In dealing with a past that
has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and not by experiment. And there
is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort
of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in
a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can
really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it
cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as
if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole
scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that
he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a
hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department it would be truer
to talk of the impatience of science. Owing to the difficulty above described, the
theorist is in far too much of a hurry. We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they
may well be called fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts. The most
empirical anthropologist is here as limited as an antiquary. He can only cling to a
fragment of the past and has no way of increasing it for the future He can only clutch his
fragment of fact, almost as the primitive man clutched his fragment of flint. And indeed
he does deal with it in much the same way and for much the same reason. It is his tool and
his only tool. It is his weapon and his only weapon. He often wields it with a fanaticism
far in excess of anything shown by men of science when they can collect more facts from
experience and even add new facts by experiment. Sometimes the professor with his bone
becomes almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone. And the dog at least does not deduce a
theory from it, proving that mankind is going to the dogs--or that it came from them.
For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey and watching it
evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an evolution being impossible, the
professor is not content to say (as most of us would be ready to say) that such an
evolution is likely enough anyhow. He produces his little bone, or little collection of
bones, and deduces the most marvellous things from it. He found in Java a piece of a
skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere near it he found an
upright thigh-bone and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human. If
they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature
would be almost equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to produce a
complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits. He
was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character. People talked of
Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of
him like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing was
reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered No
uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a
moment that this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a
cranium. In the same way people talked about him as if he were an individual whose
influence and character were familiar to us all. I have just read a story in a magazine
about Java, and how modern white inhabitants of that island are prevailed on to misbehave
themselves by the personal influence of poor old Pithecanthropus. That the modern
inhabitants of Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe; but I do not imagine
that they need any encouragement from the discovery of a few highly doubtful bones.
Anyhow, those bones are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of
the vast void that does in reason and in reality lie between man and his bestial
ancestors, if they were his ancestors. On the assumption of that evolutionary connection
(a connection which I am not in the least concerned to deny), the really arresting and
remarkable fact is the comparative absence of any such remains recording that connection
at that point. The sincerity of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to
use such a term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too strong
for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen into turning this entirely
negative term into a positive image. They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of
the Missing Link; as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a
narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitur or dining with
an undistributed middle.
In this sketch, therefore, of man in his relation to certain religious and historical
problems, I shall waste no further space on these speculations on the nature of man before
he became man. His body may have been evolved from the brutes; but we know nothing of any
such transition that throws the smallest light upon his soul as it has shown itself in
history. Unfortunately the same school of writers pursue the same style of reasoning when
they come to the first real evidence about the first real men. Strictly speaking of course
we know nothing about prehistoric man, for the simple reason that he was prehistoric. The
history of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in terms. It is the sort of
unreason in which only rationalists are allowed to indulge. If a parson had casually
observed that the Flood was ante-diluvian, it is possible that he might be a little
chaffed about his logic. If a bishop were to say that Adam was Preadamite, we might think
it a little odd. But we are not supposed to notice such verbal trifles when sceptical
historians talk of the part of history that is prehistoric. The truth is that they are
using the terms historic and prehistoric without any clear test or definition in their
minds. What they mean is that there are traces of human lives before the beginning of
human stories; and in that sense we do at least know that humanity was before history.
Human civilisation is older than human records. That is the sane way of stating our
relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples of its other arts earlier
than the art of writing; or at least of any writing that we can read. But it is certain
that the primitive arts were arts; and it is in every way probable that the primitive
civilisations were civilisations. The man left a picture of the reindeer, but he did not
leave a narrative of how he hunted the reindeer; and therefore what we say of him is
hypothesis and not history. But the art he did practice was quite artistic; his drawing
was quite intelligent and there is no reason to doubt that his story of the hunt would be
quite intelligent, only if it exists it is not intelligible. In short, the prehistoric
period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period.
It does not mean the time before civilisation or the time before arts and crafts. It
simply means the time before any connected narratives that we can read. This does indeed
make all the practical difference between remembrance and forgetfulness; but it is
perfectly possible that there were all sorts of forgotten forms of civilisation, as well
as all sorts of forgotten forms of barbarism. And in any case everything indicated that
many of these forgotten or half-forgotten social stages were much more civilised and much
less barbaric than is vulgarly imagined today. But even about these unwritten histories of
humanity, when humanity was quite certainly human, we can only conjecture with the
greatest doubt and caution. And unfortunately doubt and caution are the last things
commonly encouraged by the loose evolutionism of current culture. For that culture is full
of curiosity; and the one thing that it cannot endure is the agony of agnosticism. It was
in the Darwinian age that the word first became known and the thing first became
impossible.
It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered by impudence.
Statements are made so plainly and positively that men have hardly the moral courage to
pause upon them and find that they are without support. The other day a scientific summary
of the state of a prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words 'They wore no
clothes.' Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come
to know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything has perished
except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone
hat as well as a stone hatchet. It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an
everlasting pair of trousers of the same substance as the everlasting rock. But to persons
of a less sanguine temperament it will be immediately apparent that people might wear
simple garments, or even highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more traces of
them than these people have left. The plaiting of rushes and grasses, for instance, might
have become more and more elaborate without in the least becoming more eternal. One
civilisation might specialise in things that happened to be perishable, like weaving and
embroidery, and not in things that happen to be more permanent, like architecture and
sculpture. There have been plenty of examples of such specialist societies. A man of the
future finding the ruins of our factory machinery might as fairly say that we were
acquainted with iron and with no other substance; and announce the discovery that the
proprietor and manager of the factory undoubtedly walked about naked-- or possibly wore
iron hats and trousers.
It is not contended here that these primitive men did wear clothes any more than they
did weave rushes; but merely that we have not enough evidence to know whether they did or
not. But it may be worthwhile to look back for a moment at some of the very few things
that we do know and that they did do. If we consider them, we shall certainly not find
them inconsistent with such ideas as dress and decoration. We do not know whether they
decorated other things. We do not know whether they had embroideries, and if they had the
embroideries could not be expected to have remained. But we do know that they did have
pictures; and the pictures have remained. And there remains with them, as already
suggested, the testimony to something that is absolute and unique; that belongs to man and
to nothing else except man; that is a difference of kind and not a difference of degree. A
monkey does not draw clumsily and a man cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of
representation and a man carry it to perfection. A monkey does not do it at all; he does
not begin to do it at all; he does not begin to begin to do it at all. A line of some kind
is crossed before the first faint line can begin.
Another distinguished writer, again, in commenting on the cave drawings attributed to
the neolithic men of the reindeer period, said that none of their pictures appeared to
have any religious purpose; and he seemed almost to infer that they had no religion. I can
hardly imagine a thinner thread of argument than this which reconstructs the very inmost
moods of the pre-historic mind from the fact that somebody who has scrawled a few sketches
on a rock, from what motive we do not know, for what purpose we do not know, acting under
what customs or conventions we do not know, may possibly have found it easier to draw
reindeer than to draw religion. He may have drawn it because it was his religious symbol.
He may have drawn it because it was not his religious symbol. He may have drawn anything
except his religious symbol. He may have drawn his real religious symbol somewhere else;
or it may have been deliberately destroyed when it was drawn. He may have done or not done
half a million things; but in any case it is an amazing leap of logic to infer that he had
no religious symbol, or even to infer from his having no religious symbol that he had no
religion. Now this particular case happens to illustrate the insecurity of these guesses
very clearly. For a little while afterwards, people discovered not only paintings but
sculptures of animals in the caves. Some of these were said to be damaged with dints or
holes supposed to be the marks of arrows; and the damaged images were conjectured to be
the remains of some magic rite of killing the beasts in effigy; while the undamaged images
were explained in connection with another magic rite invoking fertility upon the herds.
Here again there is something faintly humorous about the scientific habit of having it
both ways. If the image is damaged it proves one superstition and if it is undamaged it
proves another. Here again there is a rather reckless jumping to conclusions; it has
hardly occurred to the speculators that a crowd of hunters imprisoned in winter in a cave
might conceivably have aimed at a mark for fun, as a sort of primitive parlour game. But
in any case, if it was done out of superstition, what has become of the thesis that it had
nothing to do with religion? The truth is that all this guess work has nothing to do with
anything. It is not half such a good parlour game as shooting arrows at a carved reindeer,
for it is shooting them into the air.
Such speculators rather tend to forget, for instance, that men in the modern world also
sometimes make marks in caves. When a crowd of trippers is conducted through the labyrinth
of the Marvelous Grotto or the Magic Stalactite Cavern, it has been observed that
hieroglyphics spring into sight where they have passed; initials and inscriptions which
the learned refuse to refer to any remote date. But the time will come when these
inscriptions will really be of remote date. And if the professors of the future are
anything like the professors of the present, they will be able to deduce a vast number of
very vivid and interesting things from these cave-writings of the twentieth century. If I
know anything about the breed, and if they have not fallen away from the full-blooded
confidence of their fathers, they will be able to discover the most fascinating facts
about us from the initials left in the Magic Grotto by 'Arry and 'Arriet, possibly in the
form of two intertwined A's. From this alone they will know (1) That as the letters are
rudely chipped with a blunt pocket knife, the twentieth century possessed no delicate
graving-tools and was unacquainted with the art of sculpture. (2) That as the letters are
capital letters, our civilisation never evolved any small letters or anything like a
running hand. (3) That because initial consonants stand together in an unpronounceable
fashion, our language was possibly akin to Welsh or more probably of the early Semitic
type that ignored vowels. (4) That as the initials of 'Arry and 'Arriet do not in any
special fashion profess to be religious symbols, our civilisation possessed no religion.
Perhaps the last is about the nearest to the truth; for a civilisation that had religion
would have a little more reason.
It is commonly affirmed, again, that religion grew in a very slow and evolutionary
manner; and even that it grew not from one cause; but from a combination that might be
called a coincidence. Generally speaking, the three chief elements in the combination are,
first, the fear of the chief of the tribe (whom Mr. Wells insists on calling, with
regrettable familiarity, the Old Man), second, the phenomena of dreams, and third, the
sacrificial associations of the harvest and the resurrection symbolised in the growing
corn. I may remark in passing that it seems to me very doubtful psychology to refer one
living and single spirit to three dead and disconnected causes, if they were merely dead
and disconnected causes. Suppose Mr. Wells, in one of his fascinating novels of the
future, were to tell us that there would arise among men a new and as yet nameless
passion, of which men will dream as they dream of first love, for which they will die as
they die for a flag and a fatherland. I think we should be a little puzzled if he told us
that this singular sentiment would be a combination of the habit of smoking Woodbines, the
increase of the income tax and the pleasure of a motorist in exceeding the speed limit. We
could not easily imagine this, because we could not imagine any connection between the
three or any common feeling that could include them all. Nor could anyone imagine any
connection between corn and dreams and an old chief with a spear, unless there was already
a common feeling to include them all. But if there was such a common feeling it could only
be the religious feeling; and these things could not be the beginnings of a religious
feeling that existed already. I think anybody's common sense will tell him that it is far
more likely that this sort of mystical sentiment did exist already; and that in the light
of it dreams and kings and corn-fields could appear mystical then, as they can appear
mystical now.
For the plain truth is that all this is a trick of making things seem distant and
dehumanised, merely by pretending not to understand things that we do understand. It is
like saying that prehistoric men had an ugly and uncouth habit of opening their mouths
wide at intervals and stuffing strange substances into them, as if we had never heard of
eating. It is like saying that the terrible Troglodytes of the Stone Age lifted alternate
legs in rotation, as if we never heard of walking. If it were meant to touch the mystical
nerve and awaken us to the wonder of walking and eating, it might be a legitimate fancy.
As it is here intended to kill the mystical nerve and deaden us to the wonder of religion,
it is irrational rubbish. It pretends to find some thing incomprehensible in the feelings
that we all comprehend. Who does not find dreams mysterious, and feel that they lie on the
dark borderland of being? Who does not feel the death and resurrection of the growing
things of the earth as something near to the secret of the universe? Who does not
understand that there must always be the savour of something sacred about authority and
the solidarity that is the soul of the tribe? If there be any anthropologist who really
finds these things remote and impossible to realise, we can say nothing of that scientific
gentleman except that he has not got so large and enlightened a mind as a primitive man.
To me it seems obvious that nothing but a spiritual sentiment already active could have
clothed these separate and diverse things with sanctity. To say that religion came from
reverencing a chief or sacrificing at a harvest is to put a highly elaborate cart before a
really primitive horse. It is like saying that the impulse to draw pictures came from the
contemplation of the pictures of reindeers in the cave. In other words, it is explaining
painting by saying that it arose out of the work of painters; or accounting for art by
saying that it arose out of art. It is even more like saying that the thing we call poetry
arose as the result of certain customs; such as that of an ode being officially composed
to celebrate the advent of spring; or that of a young man rising at a regular hour to
listen to the skylark and then writing his report on a piece of paper. It is quite true
that young men often become poets in the spring; and it is quite true that when once there
are poets, no mortal power can restrain them from writing about the skylark But the poems
did not exist before the poets. The poetry did not arise out of the poetic forms. In other
words, it is hardly an adequate explanation of how a thing appeared for the first time to
say it existed already. Similarly, we cannot say that religion arose out of the religious
forms, because that is only another way of saying that it only arose when it existed
already. It needed a certain sort of mind to see that there was anything mystical about
the dreams or the dead, as it needed a particular sort of mind to see that there was any
thing poetical about the skylark or the spring. That mind was presumably what we call the
human mind, very much as it exists to this day; for mystics still meditate upon death and
dreams as poets still write about spring and skylarks. But there is not the faintest hint
to suggest that anything short of the human mind we know feels any of these mystical
associations at all. A cow in a field seems to derive no lyrical impulse or instruction
from her unrivalled opportunities for listening to the skylark. And similarly there is no
reason to suppose that live sheep will ever begin to use dead sheep as the basis of a
system of elaborate ancestor-worship. It is true that in the spring a young quadruped's
fancy may lightly turn to thoughts of love, but no succession of springs has ever led it
to turn however lightly to thoughts of literature. And in the same way, while it is true
that a dog has dreams, while most other quadrupeds do not seem even to have that, we have
waited a long time for the dog to develop his dreams into an elaborate system or religious
ceremonial. We have waited so long that we have really ceased to expect it; and we no more
look to see a dog apply his dreams to ecclesiastical construction than to see him examine
his dreams by the rules of psycho-analysis. It is obvious, in short, that for some reason
or other these natural experiences, and even natural excitements, never do pass the line
that separates them from creative expression like art and religion, in any creature except
man. They never do, they never have, and it is now to all appearance very improbable that
they ever will. It is not impossible, in the sense of self-contradictory, that we should
see cows fasting from grass every Friday or going on their knees as in the old legend
about Christmas Eve. It is not in that sense impossible that cows should contemplate death
until they can lift up a sublime psalm of lamentation to the tune the old cow died of. It
is not in that sense impossible that they should express their hopes of a heavenly career
in a symbolic dance, in honour of the cow that jumped over the moon. It may be that the
dog will at last have laid in a sufficient store of dreams to enable him to build a temple
to Cerberus as a sort of canine trinity. It may be that his dreams have already begun to
turn into visions capable of verbal expression, in some revelation about the Dog Star as
the spiritual home for lost dogs. These things are logically possible, in the sense that
it is logically difficult to prove the universal negative which we call an impossibility.
But all that instinct for the probable, which we call common sense, must long ago have
told us that the animals are not to all appearance evolving in that sense; and that, to
say the least, we are not likely to have any personal evidence of their passing from the
animal experience to the human experiments. But spring and death and even dreams,
considered merely as experiences, are their experiences as much as ours. The only possible
conclusion is that these experiences, considered as experiences, do not generate anything
like a religious sense in any mind except a mind like ours. We come back to the fact of a
certain kind of mind that was already alive and alone. It was unique and it could make
creeds as it could make cave-drawings. The materials for religion had lain there for
countless ages like the materials for everything else; but the power of religion was in
the mind. Man could already see in these things the riddles and hints and hopes that he
still sees in them. He could not only dream but dream about dreams. He could not only see
the dead but see the shadow of death; and was possessed with that mysterious mystification
that forever finds death incredible.
It is quite true that we have even these hints chiefly about man when he unmistakably
appears as man. We cannot affirm this or anything else about the alleged animal originally
connecting man and the brutes. But that is only because he is not an animal but an
allegation. We cannot be certain the Pithecanthropus ever worshipped, because we cannot be
certain that he ever lived. He is only a vision called up to fill the void that does in
fact yawn between the first creatures who were certainly men and any other creatures that
are certainly apes or other animals. A few very doubtful fragments are scraped together to
suggest such an intermediate creature because it is required by a certain philosophy; but
nobody supposes that these are sufficient to establish anything philosophical even in
support of that philosophy. A scrap of skull found in Java cannot establish anything about
religion or about the absence of religion. If there ever was any such ape-man, he may have
exhibited as much ritual in religion as a man or as much simplicity in religion as an ape.
He may have been a mythologist or he may have been a myth. It might be interesting to
inquire whether this mystical quality appeared in a transition from the ape to the man, if
there were really any types of the transition to inquire about. In other words, the
missing link might or might not be mystical if he were not missing. But compared with the
evidence we have of real human beings, we have no evidence that he was a human being or a
half-human being or a being at all. Even the most extreme evolutionists do not attempt to
deduce any evolutionary views about the origin of religion from him. Even in trying to
prove that religion grew slowly from rude or irrational sources, they begin their proof
with the first men who were men. But their own proof only proves that the men who were
already men were already mystics. They used the rude and irrational elements as only men
and mystics can use them. We come back once more to the simple truth; that at sometime too
early for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred to which bones and stones
cannot in their nature bear witness; and man became a living soul.
Touching this matter of the origin of religion, the truth is that those who are thus
trying to explain it are trying to explain it away. Subconsciously they feel that it looks
less formidable when thus lengthened out into a gradual and almost invisible process. But
in fact this perspective entirely falsifies the reality of experience. They bring together
two things that are totally different, the stray hints of evolutionary origins and the
solid and self-evident block of humanity, and try to shift their standpoint till they see
them in a single foreshortened line. But it is an optical illusion. Men do not in fact
stand related to monkeys or missing links in any such chain as that in which men stand
related to men. There may have been intermediate creatures whose faint traces can be found
here and there in the huge gap. Of these beings, if they ever existed, it may be true that
they were things very unlike men or men very unlike ourselves. But of prehistoric men,
such as those called the cave-men or the reindeer men, it is not true in any sense
whatever. Prehistoric men of that sort were things exactly like men and men exceedingly
like our selves. They only happened to be men about whom we do not know much, for the
simple reason that they have left no records or chronicles; but all that we do know about
them makes them just as human and ordinary as men in a medieval manor or a Greek city.
Looking from our human standpoint up the long perspective of humanity, we simply
recognise this thing as human. If we had to recognise it as animal we should have had to
recognise it as abnormal. If we chose to look through the other end of the telescope, as I
have done more than once in these speculations, if we chose to project the human figure
forward out of an unhuman world, we could only say that one of the animals had obviously
gone mad. But seeing the thing from the right end, or rather from the inside, we know it
is sanity; and we know that these primitive men were sane. We hail a certain human
freemasonry wherever we see it, in savages, in foreigners or in historical characters. For
instance, all we can infer from primitive legend, and all we know of barbaric life,
supports a certain moral and even mystical idea of which the commonest symbol is clothes.
For clothes are very literally vestments and man wears them because he is a priest. It is
true that even as an animal he is here different from the animals. Nakedness is not nature
to him; it is not his life but rather his death; even in the vulgar sense of his death of
cold. But clothes are worn for dignity or decency or decoration where they are not in any
way wanted for warmth. It would sometimes appear that they are valued for ornament before
they are valued for use. It would almost always appear that they are felt to have some
connection with decorum. Conventions of this sort vary a great deal with various times and
places; and there are some who cannot get over this reflection, and for whom it seems a
sufficient argument for letting all conventions slide. They never tire of repeating, with
simple wonder, that dress is different in the Cannibal Islands and in Camden Town; they
cannot get any further and throw up the whole idea of decency in despair. They might as
well say that because there have been hats of a good many different shapes, and some
rather eccentric shapes, therefore hats do not matter or do not exist. They would probably
add that there is no such thing as sunstroke or going bald. Men have felt everywhere that
certain norms were necessary to fence off and protect certain private things from contempt
or coarse misunderstanding; and the keeping of those forms, whatever they were, made for
dignity and mutual respect. The fact that they mostly refer, more or less remotely, to the
relations of the sexes illustrates the two facts that must be put at the very beginning of
the record of the race. The first is the fact that original sin is really original. Not
merely in theology but in history it is a thing rooted in the origins. Whatever else men
have believed, they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind This
sense of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no clothes, just as it has made
it impossible to be natural and have no laws. But above all it is to be found in that
other fact, which is the father and mother of all laws as it is itself founded on a father
and mother; the thing that is before all thrones and even all commonwealths.
That fact is the family. Here again we must keep the enormous proportions of a normal
thing clear of various modifications and degrees and doubts more or less reasonable, like
clouds clinging about a mountain. It may be that what we call the family had to fight its
way from or through various anarchies and aberrations; but it certainly survived them and
is quite as likely as not to have also preceded them. As we shall see in the case of
communism and nomadism, more formless things could and did lie on the flank of societies
that had taken a fixed form; but there is nothing to show that the form did not exist
before the formlessness. What is vital is that form is more important than formlessness;
and that the material called mankind has taken this form. For instance, of the rules
revolving round sex, which were recently mentioned, none is more curious than the savage
custom commonly called the couvade. That seems like a law out of topsyturvydom; by which
the father is treated as if he were the mother. In any case it clearly involves the
mystical sense of sex; but many have maintained that it is really a symbolic act by which
the father accepts the responsibility of fatherhood. In that case that grotesque antic is
really a very solemn act; for it is the foundation of all we call the family and all we
know as human society. Some groping in these dark beginnings have said that mankind was
once under a matriarchy; I suppose that under a matriarchy it would not be called mankind
but womankind. But others have conjectured that what is called matriarchy was simply moral
anarchy, in which the mother alone remained fixed because all the fathers were fugitive
and irresponsible. Then came the moment when the man decided to guard and guide what he
had created. So he became the head of the family, not as a bully with a big club to beat
women with, but rather as a respectable person trying to be a responsible person. Now all
that might be perfectly true, and might even have been the first family act, and it would
still be true that man then for the first time acted like a man, and therefore for the
first time became fully a man. But it might quite as well be true that the matriarchy or
moral anarchy, or whatever we call it, was only one of the hundred social dissolutions or
barbaric backslidings which may have occurred at intervals in prehistoric as they
certainly did in historic times. A symbol like the couvade, if it was really such a
symbol, may have commemorated the suppression of a heresy rather than the first rise of a
religion. We cannot conclude with any certainty about these things, except in their big
results in the building of mankind, but we can say in what style the bulk of it and the
best of it is built. We can say that the family is the unit of the state; that it is the
cell that makes up the formation. Round the family do indeed gather the sanctities that
separate men from ants and bees. Decency is the curtain of that tent; liberty is the wall
of that city; property is but the family farm; honour is but the family flag. In the
practical proportions of human history, we come back to that fundamental of the father and
the mother and the child. It has been said already that if this story cannot start with
religious assumptions, it must none the less start with some moral or metaphysical
assumptions, or no sense can be made of the story of man. And this is a very good instance
of that alternative necessity. If we are not of those who begin by invoking a divine
Trinity, we must none the less invoke a human Trinity; and see that triangle repeated
everywhere in the pattern of the world. For the highest event in history, to which all
history looks forward and leads up, is only something that is at once the reversal and the
renewal of that triangle. Or rather it is the one triangle superimposed so as to intersect
the other, making a sacred pentacle of which, in a mightier sense than that of the
magicians, the fiends are afraid. The old Trinity was of father and mother and child and
is called the human family. The new is of child and mother and father and has the name of
the Holy Family. It is in no way altered except in being entirely reversed; just as the
world which is transformed was not in the least different, except in being turned
upside-down.
The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been like a man watching for
daybreak in a strange land; and expecting to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or
solitary peaks. But that dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great cities long
builded and lost for us in the original night; colossal cities like the houses of giants,
in which even the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees; in which the
painted portrait can be twelve times the size of the man; with tombs like mountains of man
set four-square and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls standing and
staring enormous at the gates of temples; standing still eternally as if a stamp would
shake the world. The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized. Perhaps it
reveals a civilisation already old. And among other more important things, it reveals the
folly of most of the generalisations about the previous and unknown period when it was
really young. The two first human societies of which we have any reliable and detailed
record are Babylon and Egypt. It so happens that these two vast and splendid achievements
of the genius of the ancients bear witness against two of the commonest and crudest
assumptions of the culture of the moderns. If we want to get rid of half the nonsense
about nomads and cave-men and the old man of the forest, we need only look steadily at the
two solid and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon.
Of course most of these speculators who are talking about primitive men are thinking
about modern savages. They prove their progressive evolution by assuming that a great part
of the human race has not progressed or evolved; or even changed in any way at all. I do
not agree with their theory of change; nor do I agree with their dogma of things
unchangeable. I may not believe that civilised man has had so rapid and recent a progress;
but I cannot quite understand why uncivilised man should be so mystically immortal and
immutable. A somewhat simpler mode of thought and speech seems to me to be needed
throughout this inquiry. Modern savages cannot be exactly like primitive man, because they
are not primitive. Modern savages are not ancient because they are modern. Something has
happened to their race as much as to ours, during the thousands of years of our existence
and endurance on the earth. They have had some experiences, and have presumably acted on
them if not profited by them. Like the rest of us. They have had some environment, and
even some change of environment, and have presumably adapted themselves to it in a proper
and decorous evolutionary manner. This would be true even if the experiences were mild or
the environment dreary; for there is an effect in mere time when it takes the moral form
of monotony. But it has appeared to a good many intelligent and well-informed people quite
as probable that the experience of the savages has been that of a decline from
civilisation. Most of those who criticise this view do not seem to have any very clear
notion of what a decline from civilisation would be like. Heaven help them, it is likely
enough that they will soon find out. They seem to be content if cave-men and cannibal
islanders have some things in common. such as certain particular implements. But it is
obvious on the face of it that any peoples reduced for any reason to a ruder life would
have some things in common. If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows;
but we should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men who made bows and
arrows. It is said that the Russians in their great retreat were so short of armament that
they fought with clubs cut in the wood. But a professor of the future would err in
supposing that the Russian army of 1916 was a naked Scythian tribe that had never been out
of the wood. It is like saying that a man in his second childhood must exactly copy his
first. A baby is bald like an old man; but it would be an error for one ignorant of
infancy to infer that the baby had a long white beard. Both a baby and an old man walk
with difficulty; but he who shall expect the old gentleman to lie on his back, and kick
joyfully instead, will be disappointed.
It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must have been
identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of it. There were almost
certainly some things, there were probably many things, in which the two were widely
different or flatly contrary. An example of the way in which this distinction works, and
an example essential to our argument here, is that of the nature and origin of government
I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells and the Old Man, with whom he appears to be on
such intimate terms. If we considered the cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this
portrait of the prehistoric chief of the tribe, we could only excuse it by saying that its
brilliant and versatile author simply forgot for a moment that he was supposed to be
writing a history, and dreamed he was writing one of his own very wonderful and
imaginative romances. At least I cannot imagine how he can possibly know that the
prehistoric ruler was called the Old Man or that court etiquette requires it to be spelt
with capital letters. He says of the same potentate, 'No one was allowed to touch his
spear or to sit in his seat.' I have difficulty in believing that anybody has dug up a
prehistoric spear with a prehistoric label, 'Visitors are Requested not to Touch,' or a
complete throne with the inscription, 'Reserved for the Old Man.' But it may be presumed
that the writer, who can hardly be supposed to be merely making up things out of his own
head, was merely taking for granted this very dubious parallel between the prehistoric and
the decivilised man. It may be that in certain savage tribes the chief is called the Old
Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or sit on his seat. It may be that in those
cases he is surrounded with superstitious and traditional terrors; and it may be that in
those cases, for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical. But there is not a grain of
evidence that primitive government was despotic and tyrannical. It may have been, of
course, for it may have been anything or even nothing; it may not have existed at all. But
the despotism in certain dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does not prove
that the first men were ruled despotically. It does not even suggest it; it does not even
begin to hint at it. If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we
really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and
very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may
almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are
less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty;
and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is
also true that they sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is
equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed to be a tyrant
like some of the Sultans of the East. But I cannot see why the Sultan should have appeared
any earlier in history than many other human figures. On the contrary, the strong man
armed obviously depends upon the superiority of his armour, and armament of that sort
comes with more complex civilisation. One man may kill twenty with a machine-gum; it is
obviously less likely that he could do it with a piece of flint. As for the current cant
about the strongest man ruling by force and fear, it is simply a nursery fairy-tale about
a giant with a hundred hands. Twenty men could hold down the strongest strong man in any
society, ancient or modern. Undoubtedly they might admire, in a romantic and poetical
sense, the man who was really the strongest; but that is quite a different thing, and is
as purely moral and even mystical as the admiration for the purest or the wisest. But the
spirit that endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is the spirit
of an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new one. As
his name implies, the Old Man is the ruler of an old humanity.
It is far more probable that a primitive society was something like a pure democracy.
To this day the comparatively simple agricultural communities are by far the purest
democracies. Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through the complexity of
civilisation. Anyone who likes may state it by saying that democracy is the foe of
civilisation. But he must remember that some of us really prefer democracy to
civilisation, in the sense of preferring democracy to complexity. Anyhow, peasants tilling
patches of their own land in a rough equality, and meeting to vote directly under a
village tree, are the most truly self-governing of men. It is surely as likely as not that
such a simple idea was found in the first condition of even simpler men. Indeed the
despotic vision is exaggerated, even if we do not regard the men as men. Even on an
evolutionary assumption of the most materialistic sort, there is really no reason why men
should not have had at least as much camaraderie as rats or rooks. Leadership of some sort
they doubtless had, as have the gregarious animals; but leadership implies no such
irrational servility as that attributed to the superstitious subjects of the Old Man.
There was doubtless some body corresponding, to use Tennyson's expression, to the
many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home. But I fancy that if that
venerable fowl began to act after the fashion of some Sultans in ancient and decayed Asia,
it would become a very clanging rookery and the many-wintered crow would not see many more
winters. It may be remarked, in this connection, but even among animals it would seem that
something else is respected more than bestial violence, if it be only the familiarity
which in men is called tradition or the experience which in men is called wisdom. I do not
know if crows really follow the oldest crow, but if they do they are certainly not
following the strongest crow. And I do know, in the human case, that if some ritual of
seniority keeps savages reverencing somebody called Old Man, then at least they have not
our own servile sentimental weakness for worshipping the Strong Man.
It may be said then that primitive government, like primitive art and religion and
everything else, is very imperfectly known or rather guessed at; but that it is at least
as good a guess to suggest that it was as popular as a Balkan or Pyrenean village as that
it was as capricious and secret as a Turkish divan. Both the mountain democracy and the
oriental palace are modern in the sense that they are still there, or are some sort of
growth of history; but of the two the palace has much more the look of being an
accumulation and a corruption, the village much more the look of being a really unchanged
and primitive thing. But my suggestions at this point do not go beyond expressing a
wholesome doubt about the current assumption. I think it interesting, for instance, that
liberal institutions have been traced even by moderns back to barbarians or undeveloped
states, when it happened to be convenient for the support of some race or nation or
philosophy. So the Socialists profess that their ideal of communal property existed in
very early times. So the Jews are proud of the Jubilees or juster redistributions under
their ancient law . So the Teutonists boasted of tracing parliaments and juries and
various popular things among the Germanic tribes of the north. So the Celtophiles and
those testifying to the wrongs of Ireland have pleaded the more equal justice of the clan
system, to which the Irish chiefs bore witness before Strongbow. The strength of the case
varies in the different cases; but as there is some case for all of them, I suspect there
is some case for the general proposition that popular institutions of some sort were by no
means uncommon in early and simple societies. Each of these separate schools were making
the admission to prove a particular modern thesis; but taken together they suggest a more
ancient and general truth, that there was something more in prehistoric councils than
ferocity and fear. Each of these separate theorists had his own axe to grind, but he was
willing to use a stone axe; and he manages to suggest that the stone axe might have been
as republican as the guillotine.
But the truth is that the curtain rises upon the play already in progress In one sense
it is a true paradox that there was history before history. But it is not the irrational
paradox implied in prehistoric history; for it is a history we do not know. Very probably
it was exceedingly like the history we do know, except in the one detail that we do not
know it. It is thus the very opposite of the pretentious prehistoric history, which
professes to trace everything in a consistent course from the amoeba to the anthropoid and
from the anthropoid to the agnostic. So far from being a question of our knowing all about
queer creatures very different from ourselves, they were very probably people very like
ourselves, except that we know nothing about them. In other words, our most ancient
records only reach back to a time when humanity had long been human, and even long been
civilised. The most ancient records we have not only mention but take for granted things
like kings and priests and princes and assemblies of the people; they describe communities
that are roughly recognisable as communities in our own sense. Some of them are despotic;
but we cannot tell that they have always been despotic. Some of them may be already
decadent and nearly all are mentioned as if they were old. We do not know what really
happened in the world before those records; but the little we do know would leave us
anything but astonished if we learnt that it was very much like what happens in this world
now. There would be nothing inconsistent or confounding about the discovery that those
unknown ages were full of republics collapsing under monarchies and rising again as
republics, empires expanding and finding colonies and then losing colonies. Kingdoms
combining again into world states and breaking up again into small nationalities, classes
selling themselves into slavery and marching out once more into liberty; all that
procession of humanity which may or may not be a progress but most assuredly a romance.
But the first chapters of the romance have been torn out of the book; and we shall never
read them.
It is so also with the more special fancy about evolution and social stability.
According to the real records available, barbarism and civilisation were not successive
states in the progress of the world. They were conditions that existed side by side, as
they still exist side by side. There were civilisations then as there are civilisations
now; there are savages now as there were savages then. It is suggested that all men passed
through a nomadic stage; but it is certain that there are some who have never passed out
of it, and it seems not unlikely that there were some who never passed into it. It is
probable that from very primitive times the static tiller of the soil and the wandering
shepherd were two distinct types of men; and the chronological rearrangement of them is
but a mark of that mania for progressive stages that has largely falsified history. It is
suggested that there was a communist stage, in which private property was everywhere
unknown, a whole humanity living on the negation of property; but the evidences of this
negation are themselves rather negative. Redistributions of property, jubilees, and
agrarian laws, occur at various intervals and in various forms; but that humanity
inevitably passed through a communist stage seems as doubtful as the parallel proposition
that humanity will inevitably return to it. It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the
boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a
revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary. There is an amusing
parallel example in the case of what is called feminism. In spite of all the
pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage by capture and the cave-man beating the cave-woman
with a club, it may be noted that as soon as feminism became a fashionable cry, it was
insisted that human civilisation in its first stage had been a matriarchy. Apparently it
was the cave-woman who carried the club. Anyhow all these ideas are little better than
guesses; they have a curious way of following the fortune of modern theories and fads. In
any case they are not history in the sense of record; and we may repeat that when it comes
to record, the broad truth is that barbarism and civilisation have always dwelt side by
side in the world, the civilisation sometimes spreading to absorb the barbarians,
sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost all cases possessing in a more
finished form certain ideas and institutions which the barbarians possess in a ruder form;
such as government or social authority, the arts and especially the decorative arts,
mysteries and taboos of various kinds especially surrounding the matter of sex, and some
form of that fundamental thing which is the chief concern of this enquiry; the thing that
we call religion.
Now Egypt and Babylon, those two primeval monsters, might in this matter have been
specially provided as models. They might almost be called working models to show how these
modern theories do not work. The two great truths we know about these two great cultures
happen to contradict flatly the two current fallacies which have just been considered. The
story of Egypt might have been invented to point the moral that man does not necessarily
begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism
because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the
same thing, because he is exhausted And the story of Babylon might have been invented to
point the moral that man need not be a nomad or a communist before he becomes a peasant or
a citizen, and that such cultures are not always in successive stages but often in
contemporary states. Even touching these great civilisations with which our written
history begins there is a temptation of course to be too ingenious or too cocksure. We can
read the bricks of Babylon in a very different sense from that in which we guess about the
Cup and Ring stones; and we do definitely know what is meant by the animals in the
Egyptian hieroglyphic as we know nothing of the animal in the neolithic cave. But even
here the admirable archeologists who have deciphered line after line of miles of
hieroglyphics may be tempted to read too much between the lines; even the real authority
on Babylon may forget how fragmentary is his hard-won knowledge; may forget that Babylon
has only heaved half a brick at him, though half a brick is better than no cuneiform. But
some truths, historic and not prehistoric, dogmatic and not evolutionary, facts and not
fancies, do indeed emerge from Egypt and Babylon; and these two truths are among them.
Egypt is a green ribbon along the river edging the dark red desolation of the desert.
It is a proverb, and one of vast antiquity, that it is created by the mysterious bounty
and almost sinister benevolence of the Nile. When we first hear of Egyptians they are
living as in a string of river-side villages, in small and separate but co-operative
communities along the bank of the Nile. Where the river branched into the broad Delta
there was traditionally the beginning of a somewhat different district or people; but this
need not complicate the main truth. These more or less independent though interdependent
peoples were considerably civilised already. They had a sort of heraldry; that is,
decorative art used for symbolic and social purposes; each sailing the Nile under its own
ensign representing some bird or animal. Heraldry involves two things of enormous
importance to normal humanity; the combination of the two making that noble thing called
co-operation; on which rest all peasantries and peoples that are free. The art of heraldry
means independence; an image chosen by the imagination to express the individuality. The
science of heraldry means interdependence; an agreement between different bodies to
recognise different images; a science of imagery. We have here therefore exactly that
compromise of co-operation between free families or groups which is the most normal mode
of life for humanity and is particularly apparent wherever men own their own land and live
on it. With the very mention of the image of bird and beast the student of mythology will
murmur the word 'totem' almost in his sleep. But to my mind much of the trouble arises
from his habit of saying such words as if in his sleep. Throughout this rough outline I
have made a necessarily inadequate attempt to keep on the inside rather than the outside
of such things; to consider them where possible in terms of thought and not merely in
terms of terminology. There is very little value in talking about totems unless we have
some feeling of what it really felt like to have a totem. Granted that they had totems and
we have no totems; was it because they had more fear of animals or more familiarity with
animals? Did a man whose totem was a wolf feel like a were-wolf or like a man running away
from a were-wolf? Did he feel like Uncle Remus about Brer Wolf or like St. Francis about
his brother the wolf, or like Mowgli about his brothers the wolves? Was a totem a thing
like the British lion or a thing like the British bull-dog? Was the worship of a totem
like the feeling of niggers about Mumbo Jumbo, or of children about Jumbo? I have never
read any book of folk-lore, however learned, that gave me any light upon this question,
which I think by far the most important one. I will confine myself to repeating that the
earliest Egyptian communities had a common understanding about the images that stood for
their individual states; and that this amount of communication is prehistoric in the sense
that it is already there at the beginning of history. But as history unfolds itself, this
question of communication is clearly the main question of these riverside communities.
With the need of communication comes the need of a common government and the growing
greatness and spreading shadow of the king. The other binding force besides the king, and
perhaps older than the king, is the priesthood; and the priesthood has presumably even
more to do with these ritual symbols and signals by which men can communicate. And here in
Egypt arose probably the primary and certainly the typical invention to which we owe all
history, and the whole difference between the historic and the prehistoric: the archetypal
script, the art of writing.
The popular pictures of these primeval empires are not half so popular as they might
be. There is shed over them the shadow of an exaggerated gloom, more than the normal and
even healthy sadness of heathen men. It is part of the same sort of secret pessimism that
loves to make primitive man a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is
fear. It comes of course from the fact that men are moved most by their religion;
especially when it is irreligion. For them anything primary and elemental must be evil.
But it is the curious consequence that while we have been deluged with the wildest
experiments in primitive romance, they have all missed the real romance of being
primitive. They have described scenes that are wholly imaginary, in which the men of the
Stone Age are men of stone like walking statues; in which the Assyrians or Egyptians are
as stiff or as painted as their own most archaic art. But none of these makers of
imaginary scenes have tried to imagine what it must really have been like to see those
things as fresh which we see as familiar. They have not seen a man discovering fire like a
child discovering fireworks. They have not seen a man playing with the wonderful invention
called the wheel, like a boy playing at putting up a wireless station. They have never put
the spirit of youth into their descriptions of the youth of the world. It follows that
amid all their primitive or prehistoric fancies there are no jokes. There are not even
practical jokes, in connection with the practical inventions. And this is very sharply
defined in the particular case of hieroglyphics; for there seems to be serious indication
that the whole high human art of scripture or writing began with a joke.
There are some who will learn with regret that it seems to have begun with a pun. The
king or the priests or some responsible persons, wishing to send a message up the river in
that inconveniently long and narrow territory, hit on the idea of sending it in picture
writing, like that of the Red Indian. Like most people who have written picture-writing
for fun, he found the words did not always fit. But when the word for taxes sounded rather
like the word for pig, he boldly put down a pig as a bad pun and chanced it. So a modern
hieroglyphist might represent 'at once' by unscrupulously drawing a hat followed by a
series of upright numerals. It was good enough for the Pharaohs and ought to be good
enough for him. But it must have been great fun to write or even to read these messages,
when writing and reading were really a new thing. And if people must write romances about
ancient Egypt (and it seems that neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold them
from the habit), I suggest that scenes like this would really remind us that the ancient
Egyptians were human beings. I suggest that somebody should describe the scene of the
great monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them roaring with laughter and
bubbling over with suggestions as the royal puns grew more and more wild and indefensible.
There might be another scene of almost equal excitement about the decoding of this cipher;
the guesses and clues and discoveries having all the popular thrill of a detective story.
That is how primitive romance and primitive history really ought to be written. For
whatever was the quality of the religious or moral life of remote times, and it was
probably much more human than is conventionally supposed, the scientific interest of such
a time must have been intense. Words must have been more wonderful than wireless
telegraphy; and experiments with common things a series of electric shocks. We are still
waiting for somebody to write a lively story of primitive life. The point is in some sense
a parenthesis here; but it is connected with the general matter of political development,
by the institution which was most active in these first and most fascinating of all the
fairy-tales of science.
It is admitted that we owe most of this science to the priests. Modern writers like Mr.
Wells cannot be accused of any weakness of sympathy with a pontifical hierarchy; but they
agree at least in recognising what pagan priesthoods did for the arts and sciences. Among
the more ignorant of the enlightened there was indeed a convention of saying that priests
had obstructed progress in all ages; and a politician once told me in a debate that I was
resisting modern reforms exactly as some ancient priest probably resisted the discovery of
wheels. I pointed out, in reply, that it was far more likely that the ancient priest made
the discovery of the wheels. It is overwhelmingly probable that the ancient priest had a
great deal to do with the discovery of the art of writing. It is obvious enough in the
fact that the very word hieroglyphic is akin to the word hierarchy. The religion of these
priests was apparently a more or less tangled polytheism of a type that is more
particularly described elsewhere. It passed through a period when it cooperated with the
king, another period when it was temporarily destroyed by the king, who happened to be a
prince with a private theism of his own, and a third period when it practically destroyed
the king and ruled in his stead. But the world has to thank it for many things which it
considers common and necessary: and the creators of those common things ought really to
have a place among the heroes of humanity. If we were at rest in a real paganism, instead
of being restless in a rather irrational reaction from Christianity, we might pay some
sort of pagan honour to these nameless makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of
the man who first found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who first tamed a
horse. And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices, there would be more sense in it than
in disfiguring our cities with cockney statues of stale politicians and philanthropists.
But one of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no
pagan in our civilisation has been able to be really human.
The point is here, however, that the Egyptian government, whether pontifical or royal,
found it more and more necessary to establish communication; and there always went with
communication a certain element of coercion. It is not necessarily an indefensible thing
that the state grew more despotic as it grew more civilised; it is arguable that it had to
grow more despotic in order to grow more civilised. That is the argument for autocracy in
every age; and the interest lies in seeing it illustrated in the earliest age. But it is
emphatically not true that it was most despotic in the earliest age and grew more liberal
in a later age; the practical process of history is exactly the reverse. It is not true
that the tribe began in the extreme of terror of the Old Man and his seat and spear; it is
probable, at least in Egypt, that the Old Man was rather a New Man armed to attack new
conditions. His spear grew longer and longer and his throne rose higher and higher, as
Egypt rose into a complex and complete civilisation. That is what I mean by saying that
the history of the Egyptian territory is in this the history of the earth; and directly
denies the vulgar assumption that terrorism can only come at the beginning and cannot come
at the end. We do not know what was the very first condition of the more or less feudal
amalgam of land owners, peasants and slaves in the little commonwealths beside the Nile;
but it may have been a peasantry of an even more popular sort. What we do know is that it
was by experience and education that little commonwealths lose their liberty; that
absolute sovereignty is something not merely ancient but rather relatively modern; and it
is at the end of the path called progress that men return to the king.
Egypt exhibits, in that brief record of its remotest beginnings, the primary problem of
liberty and civilisation. It is the fact that men actually lose variety by complexity. We
have not solved the problem properly any more than they did; but it vulgarises the human
dignity of the problem itself to suggest that even tyranny has no motive save in tribal
terror. And just as the Egyptian example refutes the fallacy about despotism and
civilisation, so does the Babylonian example refute the fallacy about civilisation and
barbarism. Babylon also we first hear of when it is already civilised; for the simple
reason that we cannot hear of anything until it is educated enough to talk. It talks to us
in what is called cuneiform; that strange and stiff triangular symbolism that contrasts
with the picturesque alphabet of Egypt. However relatively rigid Egyptian art may be,
there is always something different from the Babylonian spirit which was too rigid to have
any art. There is always a living grace in the lines of the lotus and something of
rapidity as well as rigidity in the movement of the arrows and the birds. Perhaps there is
something of the restrained but living curve of the river, which makes us in talking of
the serpent of old Nile almost think of the Nile as a serpent. Babylon was a civilisation
of diagrams rather than of drawings. Mr. W.B. Yeats who has a historical imagination to
match his mythological imagination (and indeed the former is impossible without the
latter) wrote truly of the men who watched the stars 'from their pedantic Babylon.' The
cuneiform was cut upon bricks, of which all their architecture was built up; the bricks
were of baked mud and perhaps the material had something in it forbidding the sense of
form to develop in sculpture or relief. Theirs was a static but a scientific civilisation,
far advanced in the machinery of life and in some ways highly modern. It is said that they
had much of the modern cult of the higher spinsterhood and recognised an official class of
independent working women. There is perhaps something in that mighty stronghold of
hardened mud that suggests the utilitarian activity of a huge hive. But though it was huge
it was human; we see many of the same social problems as in ancient Egypt or modern
England; and whatever its evils this also was one of the earliest masterpieces of man. It
stood, of course, in the triangle formed by the almost legendary rivers of Tigris and
Euphrates, and the vast agriculture of its empire, on which its towns depended, was
perfected by a highly scientific system of canals. It had by tradition a high intellectual
life, though rather philosophic than artistic; and there preside over its primal
foundation those figures who have come to stand for the star-gazing wisdom of antiquity;
the teachers of Abraham; the Chaldees.
Against this solid society, as against some vast bare wall of brick, there surged age
after age the nameless armies of the Nomads. They came out of the deserts where the
nomadic life had been lived from the beginning and where it is still lived to-day. It is
needless to dwell on the nature of that life; it was obvious enough and even easy enough
to follow a herd or a flock which generally found its own grazing-ground and to live on
the milk or meat it provided. Nor is there any reason to doubt that this habit of life
could give almost every human thing except a home. Many such shepherds or herds men may
have talked in the earliest time of all the truths and enigmas of the Book of Job; and of
these were Abraham and his children, who have given to the modern world for an endless
enigma the almost mono-maniac monotheism of the Jews. But they were a wild people without
comprehension of complex social organisation; and a spirit like the wind within them made
them wage war on it again and again. The history of Babylonia is largely the history of
its defence against the desert hordes; who came on at intervals of a century or two and
generally retreated as they came. Some say that an admixture of nomad invasion built at
Nineveh the arrogant kingdom of the Assyrians, who carved great monsters upon their
temples, bearded bulls with wings like cherubim, and who sent forth many military
conquerors who stamped the world as if with such colossal hooves. Assyria was an imperial
interlude; but it was an interlude. The main story of all that land is the war between the
wandering peoples and the state that was truly static. Presumably in prehistoric times,
and certainly in historic times, those wanderers went westward to waste whatever they
could find. The last time they came they found Babylon vanished; but that was in historic
times and the name of their leader was Mahomet.
Now it is worth while to pause upon that story because, as has been suggested, it
directly contradicts the impression still current that nomadism is merely a prehistoric
thing and social settlement a comparatively recent thing. There is nothing to show that
the Babylonians had ever wandered; there is very little to show that the tribes of the
desert ever settled down. Indeed it is probable that this notion of a nomadic stage
followed by a static stage has already been abandoned by the sincere and genuine scholars
to whose researches we all owe so much. But I am not at issue in this book with sincere
and genuine scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely
spread from certain imperfect investigations, and which has made fashionable a false
notion of the whole history of humanity. It is the whole vague notion that a monkey
evolved into a man and in the same way a barbarian evolved into a civilised man and
therefore at every stage we have to look back to barbarism and forward to civilisation.
Unfortunately this notion is in a double sense entirely in the air. It is an atmosphere in
which men live rather than a thesis which they defend. Men in that mood are more easily
answered by objects than by theories; and it will be well if anyone tempted to make that
assumption, in some trivial turn of talk or writing, can be checked for a moment by
shutting his eyes and seeing for an instant, vast and vaguely crowded, like a populous
precipice, the wonder of the Babylonian wall.
One fact does certainly fall across us like its shadow. Our glimpses of both these
early empires show that the first domestic relation had been complicated by something
which was less human, but was often regarded as equally domestic. The dark giant called
Slavery had been called up like a genii and was labouring on gigantic works of brick and
stone. Here again we must not too easily assume that what was backward was barbaric; in
the matter of manumission the earlier servitude seems in some ways more liberal than the
later; perhaps more liberal than the servitude of the future. To insure food for humanity
by forcing part of it to work was after all a very human expedient; which is why it will
probably be tried again. But in one sense there is a significance in the old slavery. It
stands for one fundamental fact about all antiquity before Christ; something to be assumed
from first to last. It is the insignificance of the individual before the State. It was as
true of the most democratic City State in Hellas as of any despotism in Babylon. It is one
of the signs of this spirit that a whole class of individuals could be insignificant or
even invisible. It must be normal because it was needed for what would now be called
'social service.' Somebody said, 'The Man is nothing and the Work is all,' meaning it for
a breezy Carlylean commonplace. It was the sinister motto of the heathen Servile State. In
that sense there is truth in the traditional vision of vast pillars and pyramids going up
under those everlasting skies for ever by the labour of numberless and nameless men,
toiling like ants and dying like flies, wiped out by the work of their own hands.
But there are two other reasons for beginning with the two fixed points of Egypt and
Babylon. For one thing they are fixed in tradition as the types of antiquity; and history
without tradition is dead. Babylon is still the burden of a nursery rhyme, and Egypt (with
its enormous population of princesses awaiting reincarnation) is still the topic of an
unnecessary number of novels. But a tradition is generally a truth; so long as the
tradition is sufficiently popular; even if it is almost vulgar. And there is a
significance in this Babylonian and Egyptian element in nursery rhymes and novels; even
the news papers, normally so much behind the times, have already got as far as the reign
of Tutankhamen. The first reason is full of the common sense of popular legend; it is the
simple fact that we do know more of these traditional things than of other contemporary
things; and that we always did. All travellers from Herodotus to Lord Carnarvon follow
this route. Scientific speculations of to-day do indeed spread out a map of the whole
primitive world, with streams of racial emigration or admixture marked in dotted lines
everywhere; over spaces which the unscientific medieval map-maker would have been content
to call 'Terra incognita,' if he did not fill the inviting blank with a picture of a
dragon, to indicate the probable reception given to pilgrims. But these speculations are
only speculations at the best; and at the worst the dotted lines can be far more fabulous
than the dragon.
There is unfortunately one fallacy here into which it is very easy for men to fall,
even those who are most intelligent and perhaps especially those who are most imaginative.
It is the fallacy of suppositing that because an idea is greater in the sense of larger,
therefore it is greater in the sense of more fundamental and fixed and certain. If a man
lives alone in a straw hut in the middle of Thibet, he may be told that he is living in
the Chinese Empire; and the Chinese Empire is certainly a splendid and spacious and
impressive thing. Or alternatively he may be told that he is living in the British Empire,
and be duly impressed. But the curious thing is that in certain mental states he can feel
much more certain about the Chinese Empire that he can not see than about the straw hut
that he can see. He has some strange magical juggle in his mind, by which his argument
begins with the empire though his experience begins with the hut. Sometimes he goes mad
and appears to be proving that a straw hut cannot exist in the domains of the Dragon
Throne; that it is impossible for such a civilisation as he enjoys to contain such a hovel
as he inhabits. But his insanity arises from the intellectual slip of supposing that
because China is a large and all-embracing hypothesis, therefore it is something more than
a hypothesis. Now modern people are perpetually arguing in this way; and they extend it to
things much less real and certain than the Chinese Empire. They seem to forget, for
instance, that a man is not even certain of the Solar System as he is certain of the South
Downs. The Solar System is a deduction, and doubtless a true deduction; but the point is
that it is a very vast and far-reaching deduction and therefore he forgets that it is a
deduction at all and treats it as a first principle. He might discover that the whole
calculation is a mis-calculation; and the sun and stars and street-lamps would look
exactly the same. But he has forgotten that it is a calculation, and is almost ready to
contradict the sun if it does not fit into the solar system. If this is a fallacy even in
the case of facts pretty well ascertained, such as the Solar System and the Chinese
Empire, it is an even more devastating fallacy in connection with theories and other
things that are not really ascertained at all. Thus history, especially prehistoric
history, has a horrible habit of beginning with certain generalisations about races. I
will not describe the disorder and misery this inversion has produced in modern politics.
Because the race is vaguely supposed to have produced the nation, men talk as if the
nation were something vaguer than the race. Because they have themselves invented a reason
to explain a result, they almost deny the result in order to justify the reason. They
first treat a Celt as an axiom and then treat an Irishman as an inference. And then they
are surprised that a great fighting, roaring Irishman is angry at being treated as an
inference. They cannot see that the Irish are Irish whether or no they are Celtic, whether
or no there ever were any Celts. And what misleads them once more is the size of the
theory; the sense that the fancy is bigger than the fact. A great scattered Celtic race is
supposed to contain the Irish, so of course the Irish must depend for their very existence
upon it. The same confusion, of course, has eliminated the English and the Germans by
swamping them in the Teutonic race; and some tried to prove from the races being at one
that the nations could not be at war. But I only give these vulgar and hackneyed examples
in passing, as more familiar examples of the fallacy; the matter at issue here is not its
application to these modern things but rather to the most ancient things. But the more
remote and unrecorded was the racial problem, the more fixed was this curious inverted
certainty in the Victorian man of science. To this day it gives a man of those scientific
traditions the same sort of shock to question these things, which were only the last
inferences when he turned them into first principles. He is still more certain that he is
an Aryan even than that he is an Anglo-Saxon, just as he is more certain that he is an
Anglo-Saxon than that he is an Englishman. He has never really discovered that he is a
European. But he has never doubted that he is an Indo-European. These Victorian theories
have shifted a great deal in their shape and scope; but this habit of a rapid hardening of
a hypothesis into a theory, and of a theory into an assumption, has hardly yet gone out of
fashion. People cannot easily get rid of the mental confusion of feeling that the
foundations of history must surely be secure; that the first steps must be safe; that the
biggest generalisation must be obvious. But though the contradiction may seem to them a
paradox, this is the very contrary of the truth. It is the large thing that is secret and
invisible; it is the small thing that is evident and enormous.
Every race on the face of the earth has been the subject of these speculations, and it
is impossible even to suggest an outline of the subject. But if we take the European race
alone, its history, or rather its prehistory, has undergone many retrospective revolutions
in the short period of my own lifetime. It used to be called the Caucasian race; and I
read in childhood an account of its collision with the Mongolian race; it was written by
Bret Harte and opened with the query 'Or is the Caucasian played out?' Apparently the
Caucasian was played out, for in a very short time he had been turned into the
Indo-European man; sometimes, I regret to say, proudly presented as the Indo-Germanic man.
It seems that the Hindu and the German have similar words for mother or father; there were
other similarities between Sanskrit and various Western tongues; and with that all
superficial differences between a Hindu and a German seemed suddenly to disappear.
Generally this composite person was more conveniently described as the Aryan, and the
really important point was that he had marched westward out of those high lands of India
where fragments of his language could still be found. When I read this as a child, I had
the fancy that after all the Aryan need not have marched westward and left his language
behind him; he might also have marched eastward and taken his language with him. If I were
to read it now, I should content myself with confessing my ignorance of the whole matter.
But as a matter of fact I have great difficulty in reading it now, because it is not being
written now. It looks as if the Aryan is also played out. Anyhow he has not merely changed
his name but changed his address; his starting-place and his route of travel. One new
theory maintains that our race did not come to its present home from the East but from the
South. Some say the Europeans did not come from Asia but from Africa. Some have even had
the wild idea that the Europeans came from Europe; or rather that they never left it.
Then there is a certain amount of evidence of a more or less prehistoric pressure from
the North, such as that which seems to have brought the Greeks to inherit the Cretan
culture and so often brought the Gauls over the hills into the fields in Italy. But I
merely mention this example of European ethnology to point out that the learned have
pretty well boxed the compass by this time; and that I, who am not one of the learned,
cannot pretend for a moment to decide where such doctors disagree. But I can use my own
common sense, and I sometimes fancy that theirs is a little rusty from want of use. The
first act of common sense is to recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain.
And I will affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense that we all know of
the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.
The truth, it may be repeated, is that what we really see, as distinct from what we may
reasonably guess, in this earliest phase of history is darkness covering the earth and
great darkness the peoples, with a light or two gleaming here and there on chance patches
of humanity; and that two of these flames do burn upon two of these tall primeval towns;
upon the high terraces of Babylon and the huge pyramids of the Nile. There are indeed
other ancient lights, or lights that may be conjectured to be very ancient, in very remote
parts of that vast wilderness of night. Far away to the east there is a high civilisation
of vast antiquity in China; there are the remains of civilisations in Mexico and South
America and other places, some of them apparently so high in civilisation as to have
reached the most refined forms of devil-worship. But the difference lies in the element
old tradition; the tradition of these lost cultures has been broken off, and though the
tradition of China still lives, it is doubtful whether we know anything about it.
Moreover, a man trying to measure the Chinese antiquity has to use Chinese traditions of
measurement; and he has a strange sensation of having passed into another world under
other laws of time and space. Time is telescoped outwards and centuries assume the slow
and stiff movement of aeons; the white man trying to see it as the yellow man sees, feels
as if his head were turning round and wonders wildly whether it is growing a pigtail. Any
how he cannot take in a scientific sense that queer perspective that leads up to the
primeval pagoda of the first of the Sons of Heaven. He is the real antipodes; the only
true alternative world to Christendom; and he is after a fashion walking upside down. I
have spoken of the medieval map-maker and his dragon; but what medieval traveller, however
much interested in monsters, would expect to find a country where a dragon is a benevolent
and amiable being? Of the more serious side of Chinese tradition something will be said in
another connection; but I am only talking of tradition and the test of antiquity. And I
only mention China as an antiquity that is not for us reached by a bridge old tradition;
and Babylon and Egypt as antiquities that are. Herodotus is a human being, in a sense in
which a Chinaman in a billy-cock hat, sitting opposite to us in a London tea shop, is
hardly human. We feel as if we knew what David and Isaiah felt like, in a way in which we
never were quite certain what Li Hung Chang felt like. The very sins that snatched away
Helen or Bathsheba have passed into a proverb of private human weakness, of pathos and
even of pardon. The very virtues of the Chinaman have about them something terrifying.
This is the difference made by the destruction or preservation of a continuous historical
inheritance; as from ancient Egypt to modern Europe. But when we ask what was that world
that we inherit, and why those particular people and places seem to belong to it, we are
led to the central fact of civilised history.
That centre was the Mediterranean; which was not so much a piece of water as a world.
But it was a world with something of the character of such a water; for it became more and
more a place of unification in which the streams of strange and very diverse cultures met.
The Nile and the Tiber alike flow into the Mediterranean; so did the Egyptian and the
Etrurian alike contribute to a Mediterranean civilisation. The glamour of the great sea
spread indeed very far in land and the unity was felt among the Arabs alone in the deserts
and the Gauls beyond the northern hills. But the gradual building up of a common culture
running round all the coasts of this inner sea is the main business of antiquity. As will
be seen, it was sometimes a bad business as well as a good business. In that orbis
terrarum or circle of lands there were the extremes of evil and of piety, there were
contrasted races and still more contrasted religions. It was the scene of an endless
struggle between Asia and Europe from the night of the Persian ships at Salamis to the
flight of the Turkish ships at Lepanto. It was the scene, as will be more especially
suggested later, of a supreme spiritual struggle between the two types of paganism,
confronting each other in the Latin and the Phoenician cities; in the Roman forum and the
Punic mart. It was the world of war and peace, the world of good and evil, the world of
all that matters most, with all respect to the Aztecs and the Mongols of the Far East,
they did not matter as the Mediterranean tradition mattered and still matters. Between it
and the Far East there were, of course, interesting cults and conquests of various kinds,
more or less in touch with it, and in proportion as they were so intelligible also to us.
The Persians came riding in to make an end of Babylon; and we are told in a Greek story
how these barbarians learned to draw the bow and tell the truth. Alexander the great Greek
marched with his Macedonians into the sunrise and brought back strange birds coloured like
the sunrise clouds and strange flowers and jewels from the gardens and treasuries of
nameless kings. Islam went eastward into that world and made it partly imaginable to us;
precisely because Islam itself was born in that circle of lands that fringed our own
ancient and ancestral sea. In the Middle Ages the empire of the Moguls increased its
majesty without losing its mystery; the Tartars conquered China and the Chinese apparently
took very little notice of them. All these things are interesting in themselves; but it is
impossible to shift the centre of gravity to the inland spaces of Asia from the in]and sea
of Europe. When all is said, if there were nothing in the world but what was said and done
and written and built in the lands lying round the Mediterranean, it would still be in all
the most vital and valuable things the world in which we live. When that southern culture
spread to the north-west it produced many very wonderful things; of which doubtless we
ourselves are the most wonderful. When it spread thence to colonies and new countries, it
was still the same culture so long as it was culture at all. But round that little sea
like a lake were the things themselves, apart from all extensions and echoes and
commentaries on the things, the Republic and the Church; the Bible and the heroic epics;
Islam and Israel and the memories of the lost empires, Aristotle and the measure of all
things. It is because the first light upon this world is really light, the daylight in
which we are still walking to-day, and not merely the doubtful visitation of strange
stars, that I have begun here with noting where that light first falls on the towered
cities of the eastern Mediterranean.
But though Babylon and Egypt have thus a sort of first claim, in the very fact of being
familiar and traditional, fascinating riddles to us but also fascinating riddles to our
fathers, we must not imagine that they were the only old civilisations on the southern
sea; or that all the civilisation was merely Sumerian or Semitic or Coptic, still less
merely Asiatic or African. Real research is more and more exalting the ancient
civilisation of Europe and especially of what we may still vaguely call the Greeks. It
must be understood in the sense that there were Greeks before the Greeks, as in so many of
their mythologies there were gods before the gods. The island of Crete was the centre of
the civilisation now called Minoan, after the Minos who lingered in ancient legend and
whose labyrinth was actually discovered by modern archeology. This elaborate European
society, with its harbours and its drainage and its domestic machinery, seems to have gone
down before some invasion of its northern neighbours, who made or inherited the Hellas we
know in history. But that earlier period did not pass till it had given to the world gifts
so great that the world has ever since been striving in vain to repay them, if only by
plagiarism.
Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some
sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was
called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth.
A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read
and write, and was described by tradition as a blind, composed a poem about the Greeks
going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world. That the
most beautiful woman in the world lived in that one little town sounds like a legend; that
the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger
than such little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the end of
the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its decay; in which case one
would like to have seen that culture in its prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which
is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as
well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal
vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to
quote the Iliad and die.
But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another element of great
historical importance; which has hardly I think been given its proper place in history.
The poet has so conceived the poem that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader
certainly, are on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor. And this is a
sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even as the poetical origin itself
recedes. Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in pagan times; but he disappears
altogether in late times. But Hector grows greater as the ages pass, and it is his name
that is the name of a Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the
hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin
and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all the defeats through which our
race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.
The tale of the end of Troy shall have no ending, for it is lifted up forever into
living echoes, immortal as our hopelessness and our hope. Troy standing was a small thing
that may have stood nameless for ages. But Troy falling has been caught up in a flame and
suspended in an immortal instant of annihilation; and because it was destroyed with fire
the fire shall never be destroyed. And as with the city so with the hero; traced in
archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the first figure of the Knight. There is
a prophetic coincidence in his title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems
to mingle the horseman with the horse. It is almost anticipated ages before in the thunder
of the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which the Iliad ends. It
is that very unity for which we can find no name but the holy centaur of chivalry. But
there are other reasons for giving in this glimpse of antiquity the name upon the sacred
town. The sanctity of such towns ran like a fire round the coasts and islands of the
northern Mediterranean, the high-fenced hamlet for which heroes died. From the smallness
of the city came the greatness of the citizen. Hellas with her hundred statues produced
nothing statelier than that walking statue; the ideal of the self-commanding man. Hellas
of the hundred statues was one legend and literature; and all that labyrinth of little
walled nations resounding with the lament of Troy.
A later legend, an afterthought but not an accident, said that stragglers from Troy
founded a republic on the Italian shore. It was true in spirit that republican virtue had
such a root. A mystery of honour, that was not born of Babylon or the Egyptian pride,
there shone like the shield of Hector, defying Asia and Africa; till the light of a new
day was loosened, with the rushing of the eagles and the coming of the name; the name that
came like a thunderclap when the world woke to Rome.
I was once escorted over the Roman foundations of an ancient British city by a
professor, who said something that seems to me a satire on a good many other professors.
Possibly the professor saw the joke, though he maintained an iron gravity, and may or may
not have realised that it was a joke against a great deal of what is called comparative
religion. I pointed out a sculpture of the head of the sun with the usual halo of rays,
but with the difference that the face in the disc, instead of being boyish like Apollo,
was bearded like Neptune or Jupiter. 'Yes, ' he said with a certain delicate exactitude,
'that is supposed to represent the local god Sul. The best authorities identify Sul with
Minerva, but this has been held to show that the identification is not complete.'
That is what we call a powerful understatement. The modern world is madder than any
satires on it; long ago Mr. Belloc made his burlesque don say that a bust of Ariadne had
been proved by modern research to be a Silenus. But that is not better than the real
appearance of Minerva as the Bearded Woman of Mr. Barnum. Only both of them are very like
many identifications by 'the best authorities' on comparative religion; and when Catholic
creeds are identified with various wild myths, I do not laugh or curse or misbehave
myself; I confine myself decorously to saying that the identification is not complete.
In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly applied to
Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped corporate mankind as a Supreme
Being. Even in the days of my youth, I remarked that there was something slightly odd
about despising and dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal
contradiction; and then asking us to adore a deity who is a hundred million persons in one
God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
But there is another entity, more or less definable and much more imaginable than the
many-headed and monstrous idol of mankind. And it has a much better light to be called, in
a reasonable sense, the religion of humanity. Man is not indeed the idol; but man is
almost everywhere the idolator. And these multitudinous idolatries of man kind have
something about them in many ways more human and sympathetic than modern metaphysical
abstractions. If an Asiatic god has three heads and seven arms, there is at least in it an
idea of material incarnation bringing an unknown power nearer to us and not farther away.
But if our friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson, when out for a Sunday walk, were
transformed and amalgamated into an Asiatic idol before our eyes, they would surely seem
farther away. If the arms of Brown and the legs of Robinson waved from the same composite
body, they would seem to be waving something of a sad farewell. If the heads of an three
gentlemen appeared smiling on the same neck, we should hesitate even by what name to
address our new and somewhat abnormal friend. In the many-headed and many-handed Oriental
idol there is a certain sense of mysteries be coming at least partly intelligible; of
formless forces of nature taking some dark but material form, but though this may be true
of the multiform god it is not so of the multiform man The human beings be come less human
by becoming less separate; we might say less human in being less lonely. The human beings
become less intelligible as they become less isolated; we might say with strict truth that
the closer they are to us the farther they are away. An Ethical Hymn-book of this
humanitarian sort of religion was carefully selected and expurgated on the principle of
preserving anything human and eliminating anything divine. One consequence was that a hymn
appeared in the amended form of 'Nearer Mankind to Thee, nearer to Thee.' It always
suggested to me the sensations of a strap-hanger during a crush on the Tube. But it is
strange and wonderful how far away the souls of men can seem, when their bodies are so
near as all that.
The human unity with which I deal here is not to be confounded with this modern
industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a congestion than a communion. It is a
thing to which human groups left to themselves, and even human individuals left to
themselves, have everywhere tended by an instinct that may truly be called human. Like all
healthy human things, it has varied very much within the limits of a general character;
for that is characteristic of everything belonging to that ancient land of liberty that
lies before and around the servile industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that its
products are all of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the same seal and
drink the same bad whiskey, that a man at the North Pole and another at the South might
recognise the same optimistic level on the same dubious tinned salmon. But wine, the gift
of gods to men, can vary with every valley and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred
wines without any wine once reminding us of whiskey; and cheeses can change from county to
county without forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese. When I am speaking of
this thing, therefore, I am speaking of something that doubtless includes very wide
differences; nevertheless I will here maintain that it is one thing. I will maintain that
most of the modern botheration comes from not realising that it is really one thing. I
will advance the thesis that before all talk about comparative religion and the separate
religious founders of the world, the first essential is to recognise this thing as a
whole, as a thing almost native and normal to the great fellowship that we call mankind.
This thing is Paganism, and I propose to show in these pages that it is the one real rival
to the Church of Christ.
Comparative religion is very comparative indeed. That is, it is so much a matter of
degree and distance and difference that it is only comparatively successful when it tries
to compare. When we come to look at it closely we find it comparing things that are really
quite incomparable. We are accustomed to see a table or catalogue of the world's great
religions in parallel columns, until we fancy they are really parallel. We are accustomed
to see the names of the great religious founders all in a row: Christ; Mahomet; Buddha;
Confucius. But in truth this is only a trick, another of these optical illusions by which
any objects may be put into a particular relation by shifting to a particular point of
sight. Those religions and religious founders, or rather those whom we choose to lump
together as religions and religious founders, do not really show any common character. The
illusion is partly produced by Islam coming immediately after Christianity in the list; as
Islam did come after Christianity and was largely an imitation of Christianity. But the
other eastern religions, or what we call religions, not only do not resemble the Church
but do not resemble each other. When we come to Confucianism at the end of the list, we
come to something in a totally different world of thought. To compare the Christian and
Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an English squire or asking whether a
man is a believer in immortality or a hundred-per-cent American. Confucianism may be a
civilisation but it is not a religion.
In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy
proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel. It is not easy, therefore, to expose
the fallacy by which a false classification is created to swamp a unique thing, when it
really is a unique thing. As there is nowhere else exactly the same fact, so there is
nowhere else exactly the same fallacy. But I will take the nearest thing I can find to
such a solitary social phenomenon, in order to show how it is thus swamped and
assimilated. I imagine most of us would agree that there is something unusual and unique
about the position of the Jews. There is nothing that is quite in the same sense an
international nation; an ancient culture scattered in different countries but still
distinct and indestructible. Now this business is like an attempt to make a list of
Nomadic Nations in order to soften the strange solitude of the Jew. It would be easy
enough to do it, by the same process of putting a plausible approximation first, and then
tailing off into totally different things thrown in somehow to make up the list. Thus in
the new list of nomadic nations the Jews would be followed by the Gypsies; who at least
are really nomadic if they are not really national. Then the professor of the new science
of Comparative Nomadics could pass easily on to something different; even if it was very
different. He could remark on the wandering adventure of the English who had scattered
their colonies over so many seas; and call them nomads. It is quite true that a great many
Englishmen seem to be strangely restless in England. It is quite true that not all of them
have left their country for their country's good. The moment we mention the wandering
empire of the English, we must add the strange exiled empire of the Irish. For it is a
curious fact, to be noted in our imperial literature, that the same ubiquity and unrest
which is a proof of English enterprise and triumph is a proof of Irish futility and
failure. Then the professor of Nomadism would look round thoughtfully and remember that
there was great talk recently of German waiters, German barbers, German clerks, Germans
naturalising themselves in England and the United States and the South American republics.
The Germans would go down as the fifth nomadic race; the words Wanderlust and
Folk-Wandering would come in very useful here. For there really have been historians who
explained the Crusades by suggesting that the Germans were found wandering (as the police
say) in what happened to be the neighbourhood of Palestine. Then the professor, feeling he
was now near the end, would make a last leap in desperation. He would recall the fact that
the French army has captured nearly every capital in Europe, that it marched across
countless conquered lands under Charlemagne or Napoleon; and that would be wanderlust and
that would be the note of a nomadic race. Thus he would have his six nomadic nations all
compact and complete, and would feel that the Jew was no longer a sort of mysterious and
even mystical exception. But people with more common sense would probably realise that he
had only extended nomadism by extending the meaning of nomadism, and that he had extended
that until it really had no meaning at all. It is quite true that the French soldier has
made some of the finest marches in all military history. But it is equally true, and far
more self-evident, that if the French peasant is not a rooted reality there is no such
thing as a rooted reality in the world; or in other words, if he is a nomad there is
nobody who is not a nomad.
Now that is the sort of trick that has been tried in the case of comparative religion
and the world's religious founders all standing respectably in a row. It seeks to classify
Jesus as the other would classify Jews, by inventing a new class for the purpose and
filling up the rest of it with stop-gaps and second-rate copies. I do not mean that these
other things are not often great things in their own real character and class.
Confucianism and Buddhism are great things, but it is not true to call them Churches; just
as the French and English are great peoples, but it is nonsense to call them nomads. There
are some points of resemblance between Christendom and its imitation in Islam; for that
matter there are some points of resemblance between Jews and Gypsies. But after that the
lists are made up of anything that comes to hand; of anything that can be put in the same
catalogue without being in the same category.
In this sketch of religious history, with all decent deference to men much more learned
than myself, I propose to cut across and disregard this modern method of classification,
which I feel sure has falsified the facts of history. I shall here submit an alternative
classification of religion or religions, which I believe would be found to cover all the
facts and, what is quite as important here, all the fancies. Instead of dividing religion
geographically and as it were vertically, into Christian, Moslem, Brahmin, Buddhist, and
so on, I would divide it psychologically and in some sense horizontally; into the strata
of spiritual elements and influences that could sometimes exist in the same country, or
even in the same man. Putting the Church apart for the moment, I should be disposed to
divide the natural religion of the mass of mankind under such headings as these: God; the
Gods; the Demons; the Philosophers. I believe some such classification will help us to
sort out the spiritual experiences of men much more successfully than the conventional
business of comparing religions; and that many famous figures will naturally fall into
their place in this way who are only forced into their place in the other. As I shall make
use of these titles or terms more than once in narrative and allusion, it will be well to
define at this stage for what I mean them to stand. And I will begin with the first, the
simplest and the most sublime, in this chapter.
In considering the elements of pagan humanity, we must begin by an attempt to describe
the indescribable. Many get over the difficulty of describing it by the expedient of
denying it, or at least ignoring it; but the whole point of it is that it was something
that was never quite eliminated even when it was ignored. They are obsessed by their
evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than
itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes from a tree, or something larger than
itself. Now there is very good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come
from some detail that was forgotten, because it was too small to be traced. Much more
probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed. There
is very good reason to suppose that many people did begin with the simple but overwhelming
idea of one God who governs all; and afterwards fell away into such things as
demon-worship almost as a sort of secret dissipation. Even the test of savage beliefs, of
which the folk-lore students are so fond, is admittedly often found to support such a
view. Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense in which anthropologists
use the word, the Australian aborigines for instance, are found to have a pure monotheism
with a high moral tone. A missionary was preaching to a very wild tribe of polytheists,
who had told him all their polytheistic tales, and telling them in return of the existence
of the one good God who is a spirit and judges men by spiritual standards. And there was a
sudden buzz of excitement among these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was letting
out a secret, and they cried to each other, 'Atahocan! He is speaking of Atahocan!'
Probably it was a point of politeness and even decency among those polytheists not to
speak of Atahocan. The name is not perhaps so much adapted as some of our own to direct
and solemn religious exhortation but many other social forces are always covering up and
confusing such simple ideas. Possibly the old god stood for an old morality found irksome
in more expansive moments; possibly intercourse with demons was more fashionable among the
best people, as in the modern fashion of Spiritualism. Anyhow, there are any number of
similar examples. They all testify to the unmistakable psychology of a thing taken for
granted, as distinct from a thing talked about. There is a striking example in a tale
taken down word for word from a Red Indian in California which starts out with hearty
legendary and literary relish: 'The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the
big chief. The moon is his wife and the stars are their children'; and so on through a
most ingenious and complicated story, in the middle of which is a sudden parenthesis
saying that the sun and moon have to do something because 'It is ordered that way by the
Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.' That is exactly the attitude of most
paganism towards God. He is something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident; a
habit possibly not peculiar to pagans. Sometimes the higher deity is remembered in the
higher moral grades and is a sort of mystery. But always, it has been truly said, the
savage is talkative about his mythology and taciturn about his religion. The Australian
savages, indeed, exhibit a topsyturveydom such as the ancients might have thought truly
worthy of the antipodes. The savage who thinks nothing of tossing off such a trifle as a
tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a baby chopped in two, or dropping into
small-talk about a colossal cosmic cow milked to make the rain, merely in order to be
sociable, will then retire to secret caverns sealed against women and white men, temples
of terrible initiation where to the thunder of the bull-roarer and the dripping of
sacrificial blood, the priest whispers the final secrets, known only to the initiate: that
honesty is the best policy, that a little kindness does nobody any harm, that all men are
brothers and that there is but one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible
and invisible.
In other words, we have here the curiosity of religious history that the savage seems
to be parading all the most repulsive and impossible parts of his belief and concealing
all the most sensible and creditable parts. But the explanation is that they are not in
that sense parts of his belief, or at least not parts of the same sort of belief. The
myths are merely tall stories, though as tall as the sky, the water spout, or the tropic
rain. The mysteries are true stories, and are taken secretly that they may be taken
seriously. Indeed it is only too easy to forget that there is a thrill in theism. A novel
in which a number of separate characters all turned out to be the same character would
certainly be a sensational novel. It is so with the idea that sun and tree and river are
the disguises of one god and not of many. Alas, we also find it only too easy to take
Atahocan for granted. But whether he is allowed to fade into a truism or preserved as a
sensation by being preserved as a secret, it is clear that he is always either an old
truism or an old tradition. There is nothing to show that he is an improved product of the
mere mythology and everything to show that he preceded it. He is worshipped by the
simplest tribes with no trace of ghosts or grave-offerings, or any of the complications in
which Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen sought the origin of the simplest of all ideas.
Whatever else there was, there was never as such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of
God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained away;
but it was never evolved.
There are not a few indications of this change in other places It is implied, for
instance, in the fact that even polytheism seems often the combination of several
monotheisms. A god will gain only a minor seat on Mount Olympus, when he had owned earth
and heaven and all the stars while he lived in his own little valley. Like many a small
nation melting in a great empire, he gives up local universality only to come under
universal limitation. The very name of Pan suggests that he became a god of the wood when
he had been a god of the world. The very name of Jupiter is almost a pagan translation of
the words 'Our Father which art in heaven.' As with the Great Father symbolised by the
sky, so with the Great Mother whom we still call Mother Earth. Demeter and Ceres and
Cybele often seem to be almost capable of taking over the whole business of godhood, so
that men should need no other gods. It seems reasonably probable that a good many men did
have no other gods but one of these, worshipped as the author of all.
Over some of the most immense and populous tracts of the world such as China, it would
seem that the simpler idea of the Great Father has never been very much complicated with
rival cults, though it may have in some sense ceased to be a cult itself. The best
authorities seem to think that though Confucianism is in one sense agnosticism, it does
not directly contradict the old theism, precisely because it has become a rather vague
theism. It is one in which God is called Heaven, as in the case of polite persons tempted
to swear in drawing-rooms. But Heaven is still overhead, even if it is very far overhead.
We have all the impression of a simple truth that has receded, until it was remote without
ceasing to be true. And this phrase alone would bring us back to the same idea even in the
pagan mythology of the West. There is surely something of this very notion of the
withdrawal of some higher power, in all those mysterious and very imaginative myths about
the separation of earth and sky. In a hundred forms we are told that heaven and earth were
once lovers, or were once at one, when some upstart thing, often some undutiful child,
thrust them apart; and the world was built on an abyss; upon a division and a parting. One
of its grossest versions was given by Greek civilisation in the myth of Uranus and Saturn.
One of its most charming versions was that of some savage niggers, who say that a little
pepper-plant grew taller and taller and lifted the whole sky like a lid; a beautiful
barbaric vision of daybreak for some of our painters who love that tropical twilight. Of
myths, and the highly mythical explanations which the moderns offer of myths, something
will be said in another section; for I cannot but think that most mythology is on another
and more superficial plane. But in this primeval vision of the rending of one world into
two there is surely something more of ultimate ideas. As to what it means, a man will
learn far more about it by lying on his back in a field, and merely looking at the sky,
than by reading all the libraries even of the most learned and valuable folklore. He will
know what is meant by saying that the sky ought to be nearer to us than it is, that
perhaps it was once nearer than it is, that it is not a thing merely alien and abysmal but
in some fashion sundered from us and saying farewell. There will creep across his mind the
curious suggestion that after all, perhaps, the myth-maker was not merely a moon-calf or
village idiot thinking he could cut up the clouds like a cake, but had in him something
more than it is fashionable to attribute to the Troglodyte; that it is just possible that
Thomas Hood was not talking like a Troglodyte when he said that, as time went on, the
tree-tops only told him he was further off from heaven than when he was a boy. But anyhow
the legend of Uranus the Lord of Heaven dethroned by Saturn the Time Spirit would mean
something to the author of that poem. And it would mean, among other things, this
banishment of the first fatherhood. There is the idea of God in the very notion that there
were gods before the gods. There is an idea of greater simplicity in all the allusions to
that more ancient order. The suggestion is supported by the process of propagation we see
in historic times. Gods and demigods and heroes breed like herrings before our very eyes
and suggest of themselves that the family may have had one founder; mythology grows more
and more complicated, and the very complication suggests that at the beginning it was more
simple. Even on the external evidence, of the sort called scientific, there is therefore a
very good case for the suggestion that man began with monotheism before it developed or
degenerated into polytheism. But I am concerned rather with an internal than an external
truth; and, as I have already said, the internal truth is almost indescribable. We have to
speak of something of which it is the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have
not merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.
I suspect an immense implication behind all polytheism and paganism. I suspect we have
only a hint of it here and there in these savage creeds or Greek origins. It is not
exactly what we mean by the presence of God; in a sense it might more truly be called the
absence of God. But absence does not mean non-existence; and a man drinking the toast of
absent friends does not mean that from his life all friendship is absent. It is a void but
it is not a negation; it is some thing as positive as an empty chair. It would be an
exaggeration to say that the pagan saw higher than Olympus an empty throne. It would be
nearer the truth to take the gigantic imagery of the Old Testament, in which the prophet
saw God from behind; it was as if some immeasurable presence had turned its back on the
world. Yet the meaning will again be missed, if it is supposed to be anything so conscious
and vivid as the monotheism of Moses and his people. I do not mean that the pagan peoples
were in the least overpowered by this idea merely because it is overpowering. On the
contrary, it was so large that they all carried it lightly, as we all carry the load of
the sky. Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud, we can all ignore its awful blue
background; we can neglect the sky; and precisely because it bears down upon us with an
annihilating force it is felt as nothing. A thing of this kind can only be an impressing
and a rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made by pagan
literature and religion. I repeat that in our special sacramental sense there is, of
course, the absence of the presence of God. But there is in a very real sense the presence
of the absence of God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt
if there was ever in all the marvellous manhood of antiquity a man who was happy as St.
Francis was happy. We feel it in the legend of a Golden Age and again in the vague
implication that the gods themselves are ultimately related to something else, even when
that Unknown God has faded into a Fate. Above all we feel it in those immortal moments
when the pagan literature seems to return to a more innocent antiquity and speak with a
more direct voice, so that no word is worthy of it except our own monotheistic
monosyllable. We cannot say anything but 'God' in a sentence like that of Socrates bidding
farewell to his judges: 'I go to die and you remain to live; and God alone knows which of
us goes the better way.' We can use no other word even for the best moments of Marcus
Aurelius: 'Can they say dear city of Cecrops, and canst thou not say dear city of God?' We
can use no other word in that mighty line in which Virgil spoke to all who suffer with the
veritable cry of a Christian before Christ: 'O you that have borne things more terrible,
to this also God shall give an end.'
In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher than the gods; but because
it is higher it is also further away. Not yet could even Virgil have read the riddle and
the paradox of that other divinity, who is both higher and nearer. For them what was truly
divine was very distant, so distant that they dismissed it more and more from their minds.
It had less and less to do with the mere mythology of which I shall write later. Yet even
in this there was a sort of tacit admission of its intangible purity, when we consider
what most of the mythologies like. As the Jews would not degrade it by images, so the
Greeks did not degrade it even by imaginations. When the gods were more and more
remembered only by pranks and profligacies, it was relatively a movement of reverence. It
was an act of piety to forget God. In other words, there is something in the whole tone of
the time suggesting that men had accepted a lower level, and still were half conscious
that it was a lower level. It is hard to find words for these things; yet the one really
just word stands ready. These men were conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of
nothing else; and the same is true of an heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may
remember the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break
in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment. There is such a thing as the momentary
power to remember that we forget. And the most ignorant of humanity know by the very look
of earth that they have forgotten heaven. But it remains true that even for these men
there were moments, like the memories of childhood, when they heard themselves talking
with a simpler language; there were moments when the Roman, like Virgil in the line
already quoted, cut his way with a sword-stroke of song out of the tangle of the
mythologies, the motley mob of gods and goddesses sank suddenly out of sight and the
Sky-Father was alone in the sky.
This latter example is very relevant to the next step in the process. A white light as
of a lost morning still lingers on the figure of Jupiter, of Pan or of the elder Apollo;
and it may well be, as already noted, that each was once a divinity as solitary as Jehovah
or Allah. They lost this lonely universality by a process it is here very necessary to
note; a process of amalgamation very like what was afterwards called syncretism. The whole
pagan world set itself to build a Pantheon. They admitted more and more gods, gods not
only of the Greeks but of the barbarians; gods not only of Europe but of Asia and Africa.
The more the merrier, though some of the Asian and African ones were not very merry. They
admitted them to equal thrones with their own, sometimes they identified them with their
own. They may have regarded it as an enrichment of their religious life; but it meant the
final loss of all that we now call religion. It meant that ancient light of simplicity,
that had a single source like the sun, finally fades away in a dazzle of conflicting
Lights and colours. God is really sacrificed to the Gods; in a very literal sense of the
flippant phrase, they have been too many for him.
Polytheism, therefore, was really a sort of pool; in the sense of the pagans having
consented to the pooling of their pagan religions. And this point is very important in
many controversies ancient and modern. It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing
to say that the god of the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans
thought themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the gods of the
city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains or some
shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of the woods. But exactly what it lost by these larger
ideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole
world one. And the converse is also true. Doubtless those more antiquated men of antiquity
who clung to their solitary statues and their single sacred names were regarded as
superstitious savages benighted and left behind. But these superstitious savages were
preserving something that is much more like the cosmic power as conceived by philosophy,
or even as conceived by science. This paradox by which the rude reactionary was a sort of
prophetic progressive has one consequence very much to the point. In a purely historical
sense, and apart from any other controversies in the same connection, it throws a light, a
single and a steady light, that shines from the beginning on a little and lonely people.
In this paradox, as in some riddle of religion of which the answer was sealed up for
centuries, lies the mission and the meaning of the Jews.
It is true in this sense, humanly speaking, that the world owes God to the Jews. It
owes that truth to much that is blamed on the Jews, possibly to much that is blameable in
the Jews. We have already noted the nomadic position of the Jews amid the other pastoral
peoples upon the fringe of the Babylonian Empire, and something of that strange erratic
course of theirs blazed across the dark territory of extreme antiquity, as they passed
from the seat of Abraham and the shepherd princes into Egypt and doubled back into the
Palestinian hills and held them against the Philistines from Crete and fell into captivity
in Babylon; and yet again returned to their mountain city by the Zionist policy of the
Persian conquerors; and so continued that amazing romance of restlessness of which we have
not yet seen the end. But through all their wanderings, and especially through all their
early wanderings, they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle,
that held perhaps a featureless symbol and certainly an invisible god. We may say that one
most essential feature was that it was featureless. Much as we may prefer that creative
liberty which the Christian culture has declared and by which it has eclipsed even the
arts of antiquity, we must not underrate the determining importance at the time of the
Hebrew inhibition of images. It is a typical example of one of those limitations that did
in fact preserve and perpetuate enlargement, like a wall built round a wide open space.
The God who could not have a statue remained a spirit. Nor would his statue in any case
have had the disarming dignity and grace of the Greek statues then or the Christian
statues afterwards. He was living in a land of monsters. We shall have occasion to
consider more fully what those monsters were, Moloch and Dagon and Tanit the terrible
goddess. If the deity of Israel had ever had an image, he would have had a phallic image.
By merely giving him a body they would have brought in all the worst elements of
mythology; all the polygamy of polytheism; the vision of the harem in heaven. This point
about the refusal of art is the first example of the limitations which are often adversely
criticised, only because the critics themselves are limited. But an even stronger case can
be found in the other criticism offered by the same critics. It is often said with a sneer
that the God of Israel was only a God of battles, 'a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts' pitted
in rivalry against other gods only as their envious foe. Well it is for the world that he
was a God of Battles. Well it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a
foe. In the ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved the
desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend. It would have been only too easy for them
to have seen him stretching out his hands in love and reconciliation, embracing Baal and
kissing the painted face of Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods; the last god to
sell his crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian pantheon or the nectar of Olympus or
the mead of Valhalla. It would have been easy enough for his worshippers to follow the
enlightened course of Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagan traditions. It is
obvious indeed that his followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it
required the almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to the
divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and ruin. The more we
really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the
Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of
the Prophets of Israel. As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of confused
mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is
called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal
enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe. In a word, there was a popular
pagan god called Jupiter-Ammon. There was never a god called Jehovah-Ammon. There was
never a god called Jehovah-Jupiter. If there had been, there would certainly have been
another called Jehovah-Moloch. Long before the liberal and enlightened amalgamators had
got so far afield as Jupiter, the image of the Lord of Hosts would have been deformed out
of all suggestion of a monotheistic maker and ruler and would have become an idol far
worse than any savage fetish; for he might have been as civilised as the gods of Tyre and
Carthage. What that civilisation meant we shall consider more fully in the chapter that
follows; when we note how the power of demons nearly destroyed Europe and even the heathen
health of the world. But the world's destiny would have been distorted still more fatally
if monotheism had failed in the Mosaic tradition. I hope in a subsequent section to show
that I am not without sympathy with all that health in the heathen world that made its
fairy-tales and its fanciful romances of religion. But I hope also to show that these were
bound to fail in the long run; and the world would have been lost if it had been unable to
return to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all things. That we do
preserve something of that primary simplicity that poets and philosophers can still indeed
in some sense say an Universal Prayer, that we live in a large and serene world under a
sky that stretches paternally over all the peoples of the earth, that philosophy and
philanthropy are truisms in a religion of reasonable men, all that we do most truly owe,
under heaven, to a secretive and restless nomadic people; who bestowed on men the supreme
and serene blessing of a jealous God.
The unique possession was not available or accessible to the pagan world, because it
was also the possession of a jealous people. The Jews were unpopular, partly because of
this narrowness already noted in the Roman world, partly perhaps because they had already
fallen into that habit of merely handling things for exchange instead of working to make
them with their hands. It was partly also because polytheism had become a sort of jungle
in which solitary monotheism could be lost; but it is strange to realise how completely it
really was lost. Apart from more disputed matters, there were things in the tradition of
Israel which belong to all humanity now, and might have belonged to all humanity then.
They had one of the colossal corner-stones of the world: the Book of Job. It obviously
stands over against the Iliad and the Greek tragedies; and even more than they it
was an early meeting and parting of poetry and philosophy in the mornings of the world. It
is a solemn and uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the
pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really perfects the pagan
tragic irony, precisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore more mystical.
Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with
riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of
things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say 'I do not understand,'
it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat 'You do not understand.' And under
that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that
would be worth understanding. But this mighty monotheistic poem remained unremarked by the
whole world of antiquity, which was thronged with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the
way in which the Jews stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that
they should have kept a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole intellectual world of
antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestly concealed the Great Pyramid. But there
were other reasons for a cross-purpose and an impasse, characteristic of the whole of the
end of paganism. After all, the tradition of Israel had only got hold of one-half of the
truth, even if we use the popular paradox and call it the bigger half. I shall try to
sketch in the next chapter that love of locality and personality that ran through
mythology; here it need only be said that there was a truth in it that could not be let
out though it were a lighter and less essential truth. The sorrow of Job had to be joined
with the sorrow of Hector; and while the former was the sorrow of the universe the latter
was the sorrow of the city; for Hector could only stand pointing to heaven as the pillar
of holy Troy. When God speaks out of the whirlwind he may well speak in the wilderness.
But the monotheism of the nomad was not enough for all that varied civilisation of fields
and fences and walled cities and temples and towns; and the turn of these things also was
to come, when the two could be combined in a more definite and domestic religion. Here and
there in all that pagan crowd could be found a philosopher whose thought ran of pure
theism; but he never had, or supposed that he had, the power to change the customs of the
whole populace. Nor is it easy even in such philosophies to find a true definition of this
deep business of the relation of polytheism and theism. Perhaps the nearest we can come to
striking the note, or giving the thing a name, is in something far away from all that
civilisation and more remote from Rome than the isolation of Israel. It is in a saying I
once heard from some Hindu tradition; that gods as well as men are only the dreams of
Brahma; and will perish when Brahma wakes. There is indeed in such an image something of
the soul of Asia which is less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it
despair, even if they would call it peace. This note of nihilism can be considered later
in a fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. It is enough to say here that there is
more of disillusion in that idea of a divine awakening than is implied for us in the
passage from mythology to religion. But the symbol is very subtle and exact in one
respect; that it does suggest the disproportion and even disruption between the very ideas
of mythology and religion, the chasm between the two categories. It is really the collapse
of comparative religion that there is no comparison between God and the gods. There is no
more comparison than there is between a man and the men who walked about in his dreams.
Under the next heading some attempt will be made to indicate the twilight of that dream in
which the gods walk about like men. But if anyone fancies the contrast of monotheism and
polytheism is only a matter of some people having one god and others a few more, for him
it will be far nearer the truth to plunge into the elephantine extravagance of Brahmin
cosmology; that he may feel a shudder going through the veil of things, the many-handed
creators, and the throned and haloed animals and all the network of entangled stars and
rulers of the night, as the eyes of Brahma open like dawn upon the death of all.
What are here called the Gods might almost alternatively be called the day-dreams. To
compare them to dreams is not to deny that dreams can come true. To compare them to
travellers' tales is not to deny that they may be true tales, or at least truthful tales.
In truth they are the sort of tales the traveller tells to himself. All this mythological
business belongs to the poetical part of men. It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a
myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It
needs a poet to criticise it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is
proved by the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never heard
explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical
studies of these popular poems. We do not submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to
a calculating boy; but we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be
treated as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not
appreciated at all. When the professor is told by the Polynesian that once there was
nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the learned man feels a thrill and a half
temptation to wish it were true, he is no judge of such things at all. When he is assured,
on the best Red Indian authority, that a primitive hero carried the sun and moon and stars
in a box, unless he clasps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a child would at such a
charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter. This test is not nonsensical; primitive
children and barbaric children do laugh and kick like other children; and we must have a
certain simplicity to repicture the childhood of the world. When Hiawatha was told by his
nurse that a warrior threw his grandmother up to the moon, he laughed like any English
child told by his nurse that a cow jumped over the moon. The child sees the joke as well
as most men, and better than some scientific men. But the ultimate test even of the
fantastic is the appropriateness of the inappropriate. And the test must appear merely
arbitrary because it is merely artistic. If any student tells me that the infant Hiawatha
only laughed out of respect for tribal custom of sacrificing the aged to economical
housekeeping, I say he did not. If any scholar tells me that the cow jumped over the moon
only because a heifer was sacrificed to Diana, I answer that it did not. It happened
because it is obviously the right thing for a cow to jump over the moon. Mythology is a
lost art, one of the few arts that really are lost; but it is an art. The horned moon and
the horned mooncalf make a harmonious and almost a quiet pattern. And throwing your
grandmother into the sky is not good behaviour; but it is perfectly good taste.
Thus scientists seldom understand, as artists understand, that one branch of the
beautiful is the ugly. They seldom allow for the legitimate liberty of the grotesque. And
they will dismiss a savage myth as merely coarse and clumsy and an evidence of
degradation, because it has not all the beauty of the herald Mercury new lighted on a
heaven-kissing hill; when it really has the beauty of the Mock Turtle or the Mad Hatter.
It is the supreme proof of a man being prosaic that he always insists on poetry being
poetical. Sometimes the humour is in the very subject as well as the style of the fable.
The Australian aborigines, regarded as the rudest of savages, have a story about a giant
frog who had swallowed the sea and all the waters of the world; and who was only forced to
spill them by being made to laugh. All the animals with all their antics passed before him
and, like Queen Victoria, he was not amused. He collapsed at last before an eel who stood
delicately balanced on the tip of its tail, doubtless with a rather desperate dignity. Any
amount of fine fantastic literature might be made out of that fable. There is philosophy
in that vision of the dry world before the beatific Deluge of laughter. There is
imagination in the mountainous monster erupting like an aqueous volcano; there is plenty
of fun in the thought of his goggling visage as the pelican or the penguin passed by.
Anyhow the frog laughed; but the folk-lore student remains grave.
Moreover, even where the fables are inferior as art, they cannot be properly judged by
science; still less properly judged as science. Some myths are very crude and queer like
the early drawings of children; but the child is trying to draw. It is none the less an
error to treat his drawing as if it were a diagram, or intended to be a diagram. The
student cannot make a scientific statement about the savage, because the savage is not
making a scientific statement about the world. He is saying something quite different;
what might be called the gossip of the gods. We may say, if we like, that it is believed
before there is time to examine it. It would be truer to say it is accepted before there
is time to believe it.
I confess I doubt the whole theory of the dissemination of myths or (as it commonly is)
of one myth. It is true that something in our nature and conditions makes many stories
similar; but each of them may be original. One man does not borrow the story from the
other man, though he may tell it from the same motive as the other man. It would be easy
to apply the whole argument about legend to literature; and turn it into a vulgar
monomania of plagiarism. I would undertake to trace a notion like that of the Golden Bough
through individual modern novels as easily as through communal and antiquated myths. I
would undertake to find something like a bunch of flowers figuring again and again from
the fatal bouquet of Becky Sharpe to the spray of roses sent by the Princess of Ruritania.
But though these flowers may spring from the same soil, it is not the same faded flower
that is flung from hand to hand. Those flowers are always fresh.
The true origin of all the myths has been discovered much too often. There are too many
keys to mythology, as there are too many cryptograms in Shakespeare. Everything is
phallic; everything is totemistic; everything is seed-time and harvest; everything is
ghosts and grave-offerings; everything is the golden bough of sacrifice; everything is the
sun and moon; everything is everything. Every folk-lore student who knew a little more
than his own monomania, every man of wider reading and critical culture like Andrew Lang,
has practically confessed that the bewilderment of these things left his brain spinning.
Yet the whole trouble comes from a man trying to look at these stories from the outside,
as if they were scientific objects. He has only to look at them from the inside, and ask
himself how he would begin a story. A story may start with anything and go anywhere. It
may start with a bird without the bird being a totem; it may start with the sun without
being a solar myth. It is said there are only ten plots in the world; and there will
certainly be common and recurrent elements. Set ten thousand children talking at once, and
telling tarradiddles about what they did in the wood, and it will not be hard to find
parallels suggesting sun-worship or animal worship. Some of the stories may be pretty and
some silly and some perhaps dirty; but they can only be judged as stories. In the modern
dialect, they can only be judged aesthetically. It is strange that aesthetics, or mere
feeling, which is now allowed to usurp where it has no rights at all, to wreck reason with
pragmatism and morals with anarchy, is apparently not allowed to give a purely aesthetic
judgement on what is obviously a purely aesthetic question. We may be fanciful about
everything except fairy-tales.
Now the first fact is that the most simple people have the most subtle ideas. Everybody
ought to know that, for everybody has been a child. Ignorant as a child is, he knows more
than he can say and feels not only atmospheres but fine shades. And in this matter there
are several fine shades. Nobody understands it who has not had what can only be called the
ache of the artist to find some sense and some story in the beautiful things he sees; his
hunger for secrets and his anger at any tower or tree escaping with its tale untold. He
feels that nothing is perfect unless it is personal. Without that the blind unconscious
beauty of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue. One need only be a very
minor poet to have wrestled with the tower or the tree until it spoke like a titan or a
dryad. It is often said that pagan mythology was a personification of the powers of
nature. The phrase is true in a sense, but it is very unsatisfactory; because it implies
that the forces are abstractions and the personification is artificial. Myths are not
allegories. Natural powers are not in this case abstractions. It is not as if there were a
God of Gravitation. There may be a genius of the waterfall; but not of mere falling, even
less than of mere water. The impersonation is not of something impersonal. The point is
that the personality perfects the water with significance. Father Christmas is not an
allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially
given a human form, like a snow man. He is something that gives a new meaning to the white
world and the evergreens, so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The test
therefore is purely imaginative. But imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not
follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true
artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths;
that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural
mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the
trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination
is a sort of incantation that can call it up.
Now we do not comprehend this process in ourselves, far less in our most remote
fellow-creatures And the danger of these things being classified is that they may seem to
be comprehended. A really fine work of folklore, like The Golden Bough, will leave too
many readers with the idea, for instance, that this or that story of a giant's or wizard's
heart in a casket or a cave only 'means' some stupid and static superstition called 'the
external soul.' But we do not know what these things mean, simply because we do not know
what we ourselves mean when we are moved by them. Suppose somebody in a story says 'Pluck
this flower and a princess will die in a castle beyond the sea,' we do not know why
something stirs in the subconsciousness, or why what is impossible seems almost
inevitable. Suppose we read 'And in the hour when the king extinguished the candle his
ships were wrecked far away on the coast of Hebrides.' We do not know why the imagination
has accepted that image before the reason can reject it; or why such correspondences seem
really to correspond to something in the soul. Very deep things in our nature, some dim
sense of the dependence of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that the things
nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in
material substances, and many more emotions past fading out, are in an idea like that of
the external soul. The power even in the myths of savages is like the power in the
metaphors of poets. The soul of such a metaphor is often very emphatically an external
soul. The best critics have remarked that in the best poets the simile is often a picture
that seems quite separate from the text. It is as irrelevant as the remote castle to the
flower or the Hebridean coast to the candle. Shelley compares the skylark to a young woman
on a turret, to a rose embedded in thick foliage, to a series of things that seem to be
about as unlike a skylark in the sky as anything we can imagine. I suppose the most potent
piece of pure magic in English literature is the much-quoted passage in Keats's Nightingale
about the casements opening on the perilous foam. And nobody notices that the image seems
to come from nowhere; that it appears abruptly after some almost equally irrelevant
remarks about Ruth; and that it has nothing in the world to do with the subject of the
poem. If there is one place in the world where nobody could reasonably expect to find a
nightingale, it is on a window-sill at the seaside. But it is only in the same sense that
nobody would expect to find a giant's heart in a casket under the sea. Now, it would be
very dangerous to classify the metaphors of the poets. When Shelley says that the cloud
will rise 'like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,' it would be quite
possible to call the first a case of the coarse primitive birth-myth and the second a
survival of the ghost-worship which became ancestor-worship. But it is the wrong way of
dealing with a cloud; and is liable to leave the learned in the condition of Polonius,
only too ready to think it like a weasel, or very like a whale.
Two facts follow from this psychology of day-dreams, which must be kept in mind
throughout their development in mythologies and even religions. First, these imaginative
impressions are often strictly local. So far from being abstractions turned into
allegories, they are often images almost concentrated into idols. The poet feels the
mystery of a particular forest; not of the science of afforestation or the department of
woods and forests. He worships the peak of a particular mountain, not the abstract idea of
altitude. So we find the god is not merely water but often one special river; he may be
the sea because the sea is single like a stream; the river that runs round the world.
Ultimately doubtless many deities are enlarged into elements; but they are something more
than omnipresent. Apollo does not merely dwell wherever the sun shines; his home is on the
rock of Delphi. Diana is great enough to be in three places at once, earth and heaven and
hell, but greater is Diana of the Ephesians. This localised feeling has its lowest form in
the mere fetish or talisman, such as millionaires put on their motor-cars. But it can also
harden into something like a high and serious religion, where it is connected with high
and serious duties; into the gods of the city or even the gods of the hearth.
The second consequence is this; that in these pagan cults there is every shade of
sincerity--and insincerity. In what sense exactly did an Athenian really think he had to
sacrifice to Pallas Athena? What scholar is really certain of the answer? In what sense
did Dr. Johnson really think that he had to touch all the posts in the street or that he
had to collect orange-peel? In what sense does a child really think that he ought to step
on every alternate paving-stone? Two things are at least fairly clear. First, in simpler
and less self-conscious times these forms could become more solid without really becoming
more serious. Day-dreams could be acted in broad daylight, with more liberty of artistic
expression; but still perhaps with something of the light step of the somnambulist. Wrap
Dr. Johnson in an antique mantle, crown him (by his kind permission) with a garland, and
he will move in state under those ancient skies of morning; touching a series of sacred
posts carved with the heads of the strange terminal gods, that stand at the limits of the
land and of the life of man. Make the child free of the marbles and mosaics of some
classic temples to play on a whole floor inlaid with squares of black and white; and he
will willingly make this fulfilment of his idle and drifting daydream the clear field for
a grave and graceful dance. But the posts and the paving-stones are little more and little
less real than they are under modern limits. They are not really much more serious for
being taken seriously. They have the sort of sincerity that they always had; the sincerity
of art as a symbol that expresses very real spiritualities under the surface of life. But
they are only sincere in the same sense as art; not sincere in the same sense as morality.
The eccentric's collection of orange-peel may turn to oranges in a Mediterranean festival
or to golden apples in a Mediterranean myth. But they are never on the same plane with the
difference between giving the orange to a blind beggar and carefully placing the
orange-peel so that the beggar may fall and break his leg. Between these two things there
is a difference of kind and not of degree. The child does not think it wrong to step on
the paving-stone as he thinks it wrong to step on the dog's tail. And it is very certain
that whatever jest or sentiment or fancy first set Johnson touching the wooden posts, he
never touched wood with any of the feeling with which he stretched out his hands to the
timber of that terrible tree, which was the death of God and the life of man
As already noted, this does not mean that there was no reality or even no religious
sentiment in such a mood. As a matter of fact the Catholic Church has taken over with
uproarious success the whole of this popular business of giving people local legends and
lighter ceremonial movements. In so far as all this sort of paganism was innocent and in
touch with nature, there is no reason why it should not be patronised by patron saints as
much as by pagan gods. And in any case there are degrees of seriousness in the most
natural make-believe. There is all the difference between fancying there are fairies in
the wood, which often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really
frightening ourselves until we walk a mile rather than pass a house we have told ourselves
is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real
things and related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or
fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul. We all understand that and the pagans
understood it. The point is that paganism did not really stir the soul except with these
doubts and fancies, with the consequence that we to-day can have little beyond doubts and
fancies about paganism. All the best critics agree that all the greatest poets, in pagan
Hellas for example, had an attitude towards their gods which is quite queer and puzzling
to men in the Christian era. There seems to be an admitted conflict between the god and
the man; but everybody seems to be doubtful about which is the hero and which is the
villain. This doubt does not merely apply to a doubter like Euripides in the Bacchae;
it applies to a moderate conservative like Sophocles in the Antigone; or even to a
regular Tory and reactionary like Aristophanes in the Frogs. Sometimes it would
seem that the Greeks believed above all things in reverence, only they had nobody to
revere. But the point of the puzzle is this, that all this vagueness and variation arise
from the fact that the whole thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no
rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
This is the mighty and branching tree called mythology which ramifies round the whole
world, whose remote branches under separate skies bear like coloured birds the costly
idols of Asia and the half-baked fetishes of Africa and the fairy kings and princesses of
the folk-tales of the forest, and buried amid vines and olives the Lares of the Latins,
and carried on the clouds of Olympus the buoyant supremacy of the gods of Greece. These
are the myths: and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men. But he who
has most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a
religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion. They satisfy some of
the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at
certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality. But though they
provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up
and say 'I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,' etc., as he stands up and says 'I
believe in God the Father Almighty,' and the rest of the Apostles Creed. Many believed in
some and not in others, or more in some and less in others, or only in a very vague
poetical sense in any. There was no moment when they were all collected into an orthodox
order which men would fight and be tortured to keep intact. Still less did anybody ever
say in that fashion: 'I believe in Odin and Thor and Freya,' for outside Olympus even the
Olympian order grows cloudy and chaotic. It seems clear to me that Thor was not a god at
all but a hero. Nothing resembling a religion would picture anybody resembling a god as
groping like a pigmy in a great cavern, that turned out to be the glove of a giant. That
is the glorious ignorance called adventure Thor may have been a great adventurer; but to
call him a god is like trying to compare Jehovah with Jack and the Beanstalk. Odin seems
to have been a real barbarian chief, possibly of the Dark Ages after Christianity.
Polytheism fades away at its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a
thing like monotheism as held by serious monotheists. Again it does satisfy the need to
cry out on some uplifted name or some noble memory in moments that are themselves noble
and uplifted; such as the birth of a child or the saving of a city. But the name was so
used by many to whom it was only a name. Finally it did satisfy, or rather it partially
satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of surrendering something as the
portion of the unknown powers; of pouring of wine upon the ground, of throwing a ring into
the sea; in a word, of sacrifice. It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our
advantage to the full; of putting something in the other balance to ballast our dubious
pride, of paying tithes to nature for our land. This deep truth of the danger of
insolence, or being too big for our boots, runs through all the great Greek tragedies and
makes them great. But it runs side by side with an almost cryptic agnosticism about the
real nature of the gods to be propitiated. Where that gesture of surrender is most
magnificent, as among the great Greeks, there is really much more idea that the man will
be the better for losing the ox than that the god will be the better for getting it. It is
said that in its grosser forms there are often actions grotesquely suggestive of the god
really eating the sacrifice. But this fact is falsified by the error that I put first in
this note on mythology. It is misunderstanding the psychology of day-dreams. A child
pretending there is a goblin in a hollow tree will do a crude and material thing, like
leaving a piece of cake for him. A poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like
bringing to the god fruits as well as flowers. But the degree of seriousness in both acts
may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree. The crude fancy is no more a creed
than the ideal fancy is a creed. Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist,
any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he
guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in
truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St.
Paul declared to them whom they had ignorantly worshipped.
The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach
the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not
restrain it at all. It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate
from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an
afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists
or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to
allegorise them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do
not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if
the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that
the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion.
There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers. Mythology,
then, sought god through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty, in the sense
in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque ugliness. But the imagination has its
own laws and therefore its own triumphs, which neither logicians nor men of science can
understand It remained true to that imaginative instinct through a thousand extravagances,
through every crude cosmic pantomime of a pig eating the moon or the world being cut out
of a cow, through all the dizzy convolutions and mystic malformations of Asiatic art,
through all the stark and staring rigidity of Egyptian and Assyrian portraiture, through
every kind of cracked mirror of mad art that seemed to deform the world and displace the
sky, it remained true to something about which there can be no argument; something that
makes it possible for some artist of some school to stand suddenly still before that
particular deformity and say, 'My dream has come true.' Therefore do we all in fact feel
that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are wise enough not
to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what is meant by Prometheus stealing
fire from heaven, until some prig of a pessimist or progressive person explains what it
means. Therefore we all know the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In
this sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only because it is the
ignorant who appreciate poems. Imagination has its own laws and triumphs; and a tremendous
power began to clothe its images, whether images in the mind or in the mud, whether in the
bamboo of the South Sea Islands or the marble of the mountains of Hellas. But there was
always a trouble in the triumph, which in these pages I have tried to analyse in vain; but
perhaps I might in conclusion state it thus.
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship
unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of
the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he
actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of
worship would stunt and even maim him for ever. Henceforth being merely secular would be a
servitude and an inhibition. If man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in
irons. We therefore feel throughout the whole of paganism a curious double feeling of
trust and distrust. When the man makes the gesture of salutation and of sacrifice, when he
pours out the libation or lifts up the sword, he knows he is doing a worthy and a virile
thing. He knows he is doing one of the things for which a man was made. His imaginative
experiment is therefore justified. But precisely because it began with imagination, there
is to the end something of mockery in it, and especially in the object of it. This
mockery, in the more in tense moments of the intellect, becomes the almost intolerable
irony of Greek tragedy. There seems a disproportion between the priest and the altar or
between the altar and the god. The priest seems more solemn and almost more sacred than
the god. All the order of the temple is solid and sane and satisfactory to certain parts
of our nature; except the very centre of it, which seems strangely mutable and dubious,
like a dancing flame. It is the first thought round which the whole has been built; and
the first thought is still a fancy and almost a frivolity. In that strange place of
meeting, the man seems more statuesque than the statue. He himself can stand for ever in
the noble and natural attitude of the statue of the Praying Boy. But whatever name be
written on the pedestal, whether Zeus or Ammon or Apollo, the god whom he worships is
Proteus.
The Praying Boy may be said to express a need rather than to satisfy a need. It is by a
normal and necessary action that his hands are lifted; but it is no less a parable that
his hands are empty. About the nature of that need there will be more to say; but at this
point it may be said that perhaps after all this true instinct, that player and sacrifice
are a liberty and an enlargement, refers back to that vast and half-forgotten conception
of universal fatherhood. which we have already seen everywhere fading from the morning
sky. This is true; and yet it is not all the truth. There remains an indestructible
instinct, in the poet as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in
localising his God. It is something in the soul of poetry if not of piety. And the
greatest of poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us the universe or
the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger language, a local habitation and a
name. No poet is merely a pantheist; those who are counted most pantheistic, like Shelley,
start with some local and particular image as the pagans did. After all, Shelley wrote of
the skylark because it was a skylark. You could not issue an imperial or international
translation of it for use in South America, in which it was changed to an ostrich. So the
mythological imagination moves as it were in circles, hovering either to find a place or
to return to it. In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a
recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of
seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places
found. So far could the lonely imagination lead, and we must turn later to the lonely
reason. Nowhere along this road did the two ever travel together.
That is where all these things differed from religion or the reality in which these
different dimensions met in a sort of solid. They differed from the reality not in what
they looked like but in what they were. A picture may look like a landscape; it may look
in every detail exactly like a landscape. The only detail in which it differs is that it
is not a landscape. The difference is only that which divides a portrait of Queen
Elizabeth from Queen Elizabeth. Only in this mythical and mystical world the portrait
could exist before the person; and the portrait was therefore more vague and doubtful. But
anybody who has felt and fed on the atmosphere of these myths will know what I mean, when
I say that in one sense they did not really profess to be realities. The pagans had dreams
about realities; and they would have been the first to admit, in their own words, that
some came through the gate of ivory and others through the gate of horn. The dreams do
indeed tend to be very vivid dreams when they touch on those tender or tragic things,
which can really make a sleeper awaken with the sense that his heart has been broken in
his sleep. They tend continually to hover over certain passionate themes of meeting and
parting, of a life that ends in death or a death that is the beginning of life. Demeter
wanders over a stricken world looking for a stolen child; Isis stretches out her arms over
the earth in vain to gather the limbs of Osiris; and there is lamentation upon the hills
for Atys and through the woods for Adonis. There mingles with all such mourning the
mystical and profound sense that death can be a deliverer and an appeasement; that such
death gives us a divine blood for a renovating river and that all good is found in
gathering the broken body of the god. We may truly call these foreshadowing; so long as we
remember that foreshadowings are shadows. And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very
exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which
reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to
say that they were like is to say that they were different. Saying something is like a dog
is another way of saying it is not a dog; and it is in this sense of identity that a myth
is not a man. Nobody really thought of Isis as a human being, nobody really thought of
Demeter as a historical character, nobody thought of Adonis as the founder of a Church.
There was no idea that any one of them had changed the world; but rather that their
recurrent death and life bore the sad and beautiful burden of the changelessness of the
world. Not one of them was a revolution, save in the sense of the revolution of the sun
and moon. Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they mean the shadows that
we are and the shadows that we pursue. In certain sacrificial and communal aspects they
naturally suggest what sort of a god might satisfy them; but they do not profess to be
satisfied. Anyone who says they do is a bad judge of poetry.
Those who talk about Pagan Christs have less sympathy with Paganism than with
Christianity. Those who call these cults 'religions,' and 'compare' them with the
certitude and challenge of the Church have much less appreciation than we have of what
made heathenism human, or of why classic literature is still something that hangs in the
air like a song. It is no very human tenderness for the hungry to prove that hunger is the
same as food. It is no very genial understanding of youth to argue that hope destroys the
need for happiness. And it is utterly unreal to argue that these images in the mind,
admired entirely in the abstract, were even in the same world with a living man and a
living polity that were worshipped because they were concrete. We might as well say that a
boy playing at robbers is the same as a man in his first day in the trenches; or that
boy's first fancies about 'the not impossible she' are the same as the sacrament of
marriage. They are fundamentally different exactly where they are superficially similar;
we might almost say they are not the same even when they are the same. They are only
different because one is real and the other is not. I do not mean merely that I myself
believe that one is true and the other is not. I mean that one was never meant to be true
in the same sense as the other. The sense in which it was meant to be true I have tried to
suggest vaguely here, but it is undoubtedly very subtle and almost indescribable. It is so
subtle that the students who profess to put it up as a rival to our religion miss the
whole meaning and purport of their own study. We know better than the scholars, even those
of us who are no scholars, what was in that hollow cry that went forth over the dead
Adonis and why the Great Mother had a daughter wedded to death. We have entered more
deeply than they into the Eleusinian Mysteries and have passed a higher grade, where gate
within gate guarded the wisdom of Orpheus. We know the meaning of all the myths. We know
the last secret revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a
prophet saying 'These things are.' It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying,
'Why cannot these things be?'
I have dwelt at some little length on this imaginative sort of paganism, which has
crowded the world with temples and is everywhere the parent of popular festivity. For the
central history of civilisation, as I see it, consists of two further stages before the
final stage of Christendom. The first was the struggle between this paganism and something
less worthy than itself, and the second the process by which it grew in itself less
worthy. In this very varied and often very vague polytheism there was a weakness of
original sin. Pagan gods were depicted as tossing men like dice; and indeed they are
loaded dice. About sex especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are
born mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity. This disproportion dragged
down the winged fancies; and filled the end of paganism with a mere filth and litter of
spawning gods. But the first point to realise is that this sort of paganism had an early
collision with another sort of paganism; and that the issue of that essentially spiritual
struggle really determined the history of the world. In order to understand it we must
pass to a review of the other kind of paganism. It can be considered much more briefly;
indeed there is a very real sense in which the less that is said about it the better. If
we have called the first sort of mythology the day-dream, we might very well call the
second sort of mythology the nightmare.
Superstition recurs in all ages, and especially in rationalistic ages. I remember
defending the religious tradition against a whole luncheon table of distinguished
agnostics; and before the end of our conversation every one of them had procured from his
pocket, or exhibited on his watch-chain, some charm or talisman from which he admitted
that he was never separated. I was the only person present who had neglected to provide
himself with a fetish. Superstition recurs in a rationalist age because it rests on
something which, if not identical with rationalism, is not unconnected with scepticism. It
is at least very closely connected with agnosticism. It rests on something that is really
a very human and intelligible sentiment, like the local invocations of the numen in
popular paganism. But it is an agnostic sentiment, for it rests on two feelings: first
that we do not really know the laws of the universe; and second that they may be very
different to all we call reason. Such men realise the real truth that enormous things do
often turn upon tiny things. When a whisper comes, from tradition or what not, that one
particular tiny thing is the key or clue, something deep and not altogether senseless in
human nature tells them that it is not unlikely. This feeling exists in both the forms of
paganism here under consideration. But when we come to the second form of it, we find it
transformed and filled with another and more terrible spirit.
In dealing with the lighter thing called mythology, I have said little about the most
disputable aspect of it; the extent to which such invocation of the spirits of the sea or
the elements can indeed call spirits from the vasty deep; or rather, (as the Shakespearean
scoffer put it) whether the spirits come when they are called. I believe that I am right
in thinking that this problem, practical as it sounds, did not play a dominant part in the
poetical business of mythology. But I think it even more obvious, on the evidence, that
things of that sort have sometimes appeared, even if they were only appearances. But when
we come to the world of superstition, in a more subtle sense, there is a shade of
difference; a deepening and a darkening shade. Doubtless most popular superstition is as
frivolous as any popular mythology. Men do not believe as a dogma that God would throw a
thunderbolt at them for walking under a ladder; more often they amuse themselves with the
not very laborious exercise of walking round it. There is no more in it than what I have
already adumbrated; a sort of airy agnosticism about the possibilities of so strange a
world. But there is another sort of superstition that does definitely look for results;
what might be called a realistic superstition. And with that the question of whether
spirits do answer or do appear becomes much more serious. As I have said, it seems to me
pretty certain that they sometimes do; but about that there is a distinction that has been
the beginning of much evil in the world. Whether it be because the Fall has really brought
men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely
that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the
black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the
white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more
carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more
fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse,
drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of
secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had
no nonsense about them. And indeed that popular phase exactly expresses the point. The
gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of
good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the
nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon
felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective;
that it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not exactly go into
the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph. It was an
adventure rather than an assignation. But the devil really kept his appointments and even
in one sense kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth,
that he had broken them.
In the accounts given us of many rude or savage races we gather that the cult of demons
often came after the cult of deities, and even after the cult of one single and supreme
deity. It may be suspected that in almost all such places the higher deity is felt to be
too far off for appeal in certain petty matters, and men invoke the spirits because they
are in a more literal sense familiar spirits. But with the idea of employing the demons
who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the demons. It may indeed be truly
described as the idea of being worthy of the demons; of making oneself fit for their
fastidious and exacting society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that
some trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the hidden spring
that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And there is after all something in the
idea of such an Open Sesame. But with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible
notion that the gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a monkey
trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man deliberately sets
himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of
evil will extort a sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of
the world. This is the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world. For most
cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even
artistic, a sort of art for art's sake. Men do not do it because they do not think it
horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible. They wish, in the most
literal sense, to sup on horrors. That is why it is often found that rude races like the
Australian natives are not cannibals; while much more refined and intelligent races, like
the New Zealand Maories, occasionally are. They are refined and intelligent enough to
indulge sometimes in a self-conscious diabolism. But if we could understand their minds,
or even really understand their language, we should probably find that they were not
acting as ignorant, that is as innocent cannibals. They are not doing it because they do
not think it wrong, but precisely because they do think it wrong. They are acting like a
Parisian decadent at a Black Mass. But the Black Mass has to hide underground from the
presence of the real Mass. In other words, the demons have really been in hiding since the
coming of Christ on earth. The cannibalism of the higher barbarians is in hiding from the
civilisation of the white man. But before Christendom, and especially outside Europe, this
was not always so. In the ancient world the demons often wandered abroad like dragons.
They could be positively and publicly enthroned as gods. Their enormous images could be
set up in public temples in the centre of populous cities. And all over the world the
traces can be found of this striking and solid fact, so curiously overlooked by the
moderns who speak of all such evil as primitive and early in evolution, that as a matter
of fact some of the very highest civilisations of the world were the very places where the
horns of Satan were exalted, not only to the stars but in the face of the sun. Take for
example the Aztecs and American Indians of the ancient empires of Mexico and Peru. They
were at least as elaborate as Egypt or China and only less lively than that central
civilisation which is our own. But those who criticise that central civilisation (which is
always their own civilisation) have a curious habit of not merely doing their legitimate
duty in condemning its crimes, but of going out of their way to idealise its victims. They
always assume that before the advent of Europe there was nothing anywhere but Eden. And
Swinburne, in that spirited chorus of the nations in 'Songs before Sunrise,' used an
expression about Spain in her South American conquests which always struck me as very
strange. He said something about 'her sins and sons through sinless lands dispersed,' and
how they 'made accursed the name of man and thrice accursed the name of God.' It may be
reasonable enough that he should say the Spaniards were sinful, but why in the world
should he say that the South Americans were sinless? Why should he have supposed that
continent to be exclusively populated by archangels or saints perfect in heaven? It would
be a strong thing to say of the most respectable neighbourhood; but when we come to think
of what we really do know of that society the remark is rather funny. We know that the
sinless priests of this sinless people worshipped sinless gods, who accepted as the nectar
and ambrosia of their sunny paradise nothing but incessant human sacrifice accompanied by
horrible torments. We may note also in the mythology of this American civilisation that
element of reversal or violence against instinct of which Dante wrote; which runs
backwards everywhere through the unnatural religion of the demons. It is notable not only
in ethics but in aesthetics. A South American idol was made as ugly as possible, as a
Greek image was made as beautiful as possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by
working backwards against their own nature and the nature of things. There was always a
sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark red timber of the
forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a cracked mirror.
In any case it is clear enough that the painted and gilded civilisation of tropical
America systematically indulged in human sacrifice. It is by no means clear, so far as I
know, that the Eskimos ever indulged in human sacrifice. They were not civilised enough.
They were too closely imprisoned by the white winter and the endless dark. Chill penury
repressed their noble rage and froze the genial current of the soul. It was in brighter
days and broader daylight that the noble rage is found unmistakably raging. It was in
richer and more instructed lands that the genial current flowed on the altars, to be drunk
by great gods wearing goggling and grinning masks and called on in terror or torment by
long cacophonous names that sound like laughter in hell. A warmer climate and a more
scientific cultivation were needed to bring forth these blooms; to draw up towards the sun
the large leaves and flamboyant blossoms that gave their gold and crimson and purple to
that garden, which Swinburne compares to the Hesperides. There was at least no doubt about
the dragon.
I do not raise in this connection the special controversy about Spain and Mexico; but I
may remark in passing that it resembles exactly the question that must in some sense be
raised afterwards about Rome and Carthage. In both cases there has been a queer habit
among the English of always siding against the Europeans, and representing the rival
civilisation, in Swinburne's phrase, as sinless; when its sins were obviously crying or
rather screaming to heaven. For Carthage also was a high civilisation, indeed a much more
highly civilised civilisation. And Carthage also founded that civilisation on a religion
of fear, sending up everywhere the smoke of human sacrifice. Now it is very right to
rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards and ideals. But it
is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the other races and religions that
professed the very opposite standards and ideals. There is a very real sense in which the
Christian is worse than the heathen, the Spaniard worse than the Red Indian, or even the
Roman potentially worse than the Carthaginian. But there is only one sense in which he is
worse; and that is not in being positively worse. The Christian is only worse because it
is his business to be better.
This inverted imagination produces things of which it is better not to speak. Some of
them indeed might almost be named without being known; for they are of that extreme evil
which seems innocent to the innocent. They are too inhuman even to be indecent. But
without dwelling much longer in these dark corners, it may be noted as not irrelevant here
that certain anti-human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic. There
may be suspected as running through it everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of the
idea of childhood. People would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if
they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth
of children. The Hebrew prophets were perpetually protesting against the Hebrew race
relapsing into an idolatry that involved such a war upon children; and it is probable
enough that this abominable apostasy from the God of Israel has occasionally appeared in
Israel since, in the form of what is called ritual murder; not of course by any
representative of the religion of Judaism, but by individual and irresponsible diabolists
who did happen to be Jews. This sense that the forces of evil especially threaten
childhood is found again in the enormous popularity of the Child Martyr of the Middle
Ages. Chaucer did but give another version of a very national English legend, when he
conceived the wickedest of all possible witches as the dark alien woman watching behind
her high lattice and heading, like the babble of a brook down the stony street, the
singing of little St. Hugh.
Anyhow the part of such speculations that concerns this story centered especially round
that eastern end of the Mediterranean, where the nomads had turned gradually into traders
and had begun to trade with the whole world. Indeed in the sense of trade and travel and
colonial extension, it already had something like an empire of the whole world. Its purple
dye, the emblem of its rich pomp and luxury, had steeped the wares which were sold far
away amid the last crags of Cornwall and the sails that entered the silence of tropic seas
amid all the mystery of Africa. It might be said truly to have painted the map purple. It
was already a world-wide success, when the princes of Tyre would hardly have troubled to
notice that one of their princesses had condescended to marry the chief of some tribe
called Judah; when the merchants of its African outpost would only have curled their
bearded and Semitic lips with a slight smile at the mention of a village called Rome. And
indeed no two things could have seemed more distant from each other, not only in space but
in Spirit, than the monotheism of the Palestinian tribe and the very virtues of the small
Italian republic. There was but one thing between them; and the thing which divided them
has united them. Very various and incompatible were the things that could be loved by the
consuls of Rome and the prophets of Israel; but they were at one in what they hated. It is
very easy in both cases to represent that hatred as something merely hateful. It is easy
enough to make a merely harsh and inhuman figure either of Elijah raving above the
slaughter of Carmel or Cato thundering against the amnesty of Africa. These men had their
limitations and their local passions; but this criticism of them is unimaginative and
therefore unreal. It leaves out something, something immense and intermediate, facing east
and west and calling up this passion in its eastern and western enemies; and that
something is the first subject of this chapter.
The civilisation that centered in Tyre and Sidon was above all things practical. It has
left little in the way of art and nothing in the way of poetry. But it prided itself upon
being very efficient; and it followed in its philosophy and religion that strange and
sometimes secret train of thought which we have already noted in those who look for
immediate effects. There is always in such a mentality an idea that there is a short cut
to the secret of all success; something that would shock the world by this sort of
shameless thoroughness. They believed, in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who
delivered the goods. In their dealings with their god Moloch, they themselves were always
careful to deliver the goods. It was an interesting transaction, upon which we shall have
to touch more than once in the rest of the narrative; it is enough to say here that it
involved the theory I have suggested, about a certain attitude towards children. This was
what called up against it in simultaneous fury the servant of one God in Palestine and the
guardians of all the household gods in Rome This is what challenged two things naturally
so much divided by every sort of distance and disunion, whose union was to save the world.
I have called the fourth and final division of the spiritual elements into which I
should divide heathen humanity by the name of The Philosophers. I confess that it covers
in my mind much that would generally be classified otherwise; and that what are here
called philosophies are very often called religions. I believe however that my own
description will be found to be much the more realistic and not the less respectful. But
we must first take philosophy in its purest and clearest form that we may trace its normal
outline; and that is to be found in the world of the purest and clearest outlines, that
culture of the Mediterranean of which we have been considering the mythologies and
idolatries in the last two chapters.
Polytheism, or that aspect of paganism, was never to the pagan what Catholicism is to
the Catholic. It was never a view of the universe satisfying all sides of life; a complete
and complex truth with something to say about everything. It was only a satisfaction of
one side of the soul of man, even if we call it the religious side; and I think it is
truer to call it the imaginative side. But this it did satisfy; in the end it satisfied it
to satiety. All that world was a tissue of interwoven tales and cults, and there ran in
and out of it, as we have already seen, that black thread among its more blameless
colours; the darker paganism that was really diabolism. But we all know that this did not
mean that all pagan men thought of nothing but pagan gods. Precisely because mythology
only satisfied one mood, they turned in other moods to something totally different. But it
is very important to realise that it was totally different. It was too different to be
inconsistent. It was so alien that it did not clash. While a mob of people were pouring on
a public holiday to the feast of Adonis or the games in honour of Apollo, this or that man
would prefer to stop at home and think out a little theory about the nature of things.
Sometimes his hobby would even take the form of thinking about the nature of God; or even
in that sense about the nature of the gods. But he very seldom thought of pitting his
nature of the gods against the gods of nature.
It is necessary to insist on this abstraction in the first student of abstractions. He
was not so much antagonistic as absent-minded. His hobby might be the universe; but at
first the hobby was as private as if it had been numismatics or playing draughts. And even
when his wisdom came to be a public possession, and almost a political situation, it was
very seldom on the same plane as the popular and religious institutions. Aristotle, with
his colossal common sense, was perhaps the greatest of all philosophers; certainly the
most practical of all philosophies But Aristotle would no more have set up the Absolute
side by side with the Apollo of Delphi, as a similar or rival religion, than Archimedes
would have thought of setting up the lever as a sort of idol or fetish to be substituted
for the Palladium of the city. Or we might as well imagine Euclid building an altar to an
isosceles triangle, or offering sacrifices to the square of the hypotenuse. The one man
meditated on metaphysics as the other man did on mathematics; for the love of truth or for
curiosity or for the fun of the thing. But that sort of fun never seems to have interfered
very much with the other sort of fun; the fun of dancing or singing to celebrate some
rascally romance about Zeus becoming a bull or a swan. It is perhaps the proof of a
certain superficiality and even insincerity about the popular polytheism, that men could
be philosophers and even sceptics without disturbing it. These thinkers could move the
foundations of the world without altering even the outline of that coloured cloud that
hung above it in the air.
For the thinkers did move the foundations of the world, even when a curious compromise
seemed to prevent them from moving the foundations of the city. The two great philosophers
of antiquity do indeed appear to us as defenders of sane and even of sacred ideas; their
maxims often read like the answers to sceptical questions too completely answered to be
always recorded. Aristotle annihilated a hundred anarchists and nature-worshipping cranks
by the fundamental statement that man is a political animal. Plato in some sense
anticipated the Catholic realism, as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on
the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men exist.
Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist as men do not exist; or
that the men need hardly be considered where they conflict with the ideas. He had
something of the social sentiment that we call Fabian in his ideal of fitting the citizen
to the city. Like an imaginary head to an ideal hat; and great and glorious as he remains,
he has been the Father of all faddists. Aristotle anticipated more fully the sacramental
sanity that was to combine the body and the soul of things; for he considered the nature
of men as well as the nature of morals, and looked to the eyes as well as to the light.
But though these great men were in that sense constructive and conservative, they belonged
to a world where thought was free to the point of being fanciful. Many other great
intellects did indeed follow them, some exalting an abstract vision of virtue, others
following more rationalistically the necessity of the human pursuit of happiness. The
former had the name of Stoics; and their name has passed into a proverb for what is indeed
one of the main moral ideals of mankind: that of strengthening the mind itself until it is
of a texture to resist calamity or even pain. But it is admitted that a great number of
the philosophers degenerated into what we still call sophists. They became a sort of
professional sceptics who went about asking uncomfortable questions, and were handsomely
paid for making themselves a nuisance to normal people. It was perhaps an accidental
resemblance to such questioning quacks that was responsible for the unpopularity of the
great Socrates; whose death might seem to contradict the suggestion of the permanent truce
between the philosophers and the gods. But Socrates did not die as a monotheist who
denounced polytheism; certainly not as a prophet who denounced idols. It is clear to
anyone reading between the lines that there was some notion, right or wrong, of a purely
personal influence affecting morals and perhaps politics The general compromise remained,
whether it was that the Greeks thought their myths a joke or that they thought their
theories a joke. There was never any collision in which one really destroyed the other,
and there was never any combination in which one was really reconciled with the other.
They certainly did not work together; if anything the philosopher was a rival of the
priest. But both seemed to have accepted a sort of separation of functions and remained
parts of the same social system. Another important tradition descends from Pythagoras; who
is significant because he stands nearest to the Oriental mystics who must be considered in
their turn. He taught a sort of mysticism of mathematics, that number is the ultimate
reality; but he also seems to have taught the transmigration of souls like the Brahmins;
and to have left to his followers certain traditional tricks of vegetarianism and
water-drinking very common among the eastern sages, especially those who figure in
fashionable drawing-rooms, like those of the later Roman Empire. But in passing to eastern
sages, and the somewhat different atmosphere of the east, we may approach a rather
important truth by other path.
One of the great philosophers said that it would be well if philosophers were kings, or
kings were philosophers. He spoke as of something too good to be true; but, as a matter of
fact, it not unfrequently was true. A certain type, perhaps too little noticed in history,
may really be called the royal philosopher. To begin with, apart from actual royalty, it
did occasionally become possible for the sage, though he was not what we call a religious
founder, to be something like a political founder. And the great example of this, one of
the very greatest in the world, will with the very thought of it carry us thousands of
miles across the vast spaces of Asia to that very wonderful and in some ways that very
wise world of ideas and institutions, which we dismiss somewhat cheaply when we talk of
China. Men have served many very strange gods; and trusted themselves loyally to many
ideals and even idols. China is a society that has really chosen to believe in intellect.
It has taken intellect seriously; and it may be that it stands alone in the world. From a
very early age it faced the dilemma of the king and the philosopher by actually appointing
a philosopher to advise the king. It made a public institution out of a private
individual, who had nothing in the world to do but to be intellectual. It had and has, of
course, many other things on the same pattern. It creates all ranks and privileges by
public examination; it has nothing that we call an aristocracy; it is a democracy
dominated by an intelligensia. But the point here is that it had philosophers to advise
kings; and one of those philosophers must have been a great philosopher and a great
statesman.
Confucius was not a religious founder or even a religious teacher; possibly not even a
religious man. He was not an atheist; he was apparently what we call an agnostic. But the
really vital point is that it is utterly irrelevant to talk about his religion at all. It
is like talking of theology as the first thing in the story of how Rowland Hill
established the postal system or Baden Powell organised the Boy Scouts. Confucius was not
there to bring a message from heaven to humanity, but to organise China; and he must have
organised it exceedingly well. It follows that he dealt much with morals; but he bound
them up strictly with manners. The peculiarity of his scheme and of his country, in which
it contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom, is that he insisted on
perpetuating an external life with all its forms, that outward continuity might preserve
internal peace. Anyone who knows how much habit has to do with health, of mind as well as
body, will see the truth in his idea. But he will also see that the ancestor-worship and
the reverence for the Sacred Emperor were habits and not creeds. It is unfair to the great
Confucius to say he was a religious founder. It is even unfair to him to say he was not a
religious founder. It is as unfair as going out of one's way to say that Jeremy Bentham
was not a Christian martyr.
But there is a class of most interesting cases in which philosophers were kings, and
not merely the friends of kings. The combination is not accidental. It has a great deal to
do with this rather elusive question of the function of the philosopher. It contains in it
some hint of why philosophy and mythology seldom came to an open rupture. It was not only
because there was something a little frivolous about the mythology. It was also because
there was something a little supercilious about the philosopher. He despised the myths,
but he also despised the mob; and thought they suited each other. The pagan philosopher
was seldom a man of the people, at any rate in spirit; he was seldom a democrat and often
a bitter critic of democracy. He had about him an air of aristocratic and humane leisure;
and his part was most easily played by men who happened to be in such a position. It was
very easy and natural for a prince or a prominent person to play at being as philosophical
as Hamlet or Theseus in the Midsummer Night's Dream. And from very early ages we
find ourselves in the presence of these princely intellectuals. In fact, we find one of
them in the very first recorded ages of the world; sitting on the primeval throne that
looked over ancient Egypt.
The most intense interest of the incident of Akenahten, commonly called the Heretic
Pharaoh, lies in the fact that he was the one example, at any rate before Christian times,
of one of these royal philosophers who set himself to fight popular mythology in the name
of private philosophy. Most of them assumed the attitude of Marcus Aurelius, who is in
many ways the model of this sort of monarch and sage. Marcus Aurelius has been blamed for
tolerating the pagan amphitheatre or the Christian martyrdoms. But it was characteristic;
for this sort of man really thought of popular religion just as he thought of popular
circuses. Of him Professor Phillimore has profoundly said 'a great and good man--and he
knew it.' The heretic Pharaoh had a philosophy more earnest and perhaps more humble. For
there is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble
have to do most of the fighting. Anyhow, the Egyptian prince was simple enough to take his
own philosophy seriously, and alone among such intellectual princes he affected a sort of
coup d'etat; hurling down the high gods of Egypt with one imperial gesture and lifting up
for all men, like a blazing mirror of monotheistic truth, the disc of the universal sun.
He had other interesting ideas often to be found in such idealists. In the sense in which
we speak of a Little Englander he was a Little Egypter. In art he was a realist because he
was an idealist; for realism is more impossible than any other ideal. But after all there
falls on him something of the shadow of Marcus Aurelius, stalked by the shadow of
Professor Phillimore. That is the matter with this noble sort of prince is that he has
nowhere quite escaped being something of a prig. Priggishness is so pungent a smell that
it clings amid the faded spices even to an Egyptian mummy. That was the matter with the
heretic Pharaoh, as with a good many other heretics, was that he probably never paused to
ask himself whether there was anything in the popular beliefs and tales of people less
educated than himself. And, as already suggested, there was something in them. There was a
real human hunger in all that element of feature and locality, that procession of deities
like enormous pet animals, in that unwearied watching at certain haunted spots, in all the
many wanderings of mythology. Nature may not have the name of Isis; Isis may not be really
looking for Osiris. But it is true that Nature is really looking for something; Nature is
always looking for the supernatural. Something much more definite was to satisfy that
need; but a dignified monarch with a disc of the sun did not satisfy it. The royal
experiment failed amid a roaring reaction of popular superstitions, in which the priests
rose on the shoulders of the people and ascended the throne of the kings.
The next great example I shall take of the princely sage is Gautama, the great Lord
Buddha. I know he is not generally classed merely with the philosophers; but I am more and
more convinced from all information that reaches me, that this is the real interpretation
of his immense importance. He was by far the greatest and the best of these intellectuals
born in the purple. His reaction was perhaps the noblest and most sincere of all the
resultant actions of that combination of thinkers and of thrones. For his reaction was
renunciation. Marcus Aurelius was content to say, with a refined irony, that even in a
palace life could be lived well. The fierier Egyptian king concluded that it could be
lived even better after a palace revolution. But the great Gautama was the only one of
them who proved he could really do without his palace. One fell back on toleration and the
other on revolution. But after all there is something more absolute about abdication.
Abdication is perhaps the one really absolute action of an absolute monarch. The Indian
prince, reared in Oriental luxury and pomp, deliberately went out and lived the life of a
beggar. That is magnificent, but it is not war; that is, it is not necessarily a Crusade
in the Christian sense. It does not decide the question of whether the life of a beggar
was the life of a saint or the life of a philosopher. It does not decide whether this
great man is really to go into the tub of Diogenes or the cave of St. Jerome. Now those
who seem to be nearest to the study of Buddha, and certainly those who write most clearly
and intelligently about him, convince me for one that he was simply a philosopher who
founded a successful school of philosophy, and was turned into a sort of divus or sacred
being merely by the more mysterious and unscientific atmosphere of all such traditions in
Asia. So that it is necessary to say at this point a word about that invisible yet vivid
border-line that we cross in passing from the Mediterranean into the mystery of the East.
Perhaps there are no things out of which we get so little of the truth as the truisms;
especially when they are really true. We are all in the habit of saying certain things
about Asia, which are true enough but which hardly help us because we do not understand
their truth; as that Asia is old or looks to the past or is not progressive. Now it is
true that Christendom is more progressive, in a sense that has very little to do with the
rather provincial notion of an endless fuss of political improvement. Christendom does
believe, for Christianity does believe, that man can eventually get somewhere, here or
hereafter, or in various ways according to various doctrines. The world's desire can
somehow be satisfied as desires are satisfied, whether by a new life or an old love or
some form of positive possession and fulfilment. For the rest, we all know there is a
rhythm and not a mere progress in things, that things rise and fall; only with us the
rhythm is a fairly free and incalculable rhythm. For most of Asia the rhythm has hardened
into a recurrence. It is no longer merely a rather topsy-turvy sort of world; it is a
wheel. What has happened to all those highly intelligent and highly civilised peoples is
that they have been caught up in a sort of cosmic rotation, of which the hollow hub is
really nothing. In that sense the worst part of existence is that it may just as well go
on like that forever. That is what we really mean when we say that Asia is old or
unprogressive or looking backwards. That is why we see even her curved swords as arcs
broken from that blinding wheel; why we see her serpentine ornament as returning
everywhere, like a snake that is never slain. It has very little to do with the political
varnish of progress; all Asiatics might have top-hats on their heads but if they had this
spirit still in their hearts, they would only think the hats would vanish and come round
again like the planets; not that running after a hat could lead them to heaven or even to
home.
Now when the genius of Buddha arose to deal with the matter, this sort of cosmic
sentiment was already common to almost everything in the east. There was indeed the jungle
of an extraordinarily extravagant and almost asphyxiating mythology. Nevertheless it is
possible to have more sympathy with this popular fruitfulness in folk-lore than with some
of the higher pessimism that might have withered it. It must always be remembered,
however, when all fair allowances are made, that a great deal of spontaneous eastern
imagery really is idolatry; the local and literal worship of an idol. This is probably not
true of the ancient Brahminical system, at least as seen by Brahmins. But that phrase
alone will remind us of a reality of much greater moment. This great reality is the Caste
System of ancient India. It may have had some of the practical advantages of the Guild
System of Medieval Europe. But it contrasts not only with that Christian democracy, but
with every extreme type of Christian aristocracy, in the fact that it does really conceive
the social superiority as a spiritual superiority. This not only divides it fundamentally
from the fraternity of Christendom, but leaves it standing like a mighty and terraced
mountain of pride between the relatively egalitarian levels both of Islam and of China.
But the fixity of this formation through thousands of years is another illustration of
that spirit of repetition that has marked time from time immemorial. Now we may also
presume the prevalence of another idea which we associate with the Buddhists as
interpreted by the Theosophists. As a fact, some of the strictest Buddhists repudiate the
idea and still more scornfully repudiate the Theosophists. But whether the idea is in
Buddhism, or only in the birthplace of Buddhism, or only in a tradition or a travesty of
Buddhism, it is an idea entirely proper to this principle of recurrence. I mean of course
the idea of Reincarnation.
But Reincarnation is not really a mystical idea. It is not really a transcendental
idea, or in that sense a religious idea. Mysticism conceives something transcending
experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can
give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them. It is no
more transcendental for a man to remember what he did in Babylon before he was born than
to remember what he did in Brixton before he had a knock on the head. His successive lives
need not be any more than human lives, under whatever limitations burden human life. It
has nothing to do with seeing God or even conjuring up the devil. In other words,
reincarnation as such does not necessarily escape from the wheel of destiny, in some sense
it is the wheel of destiny And whether it was something that Buddha founded, or something
that Buddha found, or something that Buddha entirely renounced when he found, it is
certainly something having the general character of that Asiatic atmosphere in which he
had to play his part. And the part he played was that of an intellectual philosopher, with
a particular theory about the right intellectual attitude towards it.
I can understand that Buddhists might resent the view that Buddhism is merely a
philosophy, if we understand by a philosophy merely an intellectual game such as Greek
sophists played, tossing up worlds and catching them like balls. Perhaps a more exact
statement would be that Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline; which might
even be called a psychological discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from all this
recurrent sorrow; and that was simply by getting rid of the delusion that is called
desire. It was emphatically not that we should get what we want better by restraining our
impatience for part of it, or that we should get it in a better way or in a better world.
It was emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. If once a man realised that there
is really no reality, that everything, including his soul, is in dissolution at every
instant, he would anticipate disappointment and be intangible to change, existing (in so
far as he could be said to exist) in a sort of ecstasy of indifference. The Buddhists call
this beatitude and we will not stop our story to argue the point; certainly to us it is
indistinguishable from despair. I do not see, for instance, why the disappointment of
desire should not apply as much to the most benevolent desires as to the most selfish
ones. Indeed the Lord of Compassion seems to pity people for living rather than for dying.
For the rest, an intelligent Buddhist wrote 'the explanation of popular Chinese and
Japanese Buddhism is that it is not Buddhism.' That has doubtless ceased to be a mere
philosophy, but only by becoming a mere mythology. One thing is certain; it has never
become anything remotely resembling what we call a Church.
It will appear only a jest to say that all religious history has really been a pattern
of noughts and crosses. But I do not by noughts mean nothings, but only things that are
negative compared with the positive shape or pattern of the other. And though the symbol
is of course only a coincidence, it is a coincidence that really does coincide. The mind
of Asia can really be represented by a round 0, if not in the sense of a cypher at least
of a circle. The great Asiatic symbol of a serpent with its tail in its mouth is really a
very perfect image of a certain idea of unity and recurrence that does indeed belong to
the Eastern philosophies and religions. It really is a curve that in one sense includes
everything, and in another sense comes to nothing. In that sense it does confess, or
rather boast, that all argument is an argument in a circle. And though the figure is but a
symbol, we can see how sound is the symbolic sense that produces it, the parallel symbol
of the Wheel of Buddha generally called the Swastika The cross is a thing at right angles
pointing boldly in opposite directions; but the Swastika is the same thing in the very act
of returning to the recurrent curve. That crooked cross is in fact a cross turning into a
wheel. Before we dismiss even these symbols as if they were arbitrary symbols, we must
remember how intense was the imaginative instinct that produced them or selected them both
in the east and the west. The cross has become something more than a historical memory; it
does convey, almost as by a mathematical diagram, the truth about the real point at issue;
the idea of a conflict stretching outwards into eternity. It is true, and even
tautological, to say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.
In other words the cross, in fact as well as figure, does really stand for the idea of
breaking out of the circle that is everything and nothing. It does escape from the
circular argument by which everything begins and ends in the mind. Since we are still
dealing in symbols, it might be put in a parable in the form of that story about St.
Francis, which says that the birds departing with his benediction could wing their way
into the infinites of the four winds of heaven, their tracks making a vast cross upon the
sky; for compared with the freedom of that flight of birds, the very shape of the Swastika
is like a kitten chasing its tail. In a more popular allegory, we might say that when St.
George thrust his spear into the monster's jaws, he broke in upon the solitude of the
self-devouring serpent and gave it something to bite besides its own tail. But while many
fancies might be used as figures of the truth, the truth itself is abstract and absolute;
though it is not very easy to sum up except by such figures. Christianity does appeal to a
solid truth outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as
eternal. It does declare that things are really there; or in other words that things are
really things--In this Christianity is at one with common sense; but all religious history
shows that this common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it.
It cannot otherwise exist, or at least endure, because mere thought does not remain
sane. In a sense it becomes too simple to be sane. The temptation of the philosophers is
simplicity rather than subtlety. They are always attracted by insane simplifications, as
men poised above abysses are fascinated by death and nothingness and the empty air. It
needed another kind of philosopher to stand poised upon the pinnacle of the Temple and
keep his balance without casting himself down. One of these obvious, these too obvious
explanations is that everything is a dream and a delusion and there is nothing outside the
ego. Another is that all things recur; another, which is said to be Buddhist and is
certainly Oriental, is the idea that what is the matter with us is our creation, in the
sense of our coloured differentiation and personality, and that nothing will be well till
we are again melted into one unity. By this theory, in short, the Creation was the Fall.
It is important historically because it was stored up in the dark heart of Asia and went
forth at various times in various forms over the dim borders of Europe. Here we can place
the mysterious figure of Manes or Manichaeus, the mystic of inversion, whom we should call
a pessimist, parent of many sects and heresies; here, in a higher place, the figure of
Zoroaster. He has been popularly identified with another of these too simple explanations;
the equality of evil and good, balanced and battling in every atom. He also is of the
school of sages that may be called mystics; and from the same mysterious Persian garden
came upon ponderous wings Mithras, the unknown god, to trouble the last twilight of Rome.
That circle or disc of the sun set up in the morning of the world by the remote
Egyptian has been a mirror and a model for all the philosophers. They have made many
things out of it, and sometimes gone mad about it, especially when as in these eastern
sages the circle became a wheel going round and round in their heads. But the point about
them is that they all think that existence can be represented by a diagram instead of a
drawing; and the rude drawings of the childish myth-makers are a sort of crude and
spirited protest against that view. They cannot believe that religion is really not a
pattern but a picture. Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that
really exists outside our minds. Sometimes the philosophy paints the disc all black and
calls himself a pessimist; sometimes he paints it all white and calls himself an optimist;
sometimes he divides it exactly into halves of black and white and calls himself a
dualist, like those Persian mystics to whom I wish there were space to do justice. None of
them could understand a thing that began to draw the proportions just as if they were real
proportions, disposed in the living fashion which the mathematical draughtsman would call
disproportionate. Like the first artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the
suggestion of a new purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern; he seemed only
to be distorting his diagram, when he began for the first time in all the ages to trace
the lines of a form--and of a Face.
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of
economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary
conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different
thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he
never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings. Man cannot live without the two props
of food and drink, which support him like two legs; but to suggest that they have been the
motives of all his movements in history is like saying that the goal of all his military
marches or religious pilgrimages must have been the Golden Leg of Miss Kilmansegg or the
ideal and perfect leg of Sir Willoughby Patterne. But it is such movements that make up
the story of mankind and without them there would practically be no story at all. Cows may
be purely economic, in the sense that we cannot see that they do much beyond grazing and
seeking better grazing grounds; and that is why a history of cows in twelve volumes would
not be very lively reading. Sheep and goats may be pure economists in their external
action at least; but that is why the sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires
thought worthy of detailed narration; and even the more active quadruped has not inspired
a book for boys called Golden Deeds of Gallant Goats or any similar title. But so far from
the movements that make up the story of man being economic, we may say that the story only
begins where the motive of the cows and sheep leaves off. It will be hard to maintain that
the Crusaders went from their homes into a howling wilderness because cows go from a
wilderness to a more comfortable grazing-grounds. It will be hard to maintain that the
Arctic explorers went north with the same material motive that made the swallows go south.
And if you leave things like all the religious wars and all the merely adventurous
explorations out of the human story, it will not only cease to be human at all but cease
to be a story at all. The outline of history is made of these decisive curves and angles
determined by the will of man. Economic history would not even be history.
But there is a deeper fallacy besides this obvious fact; that men need not live for
food merely because they cannot live without food The truth is that the thing most present
to the mind of man is not the economic machinery necessary to his existence; but rather
that existence itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature
of his general position in it. There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood,
and that is life. For once that he remembers exactly what work produces his wages and
exact]y what wages produce his meals, he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it is
a queer world, or wonders whether life is worth living, or wonders whether marriage is a
failure, or is pleased and puzzled with his own children, or remembers his own youth, or
in any such fashion vaguely reviews the mysterious lot of man. This is true of the
majority even of the wage-slaves of our morbid modern industrialism, which by its
hideousness and in-humanity has really forced the economic issue to the front. It is
immeasurably more true of the multitude of peasants or hunters or fishers who make up the
real mass of mankind. Even those dry pedants who think that ethics depend on economics
must admit that economics depend on existence. And any number of normal doubts and
day-dreams are about existence; not about how we can live, but about why we do. And the
proof of it is simple; as simple as suicide. Turn the universe upside down in the mind and
you turn all the political economists upside down with it. Suppose that a man wishes to
die, and the professor of political economy becomes rather a bore with his elaborate
explanations of how he is to live. And all the departures and decisions that make our
human past into a story have this character of diverting the direct course of pure
economics. As the economist may be excused from calculating the future salary of a
suicide, so he may be excused from providing an old age pension for a martyr. As he need
not provide for the future of a martyr so he need not provide for the family of a monk.
His plan is modified in lesser and varying degrees by a man being a soldier and dying for
his own country, by a man being a peasant and specially loving his own land, by a man
being more or less affected by any religion that forbids or allows him to do this or that.
But all these come back not to an economic calculation about livelihood but to an
elemental outlook upon life. They all come back to what a man fundamentally feels, when he
looks forth from those strange windows which we call the eyes, upon that strange vision
that we call the world.
No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world. But it may be allowable
to say that we need a new thing; which may be called psychological history. I mean the
consideration of what things meant in the mind of a man, especially an ordinary man; as
distinct from what is defined or deduced merely from official forms or political
pronouncements. I have already touched on it in such a case as the totem or indeed any
other popular myth. It is not enough to be told that a tom-cat was called a totem;
especially when it was not called a totem. We want to know what it felt like. Was it like
Whittington's cat or like a witch's cat? Was its real name Pashtl or Puss-in-Boots? That
is the sort of thing we need touching the nature of political and social relations. We
want to know the real sentiment that was the social bond of many common men, as sane and
as selfish as we are. What did soldiers feel when they saw splendid in the sky that
strange totem that we call the Golden Eagle of the Legions? What did vassals feel about
those other totems the lions or the leopards upon the shield of their lord? So long as we
neglect this subjective side of history, which may more simply be called the inside of
history, there will always be a certain limitation on that science which can be better
transcended by art. So long as the historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than
fact. There will be more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.
In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology of war. Our history
is stiff with official documents, public or private, which tell us nothing of the thing
itself. At the worst we only have the official posters, which could not have been
spontaneous precisely because they were official. At the best we have only the secret
diplomacy, which could not have been popular precisely because it was secret. Upon one or
other of these is based the historical judgement about the real reasons that sustained the
struggle. Governments fight for colonies or commercial rights; governments fight about
harbours or high tariffs; governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery. It seems
sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do the fighters fight? What
is the psychology that sustains the terrible and wonderful thing called a war? Nobody who
knows anything of soldiers believes the silly notion of the dons, that millions of men can
be ruled by force. If they were all to slack, it would be impossible to punish all the
slackers And the least little touch of slacking would lose a whole campaign in half a day.
What did men really feel about the policy? If it be said that they accepted the policy
from the politician, what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred
blindly for their prince what did those blind men see in their prince?
There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an appropriate language,
as realpolitik. As a matter of fact, it is an almost insanely unreal politik. It is always
stubbornly and stupidly repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for
a moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who fight. In any case
no man will die for practical politics, just as no man will die for pay. Nero could not
hire a hundred Christians to be eaten by lions at a shilling an hour; for men will not be
martyred for money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics, is
beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world believe that d soldier
says, 'My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I
shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of
Finland.' Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, 'If I am gassed I shall
probably die in torments, but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to
become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen.'
Materialist history is the most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all
romances. Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul;
that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and about death. A man
near to death is dealing directly with an absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned
only with relative and remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is
sustained by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They are
generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The first is the love of
something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguely known as home; the second is
dislike and defiance of some strange thing that threatens it. The first is far more
philosophical than it sounds, though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his
national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good
things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can
hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy
abstraction, but is really a house. But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well
as quite as strong. Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is at once an old enemy
and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alien and antagonistic, as the French feel
about the Prussian or the Eastern Christians about the Turk. If we say it is a difference
of religion, people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We will pity
them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; a difference that does really
come like a dark shadow between our eyes and the day. Men can think of this difference
even at the point of death; for it is a difference about the meaning of life.
Men are moved in these things by something far higher and holier than policy; by
hatred. When men hung on in the darkest days of the Great War, suffering either in their
bodies or in their souls for those they loved, they were long past caring about details of
diplomatic objects as motives for their refusal to surrender. Of myself and those I knew
best I can answer for the vision that made surrender impossible. It was the vision of the
German Emperor's face as he rode into Paris. This is not the sentiment which some of my
idealistic friends describe as Love. I am quite content to call it hatred; the hatred of
hell and all its works, and to agree that as they do not believe in hell they need not
believe in hatred. But in the face of this prevalent prejudice, this long introduction has
been unfortunately necessary, to ensure an understanding of what is meant by a religious
war. There is a religious war when two worlds meet; that is when two visions of the world
meet; or in more modern language when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the one man's
breath is the other man's poison; and it is vain to talk of giving a pestilence a place in
the sun. And this is what we must understand, even at the expense of digression, if we
would see what really happened in the Mediterranean; when right athwart the rising of the
Republic on the Tiber, a thing overtopping and disdaining it, dark with all the riddles of
Asia and trailing all the tribes and dependencies of imperialism, came Carthage riding on
the sea.
The ancient religion of Italy was on the whole that mixture which we have considered
under the head of mythology; save that where the Greeks had a natural turn for the
mythology, the Latins seem to have had a real turn for religion. Both multiplied gods, yet
they sometimes seem to have multiplied them for almost opposite reasons. It would seem
sometimes as if the Greek polytheism branched and blossomed upwards like the boughs of a
tree, while the Italian polytheism ramified downward like the roots. Perhaps it would be
truer to say that the former branches lifted themselves lightly, bearing flowers; while
the latter hung down, being heavy with fruit. I mean that the Latins seem to multiply gods
to bring them nearer to men, while the Greek gods rose and radiated outwards into the
morning sky. What strikes us in the Italian cults is their local and especially their
domestic character. We gain the impression of divinities swarming about the house like
flies; of deities clustering and clinging like bats about the pillars or building like
birds under the eaves. We have a vision of a god of roofs and a god of gate-posts, of a
god of doors and even a god of drains. It has been suggested that all mythology was a sort
of fairy-tale; but this was a particular sort of fairy-tale which may truly be called a
fireside tale, or a nursery-tale; because it was a tale of the interior of the home; like
those which make chairs and tables talk like elves. The old household gods of the Italian
peasants seem to have been great, clumsy. wooden images, more featureless than the
figure-head which Quilp battered with the poker. This religion of the home was very
homely. Of course there were other less human elements in the tangle of Italian mythology.
There were Greek deities superimposed on the Roman; there were here and there uglier
things underneath, experiments in the cruel kind of paganism, like the Arician rite of the
priest slaying the slayer. But these things were always potential in paganism; they are
certainly not the peculiar character of Latin paganism. The peculiarity of that may be
roughly covered by saying that if mythology personified the forces of nature, this
mythology personified nature as transformed by the forces of man. It was the god of the
corn and not of the grass, of the cattle and not the wild things of the forest; in short
the cult was literally a culture; as when we speak of it as agriculture.
With this there was a paradox which is still for many the puzzle or riddle of the
Latins. With religion running through every domestic detail like a climbing plant, there
went what seems to many the very opposite spirit; the spirit of revolt. Imperialists and
reactionaries often involve Rome as the very model of order and obedience; but Rome was
the very reverse. The real history of ancient Rome is much more like the history of modern
Paris. It might be called in modern language a city built out of barricades. It is said
that the gate of Janus was never closed because there was an eternal war without; it is
almost as true that there was an eternal revolution within. From the first Plebeian riots
to the last Servile Wars, the state that imposed peace on the world was never really at
peace. The rulers were themselves rebels.
There is a real relation between this religion in private and this revolution in public
life. Stories none the less heroic for being hackneyed remind us that the Republic was
founded on a tyrannicide that avenged an insult to a wife; that the Tribunes of the people
were re-established after another which avenged an insult to a daughter. The truth is that
only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to
criticise the state. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the
city; the gods of the hearth. That is why men are mystified in seeing that the same
nations that are thought rigid in domesticity are also thought restless in politics, for
instance the Irish and the French. It is worth while to dwell on this domestic point
because it is an exact example of what is meant here by the inside of history, like the
inside of houses. Merely political histories of Rome may be right enough in saying that
this or that was a cynical or cruel act of the Roman politicians; but the spirit that
lifted Rome from beneath was the spirit of all the Romans; and it is not a cant to call it
the ideal of Cincinnatus passing from the senate to the plough. Men of that sort had
strengthened their village on every side, had extended its victories already over Italians
and even over Greeks, when they found themselves confronted with a war that changed the
world. I have called it here the war of the gods and demons.
There was established on the opposite coast of the inland sea a city that bore the name
of the New Town. It was already much older, more powerful, and more prosperous than the
Italian town; but there still remained about it an atmosphere that made the name not
inappropriate. It had been called new because it was a colony like New York or New
Zealand. It was an outpost or settlement of the energy and expansion of the great
commercial cities of Tyre and Sidon. There was a note of the new countries and colonies
about it, a confident and commercial outlook. It was fond of saying things that rang with
a certain metallic assurance; as that nobody could wash his hands in the sea without the
leave of the New Town. For it depended almost entirely on the greatness of its ships, as
did the two great ports and markets from which its people came. It brought from Tyre and
Sidon a prodigious talent for trade and considerable experience of travel. It brought
other things as well.
In a previous chapter I have hinted at something of the psychology that lies behind a
certain type of religion. There was a tendency in those hungry for practical results,
apart from poetical results, to call upon spirits of terror and compulsion; to move
Acheron in despair of bending the Gods. There is always a sort of dim idea that these
darker powers will really do things, with no nonsense about it. In the interior psychology
of the Punic peoples this strange sort of pessimistic practicality had grown to great
proportions. In the New Town, which the Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of
Phoenicia, the god who got things done bore the name of Moloch, who was perhaps identical
with the other deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord. The Romans did not at first quite
know what to call him or what to make of him; they had to go back to the grossest myth of
Greek or Roman origins and compare him to Saturn devouring his children. But the
worshippers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and
polished civilisation, abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably far more
civilised than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any rate his meal was not a
myth. These highly civilised people really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven
on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. We can only
realise the combination by imagining a number of Manchester merchants with chimney-pot
hats and mutton-chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday at eleven o'clock to see a
baby roasted alive.
The first stages of the political or commercial quarrel can be followed in far too much
detail, precisely because it is merely political or commercial. The Punic Wars looked at
one time as if they would never end; and it is not easy to say when they ever began. The
Greeks and the Sicilians had already been fighting vaguely on the European side against
the African city. Carthage had defeated Greece and conquered Sicily. Carthage had also
planted herself firmly in Spain; and between Spain and Sicily the Latin city was contained
and would have been crushed; if the Romans had been of the sort to be easily crushed. Yet
the interest of the story really consists in the fact that Rome was crushed. If there had
not been certain moral elements as well as the material elements, the story would have
ended where Carthage certainly thought it had ended. It is common enough to blame Rome for
not making peace. But it was a true popular instinct that there could be no peace with
that sort of people. It is common enough to blame the Roman for his Delenda est
Carthago; Carthage must be destroyed. It is commoner to forget that, to all
appearance, Rome itself was destroyed. The sacred savour that hung round Rome for ever, it
is too often forgotten, clung to her partly because she had risen suddenly from the dead.
Carthage was an aristocracy, as are most of such mercantile states. The pressure of the
rich on the poor was impersonal as well as irresistible. For such aristocracies never
permit personal government, which is perhaps why this one was jealous of personal talent.
But genius can turn up anywhere, even in a governing class. As if to make the world's
supreme test as terrible as possible, it was ordained that one of the great houses of
Carthage should produce a man who came out of those gilded palaces with all the energy and
originality of Napoleon coming from nowhere. At the worst crisis of the war Rome learned
that Italy itself, by a military miracle, was invaded from the north. Hannibal, the Grace
of Baal as his name ran in his own tongue, had dragged a ponderous chain of armaments over
the starry solitudes of the Alps; and pointed southward to the city which he had been
pledged by all his dreadful gods to destroy
Hannibal marched down the road to Rome, and the Romans who rushed to war with him felt
as if they were fighting with a magician. Two great armies sank to right and left of him
into the swamps of the Trebia; more and more were sucked into the horrible whirlpool of
Cannae; more and more went forth only to fall in ruin at his touch. The supreme sign of
all disasters, which is treason, turned tribe after tribe against the falling cause of
Rome, and still the unconquerable enemy rolled nearer and nearer to the city; and
following their great leader the swelling cosmopolitan army of Carthage passed like a
pageant of the whole world; the elephants shaking the earth like marching mountains and
the gigantic Gauls with their barbaric panoply and the dark Spaniards girt in gold and the
brown Numidians on their unbridled desert horses wheeling and darting like hawks, and
whole mobs of deserters and mercenaries and miscellaneous peoples; and the grace of Baal
went before them.
The Roman augurs and scribes who said in that hour that it brought forth unearthly
prodigies, that a child was born with the head of an elephant or that stars fell down like
hailstones, had a far more philosophical grasp of what had really happened than the modern
historian who can see nothing in it but a success of strategy concluding a rivalry in
commerce. Something far different was felt at the time and on the spot, as it is always
felt by those who experience a foreign atmosphere entering their own like a fog or a foul
savour. It was no mere military defeat, it was certainly no mere mercantile rivalry, that
filled the Roman imagination with such hideous omens of nature herself becoming unnatural.
It was Moloch upon the mountain of the Latins, looking with his appalling face across the
plain; it was Baal who trampled the vineyards with his feet of stone; it was the voice of
Tanit the invisible, behind her trailing veils, whispering of the love that is more
horrible than hate. The burning of the Italian cornfields, the ruin of the Italian vines,
were some thing more than actual; they were allegorical. They were the destruction of
domestic and fruitful things, the withering of what was human before that inhumanity that
is far beyond the human thing called cruelty. The household gods bowed low in darkness
under their lowly roofs; and above them went the demons upon a wind from beyond all walls,
blowing the trumpet of the Tramontane. The door of the Alps was broken down; and in no
vulgar but a very solemn sense, it was Hell let loose. The war of the gods and demons
seemed already to have ended; and the gods were dead. The eagles were lost, the legions
were broken; and in Rome nothing remained but honour and the cold courage of despair.
In the whole world one thing still threatened Carthage, and that was Carthage. There
still remained the inner working of an element strong in all successful commercial states,
and the presence of a spirit that we know. There was still the solid sense and shrewdness
of the men who manage big enterprises; there was still the advice of the best financial
experts; there was still business government; there was still the broad and sane outlook
of practical men of affairs, and in these things could the Romans hope. As the war trailed
on to what seemed its tragic end, there grew gradually a faint and strange possibility
that even now they might not hope in vain. The plain business men of Carthage, thinking as
such men do in terms of living and dying races, saw clearly that Rome was not only dying
but dead The war was over; it was obviously hopeless for the Italian city to resist any
longer, and inconceivable that anybody should resist when it was hopeless. Under these
circumstances, another set of broad, sound business principles remained to be considered.
Wars were waged with money, and consequently cost money; perhaps they felt in their
hearts, as do so many of their kind, that after all war must be a little wicked because it
costs money. The time had now come for peace; and still more for economy. The messages
sent by Hannibal from time to time asking for reinforcements were a ridiculous
anachronism; there were much more important things to attend to now. It might be true that
some consul or other had made a last dash to the Metaurus, had killed Hannibal's brother
and flung his head, with Latin fury, into Hannibal's camp; and mad actions of that sort
showed how utterly hopeless the Latins felt about their cause. But even excitable Latins
could not be so mad as to cling to a lost cause for ever. So argued the best financial
experts; and tossed aside more and more letters, full of rather queer alarmist reports. So
argued and acted the great Carthaginian Empire. That meaningless prejudice, the curse of
commercial states, that stupidity is in some way practical and that genius is in some way
futile, led them to starve and abandon that great artist in the school of arms, whom the
gods had given them in vain.
Why do men entertain this queer idea that what is sordid must always overthrow what is
magnanimous; that there is some dim connection between brains and brutality, or that it
does not matter if a man is dull so long as he is also mean? Why do they vaguely think of
all chivalry as sentiment and all sentiment as weakness? They do it because they are, like
all men, primarily inspired by religion. For them, as for all men, the first fact is their
notion of the nature of things; their idea about what world they are living in. And it is
their faith that the only ultimate thing is fear and therefore that the very heart of the
world is evil. They believe that death is stronger than life, and therefore dead things
must be stronger than living things; whether those dead things are gold and iron and
machinery or rocks and rivers and forces of nature. It may sound fanciful to say that men
we meet at tea-tables or talk to at garden-parties are secretly worshippers of Baal or
Moloch. But this sort of commercial mind has its own cosmic vision and it is the vision of
Carthage. It has in it the brutal blunder that was the ruin of Carthage. The Punic power
fell because there is in this materialism a mad indifference to real thought. By
disbelieving in the soul, it comes to disbelieving in the mind. Being too practical to be
moral, it denies what every practical soldier calls the moral of an army. It fancies that
money will fight when men will no longer fight. So it was with the Punic merchant princes.
Their religion was a religion of despair, even when their practical fortunes were hopeful.
How could they understand that the Romans could hope even when their fortunes were
hopeless? Their religion was a religion of force and fear; how could they understand that
men can still despise fear even when they submit to force? Their philosophy of the world
had weariness in its very heart; above all they were weary of warfare; how should they
understand those who still wage war even when they are weary of it? In a word, how should
they understand the mind of Man, who had so long bowed down before mindless things, money
and brute force and gods who had the hearts of beasts? They awoke suddenly to the news
that the embers they had disdained too much even to tread out were again breaking
everywhere into flames; that Hasdrubal was defeated, that Hannibal was outnumbered, that
Scipio had carried the war into Spain; that he had carried it into Africa. Before the very
gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last fight for it and lost; and Carthage fell
as nothing has fallen since Satan. The name of the New City remains only as a name. There
is no stone of it left upon the sand. Another war was indeed waged before the final
destruction: but the destruction was final. Only men digging in its deep foundation
centuries after found a heap of hundreds of little skeletons, the holy relics of that
religion. For Carthage fell because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had
followed out to its logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten
his children.
The gods had risen again, and the demons had been defeated after all. But they had been
defeated by the defeated, and almost defeated by the dead. Nobody understands the romance
of Rome, and why she rose afterwards to a representative leadership that seemed almost
fated and fundamentally natural. Who does not keep in mind the agony of horror and
humiliation through which she had continued to testify to the sanity that is the soul of
Europe? She came to stand alone in the midst of an empire because she had once stood alone
in the midst of a ruin and a waste. After that all men knew in their hearts that she had
been representative of mankind, even when she was rejected of men. And there fell on her
the shadow from a shining and as yet invisible light and the burden of things to be. It is
not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have
rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would
have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of
Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic wars if, in after ages, divine things
descended at least upon human things and not inhuman. Europe evolved into its own vices
and its own impotence, as will be suggested on another page; but the worst into which it
evolved was not like what it had escaped. Can any man in his senses compare the great
wooden doll, whom the children expected to eat a little bit of the dinner, with the great
idol who would have been expected to eat the children ? That is the measure of how far the
world went astray, compared with how far it might have gone astray. If the Romans were
ruthless, it was in a true sense to an enemy, and certainly not merely a rival. They
remembered not trade routes and regulations, but the faces of sneering men; and hated the
hateful soul of Carthage. And we owe them something if we never needed to cut down the
groves of Venus exactly as men cut down the groves of Baal. We owe it partly to their
harshness that our thoughts of our human past are not wholly harsh. If the passage from
heathenry to Christianity was a bridge as well as a breach, we owe it to those who kept
that heathenry human. If, after all these ages, we are in some sense at peace with
paganism, and can think more kindly of our fathers, it is well to remember the things that
were and the things that might have been. For this reason alone we can take lightly the
load of antiquity and need not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or a cupid on a valentine.
Laughter and sadness link us with things long past away and remembered without dishonour;
and we can see not altogether without tenderness the twilight sinking around the Sabine
farm and hear the household gods rejoice when Catullus comes home to Sirmio. Deleta est
Carthago.
I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow of a little
village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I had just been walking through
the woods. He was one of a group of eccentrics I had come across in my wanderings who had
a new religion called Higher Thought; in which I had been so far initiated as to realise a
general atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at some later and more esoteric
stage to discover the beginnings of thought. My companion was the most amusing of them,
for however he may have stood towards thought, he was at least very much their superior in
experience, having travelled beyond the tropics while they were meditating in the suburbs;
though he had been charged with excess in telling travellers' tales. In spite of anything
said against him, I preferred him to his companions and willingly went with him through
the wood; where I could not but feel that his sunburnt face and fierce tufted eyebrows and
pointed beard gave him something of the look of Pan. Then we sat down in the meadow and
gazed idly at the tree-tops and the spire of the village church; while the warm afternoon
began to mellow into early evening and the song of a speck of a bird was faint far up in
the sky and no more than a whisper of breeze soothed rather than stirred the ancient
orchards of the garden of England. Then my companion said to me: 'Do you know why the
spire of that church goes up like that, I expressed a respectable agnosticism, and he
answered in an off-hand way, 'Oh, the same as the obelisks; the Phallic Worship of
antiquity.' Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering above his
goatlike beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan but the Devil. No mortal words
can express the immense, the insane incongruity and unnatural perversion of thought
involved in saying such a thing at such a moment and in such a place. For one moment I was
in the mood in which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous
seemed to open about me like a dawn. 'Why, of course,' I said after a moment's reflection,
'if it hadn't been for phallic worship, they would have built the spire pointing downwards
and standing on its own apex.' I could have sat in that field and laughed for an hour. My
friend did not seem offended, for indeed he was never thin-skinned about his scientific
discoveries. I had only met him by chance and I never met him again, and I believe he is
now dead; but though it has nothing to do with the argument, it may be worth while to
mention the name of this adherent of Higher Thought and interpreter of primitive religious
origins; or at any rate the name by which he was known. It was Louis de Rougemont.
That insane image of the Kentish church standing on the point of its spire, as in some
old rustic, topsy-turvy tale, always comes back into my imagination when I hear these
things said about pagan origins; and calls to my aid the laughter of the giants. Then I
feel as genially and charitably to all other scientific investigators, higher critics, and
authorities on ancient and modern religion, as I do to poor Louis de Rougemont. But the
memory of that immense absurdity remains as a sort of measure and check by which to keep
sane, not only on the subject of Christian churches, but also on the subject of heathen
temples. Now a great many people have talked about heathen origins as the distinguished
traveller talked about Christian origins. Indeed a great many modern heathens have been
very hard on heathenism. A great many modern humanitarians have been very hard on the real
religion of humanity. They have represented it as being everywhere and from the first
rooted only in these repulsive arcana; and carrying the character of something utterly
shameless and anarchical. Now I do not believe this for a moment. I should never dream of
thinking about the whole worship of Apollo what De Rougemont could think about the worship
of Christ. I would never admit that there was such an atmosphere in a Greek city as that
madman was able to smell in a Kentish village. On the contrary, it is the whole point,
even of this final chapter upon the final decay of paganism, to insist once more that the
worst sort of paganism had already been defeated by the best sort. It was the best sort of
paganism that conquered the gold of Carthage. It was the best sort of paganism that wore
the laurels of Rome. It was the best thing the world had yet seen, all things considered
and on any large scale, that ruled from the wall of the Grampians to the garden of the
Euphrates. It was the best that conquered; it was the best that ruled; and it was the best
that began to decay.
Unless this broad truth be grasped, the whole story is seen askew. Pessimism is not in
being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of
suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things
in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not
feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say
that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any test by which to
register a decline; that is why some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage
have rather an air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and
swathed and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old. But Carthage at any rate
was dead, and the worst assault ever made by the demons on mortal society had been
defeated. But how much would it matter that the worst was dead if the best was dying?
To begin with, it must be noted that the relation of Rome to Carthage was partially
repeated and extended in her relation to nations more normal and more nearly akin to her
than Carthage. I am not here concerned to controvert the merely political view that Roman
statesmen acted unscrupulously towards Corinth or the Greek cities. But I am concerned to
contradict the notion that there was nothing but a hypocritical excuse in the ordinary
Roman dislike of Greek cities. I am not presenting these pagans as paladins of chivalry,
with a sentiment about nationalism never known until Christian times. But I am presenting
them as men with the feelings of men; and those feelings were not a pretence. The truth is
that one of the weaknesses in nature-worship and mere mythology had already produced a
perversion among the Greeks due to the worst sophistry; the sophistry of simplicity. Just
as they became unnatural by worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by
worshipping man. If Greece led her conqueror, she might have misled her conqueror; but
these were things he did originally wish to conquer--ever in himself. It is true that in
one sense there was less inhumanity even in Sodom and Gomorrah than in Tyre and Sidon.
When we consider the war of the demons on the children, we cannot compare even Greek
decadence to Punic devil-worship. But it is not true that the sincere revulsion from
either need be merely pharisaical. It is not true to human nature or to common sense. Let
any lad who has had the luck to grow up sane and simple in his day-dreams of love hear for
the first time of the cult of Ganymede; he will not be merely shocked but sickened. And
that first impression, as has been said here so often about first impressions, will be
right. Our cynical indifference is an illusion; it is the greatest of all illusions; the
illusion of familiarity. It is right to conceive the more or less rustic virtues of the
ruck of the original Romans as reacting against the very rumour of it, with complete
spontaneity and sincerity. It is right to regard them as reacting, if in a lesser degree,
exactly as they did against the cruelty of Carthage. Because it was in a less degree they
did not destroy Corinth as they destroyed Carthage. But if their attitude and action was
rather destructive, in neither case need their indignation have been mere
self-righteousness covering mere selfishness. And if anybody insists that nothing could
have operated in either case but reasons of state and commercial conspiracies, we can only
tell him that there is something which he does not understand; something which possibly he
will never understand; something which, until he does understand, he will never understand
the Latins. That something is called democracy. He has probably heard the word a good many
times and even used it himself; but he has no notion of what it means. All through the
revolutionary history of Rome there was an incessant drive towards democracy; the state
and the statesman could do nothing without a considerable backing of democracy; the sort
of democracy that never has anything to do with diplomacy. It is precisely because of the
presence of Roman democracy that we hear so much about Roman oligarchy. For instance,
recent historians have tried to explain the valour and victory of Rome in terms of that
detestable and detested usury which was practised by some of the Patricians; as if Curius
had conquered the men of the Macedonian phalanx by lending them money; or the consul Nero
had negotiated the victory of Metaurus at five per cent. But we realise the usury of the
Patricians because of the perpetual revolt of the Plebeians. The rule of the Punic
merchant princes had the very soul of usury. But there was never a Punic mob that dared to
call them usurers.
Burdened like all mortal things with all mortal sin and weakness, the rise of Rome had
really been the rise of normal and especially of popular things; and in nothing more than
in the thoroughly normal and profoundly popular hatred of perversion. Now among the Greeks
a perversion had become a convention. It is true that it had become so much of a
convention, especially a literary convention, that it was sometimes conventionally copied
by Roman literary men. But this is one of those complications that always arise out of
conventions. It must not obscure our sense of the difference of tone in the two societies
as a whole. It is true that Virgil would once in a way take over a theme of Theocritus;
but nobody can get the impression that Virgil was particularly fond of that theme. The
themes of Virgil were specially and notably the normal themes and nowhere more than in
morals; piety and patriotism and the honour of the countryside. And we may well pause upon
the name of the poet as we pass into the autumn of antiquity; upon his name who was in so
supreme a sense the very voice of autumn of its maturity and its melancholy; of its fruits
of fulfilment and its prospect of decay. Nobody who reads even a few lines of Virgil can
doubt that he understood what moral sanity means to mankind. Nobody can doubt his feelings
when the demons were driven in flight before the household gods. But there are two
particular points about him and his work which are particularly important to the main
thesis here. The first is that the whole of his great patriotic epic is in a very peculiar
sense founded upon the fall of Troy; that is upon an avowed pride in Troy although she had
fallen. In tracing to Trojans the foundation of his beloved race and republic, he began
what may be called the great Trojan tradition which runs through medieval and modern
history. We have already seen the first hint of it in the pathos of Homer about Hector.
But Virgil turned it not merely into a literature but into a legend. And it was a legend
of the almost divine dignity that belongs to the defeated. This was one of the traditions
that did truly prepare the world for the coming of Christianity and especially of
Christian chivalry. This is what did help to sustain civilisation through the incessant
defeats of the Dark Ages and the barbarian wars; out of which what we call chivalry was
born. It is the moral attitude of the man with his back to the wall; and it was the wall
of Troy. All through medieval and modern times this version of the virtues in the Homeric
conflict can be traced in a hundred ways co-operating with all that was akin to it in
Christian sentiment. Our own countrymen, and the men of other countries, loved to claim
like Virgil that their own nation was descended from the heroic Trojans. All sorts of
people thought it the most superb sort of heraldry to claim to be descended from Hector.
Nobody seems to have wanted to be descended from Achilles. The very fact that the Trojan
name has become a Christian name, and been scattered to the last limits of Christendom, to
Ireland or the Gaelic Highlands, while the Greek name has remained relatively rare and
pedantic, is a tribute to the same truth. Indeed it involves a curiosity of language
almost in the nature of a joke. The name has been turned into a verb; and the very phrase
about hectoring, in the sense of swaggering, suggests the myriads of soldiers who have
taken the fallen Trojan for a model. As a matter of fact, nobody in antiquity was less
given to hectoring than Hector. But even the bully pretending to be a conqueror took his
title from the conquered. That is why the popularisation of the Trojan origin by Virgil
has a vital relation to all those elements that have made men say that Virgil was almost a
Christian. It is almost as if two great tools or toys of the same timber, the divine and
the human, had been in the hands of Providence; and the only thing comparable to the
Wooden Cross of Calvary was the Wooden Horse of Troy. So, in some wild allegory, pious in
purpose if almost profane in form, the Holy Child might have fought the dragon with a
wooden sword and a wooden horse.
The other element in Virgil which is essential to the argument is the particular nature
of his relation to mythology; or what may here in a special sense be called folklore, the
faiths and fancies of the populace. Everybody knows that his poetry at its most perfect is
less concerned with the pomposity of Olympus than with the numina of natural and
agricultural life. Everyone knows where Virgil looked for the causes of things. He speaks
of finding them not so much in cosmic allegories of Uranus and Chronos; but rather in Pan
and the sisterhood of the nymphs and Sylvanus the old man of the forest. He is perhaps
most himself in some passages of the Eclogues, in which he has perpetuated for ever the
great legend of Arcadia and the shepherds. Here again it is easy enough to miss the point
with petty criticism about all the things that happen to separate his literary convention
from ours. There is nothing more artificial than the cry of artificiality as directed
against the old pastoral poetry. We have entirely missed all that our fathers meant by
looking at the externals of what they wrote. People have been so much amused with the mere
fact that the china shepherdess was made of china that they have not even asked why she
was made at all. They have been so content to consider the Merry Peasant as a figure in an
opera that they have not asked even how he came to go to the opera, or how he strayed on
to the stage.
In short, one have only to ask why there is a china shepherdess and not a china
shopkeeper. Why were not mantelpieces adorned with figures of city merchants in elegant
attitudes; of ironmasters wrought in iron or gold speculators in gold? Why did the opera
exhibit a Merry Peasant and not a Merry Politician? Why was there not a ballet of bankers,
pirouetting upon pointed toes? Because the ancient instinct and humour of humanity have
always told them, under whatever conventions, that the conventions of complex cities were
less really healthy and happy than the customs of the countryside. So it is with the
eternity of the Eclogues. A modern poet did indeed write things called Fleet Street
Eclogues, in which poets took the place of the shepherds. But nobody has yet written
anything called Wall Street Eclogues, in which millionaires should take the place of the
poets. And the reason is that there is a real if only a recurrent yearning for that sort
of simplicity; and there is never that sort of yearning for that sort of complexity. The
key to the mystery of the Merry Peasant is that the peasant often is merry. Those who do
not believe it are simply those who do not know anything about him, and therefore do not
know which are his times for merriment. Those who do not believe in the shepherd's feast
or song are merely ignorant of the shepherd's calendar. The real shepherd is indeed very
different from the ideal shepherd, but that is no reason for forgetting the reality at the
root of the ideal. It needs a truth to make a tradition. It needs a tradition to make a
convention. Pastoral poetry is certainly often a convention, especially in a social
decline. It was in a social decline that Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses lounged about
the gardens of Versailles. It was also in a social decline that shepherds and
shepherdesses continued to pipe and dance through the most faded imitations of Virgil. But
that is no reason for dismissing the dying paganism without ever understanding its life.
It is no reason for forgetting that the very word Pagan is the same as the word Peasant.
We may say that this art is only artificiality; but it is not a love of the artificial. On
the contrary, it is in its very nature only the failure of nature-worship, or the love of
the natural
For the shepherds were dying because their gods were dying. Paganism lived upon poetry;
that poetry already considered under the name of mythology. But everywhere, and especially
in Italy, it had been a mythology and a poetry rooted in the countryside; and that rustic
religion had been largely responsible for the rustic happiness. Only as the whole society
grew in age and experience, there began to appear that weakness in all mythology already
noted in the chapter under that name. This religion was not quite a religion. In other
words, this religion was not quite a reality. It was the young world's riot with images
and ideas like a young man's riot with wine or love-making; it was not so much immoral as
irresponsible; it had no foresight of the final test of time. Because it was creative to
any extent it was credulous to any extent. It belonged to the artistic side of man, yet
even considered artistically it had long become overloaded and entangled. The family trees
sprung from the seed of Jupiter were a jungle rather than a forest; the claims of the gods
and demi-gods seemed like things to be settled rather by a lawyer or a professional herald
than by a poet. But it is needless to say that it was not only in the artistic sense that
these things had grown more anarchic. There had appeared in more and more flagrant fashion
that flower of evil that is really implicit in the very seed of nature-worship, however
natural it may seem. I have said that I do not believe that natural worship necessarily
begins with this particular passion; I am not of the De Rougemont school of scientific
folk-lore. I do not believe that mythology must begin with eroticism. But I do believe
that mythology must end in it. I am quite certain that mythology did end in it. Moreover,
not only did the poetry grow more immoral, but the immorality grew more indefensible.
Greek vices, oriental vices, hints of the old horrors of the Semitic demons began to fill
the fancies of decaying Rome, swarming like flies on a dung heap. The psychology of it is
really human enough to anyone who will try that experiment of seeing history from the
inside There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when
he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There
comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilisation when the man is tired at playing at
mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The
effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and
dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins
or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad
oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were
with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake
themselves up with nightmares.
At that stage even of paganism therefore the peasant songs and dances sound fainter and
fainter in the forest. For one thing the peasant civilisation was fading, or had already
faded from the whole countryside. The Empire at the end was organised more and more on
that servile system which generally goes with the boast of organisation, indeed it was
almost as senile as the modern schemes for the organisation of industry. It is proverbial
that what would once have been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent
for bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles and
cinemas. In this as in many other respects the modern return to heathenism has been a
return not even to the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But the causes of
it were spiritual in both cases; and especially the spirit of paganism had departed with
its familiar spirits. The heat had gone out of it with its household gods, who went along
with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest. The Old Man of the Forest was
too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ
was born. It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ was born because
Pan was already dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind,
which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology. But
the point for the moment is that the mythology could not have lasted like a theology in
any case. Theology is thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never
thought, and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of
glamour and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only ceased to believe
in the gods, but they realised that they had never believed in them. They had sung their
praises; they had danced round their altars. They had played the flute; they had played
the fool.
So came the twilight upon Arcady and the last notes of the pipe sound sadly from the
beechen grove. In the great Virgilian poems there is already something of the sadness; but
the loves and the household gods linger in lovely lines like that which Mr. Belloc took
for a test of understanding; incipe parve puer risu cognoscere matrem. But with
them as with us, the human family itself began to break down under servile organisation
and the herding of the towns. The urban mob became enlightened; that is it lost the mental
energy that could create myths. All round the circle of the Mediterranean cities the
people mourned for the loss of gods and were consoled with gladiators. And meanwhile
something similar was happening to that intellectual aristocracy of antiquity that had
been walking about and talking at large ever since Socrates and Pythagoras. They began to
betray to the world the fact that they were walking in a circle and saying the same thing
over and over again. Philosophy began to be a joke; it also began to be a bore. That
unnatural simplification of everything into one system or another, which we have noted as
the fault of the philosopher, revealed at once its finality and its futility. Everything
was virtue or everything was happiness or everything was fate or everything was good or
everything was bad; anyhow, everything was everything and there was no more to be said; so
they said it. Everywhere the sages had degenerated into sophists; that is, into hired
rhetoricians or askers of riddles. It is one of the symptoms of this that the sage begins
to turn not only into a sophist but into a magician. A touch of oriental occultism is very
much appreciated in the best houses. As the philosopher is already a society entertainer,
he may as well also be a conjurer.
Many moderns have insisted on the smallness of that Mediterranean world; and the wider
horizons that might have awaited it with the discovery of the other continents. But this
is an illusion, one of the many illusions of materialism. The limits that paganism had
reached in Europe were the limits of human existence; at its best it had only reached the
same limits anywhere else. The Roman stoics did not need any Chinamen to teach them
stoicism. The Pythagoreans did not need any Hindus to teach them about recurrence or the
simple life or the beauty of being a vegetarian. In so far as they could get these things
from the East, they had already got rather too much of them from the East. The Syncretists
were as convinced as Theosophists that all religions are really the same. And how else
could they have extended philosophy merely by extending geography? It can hardly be
proposed that they should learn a purer religion from the Aztecs or sit at the feet of the
Incas of Peru. All the rest of the world was a welter of barbarism. It is essential to
recognise that the Roman Empire was recognised as the highest achievement of the human
race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure
hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal amphitheatres
and aqueducts. Man could do no more.
For it was not the message blazed on the Babylonian wall, that one king was found
wanting or his one kingdom given to a stranger. It was no such good news as the news of
invasion and conquest. There was nothing left that could conquer Rome; but there was also
nothing left that could improve it. It was the strongest thing that was growing weak. It
was the best thing that was going to the bad. It is necessary to insist again and again
that many civilisations had met in one civilisation of the Mediterranean sea; that it was
already universal with a stale and sterile universality. The peoples had pooled their
resources and still there was not enough. The empires had gone into partnership and they
were still bankrupt. No philosopher who was really philosophical could think anything
except that, in that central sea, the wave of the world had risen to its highest, seeming
to touch the stars. But the wave was already stooping; for it was only the wave of the
world.
That mythology and that philosophy into which paganism has already been analysed had
thus both of them been drained most literally to the dregs. If with the multiplication of
magic the third department, which we have called the demons, was even increasingly active,
it was never anything but destructive. There remains only the fourth element or rather the
first; that which had been in a sense forgotten because it was the first. I mean the
primary and overpowering yet impalpable impression that the universe after all has one
origin and one aim; and because it has an aim must have an author. What became of this
great truth in the background of men's minds, at this time, it is perhaps more difficult
to determine. Some of the Stoics undoubtedly saw it more and more clearly as the clouds of
mythology cleared and thinned away; and great men among them did much even to the last to
lay the foundations of a concept of the moral unity of the world. The Jews still held
their secret certainty of it jealously behind high fences of exclusiveness; yet it is
intensely characteristic of the society and the situation that some fashionable figures,
especially fashionable ladies, actually embraced Judaism. But in the case of many others I
fancy there entered at this point a new negation. Atheism became really possible in that
abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is
the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning
and a direction in the world it sees. Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavoured to
substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men's eyes his dance of
glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos. But it was not his
strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men to
entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of impotence and despair with which
men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as they saw all the best work of humanity
sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation
itself was not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and
worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. They could fancy that all
the stars were falling stars; and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos were
bowed under a sort of gradual deluge. To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism
that is in some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and philosophy might stiffen; but
if behind these things there was a reality, surely that reality might have sustained
things as they sank. There was no God; if there had been a God, surely this was the very
moment when He would have moved and saved the world.
The life of the great civilisation went on with dreary industry and even with dreary
festivity. It was the end of the world, and the worst of it was that it need never end. A
convenient compromise had been made between all the multitudinous myths and religions of
the Empire; that each group should worship freely and merely live a sort of official
flourish of thanks to the tolerant Emperor, by tossing a little incense to him under his
official title of Divus. Naturally there was no difficulty about that; or rather it was a
long time before the world realised that there ever had been even a trivial difficulty
anywhere. The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to have made
a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The incident occurred once or twice again and
began to arouse irritation out of proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly
what these provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed to be
saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of
the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly
despairing. They seem quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the
death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. According to other accounts
God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some
sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but
which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the
sun. But it was not the strange story to which anybody paid any particular attention;
people in that world had seen queer religions enough to fill a madhouse. It was something
in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a scratch company of
barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military;
they moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a part of their
little system; and about what they said. However mildly, there was a ring like iron. Men
used to many mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery, except the
curious conjecture that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them see reason in
the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor's statue seemed to be spoken to deaf men. It
was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth; it was a difference of substance
to the touch. Those who touched their foundation fancied they had struck a rock.
With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream, the proportions of things seemed
to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had happened, these few men were
palpably present. They were important enough to be ignored. People became suddenly silent
about them and walked stiffly past them. We see a new scene, in which the world has drawn
its skirts away from these men and women and they stand in the centre of a great space
like lepers. The scene changes again and the great space where they stand is overhung on
every side with a cloud of witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down
towards them intently; for strange things are happening to them. New tortures have been
invented for the madmen who have brought good news. That sad and weary society seems
almost to find a new energy in establishing its first religious persecution. Nobody yet
knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its
midst; but they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve
round them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been
darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing
its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it
with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the
world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it
more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred
around the Church of God.
This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which popular science
associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has really found archaic
drawings of animals. The second half of human history, which was like a new creation of
the world, also begins in a cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that
animals were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the
uplands about Bethlehem; who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at
night. It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when the
doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here beneath
the very feet of the passers-by, in a cellar under the very floor of the world, that Jesus
Christ was born. But in that second creation there was indeed something symbolical in the
roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God also was a Cave-Man,
and had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously coloured, upon the wall of the
world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.
A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and
rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars
were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost
say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded. It is at least like a jest
in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see. He laboriously
explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly and almost derisively exaggerated;
and mildly condemns as improbable something that we have almost madly exalted as
incredible; as something that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true.
When that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little local infancy has been
repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasised, exulted in, sung, shouted, roared, not to
say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns, carols, rhymes, rituals, pictures, poems, and
popular sermons, it may be suggested that we hardly need a higher critic to draw our
attention to something a little odd about it; especially one of the sort that seems to
take a long time to see a joke, even his own joke. But about this contrast and combination
of ideas one thing may be said here, because it is relevant to the whole thesis of this
book. The sort of modern critic of whom I speak is generally much impressed with the
importance of education in life and the importance of psychology in education. That sort
of man is never tired of telling us that first impressions fix character by the law of
causation; and he will become quite nervous if a child's visual sense is poisoned by the
wrong colours on a golliwog or his nervous system prematurely shaken by a cacophonous
rattle. Yet he will think us very narrow-minded, if we say that this is exactly why there
really is a difference between being brought up as a Christian and being brought up as a
Jew or a Moslem or an atheist. The difference is that every Catholic child has learned
from pictures, and even every Protestant child from stories, this incredible combination
of contrasted ideas as one of the very first impressions on his mind. It is not merely a
theological difference. It is a psychological difference which can outlast any theologies.
It really is, as that sort of scientist loves to say about anything, incurable. Any
agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards,
whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of
mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown
strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them,
when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for him there will always be
some savour of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy
and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God. But the two ideas are
not naturally or necessarily combined. They would not be necessarily combined for an
ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to
connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created
in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians, because we are psychological
Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other words, this combination of
ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase, altered human nature. There is really
a difference between the man who knows it and the man who does not. It may not be a
difference of moral worth, for the Moslem or the Jew might be worthier according to his
lights; but it is a plain fact about the crossing of two particular lights, the
conjunction of two stars in our particular horoscope. Omnipotence and impotence, or
divinity and infancy, do definitely make a sort of epigram which a million repetitions
cannot turn into a platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique. Bethlehem is
emphatically a place where extremes meet.
Here begins, it is needless to say, another mighty influence for the humanisation of
Christendom. If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of
Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up with what
is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my opinions
imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was a boy a more Puritan
generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and Child.
After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that
this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous
when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You
cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You can
not suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a
new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the
void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without
visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the
mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows as it
is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of
Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads
are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.
It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing had happened in that
fold or crack in the great grey hills except that the whole universe had been turned
inside out. I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned outwards
to the largest thing were now turned inward to the smallest. The very image will suggest
all that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of the coloured
Catholic imagery like a peacock's tail. But it is true in a sense that God who had been
only a circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small. It is true
that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that
sense is centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in more ways than one, a
religion of little things. But its traditions in art and literature and popular fable have
quite sufficiently attested, as has been said, this particular paradox of the divine being
in the cradle. Perhaps they have not so clearly emphasised the significance of the divine
being in the cave. Curiously enough, indeed, tradition has not very clearly emphasised the
cave. It is a familiar fact that the Bethlehem scene has been represented in every
possible setting of time and country, of landscape and architecture; and it is a wholly
happy and admirable fact that men have conceived it as quite different according to their
different individual traditions and tastes. But while all have realised that it was a
stable, not so many have realised that it was a cave. Some critics have even been so silly
as to suppose that there was some contradiction between the stable and the cave; in which
case they cannot know much about caves or stables in Palestine. As they see differences
that are not there, it is needless to add that they do not see differences that are there.
When a well-known critic says, for instance, that Christ being born in a rocky cavern is
like Mithras having sprung alive out of a rock, it sounds like a parody upon comparative
religion. There is such a thing as the point of a story, even if it is a story in the
sense of a lie. And the notion of a hero appearing, like Pallas from the brain of Zeus,
mature and without a mother, is obviously the very opposite of the idea of a god being
born like an ordinary baby and entirely dependent on a mother. Whichever ideal we might
prefer, we should surely see that they are contrary ideals. It is as stupid to connect
them because they both contain a substance called stone as to identify the punishment of
the Deluge with the baptism in the Jordan because they both contain a substance called
water. Whether as a myth or a mystery, Christ was obviously conceived as born in a hole in
the rocks primarily because it marked the position of one outcast and homeless.
Nevertheless it is true, as I have said, that the cave has not been so commonly or so
clearly used as a symbol as the other realities that surrounded the first Christmas.
And the reason for this also refers to the very nature of that new world. It was in a
sense the difficulty of a new dimension. Christ was not only born on the level of the
world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not
only on no stage set up above the sight-seer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out
of sight; and that is an idea very difficult to express in most modes of artistic
expression. It is the idea of simultaneous happenings on different levels of life.
Something like it might have been attempted in the more archaic and decorative medieval
art. But the more the artists learned of realism and perspective, the less they could
depict at once the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills, and the glory in
the darkness that was under the hills. Perhaps it could have been best conveyed by the
characteristic expedient of some of the medieval guilds, when they wheeled about the
streets a theatre with three stages one above the other, with heaven above the earth and
hell under the earth. But in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the
earth.
There is in that alone the touch of a revolution, as of the world turned upside down.
It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or anything new, about the change
which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole
conception of law and its duties to the poor and outcast. It is profoundly true to say
that after that moment there could be no slaves. There could be and were people bearing
that legal title, until the Church was strong enough to weed them out, but there could be
no more of the pagan repose in the mere advantage to the state of keeping it a servile
state. Individuals became important, in a sense in which no instruments can be important.
A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man's end. All this popular
and fraternal element in the story has been rightly attached by tradition to the episode
of the Shepherds; the hinds who found themselves talking face to face with the princes of
heaven. But there is another aspect of the popular element as represented by the shepherds
which has not perhaps been so fully developed; and which is more directly relevant here.
Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of the popular tradition, had everywhere
been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who had felt most directly, with least
check or chill from philosophy or the corrupt cults of civilisation, the need we have
already considered; the images that were adventures of the imagination; the mythology that
was a sort of search; the tempting and tantalising hints of something half-human in
nature; the dumb significance of seasons and special places. They had best understood that
the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of a story is a personality. But
rationalism had already begun to rot away these really irrational though imaginative
treasures of the peasant; even as systematic slavery had eaten the peasant out of house
and home. Upon all such peasantries everywhere there was descending a dusk and twilight of
disappointment, in the hour when these few men discovered what they sought. Everywhere
else Arcadia was fading from the forest. Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered
like sheep. And though no man knew it, the hour was near which was to end and to fulfil
all things; and though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an unknown tongue
upon the heaving wilderness of the mountains. The shepherds had found their Shepherd.
And the thing they found was of a kind with the things they sought. The populace had
been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in believing that holy things could
have a habitation and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space. And the
barbarian who conceived the crudest fancy about the sun being stolen and hidden in a box,
or the wildest myth about the god being rescued and his enemy deceived with a stone, was
nearer to the secret of the cave and knew more about the crisis of the world, than all
those in the circle of cities round the Mediterranean who had become content with cold
abstractions or cosmopolitan generalisations; than all those who were spinning thinner and
thinner threads of thought out of the transcendentalism of Plato or the orientalism of
Pythagoras. The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic,
it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It
was a place of dreams come true. Since that hour no mythologies have been made in the
world. Mythology is a search.
We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story, in so many miracle
plays and carols, has given to the shepherds the costumes, the language, and the landscape
of the separate English and European countrysides. We all know that one shepherd will talk
in a Somerset dialect or another talk of driving his sheep from Conway towards Clyde. Most
of us know by this time how true is that error, how wise, how artistic, how intensely
Christian and Catholic is that anachronism. But some who have seen it in these scenes of
medieval rusticity have perhaps not seen it in another sort of poetry, which it is
sometimes the fashion to call artificial rather than artistic. I fear that many modern
critics will see only a faded classicism in the fact that men like Crashaw and Herrick
conceived the shepherds of Bethlehem under the form of the shepherds of Virgil. Yet they
were profoundly right; and in turning their Bethlehem play into a Latin Eclogue they took
up one of the most important links in human history. Virgil, as we have already seen, does
stand for all that saner heathenism that had over-thrown the insane heathenism of human
sacrifice; but the very fact that even the Virgilian virtues and the sane heathenism were
in incurable decay is the whole problem to which the revelation to the shepherds is the
solution. If the world had ever had the chance to grow weary of being demoniac, it might
have been healed merely by becoming sane. But if it had grown weary even of being sane,
what was to happen, except what did happen? Nor is it false to conceive the Arcadian
shepherd of the Eclogues as rejoicing in what did happen. One of the Eclogues has even
been claimed as a prophecy of what did happen. But it is quite as much in the tone and
incidental diction of the great poet that we feel the potential sympathy with the great
event; and even in their own human phrases the voices of the Virgilian shepherds might
more than once have broken upon more than the tenderness of Italy `Incipe, parve puer,
risu cognoscere matrem' They might have found in that strange place all that was best in
the last traditions of the Latins; and something better than a wooden idol standing up for
ever for the pillar of the human family; a household god. But they and all the other
mythologists would be justified in rejoicings that the event had fulfilled not merely the
mysticism but the materialism of mythology. Mythology had many sins; but it had not been
wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation. But something of the ancient voice that was
supposed to have rung through the graves, it could cry again, 'We have seen, he hath seen
us, a visible god.' So the ancient shepherds might have danced, and their feet have been
beautiful upon the mountains, rejoicing over the philosophers. But the philosophers had
also heard.
It is still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out of orient lands,
crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians.
That truth that is tradition his wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as
mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior. Caspar, Balthazar. But there
came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun
in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all
the sages. They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been
Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth of
things, and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had
their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for
philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the incomplete.
Such learned men would doubtless have come, as these learned men did come, to find
themselves confirmed in much that was true in their own traditions and right in their own
reasoning. Confucius would have found a new foundation for the family in the very reversal
of the Holy Family; Buddha would have looked upon a new renunciation, of stars rather than
jewels and divinity than royalty. These learned men would still have the right to say, or
rather a new right to say, that there was truth in their old teaching. But after all these
learned men would have come to learn. They would have come to complete their conceptions
with something they had not yet conceived; even to balance their imperfect universe with
something they might once have contradicted. Buddha would have come from his impersonal
paradise to worship a person. Confucius would have come from his temples of
ancestor-worship to worship a child.
We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos; that it was larger than
the old cosmos. In that sense Christendom is larger than creation; as creation had been
before Christ. It included things that had not been there; it also included the things
that had been there. The point happens to be well illustrated in this example of Chinese
piety, but it would be true of other pagan virtues or pagan beliefs. Nobody can doubt that
a reasonable respect for parents is part of a gospel in which God himself was subject in
childhood to earthly parents. But the other sense in which the parents were subject to him
does introduce an idea that is not Confucian. The infant Christ is not like the infant
Confucius; our mysticism conceives him in an immortal infancy. I do not know what
Confucius would have done with the Bambino had it come to life in his arms as it did in
the arms of St. Francis. But this is true in relation to all the other religions and
philosophies; it is the challenge of the Church. The Church contains what the world does
not contain. Life itself does not provide as she does for all sides of life. That every
other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a
rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma. Where is the Holy child amid the
Stoics and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady of the Moslems, a woman made for no
man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the monks of Buddha, rider and
master of the trumpets, guarding for every soldier the honour of the sword? What could St.
Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of Brahminism, he who set forth all the science and
rationality and even rationalism of Christianity? Yet even if we compare Aquinas with
Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of something
added. Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if
Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where we can
hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is so to
whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. How would Francis the
Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of
the Manchester School? Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as
any Calvinist or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with
the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect of
pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and
preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern attempts at Syncretism. They are never
able to make something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean
leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy's tale of
battle or the hedge at the end of the field. The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is
only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all
the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a pantheon had
been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians
were invited to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter, of
Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon. It was the refusal of the Christians that was
the turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world
would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have
been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in
which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and an
appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the
creed descending from antiquity, who does not realise that the whole world once very
nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
Here it is the important point that the Magi, who stand for mysticism and philosophy,
are truly conceived as seeking something new and even as finding something unexpected.
That tense sense of crisis which still tingles in the Christmas story and even in every
Christmas celebration, accentuates the idea of a search and a discovery. The discovery is,
in this case, truly a scientific discovery. For the other mystical figures in the miracle
play; for the angel and the mother, the shepherds and the soldiers of Herod, there may be
aspects both simpler and more supernatural, more elemental or more emotional. But the wise
Men must be seeking wisdom, and for them there must be a light also in the intellect. And
this is the light; that the Catholic creed is catholic and that nothing else is catholic.
The philosophy of the Church is universal. The philosophy of the philosophers was not
universal. Had Plato and Pythagoras and Aristotle stood for an instant in the light that
came out of that little cave, they would have known that their own light was not
universal. It is far from certain, indeed, that they did not know it already. Philosophy
also, like mythology, had very much the air of a search. It is the realisation of this
truth that gives its traditional majesty and mystery to the figures of the Three Kings;
the discovery that religion is broader than philosophy and that this is the broadest of
religions, contained within this narrow space. The Magicians were gazing at the strange
pentacle with the human triangle reversed; and they have never come to the end of their
calculations about it. For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our
emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a
never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the
child who was a father and the mother who was a child.
We might well be content to say that mythology had come with the shepherds and
philosophy with the philosophers; and that it only remained for them to combine in the
recognisation of religion. But there was a third element that must not be ignored and one
which that religion for ever refuses to ignore, in any revel or reconciliation. There was
present in the primary scenes of the drama that Enemy that had rotted the legends with
lust and frozen theories into atheism, but which answered the direct challenge with
something of that more direct method which we have seen in the conscious cult of the
demons. In the description of that demon-worship, of the devouring detestation of
innocence shown in the works of its witchcraft and the most inhuman of its human
sacrifice, I have said less of its incorrect and secret penetration of the saner paganism;
the soaking of mythological imagination with sex; the rise of imperial pride into
insanity. But both the indirect and the direct influence make themselves felt in the drama
of Bethlehem. A ruler under the Roman suzerainty, probably equipped and surrounded with
the Roman ornament and order though himself of eastern blood, seems in that hour to have
felt stirring within him the spirit of strange things. We all know the story of how Herod,
alarmed at some rumour of a mysterious rival, remembered the wild gesture of the
capricious despots of Asia and ordered a massacre of suspects of the new generation of the
populace. Everyone knows the story; but not everyone has perhaps noted its place in the
story of the strange religions of men. Not everybody has seen the significance even of its
very contrast with the Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered and
superficially civilised world. Only, as the purpose in his dark spirit began to show and
shine in the eyes of the Idumean, a seer might perhaps have seen something like a great
grey ghost that looked over his shoulder; have seen behind him filling the dome of night
and hovering for the last time over history, that vast and fearful face that was Moloch of
the Carthaginians; awaiting his last tribute from a ruler of the races of Shem. The demons
also, in that first festival of Christmas, feasted after their own fashion.
Unless we understand the presence of that enemy, we shall not only miss the point of
Christianity, but even miss the point of Christmas. Christmas for us in Christendom has
become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But like all the truths of that
tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the
simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical
fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. It is not only an occasion for the peacemakers
any more than for the merry-makers; it is not only a Hindu peace conference any more than
it is only a Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it also; something
that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has
just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only
hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the
exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But
the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be
covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in
the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw's den; properly understood it is not
unduly flippant to say they were rejoicings in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a
subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies were already
scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It is not only that the very
horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of
Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing
through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity
an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as
Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.
That is perhaps the mightiest of the mysteries of the cave It is already apparent that
though men are said to have looked for hell under the earth, in this case it is rather
heaven that is under the earth And there follows in this strange story the idea of an
upheaval of heaven. That is the paradox of the whole position; that henceforth the highest
thing can only work from below. Royalty can only return to its own by a sort of rebellion.
Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps especially in its beginnings, was not
so much a principality as a revolution against the prince of the world. This sense that
the world had been conquered by the great usurper, and was in his possession, has been
much deplored or derided by those optimists who identify enlightenment with ease. But it
was responsible for all that thrill of defiance and a beautiful danger that made the good
news seem to be really both good and new. It was in truth against a huge unconscious
usurpation that it raised a revolt, and originally so obscure a revolt. Olympus still
occupied the sky like a motionless cloud moulded into many mighty forms; philosophy still
sat in the high places and even on the thrones of the kings, when Christ was born in the
cave and Christianity in the catacombs. In both cases we may remark the same paradox of
revolution; the sense of something despised and of something feared The cave in one aspect
is only a hole or corner into which the outcasts are swept like rubbish; yet in the other
aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable which the tyrants are seeking like
treasure. In one sense they are there because the innkeeper would not even remember them,
and in another because the king can never forget them. We have already noted that this
paradox appeared also in the treatment of the early Church. It was important while it was
still insignificant, and certainly while it was still impotent. It was important solely
because it was intolerable; and in that sense it is true to say that it was intolerable
because it was intolerant. It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret
way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of
heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that creation of gold and marble; but it
contemplated a world without it. It dared to look right through it as though the gold and
marble had been glass. Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with
firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of
Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of
ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to
their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.
Herod had his place, therefore, in the miracle play of Bethlehem because he is the
menace to the Church Militant and shows it from the first as under persecution and
fighting for its life. For those who think this a discord, it is a discord that sounds
simultaneously with the Christmas bells. For those who think the idea of the Crusade is
one that spoils the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea of the Cross
is spoiled; the idea of the cross is spoiled quite literally in the cradle. It is not here
to the purpose to argue with them on the abstract ethics of fighting; the purpose in this
place is merely to sum up the combination of ideas that make up the Christian and Catholic
idea, and to note that all of them are already crystallised in the first Christmas story.
They are three distinct and commonly contrasted things which are nevertheless one thing;
but this is the only thing which can make them one. The first is the human instinct for a
heaven that shall be as literal and almost as local as a home. It is the idea pursued by
all poets and pagans making myths; that a particular place must be the shrine of the god
or the abode of the blest; that fairyland is a land; or that the return of the ghost must
be the resurrection of the body. I do not here reason about the refusal of rationalism to
satisfy this need. I only say that if the rationalists refuse to satisfy it, the pagans
will not be satisfied. This is present in the story of Bethlehem and Jerusalem as it is
present in the story of Delos and Delphi; and as it is not present in the whole universe
of Lucretius or the whole universe of Herbert Spencer. The second element is a philosophy
larger than other philosophies; larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely larger than
that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a hundred windows where the ancient
stoic or the modern agnostic only looks through one. It sees life with thousands of eyes
belonging to thousands of different sorts of people, where the other is only the
individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for all moods of man, it
finds work for all kinds of men, it understands secrets of psychology, it is aware of
depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between ideal and unreal marvels and miraculous
exceptions, it trains itself in tact about hard cases, all with a multiplicity and
subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond the bald or
breezy platitudes of most ancient or modern moral philosophy. In a word, there is more in
it; it finds more in existence to think about; it gets more out of life. Masses of this
material about our many-sided life have been added since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas.
But St. Thomas Aquinas alone would have found himself limited in the world of Confucius or
of Comte. And the third point is this; that while it is local enough for poetry and larger
than any other philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight. While it is deliberately
broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still stiffly embattled against every
mode of error. It gets every kind of man to fight for it, it gets every kind of weapon to
fight with, it widens its knowledge of the things that are fought for and against with
every art of curiosity or sympathy; but it never forgets that it is fighting. It proclaims
peace on earth and never forgets why there was war in heaven.
This is the trinity of truths symbolised here by the three types in the old Christmas
story; the shepherds and the kings and that other king who warred upon the children. It is
simply not true to say that other religions and philosophies are in this respect its
rivals. It is not true to say that any one of them combines these characters; it is not
true to say that any one of them pretends to combine them. Buddhism may profess to be
equally mystical; it does not even profess to be equally military. Islam may profess to be
equally military; it does not even profess to be equally metaphysical and subtle.
Confucianism may profess to satisfy the need of the philosophers for order and reason; it
does not even profess to satisfy the need of the mystics for miracle and sacrament and the
consecration of concrete things. There are many evidences of this presence of a spirit at
once universal and unique. One will serve here which is the symbol of the subject of this
chapter; that no other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical
event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression
produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage seems
to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous,
or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated. Not
one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with the sense that he was
going home. He might admire it because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical,
or any number of other things in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is
that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on
human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend or the
life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our minds to
greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods
and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero-worship. It does not exactly work
outwards, adventurously, to the wonders to be found at the ends of the earth. It is rather
something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and personal part of our being;
like that which can some times take us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the
blind pieties of the poor. It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very
heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is
as if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It is
not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials
whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. It is all that
is in us but a brief tenderness that is there made eternal; all that means no more than a
momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose;
it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken;
as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the
feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over
something more human than humanity.
To understand the nature of this chapter, it is necessary to recur to the nature of
this book. The argument which is meant to be the backbone of the book is of the kind
called the reductio ad absurdum. It suggests that the results of assuming the
rationalist thesis are more irrational than ours; but to prove it we must assume that
thesis. Thus in the first section I often treated man as merely an animal, to show that
the effect was more impossible than if he were treated as an angel. In the sense in which
it was necessary to treat man merely as an animal, it is necessary to treat Christ merely
as a man. I have to suspend my own beliefs, which are much more positive; and assume this
limitation even in order to remove it. I must try to imagine what would happen to a man
who did really read the story of Christ as the story of a man; and even of a man of whom
he had never heard before. And I wish to point out that a really impartial reading of that
kind would lead, if not immediately to belief, at least to a bewilderment of which there
is really no solution except in belief. In this chapter, for this reason, I shall bring in
nothing of the spirit of my own creed; I shall exclude the very style of diction, and even
of lettering, which I should think fitting in speaking in my own person. I am speaking as
an imaginary heathen human being, honestly, staring at the Gospel story for the first
time.
Now it is not at all easy to regard the New Testament as a New Testament. It is not at
all easy to realise the good news as new. Both for good and evil familiarity fills us with
assumptions and associations; and no man of our civilisation, whatever he thinks of our
religion, can really read the thing as if he had never heard of it before. Of course it is
in any case utterly unhistorical to talk as if the New Testament were a neatly bound book
that had fallen from heaven. It is simply the selection made by the authority of the
Church from a mass of early Christian literature. But apart from any such question there
is a psychological difficulty in feeling the New Testament as new. There is a
psychological difficulty in seeing those well-known words simply as they stand and without
going beyond what they intrinsically stand for. And this difficulty must indeed be very
great; for the result of it is very curious. The result of it is that most modern critics
and most current criticism, even popular criticism, makes a comment that is the exact
reverse of the truth. It is so completely the reverse of the truth that one could almost
suspect that they had never read the New Testament at all.
We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of
saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover
of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and
stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This
is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the
image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image
of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the
Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken
hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters.
Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that the Church in its popular imagery
ever represents him as uttering. That popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound
popular instinct. The mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor,
and for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the incredible
compassion of God. But nobody with his eyes open can doubt that it is chiefly this idea of
compassion that the popular machinery of the Church does seek to carry. The popular
imagery carries a great deal to excess the sentiment of 'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.' It
is the first thing that the outsider feels and criticises in a Pieta or a shrine of the
Sacred Heart. As I say, while the art may be insufficient, I am not sure that the instinct
is unsound. In any case there is something appalling, something that makes the blood run
cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something insupportable
even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner of a street or coming out into
the spaces of a marketplace, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it
turned upon a generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite.
The Church can reasonably be justified therefore if she turns the most merciful face or
aspect towards men; but it is certainly the most merciful aspect that she does turn. And
the point is here that it is very much more specially and exclusively merciful than any
impression that could be formed by a man merely reading the New Testament for the first
time. A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand would form quite another
impression; an impression full of mystery and possibly of inconsistency; but certainly not
merely an impression of mildness. It would be intensely interesting; but part of the
interest would consist in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained. It is
full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they
signify, of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms
above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to
follow some higher weather-chart of their own. The Peter whom popular Church teaching
presents is very rightly the Peter to whom Christ said in forgiveness, 'Feed my lambs.' He
is not the Peter upon whom Christ turned as if he were the devil, crying in that obscure
wrath, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.' Christ lamented with nothing but love and pity over
Jerusalem which was to murder him. We do not know what strange spiritual atmosphere or
spiritual insight led him to sink Bethsaida lower in the pit than Sodom. I am putting
aside for the moment all questions of doctrinal inferences or expositions, orthodox or
otherwise; I am simply imagining the effect on a man's mind if he did really do what these
critics are always talking about doing; if he did really read the New Testament without
reference to orthodoxy and even without reference to doctrine. He would find a number of
things which fit in far less with the current unorthodoxy than they do with the current
orthodoxy. He would find, for instance, that if there are any descriptions that deserved
to be called realistic, they are precisely the descriptions of the supernatural. If there
is one aspect of the New Testament Jesus in which he may be said to present himself
eminently as a practical person, it is in the aspect of an exorcist. There is nothing meek
and mild, there is nothing even in the ordinary sense mystical, about the tone of the
voice that says 'Hold thy peace and come out of him.' It is much more like the tone of a
very business-like lion-tamer or a strong-minded doctor dealing with a homicidal maniac.
But this is only a side issue for the sake of illustration; I am not now raising these
controversies; but considering the case of the imaginary man from the moon to whom the New
Testament is new.
Now the first thing to note is that if we take it merely as a human story, it is in
some ways a very strange story. I do not refer here to its tremendous and tragic
culmination or to any implications involving triumph in that tragedy. I do not refer to
what is commonly called the miraculous element; for on that point philosophies vary and
modern philosophies very decidedly waver. Indeed the educated Englishman of to-day may be
said to have passed from an old fashion, in which he would not believe in any miracles
unless they were ancient, and adopted a new fashion in which he will not believe in any
miracles unless they are modern. He used to hold that miraculous cures stopped with the
first Christians and is now inclined to suspect that they began with the first Christian
Scientists. But I refer here rather specially to unmiraculous and even to unnoticed and
inconspicuous parts of the story. There are a great many things about it which nobody
would have invented, for they are things that nobody has ever made any particular use of;
things which if they were remarked at all have remained rather as puzzles. For instance,
there is that long stretch of silence in the life of Christ up to the age of thirty. It is
of all silences the most immense and imaginatively impressive. But it is not the sort of
thing that anybody is particularly likely to invent in order to prove something; and no
body so far as I know has ever tried to prove anything in particular from it. It is
impressive, but it is only impressive as a fact; there is nothing particularly popular or
obvious about it as a fable. The ordinary trend of hero-worship and myth-making is much
more likely to say the precise opposite. It is much more likely to say (as I believe some
of the gospels rejected by the Church do say) that Jesus displayed a divine precocity and
began his mission at a miraculously early age. And there is indeed something strange in
the thought that he who of all humanity needed least preparation seems to have had most.
Whether it was some mode of the divine humility, or some truth of which we see the shadow
of the longer domestic tutelage of the higher creatures of the earth. I do not propose to
speculate; I mention it simply as an example of the sort of thing that does in any case
give rise to speculations, quite apart from recognised religious speculations. Now the
whole story is full of these things. It is not by any means, as baldly presented in print,
a story that it is easy to get to the bottom of. It is anything but what these people talk
of as a simple Gospel. Relatively speaking, it is the Gospel that has the mysticism and
the Church that has the rationalism. As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that
is the riddle and the Church that is the answer. But whatever be the answer, the Gospel as
it stands is almost a book of riddles.
First, a man reading the Gospel sayings would not find platitudes. If he had read even
in the most respectful spirit the majority of ancient philosophers and of modern
moralists, he would appreciate the unique importance of saying that he did not find
platitudes. It is more than can be said even of Plato. It is much more than can be said of
Epictetus or Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or Apollonius of Tyana. And it is immeasurably more
than can be said of most of the agnostic moralists and the preachers of the ethical
societies; with their songs of service and their religion of brotherhood. The morality of
most moralists ancient and modern, has been one solid and polished cataract of platitudes
flowing for ever and ever. That would certainly not be the impression of the imaginary
independent outsider studying the New Testament. He would be conscious of nothing so
commonplace and in a sense of nothing so continuous as that stream. He would find a number
of strange claims that might sound like the claim to be the brother of the sun and moon; a
number of very startling pieces of advice; a number of stunning rebukes; a number of
strangely beautiful stories. He would see some very gigantesque figures of speech about
the impossibility of threading a needle with a camel or the possibility of throwing a
mountain into the sea. He would see a number of very daring simplifications of the
difficulties of life; like the advice to shine upon everybody indifferently as does the
sunshine or not to worry about the future any more than the birds. He would find on the
other hand some passages of almost impenetrable darkness, so far as he is concerned, such
as the moral of the parable of the Unjust Steward. Some of these things might strike him
as fables and some as truths; but none as truisms. For instance, he would not find the
ordinary platitudes in favour of peace. He would find several paradoxes in favour of
peace. He would find several ideals of non-resistance, which taken as they stand would be
rather too pacific for any pacifist. He would be told in one passage to treat a robber not
with passive resistance, but rather with positive and enthusiastic encouragement, if the
terms be taken literally; heaping up gifts upon the man who had stolen goods. But he would
not find a word of all that obvious rhetoric against war which has filled countless books
and odes and orations; not a word about the wickedness of war, the wastefulness of war,
the appalling scale of the slaughter in war and all the rest of the familiar frenzy;
indeed not a word about war at all. There is nothing that throws any particular light on
Christ's attitude towards organised warfare, except that he seems to have been rather fond
of Roman soldiers. Indeed it is another perplexity, speaking from the same external and
human stand point, that he seems to have got on much better with Romans than he did with
Jews. But the question here is a certain tone to be appreciated by merely reading a
certain text; and we might give any number of instances of it.
The statement that the meek shall inherit the earth is very far from being a meek
statement. I mean it is not meek in the ordinary sense of mild and moderate and
inoffensive. To justify it, it would be necessary to go very deep into history and
anticipate things undreamed of then and by many unrealised even now; such as the way in
which the mystical monks reclaimed the lands which the practical kings had lost. If it was
a truth at all, it was because it was a prophecy. But certainly it was not a truth in the
sense of a truism. The blessing upon the meek would seem to be a very violent statement;
in the sense of doing violence to reason and probability. And with this we come to another
important stage in the speculation. As a prophecy it really was fulfilled; but it was only
fulfilled long afterwards. The monasteries were the most practical and prosperous estates
and experiments in reconstruction after the barbaric deluge; the meek did really inherit
the earth. But nobody could have known anything of the sort at the time-- unless indeed
there was one who knew. Something of the same thing may be said about the incident of
Martha and Mary; which has been interpreted in retrospect and from the inside by the
mystics of the Christian contemplative life. But it was not at all an obvious view of it;
and most moralists, ancient and modern, could be trusted to make a rush for the obvious.
What torrents of effortless eloquence would have flowed from them to swell any slight
superiority on the part of Martha; what splendid sermons about the Joy of Service and the
Gospel of Work and the World Left Better Than We Found It, and generally all the ten
thousand platitudes that can be uttered in favour of taking trouble--by people who need
take no trouble to utter them. If in Mary the mystic and child of love Christ was guarding
the seed of something more subtle, who was likely to understand it at the time? Nobody
else could have seen Clare and Catherine and Teresa shining above the little roof at
Bethany. It is so in another way with that magnificent menace about bringing into the
world a sword to sunder and divide. Nobody could have guessed then either how it could be
fulfilled or how it could be justified. Indeed some freethinkers are still so simple as to
fall into the trap and be shocked at a phrase so deliberately defiant. They actually
complain of the paradox for not being a platitude.
But the point here is that if we could read the Gospel reports as things as new as
newspaper reports, they would puzzle us and perhaps terrify us much more than the same
things as developed by historical Christianity. For instance, Christ after a clear
allusion to the eunuchs of eastern courts, said there would be eunuchs of the kingdom of
heaven. If this does not mean the voluntary enthusiasm of virginity, it could only be made
to mean something much more unnatural or uncouth. It is the historical religion that
humanises it for us by experience of Franciscans or of Sisters of Mercy. The mere
statement standing by itself might very well suggest a rather dehumanised atmosphere; the
sinister and inhuman silence of the Asiatic harem and divan. This is but one instance out
of scores; but the moral is that the Christ of the Gospel might actually seem more strange
and terrible than the Christ of the Church.
I am dwelling on the dark or dazzling or defiant or mysterious side of the Gospel
words, not because they had not obviously a more obvious and popular side, but because
this is the answer to a common criticism on a vital point. The freethinker frequently says
that Jesus of Nazareth was a man of his time, even if he was in advance of his time; and
that we cannot accept his ethics as final for humanity. The freethinker then goes on to
criticise his ethics, saying plausibly enough that men cannot turn the other cheek, or
that they must take thought for the morrow, or that the self-denial is too ascetic or the
monogamy too severe. But the Zealots and the Legionaries did not turn the other cheek any
more than we do, if so much. The Jewish traders and Roman tax-gatherers took thought for
the morrow as much as we, if not more. We cannot pretend to be abandoning the morality of
the past for one more suited to the present. It is certainly not the morality of another
age, but it might be of another world.
In short, we can say that these ideals are impossible in themselves. Exactly what we
cannot say is that they are impossible for us. They are rather notably marked by a
mysticism which, if it be a sort of madness, would always have struck the same sort of
people as mad. Take, for instance, the case of marriage and the relations of the sexes. It
might very well have been true that a Galilean teacher taught things natural to a Galilean
environment; but it is not. It might rationally be expected that a man in the time of
Tiberius would have advanced a view conditioned by the time of Tiberius; but he did not.
What he advanced was something quite different; something very difficult; but something no
more difficult now than it was then. When, for instance, Mahomet made his polygamous
compromise we may reasonably say that it was conditioned by a polygamous society. When he
allowed a man four wives he was really doing something suited to the circumstances, which
might have been less suited to other circumstances. Nobody will pretend that the four
wives were like the four winds, something seemingly a part of the order of nature; nobody
will say that the figure four was written for ever in stars upon the sky But neither will
anyone say that the figure four is an inconceivable ideal; that it is beyond the power of
the mind of man to count up to four; or to count the number of his wives and see whether
it amounts to four. It is a practical compromise carrying with it the character of a
particular society. If Mahomet had been born in Acton in the nineteenth century, we may
well doubt whether he would instantly have filled that suburb with harems of four wives
apiece. As he was born in Arabia in the sixth century, he did in his conjugal arrangements
suggest the conditions of Arabia in the sixth century. But Christ in his view of marriage
does not in the least suggest the conditions of Palestine of the first century. He does
not suggest anything at all, except the sacramental view of marriage as developed long
afterwards by the Catholic Church. It was quite as difficult for people then as for people
now. It was much more puzzling to people then than to people now. Jews and Romans and
Greeks did not believe, and did not even understand enough to disbelieve, the mystical
idea that the man and the woman had become one sacramental substance. We may think it an
incredible or impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any more incredible or impossible
than they would have thought it. In other words, whatever else is true, it is not true
that the controversy has been altered by time. Whatever else is true, it is emphatically
not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time, but are no longer
suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they we to his time is perhaps suggested in the
end of his story.
The same truth might be stated in another way by saying that if the story be regarded
as merely human and historical, it is extraordinary how very little there is in the
recorded words of Christ that ties him at all to his own time. I do not mean the details
of a period, which even a man of the period knows to be passing. I mean the fundamentals
which even the wisest man often vaguely assumes to be eternal. For instance, Aristotle was
perhaps the wisest and most wide-minded man who ever lived. He founded himself entirely
upon fundamentals, which have been generally found to remain rational and solid through
all social and historical changes. Still, he lived in a world in which it was thought as
natural to have slaves as to have children. And therefore he did permit himself a serious
recognition of a difference between slaves and free men. Christ as much as Aristotle lived
in a world that took slavery for granted. He did not particularly denounce slavery. He
started a movement that could exist in a world with slavery. But he started a movement
that could exist in a world without slavery. He never used a phrase that made his
philosophy depend even upon the very existence of the social order in which he lived. He
spoke as one conscious that everything was ephemeral, including the things that Aristotle
thought eternal. By that time the Roman Empire had come to be merely the orbis terrarum,
another name for the world. But he never made his morality dependent on the existence of
the Roman Empire or even on the existence of the world. 'Heaven and earth shall pass away,
but my words shall not pass away.'
The truth is that when critics have spoken of the local limitations of the Galilean, it
has always been a case of the local limitations of the critics. He did undoubtedly believe
in certain things that one particular modern sect of materialists do not believe. But they
were not things particularly peculiar to his time. It would be nearer the truth to say
that the denial of them is quite peculiar to our time. Doubtless it would be nearer still
to the truth to say merely that a certain solemn social importance, in the minority
disbelieving them, is peculiar to our time. He believed, for instance, in evil spirits or
in the psychic healing of bodily ills; but not because he was a Galilean born under
Augustus. It is absurd to say that a man believed things because he was a Galilean under
Augustus when he might have believed the same things if he had been an Egyptian under
Tutenkamen or an Indian under Gengis Khan. But with this general question of the
philosophy of diabolism or of divine miracles I deal elsewhere. It is enough to say that
the materialists have to prove the impossibility of miracles against the testimony of all
mankind, not against the prejudices of provincials in North Palestine under the first
Roman Emperors. What they have to prove, for the present argument, is the presence in the
Gospels of those particular prejudices of those particular provincials. And, humanly
speaking, it is astonishing how little they can produce even to make a beginning of
proving it.
So it is in this case of the sacrament of marriage. We may not believe in sacraments,
as we may not believe in spirits, but it is quite clear that Christ believed in this
sacrament in his own way and not in any current or contemporary way. He certainly did not
get his argument against divorce from the Mosaic law or the Roman law or the habits of the
Palestinian people. It would appear to his critics then exactly what it appears to his
critics now; an arbitrary and transcendental dogma coming from nowhere save in the sense
that it came from him. I am not at all concerned here to defend that dogma; the point here
is that it is just as easy to defend it now as it was to defend it then. It is an ideal
altogether outside time; difficult at any period; impossible at no period. In other words,
if anyone says it is what might be expected of a man walking about in that place at that
period, we can quite fairly answer that it is much more like what might be the mysterious
utterance of a being beyond man, if he walked alive among men.
I maintain therefore that a man reading the New Testament frankly and freshly would not
get the impression of what is now often meant by a human Christ. The merely human Christ
is a made-up figure, a piece of artificial selection, like the merely evolutionary man.
Moreover there have been too many of these human Christs found in the same story, just as
there have been too many keys to mythology found in the same stories. Three or four
separate schools of rationalism have worked over the ground and produced three or four
equally rational explanations of his life. The first rational explanation of his life was
that he never lived. And this in turn gave an opportunity for three or four different
explanations, as that he was a sun-myth or a corn-myth, or any other kind of myth that is
also a monomania. Then the idea that he was a divine being who did not exist gave place to
the idea that he was a human being who did exist. In my youth it vas the fashion to say
that he was merely an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes, who had apparently
nothing very much to say that Hillel or a hundred other Jews might not have said; as that
it is a kindly thing to be kind and an assistance to purification to be pure. Then
somebody said he was a madman with a Messianic delusion. Then others said he was indeed an
original teacher because he cared about nothing but Socialism; or (as others said) about
nothing but Pacifism. Then a more grimly scientific character appeared who said that Jesus
would never have been heard of at all except for his prophecies of the end of the world.
He was important merely as a Millenarian like Dr. Cumming; and created a provincial scare
by announcing the exact date of the crack of doom. Among other variants on the same theme
was the theory that he was a spiritual healer and nothing else; a view implied by
Christian Science, which has really to expound a Christianity without the Crucifixion in
order to explain the curing of Peter's wife's mother or the daughter of a centurion. There
is another theory that concentrates entirely on the business of diabolism and what it
would call the contemporary superstition about demoniacs, as if Christ, like a young
deacon taking his first orders, had got as far as exorcism and never got any further. Now,
each of these explanations in itself seems to me singularly inadequate; but taken together
they do suggest something of the very mystery which they miss. There must surely have been
something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs can
be carved out of him. If the Christian Scientist is satisfied with him as a spiritual
healer and the Christian Socialist is satisfied with him as a social reformer, so
satisfied that they do not even expect him to be anything else, it looks as if he really
covered rather more ground than they could be expected to expect. And it does seem to
suggest that there might be more than they fancy in these other mysterious attributes of
casting out devils or prophesying doom.
Above all, would not such a new reader of the New Testament stumble over something that
would startle him much more than it startles us? I have here more than once attempted the
rather impossible task of reversing time and the historic method; and in fancy looking
forward to the facts, instead of backward through the memories. So I have imagined the
monster that man might have seemed at first to the mere nature around him. We should have
a worse shock if we really imagined the nature of Christ named for the first time. What
should we feel at the first whisper of a certain suggestion about a certain man? Certainly
it is not for us to blame anybody who should find that first wild whisper merely impious
and insane. On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first step. Stark
staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that truth than a modernist metaphysic
that would make it out merely a matter of degree. It were better to rend our robes with a
great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgement, or to lay hold of the man as
a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than to stand stupidly
debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim. There is
more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the
sensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop
dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter's apprentice said calmly and almost
carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: 'Before Abraham was, I am.'
In the last chapter I have deliberately stressed what seems to be nowadays a neglected
side of the New Testament story, but nobody will suppose, I imagine, that it is meant to
obscure that side that may truly be called human. That Christ was and is the most merciful
of judges and the most sympathetic of friends is a fact of considerably more importance in
our own private lives than in anybody's historical speculations. But the purpose of this
book is to point out that something unique has been swamped in cheap generalisations; and
for that purpose it is relevant to insist that even what was most universal was also most
original. For instance, we might take a topic which really is sympathetic to the modern
mood, as the ascetic vocations recently referred to are not. The exaltation of childhood
is something which we do really understand; but it was by no means a thing that was then
in that sense understood. If we wanted an example of the originality of the Gospels we
could hardly take a stronger or more startling one. Nearly two thousand years afterwards
we happen to find ourselves in a mood that does really feel the mystical charm of the
child; we express it in romances and regrets about childhood, in Peter Pan or The
Child's Garden of Verses. And we can say of the words of Christ with so angry an
anti-Christian as Swinburne:--
'No sign that ever was given
To faithful or faithless eyes
Showed ever beyond clouds riven
So clear a paradise.
Earth's creeds may be seventy times seven
And blood have defiled each creed
But if such be the kingdom of heaven
It must be heaven indeed.'
But that paradise was not clear until Christianity had gradually cleared it. The pagan
world, as such, would not have understood any such thing as a serious suggestion that a
child is higher or holier than a man. It would have seemed like the suggestion that a
tadpole is higher or holier than a frog. To the merely rationalistic mind, it would sound
like saying that a bud must be more beautiful than a flower or that an unripe apple must
be better than a ripe one. In other words, this modern feeling is an entirely mystical
feeling. It is quite as mystical as the cult of virginity; in fact it is the cult of
virginity. But pagan antiquity had much more idea of the holiness of the virgin than of
the holiness of the child. For various reasons we have come nowadays to venerate children,
perhaps partly because we envy children for still doing what men used to do; such as play
simple games and enjoy fairy-tales. Over and above this, however, there is a great deal of
real and subtle psychology in our appreciation of childhood; but if we turn it into a
modern discovery, we must once more admit that the historical Jesus of Nazareth had
already discovered it two thousand years too soon. There was certainly nothing in the
world around him to help him to the discovery. Here Christ was indeed human; but more
human than a human being was then likely to be. Peter Pan does not belong to the world of
Pan but the world of Peter.
Even in the matter of mere literary style, if we suppose ourselves thus sufficiently
detached to look at it in that light, there is a curious quality to which no critic seems
to have done justice. It had among other things a singular air of piling tower upon tower
by the use of the a fortiori; making a pagoda of degrees like the seven heavens. I
have already noted that almost inverted imaginative vision which pictured the impossible
penance of the Cities of the Plain. There is perhaps nothing so perfect in all language or
literature as the use of these three degrees in the parable of the lilies of the field; in
which he seems first to take one small flower in his hand and note its simplicity and even
its impotence; then suddenly expands it in flamboyant colours into all the palaces and
pavilions full of a great name in national legend and national glory; and then, by yet a
third overturn, shrivels into nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away
``and if God so clothes the grass that today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven-- how
much more'' It is like the building of a good Babel tower by white magic in a moment and
in the movement of a hand; a tower heaved suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can be
seen afar off, higher than we had fancied possible, the figure of man; lifted by three
infinities above all other things, on a starry ladder of light logic and swift
imagination. Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a masterpiece than most of the
masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems to have been uttered almost at random while a
man might pull a flower. But merely in a literary sense also, this use of the comparative
in several degrees has about it a quality which seems to me to hint of much higher things
than the modern suggestion of the simple teaching of pastoral or communal ethics. There is
nothing that really indicates a subtle and in the true sense a superior mind so much as
this power of comparing a lower thing with a higher and yet that higher with a higher
still; of thinking on three planes at once. There is nothing that wants the rarest sort of
wisdom so much as to see, let us say, that the citizen is higher than the slave and yet
that the soul is infinitely higher than the citizen or the city. It is not by any means a
faculty that commonly belongs to these simplifiers of the Gospel; those who insist on what
they call a simple morality and others call a sentimental morality. It is not at all
covered by those who are content to tell everybody to remain at peace. On the contrary,
there is a very striking example of it in the apparent inconsistency between Christ's
sayings about peace and about a sword. It is precisely this power which perceives that
while a good peace is better than a good war, even a good war is better than a bad peace.
These far-flung comparisons are nowhere so common as in the Gospels; and to me they
suggest something very vast. So a thing solitary and solid, with the added dimension of
depth or height, might tower over the flat creatures living only on a plane.
This quality of something that can only be called subtle and superior, something that
is capable of long views and even of double meanings, is not noted here merely as a
counterblast to the commonplace exaggerations of amiability and mild idealism. It is also
to be noted in connection with the more tremendous truth touched upon at the end of the
last chapter. For this is the very last character that commonly goes with mere
megalomania; especially such steep and staggering megalomania as might be involved in that
claim. This quality that can only be called intellectual distinction is not, of course, an
evidence of divinity. But it is an evidence of a probable distaste for vulgar and
vainglorious claims to divinity. A man of that sort, if he were only a man, would be the
last man in the world to suffer from that intoxication by one notion from nowhere in
particular, which is the mark of the self-deluding sensationalist in religion . Nor is it
even avoided by denying that Christ did make this claim. Of no such man as that, of no
other prophet or philosopher of the same intellectual order, would it be even possible to
pretend that he had made it. Even if the Church had mistaken his meaning, it would still
be true that no other historical tradition except the Church had ever even made the same
mistake. Mahomedans did not misunderstand Mahomet and suppose he was Allah. Jews did not
misinterpret Moses and identify him with Jehovah. Why was this claim alone exaggerated
unless this alone was made. Even if Christianity was one vast universal blunder, it is
still a blunder as solitary as the Incarnation.
The purpose of these pages is to fix the falsity of certain vague and vulgar
assumptions; and we have here one of the most false. There is a sort of notion in the air
everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were
rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim
to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique. Mahomet did
not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did not make it any more that Plato
or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he was Bramah. Zoroaster no more claimed to be Ormuz
than to be Ahriman. The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should
expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy. It is exactly the
other way. Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very
greatest claim. Outside the unique case we are considering, the only kind of man who ever
does make that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or self-centered monomaniac.
Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of gods and men, come down from the
sky; though we might imagine some insane Roman Emperor like Caligula claiming it for him,
or more probably for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were
literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank finding it as a
cryptogram in Shakespeare's works, or preferably in his own works. It is possible to find
here and there human beings who make this supremely superhuman claim. It is possible to
find them in lunatic asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats. But what is
much more important than their mere materialistic fate in our very materialistic society,
under very crude and clumsy laws about lunacy, the type we know as tinged with this, or
tending towards it, is a diseased and disproportionate type; narrow yet swollen and morbid
to monstrosity. It is by rather an unlucky metaphor that we talk of a madman as cracked;
for in a sense he is not cracked enough. He is cramped rather than cracked; there are not
enough holes in his head to ventilate it. This impossibility of letting in daylight on a
delusion does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity. It can be found, not
among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a low set of lunatics.
But this is exactly where the argument becomes intensely interesting; because the argument
proves too much. For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person. No
modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a
horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No
atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a
monster with one mad idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical
criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all
analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of all.
In, fact, those who can really take it (as I here hypothetically take it) in a quite
dry and detached spirit, have here a most curious and interesting human problem. It is so
intensely interesting, considered as a human problem, that it is in a spirit quite
disinterested, so to speak, that I wish some of them had turned that intricate human
problem into something like an intelligible human portrait. If Christ was simply a human
character, he really was a highly complex and contradictory human character. For he
combined exactly the two things that lie at the two extremes of human variation. He was
exactly what the man with a delusion never is; he was wise; he was a good judge. What he
said was always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often
unexpectedly moderate. Take a thing like the point of the parable of the tares and the
wheat. It has the quality that unites sanity and subtlety. It has not the simplicity of a
madman. It has not even the simplicity of a fanatic. It might be uttered by a philosopher
a hundred years old, at the end of a century of Utopias. Nothing could be less like this
quality of seeing beyond and all round obvious things, than the condition of the egomaniac
with the one sensitive spot on his brain. I really do not see how these two characters
could be convincingly combined, except in the astonishing way in which the creed combines
them. For until we reach the full acceptance of the fact as a fact, however marvellous,
all mere approximations to it are actually further and further away from it. Divinity is
great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows
greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a
great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the
paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it.
Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may think he is
omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense
omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows.
Even on the purely human and sympathetic side, therefore, the Jesus of the New
Testament seems to me to have in a great many ways the note of something superhuman; that
is of something human and more than human. But there is another quality running through
all his teachings which seems to me neglected in most modern talk about them as teachings;
and that is the persistent suggestion that he has not really come to teach. If there is
one incident in the record which affects me personally as grandly and gloriously human, it
is the incident of giving wine for the wedding-feast. That is really human in the sense in
which a whole crowd of prigs, having the appearance of human beings, can hardly be
described as human. It rises superior to all superior persons. It is as human as Herrick
and as democratic as Dickens. But even in that story there is something else that has that
note of things not fully explained; and in a way here very relevant. I mean the first
hesitation, not on any ground touching the nature of the miracle, but on that of the
propriety of working any miracles at all, at least at that stage; 'my time is not yet
come.' What does that mean? At least it certainly meant a general plan or purpose in the
mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in. And if we leave out that solitary
strategic plan, we not only leave out the point of the story, but the story.
We often hear of Jesus of Nazareth as a wandering teacher, and there is a vital truth
in that view in so far as it emphasises an attitude towards luxury and convention which
most respectable people would still regard as that of a vagabond. It is expressed in his
own great saying about the holes of the foxes and the nests of the birds, and, like many
of his great sayings, it is felt as less powerful than it is, through lack of appreciation
of that great paradox by which he spoke of his own humanity as in some way collectively
and representatively human; calling himself simply the Son of Man; that is, in effect,
calling himself simply Man. It is fitting that the New Man or the Second Adam should
repeat in so ringing a voice and with so arresting a gesture the great fact which came
first in the original story, that man differs from the brutes by everything, even by
deficiency; that he is in a sense less normal and even less native; a stranger upon the
earth. It is well to speak of his wanderings in this sense and in the sense that he shared
the drifting life of the most homeless and hopeless of the poor. It is assuredly well to
remember that he would quite certainly have been moved on by the police and almost
certainly arrested by the police for having no visible means of subsistence. For our law
has in it a turn of humour or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod never happened to think
of, that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.
But in another sense the word 'wandering' as applied to his life is a little
misleading. As a matter of fact, a great many of the pagan sages and not a few of the
pagan sophists might truly be described as wandering teachers. In some of them their
rambling journeys were not altogether without a parallel in their rambling remarks.
Apollonius of Tyana, who figured in some fashionable cults as a sort of ideal philosopher,
is represented as rambling as far as the Ganges and Ethiopia, more or less talking all the
time. There was actually a school of philosophers called the Peripatetics; and most even
of the great philosophers give us a vague impression of having very little to do except to
walk and talk. The great conversations which give us our glimpses of the great minds of
Socrates or Buddha or even Confucius often seem to be parts of a never-ending picnic; and
especially, which is the important point, to have neither beginning nor end. Socrates did
indeed find the conversation interrupted by the incident of his execution. But it is the
whole point and the whole particular merit, of the position of Socrates that death was
only an interruption and an incident. We miss the real moral importance of the great
philosopher if we miss that point; that he stares at the executioner with an innocent
surprise, and almost an innocent annoyance, at finding anyone so unreasonable as to cut
short a little conversation for the elucidation of truth. He is looking for truth and not
looking for death. Death is but a stone in the road which can trip him up. His work in
life is to wander on the roads of the world and talk about truth for ever. Buddha, on the
other hand, did arrest attention by one gesture; it was the gesture of renunciation, and
therefore in a sense of denial. But by one dramatic negation he passed into a world of
negation that was not dramatic; which he would have been the first to insist was not
dramatic. Here again we miss the particular moral importance of the great mystic if we do
not see the distinction; that it was his whole point that he had done with drama, which
consists of desire and struggle and generally of defeat and disappointment. He passes into
peace and lives to instruct others how to pass into it. Henceforth his life is that of the
ideal philosopher; certainly a far more really ideal philosopher than Apollonius of Tyana;
but still a philosopher in the sense that it is not his business to do anything but rather
to explain everything; in his case, we might almost say, mildly and softly to explore
everything. For the messages are basically different. Christ said 'Seek first the kingdom,
and all these things shall be added unto you.' Buddha said 'Seek first the kingdom, and
then you will need none of these things.'
Now compared to these wanderers the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a
thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things consist in doing
something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had
walked about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even the external
movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the sense of forgetting that it was
a journey. This is where it was a fulfilment of the myths rather than of the philosophies;
it is a journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to find the Golden Fleece, or
Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that he was seeking was death. The
primary thing that he was going to do was to die. He was going to do other things equally
definite and objective; we might almost say equally external and material. But from first
to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die. No two things could possibly be
more different than the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. We are meant to feel
that the death of Socrates was, from the point of view of his friends at least, a stupid
muddle and miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow of a humane and lucid, I had
almost said a light philosophy. We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ as
Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that his life was in that sense
a sort of love-affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice. From
the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment when the sun is
extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on wings with the speed and
direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond words.
Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost in the manner of a
military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement
or his doom. It is a story that begins in the paradise of Galilee, a pastoral and peaceful
land having really some hint of Eden, and gradually climbs the rising country into the
mountains that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars, as to a Mountain of
Purgatory. He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on the way for
discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the mountain city. That is the meaning
of that great culmination when he crested the ridge and stood at the turning of the road
and suddenly cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem. Some light touch of that lament is in
every patriotic poem; or if it is absent, the patriotism stinks with vulgarity. That is
the meaning the stirring and startling incident at the gates of the Temple, when the
tables were hurled like lumber down the steps, and the rich merchants driven forth with
bodily blows; the incident that must be at least as much of a puzzle to the pacifists as
any paradox about non resistance can be to any of the militarists. I have compared the
quest to the journey of Jason, but we must never forget that in a deeper sense it is
rather to be compared to the journey of Ulysses. It was not only a romance of travel but a
romance of return; and of the end of a usurpation. No healthy boy reading the story
regards the rout of the Ithacan suitors as anything but a happy ending. But there are
doubtless some who regard the rout of the Jewish merchants and money changers with that
refined repugnance which never fails to move them in the presence of violence, and
especially of violence against the well-to-do. The point, here however, is that all these
incidents have in them a character of mounting crisis. In other words. these incidents are
not incidental. When Apollonius the ideal philosopher is brought before the judgement-seat
of Domitian and vanishes by magic, the miracle is entirely incidental. It might have
occurred at any time in the wandering life of the Tyanean; indeed, I believe it is
doubtful in date as well as in substance. The ideal philosopher merely vanished, and
resumed his ideal existence somewhere else for an indefinite period. It is characteristic
of the contrast perhaps that Apollonius was supposed to have lived to an almost miraculous
old age. Jesus of Nazareth was less prudent in his miracles. When Jesus was brought before
the judgement-seat of Pontius Pilate, he did not vanish. It was the crisis and the goal;
it was the hour and the power of darkness. It was the supremely supernatural act, of all
his miraculous life, that he did not vanish.
Every attempt to amplify that story has diminished it. The task has been attempted by
many men of real genius and eloquence as well as by only too many vulgar sentimentalists
and self-conscious rhetoricians. The tale has been retold with patronising pathos by
elegant sceptics and with fluent enthusiasm by boisterous best-sellers. It will not be
retold here. The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like the power
of mill-stones; and those who can read them simply enough will feel as if rocks had been
rolled upon them. Criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words about
such words as these? What is the use of word-painting about the dark garden filled
suddenly with torchlight and furious faces? 'Are you come out with swords and staves as
against a robber? All day I sat in your temple teaching, and you took me not.' Can
anything be added to the massive and gathered restraint of that irony; like a great wave
lifted to the sky and refusing to fall? 'Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me but weep
for yourselves and for your children.' As the High Priest asked what further need he had
of witnesses, we might well ask what further need we have of words. Peter in a panic
repudiated him: 'and immediately the cock crew; and Jesus looked upon Peter, and Peter
went out and wept bitterly.' Has anyone any further remarks to offer. Just before the
murder he prayed for all the murderous race of men, saying, 'They know not what they do';
is there anything to say to that, except that we know as little what we say? Is there any
need to repeat and spin out the story of how the tragedy trailed up the Via Dolorosa and
how they threw him in haphazard with two thieves in one of the ordinary batches of
execution; and how in all that horror and howling wilderness of desertion one voice spoke
in homage, a startling voice from the very last place where it was looked for, the gibbet
of the criminal; and he said to that nameless ruffian, 'This night shalt thou be with me
in Paradise'? Is there anything to put after that but a full stop? Or is anyone prepared
to answer adequately that farewell gesture to all flesh which created for his Mother a new
Son?
It is more within my powers, and here more immediately to my purpose, to point out that
in that scene were symbolically gathered all the human forces that have been vaguely
sketched in this story. As kings and philosophers and the popular element had been
symbolically present at his birth, so they were more practically concerned in his death;
and with that we come face to face with the essential fact to be realised. All the great
groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical
truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and
Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow
cataract. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at
that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we
must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing
originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness
and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.
In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their
worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the
priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the
legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a
heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the
household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite
monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome,
the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away
even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what
is justice can only ask: 'What is truth?' So in that drama which decided the whole fate of
antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role.
Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of
rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become
the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had
washed his hands of the world.
There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind all the
mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important truth in the world;
and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure
personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring
face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries divine or
human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away. Anyhow it could not save the world; it
could not even conquer the world. There were philosophers who held it in its highest and
noblest form; but they not only could not convert the world, but they never tried. You
could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a private opinion than you could
clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. The Jewish priests had guarded it jealously in
the good and the bad sense. They had kept it as a gigantic secret. As savage heroes might
have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in the tabernacle. They were proud
that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a single deity; and they did not know
that they had themselves gone blind. Since that day their representatives have been like
blind men in broad daylight, striking to right and left with their staffs, and cursing the
darkness. But there has been that in their monumental monotheism that it has at least
remained like a monument, the last thing of its kind, and in a sense motionless in the
more restless world which it cannot satisfy. For it is certain that for some reason it
cannot satisfy. Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in his
heaven and all is right with the world, since the rumour that God had left his heavens to
set it right.
And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had once been good, so it
was with the element which was perhaps the best, or which Christ himself seems certainly
to have felt as the best. The poor to whom he preached the good news, the common people
who heard him gladly, the populace that had made so many popular heroes and demigods in
the old pagan world, showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving the world. They
suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city, and especially the mob of the
capital, during the decline of a society. The same thing that makes the rural population
live on tradition makes the urban population live on rumour. Just as its myths at the best
had been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily changed by baseless assertion
that is arbitrary without being authoritative. Some brigand or other was artificially
turned into a picturesque and popular figure and run as a kind of candidate against
Christ. In all this we recognise the urban population that we know, with its newspaper
scares and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an evil more peculiar
to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual, even of
the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was
the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in that hour,
'It is well that one man die for the people.' Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to
the city and to the state had also been in itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had
its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honoured for ever. It was failing through its
weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was
only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went along with the Sadducees and the
Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates
and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit
might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of
approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.
There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost
and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a
man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the
naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the
hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if
there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and
the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and
dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have
purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts
had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.
They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first
Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting
a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was
once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb
should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture and guarded by the
authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious
humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it
was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that
was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the
heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only
live, so they could only die; and they were dead.
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave
empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even
they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was
the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of
the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.
Christ founded the Church with two great figures of speech; in the final words to the
Apostles who received authority to found it. The first was the phrase about founding it on
Peter as on a rock; the second was the symbol of the keys. About the meaning of the former
there is naturally no doubt in my own case; but it does not directly affect the argument
here save in two more secondary aspects. It is yet another example of a thing that could
only fully expand and explain itself afterwards, and even long afterwards. And it is yet
another example of something the very reverse of simple and self-evident even in the
language, in so far as it described a man as a rock when he had much more the appearance
of a reed.
But the other image of the keys has an exactitude that has hardly been exactly noticed.
The keys have been conspicuous enough in the art and heraldry of Christendom; but not
everyone has noted the peculiar aptness of the allegory. We have now reached the point in
history where something must be said of the first appearance and activities of the Church
in the Roman Empire; and for that brief description nothing could be more perfect than
that ancient metaphor. The Early Christian was very precisely a person carrying about a
key, or what he said was a key. The whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to
possess that key. It was not merely a vague forward movement, which might be better
represented by a battering-ram. It was not something that swept along with it similar or
dissimilar things, as does a modern social movement. As we shall see in a moment, it
rather definitely refused to do so. It definitely asserted that there was a key and that
it possessed that key and that no other key was like it; in that sense it was as narrow as
you please. Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the prison of the whole
world; and let in the white daylight of liberty.
The creed was like a key in three respects; which can be most conveniently summed up
under this symbol. First, a key is above all things a thing with a shape It is a thing
that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the
philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness. That is where it differs from all
that formless infinity, Manichean or Buddhist, which makes a sort of pool of night in the
dark heart of Asia; the ideal of uncreating all the creatures. That is where it differs
also from the analogous vagueness of mere evolutionism, the idea of creatures constantly
losing their shape. A man told that his solitary latchkey had been melted down with a
million others into a Buddhistic unity would be annoyed. But a man told that his key was
gradually growing and sprouting in his pocket, and branching into new wards or
complications, would not be more gratified.
Second, the shape of a key is in itself a rather fantastic shape. A savage who did not
know it was a key would have the greatest difficulty in guessing what it could possibly
be. And it is fantastic because it is in a sense arbitrary. A key is not a matter of
abstractions; in that sense a key is not a matter of argument. It either fits the lock or
it does not. It is useless for men to stand disputing over it, considered by itself; or
reconstructing it on pure principles of geometry or decorative art. It is senseless for a
man to say he would like a simple key; it would be far more sensible to do his best with a
crowbar. And thirdly, as the key is necessarily a thing with a pattern, so this was one
having in some ways a rather elaborate pattern. When people complain of the religion being
so early complicated with theology and things of the kind, they forget that the world had
not only got into a hole, but had got into a whole maze of holes and corners. The problem
itself was a complicated problem; it did not in the ordinary sense merely involve anything
so simple as sin. It was also full of secrets, of unexplored and unfathomable fallacies,
of unconscious mental diseases, of dangers in all directions. If the faith had faced the
world only with the platitudes about peace and simplicity some moralists would confine it
to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and labyrinthine lunatic
asylum. What it did do we must now roughly describe; it is enough to say here that there
was undoubtedly much about the key that seemed complex, indeed there was only one thing
about it that was simple. It opened the door.
There are certain recognised and accepted statements in this matter which may for
brevity and convenience be described as lies. We have all heard people say that
Christianity arose in an age of barbarism. They might just as well say that Christian
Science arose in an age of barbarism. They may think Christianity was a symptom of social
decay, as I think Christian Science a symptom of mental decay. They may think Christianity
a superstition that ultimately destroyed a civilisation, as I think Christian Science a
superstition capable (if taken seriously) of destroying any number of civilisations. But
to say that a Christian of the fourth or fifth centuries was a barbarian living in a
barbarous time is exactly like saying that Mrs. Eddy was a Red Indian. And if I allowed my
constitutional impatience with Mrs. Eddy to impel me to call her a Red Indian, I should
incidentally be telling a lie. We may like or dislike the imperial civilisation of Rome in
the fourth century; we may like or dislike the industrial civilisation of America in the
nineteenth century; but that they both were what we commonly mean by a civilisation no
person of commonsense could deny if he wanted to. This is a very obvious fact but it is
also a very fundamental one; and we must make it the foundation of any further description
of constructive Christianity in the past. For good or evil, it was pre-eminently the
product of a civilised age, perhaps of an over-civilised age. This is the first fact apart
from all praise or blame; indeed I am so unfortunate as not to feel that I praise a thing
when I compare it to Christian Science. But it is at least desirable to know something of
the savour of a society in which we are condemning or praising anything; and the science
that connects Mrs. Eddy with tomahawks or the Mater Dolorosa with totems may for our
general convenience be eliminated. The dominant fact, not merely about the Christian
religion, but about the whole pagan civilisation, was that which has been more than once
repeated in these pages. The Mediterranean was a lake in the real sense of a pool; in
which a number of different cults or cultures were, as the phrase goes, pooled. Those
cities facing each other round the circle of the lake became more and more one
cosmopolitan culture. On its legal and military side it was the Roman Empire, but it was
very many-sided. It might be called superstitious in the sense that it contained a great
number of varied superstitions; but by no possibility can any part of it be called
barbarous.
In this level of cosmopolitan culture arose the Christian religion and the Catholic
Church; and everything in the story suggests that it was felt to be something new and
strange. Those who have tried to suggest that it evolved out of something much milder or
more ordinary have found that in this case their evolutionary method is very difficult to
apply. They may suggest that Essenes or Ebionites or such things were the seed; but the
seed is invisible; the tree appears very rapidly full-grown; and the tree is something
totally different. It is certainly a Christmas tree in the sense that it keeps the
kindliness and moral beauty of the story of Bethlehem; but it was as ritualistic as the
seven-branched candlestick, and the candles it carried were considerably more than were
probably permitted by the first prayer-book of Edward the Sixth. It might well be asked,
indeed, why any one accepting the Bethlehem tradition should object to golden or gilded
ornament since the Magi themselves brought gold, why he should dislike incense in the
church since incense was brought even to the stable. But these are controversies that do
not concern me here. I am concerned only with the historical fact, more and more admitted
by historians, that very early in its history this thing became visible to the
civilisation of antiquity; and that already the Church appeared as a Church; with
everything that is implied in a Church and much that is disliked in a Church. We will
discuss in a moment how far it was like other ritualistic or magical or ascetical
mysteries in its own time. It was certainly not in the least like merely ethical and
idealistic movements in our time. It had a doctrine; it had a discipline; it had
sacraments; it had degrees of initiation, it admitted people and expelled people; it
affirmed one dogma with authority and repudiated another with anathemas. If all these
things be the marks of Antichrist, the reign of Antichrist followed very rapidly upon
Christ.
Those who maintain that Christianity was not a Church but a moral movement of idealists
have been forced to push the period of its perversion or disappearance further and further
back. A bishop of Rome writes claiming authority in the very lifetime of St. John the
Evangelist; and it is described as the first papal aggression. A friend of the Apostles
writes of them as men he knew and says they taught him the doctrine of the Sacrament, and
Mr. Wells can only murmur that the reaction towards barbaric blood-rites may have happened
rather earlier than might be expected. The date of the Fourth Gospel, which at one time
was steadily growing later and later, is now steadily growing earlier and earlier; until
critics are staggered at the dawning and dreadful possibility that it might be something
like what it professes to be. The last limit of an early date for the extinction of true
Christianity has probably been found by the latest German professor whose authority is
invoked by Dean Inge. This learned scholar says that Pentecost was the occasion for the
first founding of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic, and despotic Church utterly alien to the
simple ideals of Jesus of Nazareth. This may be called, in a popular as well as a learned
sense, the limit. What do professors of this kind imagine that men are made of? Suppose it
were a matter of any merely human movement, let us say that of the conscientious
objectors. Some say the early Christians were Pacifists; I do not believe it for a moment;
but I am quite ready to accept the parallel for the sake of the argument. Tolstoy or some
great preacher of peace among peasants has been shot as a mutineer for defying
conscription; and a little while afterwards his few followers meet together in an upper
room in remembrance of him. They never had any reason for coming together except that
common memory; they are men of many kinds with nothing to bind them, except that the
greatest event in all their lives was this tragedy of the teacher of universal peace. They
are always repeating his words, revolving his problems, trying to imitate his character.
The Pacifists meet at their Pentecost and are possessed of a sudden ecstasy of enthusiasm
and wild rush of the whirlwind of inspiration, in the course of which they proceed to
establish universal Conscription, to increase the Navy Estimates, to insist on everybody
going about armed to the teeth and on all the frontiers bristling with artillery; the
proceedings concluded with the singing of 'Boys of the Bulldog Breed' and 'Don't let them
scrap the British Navy.' That is something like a fair parallel to the theory of these
critics; that the transition from their idea of Jesus to their idea of Catholicism could
have been made in the little upper room at Pentecost. Surely anybody's commonsense would
tell him that enthusiasts who only met through their common enthusiasm for a leader whom
they loved, would not instantly rush away to establish everything that he hated. No, if
the 'ecclesiastical and dogmatic system' is as old as Pentecost it is as old as Christmas.
If we trace it back to such very early Christians we must trace it back to Christ.
We may begin then with these two negations. It is nonsense to say that the Christian
faith appeared in a simple age; in the sense of an unlettered and gullible age. It is
equally nonsense to say that the Christian faith was a simple thing; in the sense of a
vague or childish or merely instinctive thing. Perhaps the only point in which we could
possibly say that the Church fitted into the pagan world, is the fact that they were both
not only highly civilised but rather complicated. They were both emphatically many-sided;
but antiquity was then a many-sided hole, like a hexagonal hole waiting for an equally
hexagonal stopper. In that sense only the Church was many-sided enough to fit the world.
The six sides of the Mediterranean world faced each other across the sea and waited for
something that should look all ways at once. The Church had to be both Roman and Greek and
Jewish and African and Asiatic. In the very words of the Apostle of the Gentiles, it was
indeed all things to all men. Christianity then was not merely crude and simple and was
the very reverse of the growth of a barbaric time. But when we come to the contrary
charge, we come to a much more plausible charge. It is very much more tenable that the
Faith was but the final phase of the decay of civilisation, in the sense of the excess of
civilisation; that this superstition was a sign that Rome was dying, and dying of being
much too civilised. That is an argument much better worth considering; and we will proceed
to consider it.
At the beginning of this book I ventured on a general summary of it, in a parallel
between the rise of humanity out of nature and the rise of Christianity out of history. I
pointed out that in both cases what had gone before might imply something coming after;
but did not in the least imply what did come after. If a detached mind had seen certain
apes it might have deduced more anthropoids; it would not have deduced man or anything
within a thousand miles of what man has done. In short, it might have seen Pithecanthropus
or the Missing Link looming in the future, if possible almost as dimly and doubtfully as
we see him looming in the past. But if it foresaw him appearing it would also foresee him
disappearing, and leaving a few faint traces just as he has left a few faint traces; if
they are traces. To foresee that Missing Link would not be to foresee Man, or anything
like Man. Now this earlier explanation must be kept in mind; because it is an exact
parallel to the true view of the Church; and the suggestion of it having evolved naturally
out of the Empire in decay.
The truth is that in one sense a man might very well have predicted that the imperial
decadence would produce something like Christianity. That is, something a little like and
gigantically different. A man might very well have said, for instance, 'Pleasure has been
pursued so extravagantly that there will be a reaction into pessimism. Perhaps it will
take the form of asceticism; men will mutilate themselves instead of merely hanging
themselves.' Or a man might very reasonably have said, 'If we weary of our Greek and Latin
gods we shall be hankering after some eastern mystery or other; there will be a fashion in
Persians or Hindoos.' Or a man of the world might well have been shrewd enough to say,
'Powerful people are picking up these fads; some day the court will adopt one of them and
it may become official.' Or yet another and gloomier prophet might be pardoned for saying,
'The world is going down-hill; dark and barbarous superstitions will return, it does not
matter much which. They will all be formless and fugitive like dreams of the night.'
Now it is the intense interest of the case that all these prophecies were really
fulfilled; but it was not the Church that fulfilled them. It was the Church that escaped
from them, confounded them, and rose above them in triumph. In so far as it was probable
that the mere nature of hedonism would produce a mere reaction of asceticism it did
produce a mere reaction of asceticism. It was the movement called Manichean and the Church
was its mortal enemy. In so far as it would have naturally appeared at that point of
history, it did appear; it did also disappear, which was equally natural. The mere
pessimist reaction did come with the Manichees and did go with the Manichees But the
Church did not come with them or go with them; and she had much more to do with them going
than with their coming. Or again, in so far as it was probable that even the growth of
scepticism would bring in a fashion of eastern religion, it did bring it in; Mithras came
from far beyond Palestine out of the heart of Persia, bringing strange mysteries of the
blood of bulls. Certainly there was everything to show that some such fashion would have
come in any case but certainly there is nothing in the world to show that it would not
have passed away in any case. Certainly an Oriental fad was something eminently fitted to
the fourth or fifth century; but that hardly explains it having remained to the twentieth
century, and still going strong. In short, in so far as things of the kind might have been
expected then, things like Mithraism were experienced then; but it scarcely explains our
more recent experiences. And if we were still Mithraists merely because Mithraic
head-dresses and other Persian apparatuses might be expected to be all the rage in the
days of Domitian, it would almost seem by this time that we must be a little dowdy.
It is the same, as will be suggested in a moment, with the idea of official
favouritism. In so far as such favouritism shown towards a fad was something that might
have been looked for during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it was something
that did exist in that Empire and did decline and fall with it. It throws no sort of light
on the thing that resolutely refused to decline and fall; that grew steadily while the
other was declining and falling; and which even at this moment is going forward with
fearless energy, when an other aeon has completed its cycle and another civilisation seems
almost ready to fall or to decline.
Now the curious fact is this; that the very heresies which the early Church is blamed
for crushing testify to the unfairness for which she is blamed. In so far as something
deserved the blame, it was precisely the things that she is blamed for blaming. In so far
as something was merely a superstition, she herself condemned that superstition. In so far
as something was a mere reaction into barbarism, she herself resisted it because it was a
reaction into barbarism. In so far as something was a fad of the fading empire, that died
and deserved to die, it was the Church alone that killed it. The Church is reproached for
being exactly what the heresy was repressed for being The explanations of the evolutionary
historians and higher critics do really explain why Arianism and Gnosticism and
Nestorianism were born--and also why they died. They do not explain why the Church was
born or why she has refused to die. Above all, they do not explain why she should have
made war on the very evils she is supposed to share.
Let us take a few practical examples of the principle; the principle that if there was
anything that was really a superstition of the dying empire, it did really die with the
dying empire; and certainly was not the same as the very thing that destroyed it. For this
purpose we will take in order two or three of the most ordinary explanations of Christian
origins among the modern critics of Christianity. Nothing is more common, for instance,
than to find such a modern critic writing something like this: 'Christianity was above all
a movement of ascetics, a rush into the desert, a refuge in the cloister, a renunciation
of all life and happiness; and this was a part of a gloomy and in human reaction against
nature itself, a hatred of the body, a horror of the material universe, a sort of
universal suicide of the senses and even of the self. It came from an eastern fanaticism
like that of the fakirs and was ultimately founded on an eastern pessimism, which seems to
feel existence itself as an evil.'
Now the most extraordinary thing about this is that it is all quite true; it is true in
every detail except that it happens to be attributed entirely to the wrong person. It is
not true of the Church; but it is true of the heretics condemned by the Church. It is as
if one were to write a most detailed analysis of the mistakes and misgovernment of the
ministers of George the Third, merely with the small inaccuracy that the whole story was
told about George Washington; or as if somebody made a list of the crimes of the
Bolshevists with no variation except that they were all attributed to the Czar. The early
Church was indeed very ascetic in connection with a totally different philosophy; but the
philosophy of a war on life and nature as such really did exist in the world, if the
critics only knew where to look for it.
What really happened was this. When the Faith first emerged into the world, the very
first thing that happened to it was that it was caught in a sort of swarm of mystical and
metaphysical sects, mostly out of the East; like one lonely golden bee caught in a swarm
of wasps. To the ordinary onlooker, there did not seem to be much difference, or anything
beyond a general buzz; indeed in a sense there was not much difference so far as stinging
and being stung were concerned. The difference was that only one golden dot in all that
whirring gold-dust had the power of going forth to make hives for all humanity; to give
the world honey and wax or (as was so finely said in a context too easily forgotten) 'the
two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.' The wasps all died that winter; and
half the difficulty is that hardly anyone knows anything about them and most people do not
know that they ever existed; so that the whole story of that first phase of our religion
is lost. Or, to vary the metaphor, when this movement or some other movement pierced the
dyke between the east and west and brought more mystical ideas into Europe, it brought
with it a whole flood of other mystical ideas besides its own, most of them ascetical and
nearly all of them pessimistic. They very nearly flooded and over-whelmed the purely
Christian element. They came mostly from that region that was a sort of dim borderland
between the eastern philosophies and the eastern mythologies, and which shared with the
wilder philosophers that curious crave for making fantastic patterns of the cosmos in the
shape of maps and genealogical trees. Those that are supposed to derive from the
mysterious Manes are called Manichean; kindred cults are more generally known as Gnostic;
they are mostly of a labyrinthine complexity, but the point to insist on is the pessimism;
the fact that nearly all in one form or another regarded the creation of the world as the
work of an evil spirit. Some of them had that Asiatic atmosphere that surrounds Buddhism;
the suggestion that life is a corruption of the purity of being. Some of them suggested a
purely spiritual order which had been betrayed by the coarse and clumsy trick of making
such toys as the sun and moon and stars. Anyhow all this dark tide out of the metaphysical
sea in the midst of Asia poured through the dykes simultaneously with the creed of Christ;
but it is the whole point of the story that the two were not the same; that they flowed
like oil and water. That creed remained in the shape of a miracle; a river still flowing
through the sea. And the proof of the miracle was practical once more; it was merely that
while all that sea was salt and bitter with the savour of death, of this one stream in the
midst of it a man could drink.
Now that purity was preserved by dogmatic definitions and exclusions. It could not
possibly have been preserved by anything else If the Church had not renounced the
Manicheans it might have become merely Manichean. If it had not renounced the Gnostics it
might have become Gnostic. But by the very fact that it did renounce them it proved that
it was not either Gnostic or Manichean. At any rate it proved that something was not
either Gnostic or Manichean; and what could it be that condemned them, if it was not the
original good news of the runners from Bethlehem and the trumpet of the Resurrection? The
early Church was ascetic, but she proved that she was not pessimistic, simply by
condemning the pessimists. The creed declared that man was sinful, but it did not declare
that life was evil, and it proved it by damning those who did. The condemnation of the
early heretics is itself condemned as something crabbed and narrow; but it was in truth
the very proof that the Church meant to be brotherly and broad. It proved that the
primitive Catholics were specially eager to explain that they did not think man utterly
vile; that they did not think life incurably miserable; that they did not think marriage a
sin or procreation a tragedy. They were ascetic because asceticism was the only possible
purge of the sins of the world; but in the very thunder of their anathemas they affirmed
for ever that their asceticism was not to be anti-human or anti-natural; that they did
wish to purge the world and not destroy it. And nothing else except those anathemas could
possibly have made it clear, amid a confusion which still confuses them with their mortal
enemies. Nothing else but dogma could have resisted the riot of imaginative invention with
which the pessimists were waging their war against nature; with their Aeons and their
Demiurge, their strange Logos and their sinister Sophia. If the Church had not insisted on
theology, it would have melted into a mad mythology of the mystics, yet further removed
from reason or even from rationalism; and, above all yet further removed from life and
from the love of life. Remember that it would have been an inverted mythology, one
contradicting everything natural in paganism; a mythology in which Pluto would be above
Jupiter and Hades hang higher than Olympus; in which Brahma and all that has the breath of
life would be subject to Seeva, shining with the eye of death.
That the early Church was itself full of an ecstatic enthusiasm for renunciation and
virginity makes this distinction much more striking and not less so. It makes all the more
important the place where the dogma drew the line. A man might crawl about on all fours
like a beast because he was an ascetic. He might stand night and day on the top of a
pillar and be adored for being an ascetic, but he could not say that the world was a
mistake or the marriage state a sin without being a heretic. What was it that thus
deliberately disengaged itself from eastern asceticism by sharp definition and fierce
refusal, if it was not something with an individuality of its own; and one that was quite
different? If the Catholics are to be confused with the Gnostics, we can only say it was
not their fault if they are. And it is rather hard that the Catholics should be blamed by
the same critics for persecuting the heretics and also for sympathising with the heresy.
The Church was not a Manichean movement if only because it was not a movement at all.
It was not even merely an ascetical movement, because it was not a movement at all. It
would be nearer the truth to call it the tamer of asceticism than the mere leader or
loosener of it. It was a thing having its own theory of asceticism, its own type of
asceticism, but most conspicuous at the moment as the moderator of other theories and
types. This is the only sense that can be made, for instance, of the story of St.
Augustine. As long as he was a mere man of the world, a mere man drifting with his time,
he actually was a Manichean. It really was quite modern and fashionable to be a Manichean.
But when he became a Catholic, the people he instantly turned on and rent in pieces were
the Manicheans. The Catholic way of putting it is that he left off being a pessimist to
become an ascetic. But as the pessimists interpreted asceticism, it ought to be said that
he left off being an ascetic to become a saint. The war upon life, the denial of nature,
were exactly the things he had already found in the heathen world outside the Church, and
had to renounce when he entered the Church. The very fact that St Augustine remains a
somewhat sterner or sadder figure than St. Francis or St. Teresa only accentuates the
dilemma. Face to face with the gravest or even grimmest of Catholics, we can still ask,
'Why did Catholicism make war on Manichees, if Catholicism was Manichean?'
Take another rationalistic explanation of the rise of Christendom. It is common enough
to find another critic saying, 'Christianity did not really rise at all; that is, it did
not merely rise from below; it was imposed from above. It is an example of the power of
the executive, especially in despotic states. The Empire was really an Empire; that is, it
was really ruled by the Emperor. One of the Emperors happened to become a Christian. He
might just as well have become a Mithraist or a Jew or a Fire-Worshipper; it was common in
the decline of the Empire for eminent and educated people to adopt these eccentric eastern
cults. But when he adopted it, it became the official religion of the Roman Empire; and
when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it became as strong, as
universal and as invincible as the Roman Empire. It has only remained in the world as a
relic of that Empire; or, as many have put it, it is but the ghost of Caesar still
hovering over Rome.' This also is a very ordinary line taken in the criticism of
orthodoxy, to say that it was only officialism that ever made it orthodoxy. And here again
we can call on the heretics to refute it.
The whole great history of the Arian heresy might have been invented to explode this
idea. It is a very interesting history often repeated in this connection; and the upshot
of it is in that in so far as there ever was a merely official religion, it actually died
because it was merely an official religion; and what destroyed it was the real religion.
Arius advanced a version of Christianity which moved, more or less vaguely, in the
direction of what we should call Unitarianism; though it was not the same, for it gave to
Christ a curious intermediary position between the divine and human. The point is that it
seemed to many more reasonable and less fanatical; and among these were many of the
educated class in a sort of reaction against the first romance of conversion. Arians were
a sort of moderates and a sort of modernists. And it was felt that after the first
squabbles this was the final form of rationalised religion into which civilisation might
well settle down. It was accepted by Divus Caesar himself and became the official
orthodoxy; the generals and military princes drawn from the new barbarian powers of the
north, full of the future, supported it strongly. But the sequel is still more important.
Exactly as a modern man might pass through Unitarianism to complete agnosticism, so the
greatest of the Arian emperors ultimately shed the last and thinnest pretense of
Christianity; he abandoned ever Arius and returned to Apollo. He was a Caesar of the
Caesars; a soldier, a scholar, a man of large ambitions and ideals; another of the
philosopher kings. It seemed to him as if at his signal the sun rose again. The oracles
began to speak like birds beginning to sing at dawn; paganism was itself again; the gods
returned. It seemed the end of that strange interlude of an alien superstition. And indeed
it was the end of it, so far as there was a mere interlude of mere superstition. It was
the end of it, in so far as it was the fad of an emperor or the fashion of a generation.
If there really was something that began with Constantine, then it ended with Julian.
But there was something that did not end. There had arisen in that hour of history,
defiant above the democratic tumult of the Councils of the Church, Athanasius against the
world. We may pause upon the point at issue; because it is relevant to the whole of this
religious history, and the modern world seems to miss the whole point of it. We might put
it this way. If there is one question which the enlightened and liberal have the habit of
deriding and holding up as a dreadful example of barren dogma and senseless sectarian
strife, it is this Athanasian question of the Co-Eternity of the Divine Son. On the other
hand, if there is one thing that the same liberals always offer us as a piece of pure and
simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes, it is the single sentence, 'God is
Love.' Yet the two statements are almost identical; at least one is very nearly nonsense
without the other. The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful
sentiment. For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He
loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is
lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery
is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to
self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some
such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea
like love. If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in
the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of
the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more
arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of
the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God
of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was
emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the
Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful
interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our
hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood,
turns even God into a Holy Family.
That this purely Christian dogma actually for a second time rebelled against the
Empire, and actually for a second time refounded the Church in spite of the Empire, is
itself a proof that there was something positive and personal working in the world, other
than whatever official faith the Empire chose to adopt. This power utterly destroyed the
official faith that the Empire did adopt. It went on its own way as it is going on its own
way still. There are any number of other examples in which is repeated precisely the same
process we have reviewed in the case of the Manichean and the Arian. A few centuries
afterwards, for instance, the Church had to maintain the same Trinity, which is simply the
logical side of love, against another appearance of the isolated and simplified deity in
the religion of Islam. Yet there are some who cannot see what the Crusaders were fighting
for; and some even who talk as if Christianity had never been anything but a form of what
they call Hebraism coming in with the decay of Hellenism. Those people must certainly be
very much puzzled by the war between the Crescent and the Cross. If Christianity had never
been anything but a simpler morality sweeping away polytheism, there is no reason why
Christendom should not have been swept into Islam. The truth is that Islam itself was a
barbaric reaction against that very humane complexity that is really a Christian
character; that idea of balance in the deity, as of balance in the family, that makes that
creed a sort of sanity, and that sanity the soul of civilisation. And that is why the
Church is from the first a thing holding its own position and point of view, quite apart
from the accidents and anarchies of its age. That is why it deals blows impartially right
and left, at the pessimism of the Manichean or the optimism of the Pelagian. It was not a
Manichean movement because it was not a movement at all. It was not an official fashion
because it was not a fashion at all. It was something that could coincide with movements
and fashions, could control them and could survive them.
So might rise from their graves the great heresiarchs to confound their comrades of
to-day. There is nothing that the critics now affirm that we cannot call on these great
witnesses to deny. The modern critic will say lightly enough that Christianity was but a
reaction into asceticism and anti-natural spirituality, a dance of fakirs furious against
life and love. But Manes the great mystic will answer them from his secret throne and cry,
'These Christians have no right to be called spiritual; these Christians have no title to
be called ascetics, they who compromised with the curse of life and all the filth of the
family. Through them the earth is still foul with fruit and harvest and polluted with
population Theirs was no movement against nature, or my children would have carried it to
triumph; but these fools renewed the world when I would have ended it with a gesture.' And
another critic will write that the Church was but the shadow of the Empire, the fad of a
chance Emperor, and that it remains in Europe only as the ghost of the power of Rome. And
Arius the deacon will answer out of the darkness of oblivious 'No, indeed, or the world
would have followed my more reasonable religion. For mine went down before demagogues and
men defying Caesar; and around my champion was the purple cloak and mine was the glory of
the eagles. It was not for lack of these things that I failed. And yet a third modern will
maintain that the creed spread only as a sort of panic of hell-fire; men everywhere
attempting impossible things in fleeing from incredible vengeance; a nightmare of
imaginary remorse; and such an explanation will satisfy many who see something dreadful in
the doctrine of orthodoxy. And then there will go up against it the terrible voice of
Tertullian, saying, 'And why then was I cast out; and why did soft hearts and heads decide
against me when I proclaimed the perdition of all sinners; and what was this power that
thwarted me when I threatened all backsliders with hell? For none ever went up that hard
road so far as I; and mine was the Credo Quia Impossible.' Then there is the fourth
suggestion that there was something of the Semitic secret society in the whole matter;
that it was a new invasion of the nomad spirit shaking a kindlier and more comfortable
paganism, its cities and its household gods; whereby the jealous monotheistic races could
after all establish their jealous God. And Mahomet shall answer out of the whirlwind, the
red whirlwind of the desert, 'Who ever served the jealousy of God as I did or left him
more lonely in the sky? Who ever paid more honour to Moses and Abraham or won more
victories over idols and the images of paganism? And what was this thing that thrust me
back with the energy of a thing alive; whose fanaticism could drive me from Sicily and
tear up my deep roots out of the rock of Spain? What faith was theirs who thronged in
thousands of every class a country crying out that my ruin was the will of God; and what
hurled great Godfrey as from a catapult over the wall of Jerusalem, and what brought great
Sobieski like a thunderbolt to the gates of Vienna? I think there was more than you fancy
in the religion that has so matched itself with mine.'
Those who would suggest that the faith was a fanaticism are doomed to an eternal
perplexity. In their account it is bound to appear as fanatical for nothing, and fanatical
against everything. It is ascetical and at war with ascetics, Roman and in revolt against
Rome, monotheistic and fighting furiously against monotheism; harsh in its condemnation of
harshness; a riddle not to be explained even as unreason. And what sort of unreason is it
that seems reasonable to millions of educated Europeans through all the revolutions of
some sixteen hundred years? People are not amused with a puzzle or a paradox or a mere
muddle in the mind for all that time. I know of no explanation except that such a thing is
not unreason but reason; that if it is fanatical it is fanatical for reason and fanatical
against all the unreasonable things. That is the only explanation I can find of a thing
from the first so detached and so confident, condemning things that looked so like itself,
refusing help from powers that seemed so essential to its existence, sharing on its human
side all the passions of the age, yet always at the supreme moment suddenly rising
superior to them, never saying exactly what it was expected to say and never needing to
unsay what it had said; I can find no explanation except that, like Pallas from the brain
of Jove, it had indeed come forth out of the mind of God, mature and mighty and armed for
judgement and for war.
The modern missionary, with his palm-leaf hat and his umbrella, has become rather a
figure of fun. He is chaffed among men of the world for the ease with which he can be
eaten by cannibals and the narrow bigotry which makes him regard the cannibal culture as
lower than his own. Perhaps the best part of the joke is that the men of the world do not
see that the joke is against themselves. It is rather ridiculous to ask a man just about
to be boiled in a pot and eaten, at a purely religious feast, why he does not regard all
religions as equally friendly and fraternal. But there is a more subtle criticism uttered
against the more old-fashioned missionary; to the effect that he generalises too broadly
about the heathen and pays too little attention to the difference between Mahomet and
Mumbo-Jumbo. There was probably truth in this complaint, especially in the past; but it is
my main contention here that the exaggeration is all the other way at present. It is the
temptation of the professors to treat mythologies too much as theologies; as things
thoroughly thought out are seriously held. It is the temptation of the intellectuals to
take much too seriously the fine shades of various schools in the rather irresponsible
metaphysics of Asia. Above all it is their temptation to miss the real truth implied in
the idea of Aquinas contra Gentiles or Athanasius contra mundum.
If the missionary says, in fact, that he is exceptional in being a Christian, and that
the rest of the races and religions can be collectively classified as heathen, he is
perfectly right. He may say it in quite the wrong spirit, in which case he is spiritually
wrong. But in the cold light of philosophy and history, he is intellectually right. He may
not be right minded, but he is right. He may not even have a right to be right, but he is
right. The outer world to which he brings his creed really is some thing subject to
certain generalisations covering all its varieties, and is not merely a variety of similar
creeds. Perhaps it is in any case too much of a temptation to pride or hypocrisy to call
it heathenry. Perhaps it could be better simply to call it humanity. But there are certain
broad characteristics of what we call humanity while it remains in what we call heathenry.
They are not necessarily bad characteristics; some of them are worthy of the respect of
Christendom; some of them have been absorbed and transfigured in the substance of
Christendom. But they existed before Christendom and they still exist outside Christendom,
as certainly as the sea existed before a boat and all round a boat; and they have as
strong and as universal and as unmistakable a savour as the sea.
For instance, all real scholars who have studied the Greek and Roman culture say one
thing about it. They agree that in the ancient world religion was one thing and philosophy
quite another. there was very little effort to rationalise and at the same time to realise
a real belief in the gods. There was very little pretense of any such real belief among
the philosophers. But neither had the passion or perhaps the power to persecute the others
save in particular and peculiar cases; and neither the philosopher in his school nor the
priest in his temple seems ever to have seriously contemplated his own concept as covering
the world. A priest sacrificing to Artemis in Calydon did not seem to think that people
would some day sacrifice to her instead of to Isis beyond the sea; a sage following the
vegetarian rule of the Neo-Pythagoreans did not seem to think it would universally prevail
and exclude the methods of Epictetus or Epicurus. We may call this liberality if we like;
I am not dealing with an argument but describing an atmosphere. All this, I say, is
admitted by all scholars; but what neither the learned nor the unlearned have fully
realised, perhaps, is that this description is really an exact description of all
non-Christian civilisation today; and especially of the great civilisations of the East.
Eastern paganism really is much more all of a piece, just as ancient paganism was much
more all of a piece, than the modern critics admit. It is a many-coloured Persian Carpet
as the other was a varied and tessellated Roman pavement; but the one real crack right
across that pavement came from the earthquake of the Crucifixion.
The modern European seeking his religion in Asia is reading his religion into Asia.
Religion there is something different; it is both more and less. He is like a man mapping
out the sea as land; marking waves as mountains; not understanding the nature of its
peculiar permanence. It is perfectly true that Asia has its own dignity and poetry and
high civilisation. But it is not in the least true that Asia has its own definite
dominions of moral government, where all loyalty is conceived in terms of morality; as
when we say that Ireland is Catholic or that New England was Puritan. The map is not
marked out in religions, in our sense of churches. The state of mind is far more subtle,
more relative, more secretive, more varied and changing, like the colours of the snake.
The Moslem is the nearest approach to a militant Christian; and that is precisely because
he is a much nearer approach to an envoy from western civilisation. The Moslem in the
heart of Asia almost stands for the soul of Europe. And as he stands between them and
Europe in the matter of space so he stands between them and Christianity in the matter of
time. In that sense the Moslems in Asia are merely like the Nestorians in Asia. Islam,
historically speaking, is the greatest of the Eastern heresies. It owed something to the
quite isolated and unique individuality of Israel; but it owed more to Byzantium and the
theological enthusiasm of Christendom. It owed something even to the Crusades. It owed
nothing whatever to Asia. It owed nothing to the atmosphere of the ancient and traditional
world of Asia, with its immemorial etiquette and its bottomless or bewildering
philosophies. All that ancient and actual Asia felt the entrance of Islam as something
foreign and western and warlike, piercing it like a spear.
Even where we might trace in dotted lines the domains of Asiatic religions, we should
probably be reading into them something dogmatic and ethical belonging to our own
religion. It is as if a European ignorant of the American atmosphere were to suppose that
each 'state' was a separate sovereign state as patriotic as France or Poland; or that when
a Yankee referred fondly to his 'home town' he meant he had no other nation, like a
citizen of ancient Athens or Rome. As he would be reading a particular sort of loyalty
into America, so we are reading a particular sort of loyalty into Asia. There are
loyalties of other kinds; but not what men in the West mean by being a believer, by trying
to be a Christian, by being a good Protestant or a practising Catholic. In the
intellectual world it means something far more vague and varied by doubts and
speculations. In the moral world it means something far more loose and drifting. A
professor of Persian at one of our great universities, so passionate a partisan of the
East as practically to profess a contempt for the West, said to a friend of mine: 'You
will never understand oriental religions, because you always conceive religion as
connected with ethics. This kind has really nothing to do with ethics.' We have most of us
known some Masters of the Higher Wisdom, some Pilgrims upon the Path to Power, some
eastern esoteric saints and seers, who had really nothing to do with ethics. Something
different, something detached and irresponsible, tinges the moral atmosphere of Asia and
touches even that of Islam. It was very realistically caught in the atmosphere of Hassan;
and a very horrible atmosphere too. It is even more vivid in such glimpses as we get of
the genuine and ancient cults of Asia. Deeper than the depths of metaphysics, far down in
the abysses of mystical meditations under all that solemn universe of spiritual things, is
a secret, an intangible and a terrible levity. It does not really very much matter what
one does. Either because they do not believe in a devil, or because they do believe in a
destiny, or because experience here is everything and eternal life something totally
different, but for some reason they are totally different. I have read somewhere that
there were three great friends famous in medieval Persia for their unity of mind. One
became the responsible and respected Vizier of the Great King; the second was the poet
Omar, pessimist and epicurean, drinking wine in mockery of Mahomet; the third was the Old
Man of the Mountain who maddened his people with hashish that they might murder other
people with daggers. It does not really much matter what one does.
The Sultan in Hassan would have understood all those three men; indeed he was all those
three men. But this sort of universalist cannot have what we call a character; it is what
we call a chaos. He cannot choose; he cannot fight; he cannot repent; he cannot hope. He
is not in the same sense creating something; for creation means rejection. He is not, in
our religious phrase, making his soul. For our doctrine of salvation does really mean a
labour like that of a man trying to make a statue beautiful; a victory with wings. For
that there must be a final choice, for a man cannot make statues without rejecting stone.
And there really is this ultimate unmorality behind the metaphysics of Asia. And the
reason is that there has been nothing through all those unthinkable ages to bring the
human mind sharply to the point; to tell it that the time has come to choose. The mind has
lived too much in eternity. The soul has been too immortal, in the special sense that it
ignores the idea of mortal sin. It has had too much of eternity, in the sense that it has
not had enough of the hour of death and the day of judgement. It is not crucial enough; in
the literal sense that it has not had enough of the cross. That is what we mean when we
say that Asia is very old. But strictly speaking Europe is quite as old as Asia; indeed in
a sense any place is as old as any other place. What we mean is that Europe has not merely
gone on growing older. It has been born again.
Asia is all humanity; as it has worked out its human doom. Asia, in its vast territory,
in its varied populations, in its heights of past achievement and its depths of dark
speculation, is itself a world; and represents something of what we mean when we speak of
the world. It is a cosmos rather than a continent. It is the world as man has made it; and
contains many of the most wonderful things that man has made. Therefore Asia stands as the
one representative of paganism and the one rival to Christendom. But everywhere else where
we get glimpses of that mortal destiny, they suggest stages in the same story. Where Asia
trails away into the southern archipelagoes of the savages, or where a darkness full of
nameless shapes dwells in the heart of Africa, or where the last survivors of lost races
linger in the cold volcano of prehistoric America, it is all the same story; sometimes
perhaps later chapters of the same story. It is men entangled in the forest of their own
mythology; it is men drowned in the sea of their own metaphysics. Polytheists have grown
weary of the wildest of fictions. Monotheists have grown weary of the most wonderful of
truths. Diabolists here and there have such a hatred of heaven and earth that they have
tried to take refuge in hell. It is the Fall of Man; and it is exactly that fall that was
being felt by our own fathers at the first moment of the Roman decline. We also were going
down that side road; down that easy slope; following the magnificent procession of the
high civilisations of the world.
If the Church had not entered the world then, it seems probable that Europe would be
now very much what Asia is now. Something may be allowed for a real difference of race and
environment, visible in the ancient as in the modern world. But after all we talk about
the changeless East very largely because it has not suffered the great change. Paganism in
its last phase showed considerable signs of be coming equally changeless. This would not
mean that new schools or sects of philosophy would not arise; as new schools did arise in
Antiquity and do arise in Asia. It does not mean that there would be no real mystics or
visionaries; as there were mystics in Antiquity and are mystics in Asia. It does not mean
that there would be no social codes, as there were codes in Antiquity and are codes in
Asia. It does not mean that there could not be good men or happy lives, for God has given
all men a conscience and conscience can give all men a kind of peace. But it does mean
that the tone and proportion of all these things, and especially the proportion of good
and evil things, would be in the unchanged West what they are in the changeless East. And
nobody who looks at that changeless East honestly, and with a real sympathy, can believe
that there is anything there remotely resembling the challenge and revolution of the
Faith.
In short, if classic paganism had lingered until now, a number of things might well
have lingered with it; and they would look very like what we call the religions of the
East. There would still be Pythagoreans teaching reincarnation, as there are still Hindus
teaching reincarnation. There would still be Stoics making a religion out of reason and
virtue, as there are still Confucians making a religion out of reason and virtue. There
would still be Neo-Platonists studying transcendental truths, the meaning of which was
mysterious to other people and disputed even amongst themselves; as the Buddhists still
study a transcendentalism mysterious to others and disputed among themselves. There would
still be intelligent Apollonians apparently worshipping the sun-god but explaining that
they were worshipping the divine principle; just as there are still intelligent Parsees
apparently worshipping the sun but explaining that they are worshipping the deity. There
would still be wild Dionysians dancing on the mountain as there are still wild Dervishes
dancing in the desert. There would still be crowds of people attending the popular feasts
of the gods, in pagan Europe as in pagan Asia. There would still be crowds of gods, local
and other, for them to worship. And there would still be a great many more people who
worshipped them than people who believed in them. Finally there would still be a very
large number of people who did worship gods and did believe in gods; and who believed in
gods and worshipped gods simply because they were demons. There would still be Levantines
secretly sacrificing to Moloch as there are still Thugs secretly sacrificing to Kalee.
There would still be a great deal of magic; and a great deal of it would be black magic.
There would still be a considerable admiration of Seneca and a considerable imitation of
Nero; just as the exalted epigrams of Confucius could coexist with the tortures of China.
And over all that tangled forest of traditions growing wild or withering would brood the
broad silence of a singular and even nameless mood; but the nearest name of it is nothing.
All these things, good and bad, would have an indescribable air of being too old to die.
None of these things occupying Europe in the absence of Christendom would bear the
least likeness to Christendom. Since the Pythagorean Metempsychosis would still be there,
we might call it the Pythagorean religion as we talk about the Buddhist religion. As the
noble maxims of Socrates would still be there, we might call it the Socratic religion as
we talk about the Confucian religion. As the popular holiday was still marked by a
mythological hymn to Adonis, we might call it the religion of Adonis as we talk about the
religion of Juggernaut. As literature would still be based on the Greek mythology, we
might call that mythology a religion, as we call the Hindu mythology a religion. We might
say that there were so many thousands or millions of people belonging to that religion, in
the sense of frequenting such temples or merely living in a land full of such temples. But
if we called the last tradition of Pythagoras or the lingering legend of Adonis by the
name of a religion, then we must find some other name for the Church of Christ.
If anybody says that philosophic maxims presented through many ages, or mythological
temples frequented by many people, are things of the same class and category as the
Church, it is enough to answer quite simply that they are not. Nobody thinks they are the
same when he sees them in the old civilisation of Greece and Rome; nobody would think they
were the same if that civilisation had lasted two thousand years longer and existed at the
present day; nobody can in reason think they are the same in the parallel pagan
civilisation in the East, as it is at the present day. None of these philosophies or
mythologies are anything like a Church; certainly nothing like a Church Militant. And, as
I have shown elsewhere, even if this rule were not already proved, the exception would
prove the rule. The rule is that pre-Christian or pagan history does not produce a Church
Militant; and the exception, or what some would call the exception, is that Islam is at
least militant if it is not Church. And that is precisely because Islam is the one
religious rival that is not pre-Christian and therefore not in that sense pagan. Islam was
a product of Christianity; even if it was a by-product; even if it was a bad product. It
was a heresy or parody emulating and therefore imitating the Church. It is no more
surprising that Mahomedanism had something of her fighting spirit than that Quakerism had
something of her peaceful spirit. After Christianity there are any number of such
emulations or extensions. Before it there are none.
The Church Militant is thus unique because it is an army marching to effect a universal
deliverance. The bondage from which the world is thus to be delivered is something that is
very well symbolised by the state of Asia as by the state of pagan Europe. I do not mean
merely their moral or immoral state. The missionary, as a matter of fact, has much more to
say for himself than the enlightened imagine even when he says that the heathen are
idolatrous and immoral. A touch or two of realistic experience about Eastern religion,
even about Moslem religion, will reveal some startling insensibilities in ethics; such as
the practical indifference to the line between passion and perversion. It is not prejudice
but practical experience which says that Asia is full of demons as well as gods. But the
evil I mean is in the mind. And it is in the mind wherever the mind has worked for a long
time alone. It is what happens when all dreaming and thinking have come to an end in an
emptiness that is at once negation and necessity. It sounds like an anarchy, but it is
also a slavery. It is what has been called already the wheel of Asia; all those recurrent
arguments about cause and effect or things beginning and ending in the mind, which make it
impossible for the soul really to strike out and go anywhere or do anything. And the point
is that it is not necessarily peculiar to Asiatics; it would have been true in the end of
Europeans--if something had not happened. If the Church Militant had not been a thing
marching, all men would have been marking time. If the Church Militant had not endured a
discipline, all men would have endured a slavery.
What that universal yet fighting faith brought into the world was hope. Perhaps the one
thing common to mythology and philosophy was that both were really sad; in the sense that
they had not this hope even if they had touches of faith or charity. We may call Buddhism
a faith; though to us it seems more like a doubt. We may call the Lord of Compassion a
Lord of Charity, though it seems to us a very pessimist sort of pity. But those who insist
most on the antiquity and size of such cults must agree that in all their ages they have
not covered all their areas with that sort of practical and pugnacious hope. In
Christendom hope has never been absent; rather it has been errant, extravagant,
excessively fixed upon fugitive chances. Its perpetual revolution and reconstruction has
at least been an evidence of people being in better spirits. Europe did very truly renew
its youth like the eagles; just as the eagles of Rome rose again over the legions of
Napoleon, or we have seen soaring but yesterday the silver eagle of Poland. But in the
Polish case ever revolution always went with religion. Napoleon himself sought a
reconciliation with religion. Religion could never be finally separated even from the most
hostile of the hopes; simply because it was the very source of the hopefulness. And the
cause of this is to be found simply in the religion itself. Those who quarrel about it
seldom even consider it in itself. There is neither space nor place for such a full
consideration here; but a word may be said to explain a reconciliation that always recurs
and still seems to require explanation.
There will be no end to the weary debates about liberalising theology, until people
face the fact that the only liberal part of it is really the dogmatic part. If dogma is
incredible, it is because it is incredibly liberal. If it is irrational, it can only be in
giving us more assurance of freedom than is justified by reason. The obvious example is
that essential form of freedom which we call free-will. It is absurd to say that a man
shows his liberality in denying his liberty. But it is tenable that he has to affirm a
transcendental doctrine in order to affirm his liberty. There is a sense in which we might
reasonably say that if man has a primary power of choice, he has in that fact a
super-natural power of creation, as if he could raise the dead or give birth to the
unbegotten. Possibly in that case a man must be a miracle; and certainly in that case he
must be a miracle in order to be a man; and most certainly in order to be a free man. But
it is absurd to forbid him to be a free man and do it in the name of a more free religion.
But it is true in twenty other matters. Anybody who believes at all in God must believe
in the absolute supremacy of God. But in so far as that supremacy does allow of any
degrees that can be called liberal or illiberal, it is self-evident that the illiberal
power is the deity of the rationalists and the liberal power is the deity of the
dogmatists. Exactly in proportion as you turn monotheism into monism you turn it into
despotism. It is precisely the unknown God of the scientist, with his impenetrable purpose
and his inevitable and unalterable law, that reminds us of a Prussian autocrat making
rigid plans in a remote tent and moving mankind like machinery. It is precisely the God of
miracles and of answered prayers who reminds us of a liberal and popular prince, receiving
petitions, listening to parliaments and considering the cases of a whole people. I am not
now arguing the rationality of this conception in other respects; as a matter of fact it
is not, as some suppose, irrational; for there is nothing irrational in the wisest and
most well-informed king acting differently according to the action of those he wishes to
save. But I am here only noting the general nature of liberality, or of free or enlarged
atmosphere of action. And in this respect it is certain that the king can only be what we
call magnanimous if he is what some call capricious. It is the Catholic, who has the
feeling that his prayers do make a difference, when offered for the living and the dead,
who also has the feeling of living like a free citizen in something almost like a
constitutional commonwealth. It is the monist who lives under a single iron law who must
have the feeling of living like a slave under a sultan. Indeed I believe that the original
use of the word suffragium, which we now use in politics for a vote, was that employed in
theology about a prayer. The dead in Purgatory were said to have the suffrages of the
living. And in this sense, of a sort of right of petition to the supreme ruler, we may
truly say that the whole of the Communion of Saints, as well as the whole of the Church
Militant, is founded on universal suffrage.
But above all, it is true of the most tremendous issue; of that tragedy which has
created the divine comedy of our creed. Nothing short of the extreme and strong and
startling doctrine of the divinity of Christ will give that particular effect that can
truly stir the popular sense like a trumpet; the idea of the king himself serving in the
ranks like a common soldier. By making that figure merely human we make that story much
less human. We take away the point of the story which actually pierces humanity; the point
of the story which was quite literally the point of a spear. It does not especially
humanise the universe to say that good and wise men can die for their opinions; any more
than it would be any sort of uproariously popular news in an army that good soldiers may
easily get killed. It is no news that King Leonidas is dead any more than that Queen Anne
is dead; and men did not wait for Christianity to be men, in the full sense of being
heroes. But if we are describing, for the moment, the atmosphere of what is generous and
popular and even picturesque, any knowledge of human nature will tell us that no
sufferings of the sons of men, or even of the servants of God, strike the same note as the
notion of the master suffering instead of his servants. And this is given by the
theological and emphatically not by the scientific deity. No mysterious monarch, hidden in
his starry pavilion at the base of the cosmic campaign, is in the least like that
celestial chivalry of the Captain who carries his five wounds in the front of battle.
What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is bad; but rather that
dogma is too good to be true. That is, he means that dogma is too liberal to be likely.
Dogma gives man too much freedom when it permits him to fall. Dogma gives even God too
much freedom when it permits him to die. That is what the intelligent sceptics ought to
say; and it is not in the least my intention to deny that there is something to be said
for it. They mean that the universe is itself a universal prison; that existence itself is
a limitation and a control; and it is not for nothing that they call causation a chain. In
a word, they mean quite simply that they cannot believe these things; not in the least
that they are unworthy of belief. We say not lightly but very literally, that the truth
has made us free. They say that it makes us so free that it cannot be the truth. To them
it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom as we enjoy. It is like
believing in men with wings to entertain the fancy of men with wills. It is like accepting
a fable about a squirrel in conversation with a mountain to believe in a man who is free
to ask or a God who is free to answer. This is a manly and a rational negation for which I
for one shall always show respect. But I decline to show any respect for those who first
of all clip the wings and cage the squirrel, rivet the chains and refuse the freedom,
close all the doors of the cosmic prison on us with a clang of eternal iron, tell us that
our emancipation is a dream and our dungeon a necessity; and then calmly turn round and
tell us they have a freer thought and a more liberal theology.
The moral of all this is an old one; that religion is revelation. In other words it is
a vision, and a vision received by faith; but it is a vision of reality. The faith
consists in a conviction of its reality. That, for example, is the difference between a
vision and a day-dream. And that is the difference between religion and mythology. That is
the difference between faith and all that fancy-work, quite human and more or less
healthy, which we considered under the head of mythology. There is something in the
reasonable use of the very word vision that implies two things about it; first that it
comes very rarely, possibly that it comes only once; and secondly that it probably comes
once and for all. A day-dream may come every day. A day-dream may be different every day.
It is something more than the difference between telling ghost-stories and meeting a
ghost.
But if it is not a mythology neither is it a philosophy. It is not a philosophy
because, being a vision, it is not a pattern but a picture. It is not one of those
simplifications which resolve everything into an abstract explanation; as that everything
is recurrent; or everything is relative; or everything is inevitable; or everything is
illusive. It is not a process but a story. It has proportions, of the sort seen in a
picture or a story; it has not the regular repetitions of a pattern or a process; but it
replaces them by being convincing as a picture or a story is convincing. In other words,
it is exactly, as the phrase goes, like life. For indeed it is life. An example of what is
meant here might well be found in the treatment of the problem of evil. It is easy enough
to make a plan of life of which the background is black, as the pessimists do; and then
admit a speck or two of star-dust more or less accidental, or at least in the literal
sense insignificant. And it is easy enough to make another plan on white paper, as the
Christian Scientists do, and explain or explain away somehow such dots or smudges as may
be difficult to deny. Lastly it is easiest of all perhaps, to say as the dualists do, that
life is like a chess-board in which the two are equal, and can as truly be said to consist
of white squares on a black board or of black squares on a white board. But every man
feels in his heart that none of these three paper plans is like life; that none of these
worlds is one in which he can live. Something tells him that the ultimate idea of a world
is not bad or even neutral; staring at the sky or the grass or the truths of mathematics
or even a new-laid egg, he has a vague feeling like the shadow of that saying of the great
Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, 'Every existence, as such, is good.' On the
other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly and debased and even diseased to
minimise evil to a dot or even a blot. He realises that optimism is morbid. It is if
possible even more morbid than pessimism. These vague but healthy feelings, if he followed
them out, would result in the idea that evil is in some way an exception but an enormous
exception; and ultimately that evil is an invasion or yet more truly a rebellion. He does
not think that everything is right or that every thing is wrong, or that everything is
equally right and wrong. But he does think that right has a right to be right and
therefore a right to be there, and wrong has no right to be wrong and therefore no right
to be there. It is the prince of the world; but it is also a usurper. So he will apprehend
vaguely what the vision will give to him vividly; no less than all that strange story of
treason in heaven and the great desertion by which evil damaged and tried to destroy a
cosmos that it could not create. It is a very strange story and its proportions and its
lines and colours are as arbitrary and absolute as the artistic composition of a picture.
It is a vision which we do in fact symbolise in pictures by titanic limbs and passionate
tints of plumage; all that abysmal vision of falling stars and the peacock panoplies of
the night. But that strange story has one small advantage over the diagrams. It is like
life.
Another example might be found, not in the problem of evil, but in what is called the
problem of progress. One of the ablest agnostics of the age once asked me whether I
thought mankind grew better or grew worse or remained the same. He was confident that the
alternative covered all possibilities. He did not see that it only covered patterns and
not pictures; processes and not stories. I asked him whether he thought that Mr. Smith of
Golder's Green got better or worse or remained exactly the same between the age of thirty
and forty. It then seemed to dawn on him that it would rather depend on Mr. Smith; and how
he chose to go on. It had never occurred to him that it might depend on how mankind chose
to go on; and that its course was not a straight line or an upward or downward curve, but
a track like that of a man across a valley, going where he liked and stopping where he
chose, going into a church or falling down in a ditch. The life of man is a story; an
adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.
The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realisation both of
mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only
it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies;
only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because
it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal narrative
instinct which produced all the fairy tales is something that is neglected by all the
philosophies--except one. The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the
finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man
in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this
philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both there is an idea of free
will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim and it is the
business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it. Now this
deep and democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all the other
philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and it is the
definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and ends in
another. From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his
abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them
that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them that
really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the
free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does something
to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist)
and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that detachment
that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into
atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences; or a
mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a bottomless relativity
making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is
such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing
as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for
every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that
belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation
and end with a last judgement.
And that is the reason why the myths and the philosophers were at war until Christ
came. That is why the Athenian democracy killed Socrates out of respect for the gods; and
why every strolling sophist gave himself the airs of a Socrates whenever he could talk in
a superior fashion of the gods; and why the heretic Pharaoh wrecked his huge idols and
temples for an abstraction and why the priests could return in triumph and trample his
dynasty under foot; and why Buddhism had to divide itself from Brahminism, and why in
every age and country outside Christendom there has been a feud for ever between the
philosopher and the priest. It is easy enough to say that the philosopher is generally the
more rational; it is easier still to forget that the priest is always the more popular.
For the priest told the people stories; and the philosopher did not understand the
philosophy of stories. It came into the world with the story of Christ.
And this is why it had to be a revelation or vision given from above. Any one who will
think of the theory of stories or pictures will easily see the point. The true story of
the world must be told by somebody to somebody else. By the very nature of a story it
cannot be left to occur to anybody. A story has proportions, variations, surprises,
particular dispositions, which cannot be worked out by rule in the abstract, like a sum.
We could not deduce whether or no Achilles would give back the body of Hector from a
Pythagorean theory of number or recurrence; and we could not infer for ourselves in what
way the world would get back the body of Christ, merely from being told that all things go
round and round upon the wheel of Buddha. A man might perhaps work out a proposition of
Euclid without having heard of Euclid; but he would not work out the precise legend of
Eurydice without having heard of Eurydice. At any rate he would not be certain how the
story would end and whether Orpheus was ultimately defeated. Still less could he guess the
end of our story; or the legend of our Orpheus rising, not defeated from, the dead.
To sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man offered salvation
by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of the past; which had
never been satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied together. It met the
mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by
being a true story. That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical character, as
nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character. But that is also why the
historical character had to be the ideal figure; and even fulfil many of the functions
given to these other ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he
could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun. The more deeply we
think of the matter the more we shall conclude that, if there be indeed a God, his
creation could hardly have reached any other culmination than this granting of a real
romance to the world. Otherwise the two sides of the human mind could never have touched
at all; and the brain of man would have remained cloven and double; one lobe of it
dreaming impossible dreams and the other repeating invariable calculations. The
picture-makers would have remained forever painting the portrait of nobody. The sages
would have remained for ever adding up numerals that came to nothing. It was that abyss
that nothing but an incarnation could cover; a divine embodiment of our dreams; and he
stands above that chasm whose name is more than priest and older even than Christendom;
Pontifex Maximus, the mightiest maker of a bridge.
But even with that we return to the more specially Christian symbol in the same
tradition; the perfect pattern of the keys. This is a historical and not a theological
outline, and it is not my duty here to defend in detail that theology, but merely to point
out that it could not even be justified in design without being justified in detail--like
a key. Beyond the broad suggestion of this chapter I attempt no apologetic about why the
creed should be accepted. But in answer to the historical query of why it was accepted and
is accepted, I answer for millions of others in my reply; because it fits the lock,
because it is like life. It is one among many stories; only it happens to be a true story.
It is one among many philosophies; only it happens to be the truth. We accept it; and the
ground is solid under our feet and the road is open before us. It does not imprison us in
a dream of destiny or a consciousness of the universal delusion. It opens to us not only
incredible heavens but what seems to some an equally incredible earth, and makes it
credible. This is the sort of truth that is hard to explain because it is a fact; but it
is a fact to which we can call witnesses. We are Christians and Catholics not because we
worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of
liberty blow over the land of the living.
It is not the purpose of this book to trace the subsequent history of Christianity,
especially the later history of Christianity; which involves controversies of which I hope
to write more fully elsewhere. It is devoted only to the suggestion that Christianity,
appearing amid heathen humanity, had all the character of a unique thing and even of a
supernatural thing. It was not like any of the other things; and the more we study it the
less it looks like any of them. But there is a certain rather peculiar character which
marked it henceforward even down to the present moment, with a note on which this book may
well conclude.
I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old to die.
Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series of revolutions
and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen
again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary
fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and
over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again
been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a
new religion. This truth is hidden from many by a convention that is too little noticed.
Curiously enough, it is a convention of the sort which those who ignore it claim
especially to detect and denounce. They are always telling us that priests and ceremonies
are not religion and that religious organisation can be a hollow sham, but they hardly
realise how true it is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of
Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man
in his heart expected its end. This fact is only masked in medieval and other times by
that very official religion which such critics pride themselves on seeing through.
Christianity remained the official religion of a Renaissance prince or the official
religion of an eighteenth-century bishop, just as an ancient mythology remained the
official religion of Julius Caesar or the Arian creed long remained the official religion
of Julian the Apostate. But there was a difference between the cases of Julius and of
Julian; because the Church had begun its strange career. There was no reason why men like
Julius should not worship gods like Jupiter for ever in public and laugh at them for ever
in private. But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it had come to life
again. He also found, incidentally, that there was not the faintest sign of Jupiter ever
coming to life again. This case of Julian and the episode of Arianism is but the first of
a series of examples that can only be roughly indicated here. Arianism, as has been said,
had every human appearance of being the natural way in which that particular superstition
of Constantine might be expected to peter out. All the ordinary stages had been passed
through; the creed had become a respectable thing, had become a ritual thing, had then
been modified into a rational thing; and the rationalists were ready to dissipate the last
remains of it, just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again suddenly and threw
them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising from the dead. But there are many other
examples of the same thing, even about the same time. The rush of missionaries from
Ireland, For instance, has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an old
world, and even on a Church that showed signs of growing old. Some of them were martyred
on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority on Cornish antiquities told me that he
did not believe for a moment that they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it
with some humour) 'by rather slack Christians.'
Now if we were to dip below the surface of history, as it is not in the scope of this
argument to do, I suspect that we should find several occasions when Christendom was thus
to all appearance hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference, so that only the old
Christian shell stood as the pagan shell had stood so long. But the difference is that in
every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the fathers had been slack
about it. This is obvious in the case of the transition from the Renaissance to the
Counter-Reformation. It is obvious in the case of a transition from the eighteenth century
to the many Catholic revivals of our own time. But I suspect many other examples which
would be worthy of separate studies.
The Faith is not a survival. It is not as if the Druids had managed somehow to survive
somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might have happened in Asia or ancient
Europe, in that indifference or tolerance in which mythologies and philosophies could live
for ever side by side. It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this
Western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing. Europe, in the
tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and reconstruction; rebuilding a universal
republic. And it always began by rejecting this old stone and ended by making it the head
of the corner; by bringing it back from the rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the
capitol. Some stones of Stonehenge are standing and some are fallen; and as the stone
falleth so shall it lie. There has not been a Druidic renaissance every century or two,
with the young Druids crowned with fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury Plain.
Stonehenge has not been rebuilt in every style of architecture from the rude round Norman
to the last rococo of the Baroque. The sacred place of the Druids is safe from the
vandalism of restoration.
But the Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old to die; but in
one in which they were always young enough to get killed. The consequence was that
superficially and externally it often did get killed; nay, it sometimes wore out even
without getting killed. And there follows a fact I find it somewhat difficult to describe,
yet which I believe to be very real and rather important. As a ghost is the shadow of a
man, and in that sense the shadow of life, so at intervals there passed across this
endless life a sort of shadow of death. It came at the moment when it would have perished
had it been perishable. It withered away everything that was perishable. If such animal
parallels were worthy of the occasion we might say that the snake shuddered and shed a
skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as it lost only one of its
nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives. It is truer to say, in a more dignified image, that a
clock struck and nothing happened; or that a bell tolled for an execution that was
everlastingly postponed.
What was the meaning of all that dim but vast unrest of the twelfth century; when, as
it has been so finely said, Julian stirred in his sleep? Why did there appear so strangely
early, in the twilight of dawn after the Dark Ages, so deep a scepticism as that involved
in urging nominalism against realism? For realism against nominalism was really realism
against rationalism, or something more destructive than what we call rationalism. The
answer is that just as some might have thought the Church simply a part of the Roman
Empire, so others later might have thought the Church only a part of the Dark Ages. The
Dark Ages ended as the Empire had ended, and the Church should have departed with them, if
she had been also one of the shades of night. It was another of those spectral deaths or
simulations of death. I mean that if nominalism had succeeded, it would have been as if
Arianism had succeeded, it would have been the beginning of a confession that Christianity
had failed. For nominalism is a far more fundamental scepticism than mere atheism. Such
was the question that was openly asked as the Dark Ages broadened into that daylight that
we call the modern world. But what was the answer? The answer was Aquinas in the chair of
Aristotle, taking all knowledge for his province; and tens of thousands of lads down to
the lowest ranks of peasant and serf, living in rags and on crusts about the great
colleges, to listen to the scholastic philosophy.
What was the meaning of all that whisper of fear that ran round the west under the
shadow of Islam, and fills every old romance with incongruous images of Saracen knights
swaggering in Norway or the Hebrides? Why were men in the extreme west, such as King John
if I remember rightly, accused of being secretly Moslems, as men are accused of being
secretly atheists? Why was there that fierce alarm among some of the authorities about the
rationalistic Arab version of Aristotle? Authorities are seldom alarmed like that except
when it is too late. The answer is that hundreds of people probably believed in their
hearts that Islam would conquer Christendom; that Averroes was more rational than Anselm;
that the Saracen Culture was really, as it was superficially, a superior culture. Here
again we should probably find a whole generation, the older generation, serve doubtful and
depressed and weary. The coming of Islam would only have been the coming of Unitarianism a
thousand years before its time. To many it may have seemed quite reasonable and quite
probable and quite likely to happen. If so, they would have been surprised at what did
happen. What did happen was a roar like thunder from thousands and thousands of young men,
throwing all their youth into one exultant counter-charge, the Crusades. It was the sons
of St. Francis, the Jugglers of God, wandering singing over all the roads of the world; it
was the Gothic going up like a flight of arrows; it was the waking of the world. In
considering the war of the Albigensians, we come to the breach in the heart of Europe and
the landslide of a new philosophy that nearly ended Christendom for ever. In that case the
new philosophy was also a very new philosophy; it was pessimism. It was none the less like
modern ideas because it was as old as Asia; most modern ideas are. It was the Gnostics
returning; but why did the Gnostics return? Because it was the end of an epoch, like the
end of the Empire; and should have been the end of the Church. It was Schopenhauer
hovering over the future; but it was also Manichaeus rising from the dead; that men might
have death and that they might have it more abundantly.
It is rather more obvious in the case of the Renaissance, simply because the period is
so much nearer to us and people know so much more about it. But there is more even in that
example than most people know. Apart from the particular controversies which I wish to
reserve for a separate study, the period was far more chaotic that those controversies
commonly imply. When Protestants call Latimer a martyr to Protestantism, and Catholics
reply that Campion was a martyr to Catholicism, it is often forgotten that many who
perished in such persecutions could only be described as martyrs to atheism or anarchism
or even diabolism. That world was almost as wild as our own; the men wandering about in it
included the sort of man who says there is no God, the sort of man who says he is himself
God, the sort of man who says something that nobody can make head or tail of. If we could
have the conversation of the age following the Renaissance, we should probably be shocked
by its shameless negations. The remarks attributed to Marlowe are probably pretty typical
of the talk in many intellectual taverns. The transition from Pre-Reformation to
Post-Reformation Europe was through a void of very yawning questions; yet again in the
long run the answer was the same. It was one of those moments when, as Christ walked on
the water, so was Christianity walking in the air.
But all these cases are remote in date and could only be proved in detail. We can see
the fact much more clearly in the case when the paganism of the Renaissance ended
Christianity and Christianity unaccountably began all over again. But we can see it most
clearly of all in the case which is close to us and full of manifest and minute evidence;
the case of the great decline of religion that began about the time of Voltaire. For
indeed it is our own case, and we ourselves have seen the decline of that decline. The two
hundred years since Voltaire do not flash past us at a glance like the fourth and fifth
centuries or the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In our own case we can see this
oft-repeated process close at hand; we know how completely a society can lose its
fundamental religion without abolishing its official religion; we know how men can all
become agnostics long before they abolish bishops. And we know that also in this last
ending, which really did look to us like the final ending, the incredible thing has
happened again; the Faith has a better following among the young men than among the old.
When Ibsen spoke of the new generation knocking at the door, he certainly never expected
that it would be the church-door.
At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist
sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the
dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died. How complete was the collapse
and how strange the reversal we can only see in detail in the case nearest to our own
time.
A thousand things have been said about the Oxford Movement and the parallel French
Catholic revival; but few have made us feel the simplest fact about it; that it was a
surprise. It was a puzzle as well as a surprise; because it seemed to most people like a
river turning backwards from the sea and trying to climb back into the mountains. To have
read the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is to know that nearly
everybody had come to take it for granted that religion was a thing that would continually
broaden like a river, till it reached an infinite sea. Some of them expected it to go down
in a cataract of catastrophe, most of them expected it to widen into an estuary of
equality and moderation; but all of them thought its returning on itself a prodigy as
incredible as witchcraft. In other words, most moderate people thought that faith like
freedom would be slowly broadened down, and some advanced people thought that it would be
very rapidly broadened down, not to say flattened out. All that world of Guizot and
Macaulay and the commercial and scientific liberality was perhaps more certain than any
men before or since about the direction in which the world is going. People were so
certain about the direction that they only differed about the pace. Many anticipated with
alarm, and a few with sympathy, a Jacobin revolt that should guillotine the Archbishop of
Canterbury or a Chartist riot that should hang the parsons on the lampposts. But it seemed
like a convulsion in nature that the Archbishop instead of losing his head should be
looking for his mitre; and that instead of diminishing the respect due to parsons we
should strengthen it to the respect due to priests. It revolutionised their very vision of
revolution; and turned their very topsyturveydom topsyturvey.
In short, the whole world being divided about whether the stream was going slower or
faster, became conscious of something vague but vast that was going against the stream.
Both in fact and figure there is something deeply disturbing about this, and that for an
essential reason. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go
against it. A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all the swiftness of a
leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim backwards. A paper boat can ride the rising
deluge with all the airy arrogance of a fairy ship, but if the fairy ship sails up stream
it is really rowed by the fairies. And among the things that merely went with the tide of
apparent progress and enlargement there was many a demagogue or sophist whose wild
gestures were in truth as lifeless as the movement of a dead dog's limbs wavering in the
eddying water; and many a philosophy uncommonly like a paper boat, of the sort that it is
not difficult to knock into a cocked hat. But even the truly living and even life-giving
things that went with that stream did not thereby prove that they were living or
life-giving. It was this other force that was unquestionably and unaccountably alive; the
mysterious and unmeasured energy that was thrusting back the river. That was felt to be
like the movement of some great monster; and it was none the less clearly a living monster
because most people thought it a prehistoric monster. It was none the less an unnatural,
an incongruous, and to some a comic upheaval; as if the Great Sea Serpent had suddenly
risen out of the Round Pond--unless we consider the Sea Serpent as more likely to live in
the Serpentine. This flippant element in the fantasy must not be missed, for it was one of
the clearest testimonies to the unexpected nature of the reversal. That age did really
feel that a preposterous quality in prehistoric animals belonged also to historic rituals;
that mitres and tiaras were like the horns or crests of antediluvian creatures; and that
appealing to a Primitive Church was like dressing up as a Primitive Man.
The world is still puzzled by that movement; but most of all because it still moves. I
have said something elsewhere of the rather random sort of reproaches that are still
directed against it and its much greater consequences; it is enough to say here that the
more such critics reproach it the less they explain it. In a sense it is my concern here,
if not to explain it, at least to suggest the direction of the explanation; but above all,
it is my concern to point out one particular thing about it. And that is that it had all
happened before; and even many times before.
To sum up, in so far as it is true that recent centuries have seen an attenuation of
Christian doctrine, recent centuries have only seen what the most remote centuries have
seen. And even the modern example has only ended as the medieval and pre-medieval examples
ended. It is already clear, and grows clearer every day, that it is not going to end in
the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather in the return of those parts of it
that had really disappeared. It is going to end as the Arian compromise ended, as the
attempts at a compromise with Nominalism and even with Albigensianism ended. But the point
to seize in the modern case, as in all the other cases is that what returns is not in that
sense a simplified theology; not according to that view a purified theology; it is simply
theology. It is that enthusiasm for theological studies that marked the most doctrinal
ages; it is the divine science. An old Don with D. D. after his name may have become the
typical figure of a bore; but that was because he was himself bored with his theology, not
because he was excited about it. It was precisely because he was admittedly more
interested in the Latin of Plautus than in the Latin of Augustine, in the Greek of
Xenophon than in the Greek of Chrysostom. It was precisely because he was more interested
in a dead tradition than in a decidedly living tradition. In short, it was precisely
because he was himself a type of the time in which Christian faith was weak. It was not
because men would not hail, if they could, the wonderful and almost wild vision of a
Doctor of Divinity.
There are people who say they wish Christianity to remain as a spirit. They mean, very
literally, that they wish it to remain as a ghost. But it is not going to remain as a
ghost. What follows this process of apparent death is not the lingerings of the shade; it
is the resurrection of the body. These people are quite prepared to shed pious and
reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what they are not prepared for is
the Son of God walking once more upon the hills of morning. These people, and indeed most
people, were indeed by this time quite accustomed to the idea that the old Christian
candle-light would fade into the light of common day. To many of them it did quite
honestly appear like that pale yellow flame of a candle when it is left burning in
daylight. It was all the more unexpected, and therefore all the more unmistakable, that
the seven branched candle-stick suddenly towered to heaven like a miraculous tree and
flamed until the sun turned pale. But other ages have seen the day conquer the
candle-light and then the candle-light conquer the day. Again and again, before our time,
men have grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there has followed on
that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson cataract, the strength of the
red original wine. And we only say once more to-day as has been said many times by our
fathers: 'Long years and centuries ago own fathers or the founders of our people drank, as
they dreamed, of the blood of God. Long years and centuries have passed since the strength
of that giant vintage has been anything but a legend of the age of giants. Centuries ago
already is the dark time of the second fermentation, when the wine of Catholicism turned
into the vinegar of Calvinism. Long since that bitter drink has been itself diluted;
rinsed out and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the world. Never did
we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity and the spirit, still less the
richer and the sweeter strength of the purple vineyards in our dreams of the age of gold.
Day by day and year by year we have lowered our hopes and lessened our convictions; we
have grown more and more used to seeing those vats and vineyards overwhelmed in the
water-floods and the last savour and suggestion of that special element fading like a
stain of purple upon a sea of grey. We have grown used to dilution, to dissolution, to a
watering down that went on for ever. But 'Thou hast kept the good wine until now.'
This is the final fact, and it is the most extraordinary of all. The faith has not only
often died but it has often died of old age. It has not only been often killed but it has
often died a natural death; in the sense of coming to a natural and necessary end. It is
obvious that it has survived the most savage and the most universal persecutions from the
shock of the Diocletian fury to the shock of the French Revolution. But it has a more
strange and even a more weird tenacity; it has survived not only war but peace. It has not
only died often but degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness
and even its own surrender. We need not repeat what is so obvious about the beauty of the
end of Christ in its wedding of youth and death. But this is almost as if Christ had lived
to the last possible span, had been a white-haired sage of a hundred and died of natural
decay, and then had risen again rejuvenated, with trumpets and the rending of the sky. It
was said truly enough that human Christianity in its recurrent weakness was sometimes too
much wedded to the powers of the world; but if it was wedded it has very often been
widowed. It is a strangely immortal sort of widow. An enemy may have said at one moment
that it was but an aspect of the power of the Caesars; and it sounds as strange to-day as
to call it an aspect of the Pharaohs. An enemy might say that it was the official faith of
feudalism; and it sounds as convincing now as to say that it was bound to perish with the
ancient Roman villa. All these things did indeed run their course to its normal end; and
there seemed no course for the religion but to end with them. It ended and it began again.
'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.' The civilisation
of antiquity was the whole world: and men no more dreamed of its ending than of the ending
of daylight. They could not imagine another order unless it were in another world. The
civilisation of the world has passed away and those words have not passed away. In the
long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was so familiar a thing that no man could imagine
himself without a lord: and religion was so woven into that network that no man would have
believed they could be torn asunder. Feudalism itself was torn to rags and rotted away in
the popular life of the true Middle Ages; and the first and freshest power in that new
freedom was the old religion. Feudalism had passed away, and the words did not pass away.
The whole medieval order, in many ways so complete and almost cosmic a home for man, wore
out gradually in its turn and here at least it was thought that the words would die. They
went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty years were using all
its light and learning for new religious foundations, new apologetics, new saints. It was
supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was
supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution.
Science explained it away; and it was still there. History disinterred it in the past; and
it appeared suddenly in the future. To-day it stands once more in our path; and even as we
watch it, it grows.
If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men really learn to
apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a story, it would seem that sooner
or later even its enemies will learn from their incessant and interminable disappointments
not to look for anything so simple as its death. They may continue to war with it, but it
will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as they war with the
skies. 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.' They will
watch for it to stumble; they will watch for it to err; they will no longer watch for it
to end. Insensibly, even unconsciously, they will in their own silent anticipations fulfil
the relative terms of that astounding prophecy; they will forget to watch for the mere
extinction of what has so often been vainly extinguished; and will learn instinctively to
look first for the coming of the comet or the freezing of the star.
I have taken the liberty once or twice of borrowing the excellent phrase about an
Outline of History; though this study of a special truth and a special error can of course
claim no sort of comparison with the rich and many-sided encyclopedia of history. for
which that name was chosen. And yet there is a certain reason in the reference: and a
sense in which the one thing touches and even cuts across the other. For the story of the
world as told by Mr. Wells could here only be criticised as an outline. And, strangely
enough, it seems to me that it is only wrong as an outline. It is admirable as an
accumulation of history; it is splendid as a store-house or treasure of history; it is a
fascinating disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification of history;
but it is quite false as an outline of history. The one thing that seems to me quite wrong
about it is the outline; the sort of outline that can really be a single line, like that
which makes all the difference between a caricature of the profile of Mr. Winston
Churchill and of Sir Alfred Mond. In simple and homely language, I mean the things that
stick out; the things that make the simplicity of a silhouette. I think the proportions
are wrong; the proportions of what is certain as compared with what is uncertain, of what
played a great part as compared with what played a smaller part, of what is ordinary and
what is extraordinary, of what really lies level with an average and what stands out as an
exception.
I do not say it as a small criticism of a great writer, and I have no reason to do so;
for in my own much smaller task I feel I have failed in very much the same way. I am very
doubtful whether I have conveyed to the reader the main point I meant about the
proportions of history, and why I have dwelt so much more on some things than others. I
doubt whether I have clearly fulfilled the plan that I set out in the introductory
chapter; and for that reason I add these lines as a sort of summary in a concluding
chapter. I do believe that the things on which I have insisted are more essential to an
outline of history than the things which I have subordinated or dismissed. I do not
believe that the past is most truly pictured as a thing in which humanity merely fades
away into nature, or civilisation merely fades away into barbarism, or religion fades away
into mythology, or our own religion fades away into the religions of the world. In short I
do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines.
I believe that, of the two, it would be far nearer the truth to tell the tale very simply,
like a primitive myth about a man who made the sun and stars or a god who entered the body
of a sacred monkey. I will therefore sum up all that has gone before in what seems to me a
realistic and reasonably proportioned statement; the short story of mankind.
In the land lit by that neighbouring star, whose blaze is the broad daylight, there are
many and very various things motionless and moving. There moves among them a race that is
in its relation to others a race of gods. The fact is not lessened but emphasised because
it can behave like a race of demons. Its distinction is not an individual illusion, like
one bird pluming itself on its own plumes; it is a solid and a many-sided thing. It is
demonstrated in the very speculations that have led to its being denied. That men, the
gods of this lower world, are linked with it in various ways is true; but it is another
aspect of the same truth. That they grow as the grass grows and walk as the beasts walk is
a secondary necessity that sharpens the primary distinction. It is like saying that a
magician must after all have the appearance of a man; or that even the fairies could not
dance without feet. It has lately been the fashion to focus the mind entirely on these
mild and subordinate resemblances and to forget the main fact altogether. It is customary
to insist that man resembles the other creatures. Yes; and that very resemblance he alone
can see. The fish does not trace the fish-bone pattern in the fowls of the air; or the
elephant and the emu compare skeletons. Even in the sense in which man is at one with the
universe it is an utterly lonely universality. The very sense that he is united with all
things is enough to sunder him from all.
Looking around him by this unique light, as lonely as the literal flame that he alone
has kindled, this demigod or demon of the visible world makes that world visible. He sees
around him a world of a certain style or type. It seems to proceed by certain rules or at
least repetitions. He sees a green architecture that builds itself without visible hands;
but which builds itself into a very exact plan or pattern, like a design already drawn in
the air by an invisible finger. It is not, as is now vaguely suggested, a vague thing. It
is not a growth or a groping of blind life. Each seeks an end; a glorious and radiant end,
even for every daisy or dandelion we see in looking across the level of a common field. In
the very shape of things there is more than green growth; there is the finality of the
flower. It is a world of crowns. This impression, whether or no it be an illusion, has so
profoundly influenced this race of thinkers and masters of the material world, that the
vast majority have been moved to take a certain view of that world. They have concluded,
rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as the tree seemed to have a plan; and an
end and crown like the flower. But so long as the race of thinkers was able to think, it
was obvious that the admission of this idea of a plan brought with it another thought more
thrilling and even terrible. There was someone else, some strange and unseen being, who
had designed these things, if indeed they were designed. There was a stranger who was also
a friend; a mysterious benefactor who had been before them and built up the woods and
hills for their coming, and had kindled the sunrise against their rising, as a servant
kindles a fire. Now this idea of a mind that gives a meaning to the universe has received
more and more confirmation within the minds of men, by meditations and experiences much
more subtle and searching than any such argument about the external plan of the world. But
I am concerned here with keeping the story in its most simple and even concrete terms; and
it is enough to say here that most men, including the wisest men, have come to the
conclusion that the world has such a final purpose and therefore such a first cause. But
most men in some sense separated themselves from the wisest men, when it came to the
treatment of that idea. There came into existence two ways of treating that idea, which
between them made up most of the religious history of the world. The majority, like the
minority, had this strong sense of a second meaning in things; of a strange master who
knew the secret of the world. But the majority, the mob or mass of men, naturally tended
to treat it rather in the spirit of gossip. The gossip, like all gossip, contained a great
deal of truth and falsehood. The world began to tell itself tales about the unknown being
or his sons or servants or messengers. Some of the tales may truly be called old wives'
tales; as professing only to be very remote memories of the morning of the world; myths
about the baby moon or the half-baked mountains. Some of them might more truly be called
travellers' tales; as being curious but contemporary tales brought from certain
borderlands of experience; such as miraculous cures or those that bring whispers of what
has happened to the dead. Many of them are probably true tales; enough of them are
probably true to keep a person of real commonsense more or less conscious that there
really is something rather marvellous behind the cosmic curtain. But in a sense it is only
going by appearances; even if the appearances are called apparitions. It is a matter of
appearances--and disappearances. At the most these gods are ghosts; that is, they are
glimpses. For most of us they are rather gossip about glimpses. And for the rest, the
whole world is full of rumours, most of which are almost avowedly romances. The great
majority of the tales about gods and ghosts and the invisible king are told, if not for
the sake of the tale, at least for the sake of the topic. They are evidence of the eternal
interest of the theme; they are not evidence of anything else, and they are not meant to
be. They are mythology or the poetry that is not bound in books-- or bound in any other
way.
Meanwhile the minority, the sages or thinkers, had withdrawn apart and had taken up an
equally congenial trade. They were drawing up plans of the world; of the world which all
believed to have a plan. They were trying to set forth the plan seriously and to scale.
They were setting their minds directly to the mind that had made the mysterious world;
considering what sort of a mind it might be and what its ultimate purpose might be. Some
of them made that mind much more impersonal than mankind has generally made it; some
simplified it almost to a blank; a few, a very few, doubted it altogether. One or two of
the more morbid fancied that it might be evil and an enemy; just one or two of the more
degraded in the other class worshipped demons instead of gods. But most of these theorists
were theists: and they not only saw a moral plan in nature, but they generally laid down a
moral plan for humanity. Most of them were good men who did good work: and they were
remembered and reverenced in various ways. They were scribes; any their scriptures became
more or less holy scriptures. They were law-givers; and their tradition became not only
legal but ceremonial. We may say that they received divine honours, in the sense in which
kings and great captains in certain countries often received divine honours. In a word,
wherever the other popular spirit, the spirit of legend and gossip could come into play,
it surrounded them with the more mystical atmosphere of the myths. Popular poetry turned
the sages into saints. But that was all it did. They remained themselves; men never really
forgot that they were men, only made into gods in the sense that they were made into
heroes. Divine Plato, like Divus Caesar, was a title and not a dogma. In Asia, where the
atmosphere was more mythological, the man was made to look more like a myth, but he
remained a man. He remained a man of a certain social class or school of men, receiving
and deserving great honour from mankind. It is the order or school of the philosophers;
the men who have set themselves seriously to trace the order across any apparent chaos in
the vision of life. Instead of living on imaginative rumours and remote traditions and the
tail-end of exceptional experiences about the mind and meaning behind the world, they have
tried in a sense to project the primary purpose of that mind a priori. They have tried to
put on paper a possible plan of the world; almost as if the world were not yet made.
Right in the middle of all these things stands up an enormous exception. It is quite
unlike anything else. It is a thing final like the trump of doom, though it is also a
piece of good news; or news that seems too good to be true. It is nothing less than the
loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It
declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there
did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make
theories and the mythologists hand down myths; the Man Who Made the World. That such a
higher personality exists behind all things had indeed always been implied by all the best
thinkers, as well as by all the most beautiful legends. But nothing of this sort had ever
been implied in any of them. It is simply false to say that the other sages and heroes had
claimed to be that mysterious master and maker, of whom the world had dreamed and
disputed. Not one of them had ever claimed to be anything of the sort. Not one of their
sects or schools had even claimed that they had claimed to be anything of the sort. The
most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the true servant of such a being.
The most that any visionary had ever said was that men might catch glimpses of the glory
of that spiritual being; or much more often of lesser spiritual beings. The most that any
primitive myth had even suggested was that the Creator was present at the Creation. But
that the Creator was present at scenes a little subsequent to the supper-parties of
Horace, and talked with tax-collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life
of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by the whole of
that great civilisation for more than a thousand years-- that is something utterly unlike
anything else in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since
he spoke his first articulate word, instead of barking like a dog. Its unique character
can be used as an argument against it as well as for it. It would be easy to concentrate
on it as a case of isolated insanity; but it makes nothing but dust and nonsense of
comparative religion.
It came on the world with a wind and rush of running messengers proclaiming that
apocalyptic portent, and it is not unduly fanciful to say that they are running still.
What puzzles the world, and its wise philosophers and fanciful pagan poets, about the
priests and people of the Catholic Church is that they still behave as if they were
messengers. A messenger does not dream about what his message might be, or argue about
what it probably would be; he delivers it as it is. It is not a theory or a fancy but a
fact. It is not relevant to this intentionally rudimentary outline to prove in detail that
it is a fact; but merely to point out that these messengers do deal with it as men deal
with a fact. All that is condemned in Catholic tradition, authority, and dogmatism and the
refusal to retract and modify, are but the natural human attributes of a man with a
message relating to a fact. I desire to avoid in this last summary all the controversial
complexities that may once more cloud the simple lines of that strange story; which I have
already called, in words that are much too weak, the strangest story in the world. I
desire merely to mark those main lines and specially to mark where the great line is
really to be drawn. The religion of the world, in its right proportions, is not divided
into fine shades of mysticism or more or less rational forms of mythology. It is divided
by the line between the men who are bringing that message and the men who have not yet
heard it, or cannot yet believe it.
But when we translate the terms of that strange tale back into the more concrete and
complicated terminology of our time, we find it covered by names and memories of which the
very familiarity is a falsification. For instance, when we say that a country contains so
many Moslems, we really mean that it contains so many monotheists; and we really mean, by
that, that it contains so many men; men with the old average assumption of men--that the
invisible ruler remains invisible. They hold it along with the customs of a certain
culture and under the simpler laws of a certain law-giver; but so they would if their
law-giver were Lycurgus or Solon. They testify to something which is a necessary and noble
truth; but was never a new truth. Their creed is not a new colour; it is the neutral and
normal tint that is the background of the many-coloured life of man. Mahomet did not, like
the Magi, find a new star; he saw through his own particular window a glimpse of the great
grey field of the ancient starlight. So when we say that the country contains so many
Confucians or Buddhists, we mean it contains so many pagans whose prophets have given them
another and rather vaguer version of the invisible power; making it not only invisible but
almost impersonal. When we say that they also have temples and idols and priests and
periodical festivals, we simply mean that this sort of heathen is enough of a human being
to admit the popular element of pomp and pictures and feasts and fairy-tales. We only mean
that Pagans have more sense than Puritans. But what the gods are supposed to be, what the
priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running
messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel;
nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.
Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if
something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they
have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is
the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of
something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But
it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of
the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is
almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to
grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes
fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.
For this is the last proof of the miracle; that something so supernatural should have
become so natural. I mean that anything so unique when seen from the outside should only
seem universal when seen from the inside. I have not minimised the scale of the miracle,
as some of our wilder theologians think it wise to do. Rather have I deliberately dwelt on
that incredible interruption, as a blow that broke the very backbone of history. I have
great sympathy with the monotheists, the Moslems, or the Jews, to whom it seems a
blasphemy; a blasphemy that might shake the world. But it did not shake the world; it
steadied the world. That fact, the more we consider it, will seem more solid and more
strange. I think it a piece of plain justice to all the unbelievers to insist upon the
audacity of the act of faith that is demanded of them. I willingly and warmly agree that
it is, in itself, a suggestion at which we might expect even the brain of the believer to
reel, when he realised his own belief. But the brain of the believer does not reel; it is
the brains of the unbelievers that reel. We can see their brains reeling on every side and
into every extravagance of ethics and psychology; into pessimism and the denial of life;
into pragmatism and the denial of logic; seeking their omens in nightmares and their
canons in contradictions; shrieking for fear at the far-off sight of things beyond good
and evil, or whispering of strange stars where two and two make five. Meanwhile this
solitary thing that seems at first so outrageous in outline remains solid and sane in
substance. It remains the moderator of all these manias; rescuing reason from the
Pragmatists exactly as it rescued laughter from the Puritans. I repeat that I have
deliberately emphasised its intrinsically defiant and dogmatic character. The mystery is
how anything so startling should have remained defiant and dogmatic and yet become
perfectly normal and natural. I have admitted freely that, considering the incident in
itself, a man who says he is God may be classed with a man who says he is glass. But the
man who says he is glass is not a glazier making windows for all the world. He does not
remain for after ages as a shining and crystalline figure, in whose light everything is as
clear as crystal
But this madness has remained sane. The madness has remained sane when everything else
went mad. The madhouse has been a house to which, age after age, men are continually
coming back as to a home. That is the riddle that remains; that anything so abrupt and
abnormal should still be found a habitable and hospitable thing. I care not if the sceptic
says it is a tall story; I cannot see how so toppling a tower could stand so long without
foundation. Still less can I see how it could become, as it has become, the home of man.
Had it merely appeared and disappeared, it might possibly have been remembered or
explained as the last leap of the rage of illusion, the ultimate myth of the ultimate
mood, in which the mind struck the sky and broke. But the mind did not break. It is the
one mind that remains unbroken in the break-up of the world. If it were an error, it seems
as if the error could hardly have lasted a day. If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem
that such an ecstasy could not endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly two thousand
years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in
its hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate
and death, than all the world outside. For it was the soul of Christendom that came forth
from the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common sense. Though we dared not look
on His face we could look on His fruits; and by His fruits we should know Him. The fruits
are solid and the fruitfulness is much more than a metaphor; and nowhere in this sad world
are boys happier in apple-trees, or men in more equal chorus singing as they tread the
vine, than under the fixed flash of this instant and intolerant enlightenment; the
lightning made eternal as the light.
On re-reading these pages I feel that I have tried in many places and with many words,
to say something that might be said in one word. In a sense this study is meant to be
superficial. That is. it is not meant as a study of the things that need to be studied. It
is rather a reminder of the things that are seen so quickly that they are forgotten almost
as quickly. Its moral, in a manner of speaking, is that first thoughts are best; so a
flash might reveal a landscape; with the Eiffel Tower or the Matterhorn standing up in it
as they would never stand up again in the light of common day. I ended the book with an
image of everlasting lightning; in a very different sense, alas, this little flash has
lasted only too long. But the method has also certain practical disadvantages upon which I
think it well to add these two notes. It may seem to simplify too much and to ignore out
of ignorance. I feel this especially in the passage about the prehistoric pictures; which
is not concerned with all that the learned may learn from prehistoric pictures, but with
the single point of what anyone could learn from there being any prehistoric pictures at
all. I am conscious that this attempt to express it in terms of innocence may exaggerate
even my own ignorance. Without any pretence of scientific research or information, I
should be sorry to have it thought that I knew no more than what was needed, in that
passage, of the states into which primitive humanity has been divided. I am aware, of
course, that the story is elaborately stratified; and that there were many such stages
before the Cro-Magnon or any peoples with whom we associate such pictures. Indeed recent
studies about the Neanderthal and other races rather tend to repeat the moral that is here
most relevant. The notion noted in these pages of something necessarily slow or late in
the development of religion, will gain little indeed from these later revelations about
the precursors of the reindeer picture-maker. The learned appear to hold that, whether the
reindeer picture could be religious or not, the people that lived before it were religious
already; burying their dead with the significant signs of mystery and hope. This obviously
brings us back to the same argument; an argument that is not approached by any measurement
of the earlier man's skull. It is little use here to compare the head of the man with the
head of the monkey, if it certainly never came into the head of the monkey to bury another
monkey with nuts in his grave to help him towards a heavenly monkey house. Talking of
skulls, I am also aware of the story of the Cro-Magnon skull that was much larger and
finer than a modern skull. It is a very funny story; because an eminent evolutionist,
awakening to a somewhat belated caution, protested against anything being inferred from
one specimen. It is the duty of a solitary skull to prove that our fathers were our
inferiors. Any solitary skull presuming to prove that they were superior is felt to be
suffering from swelled head.
In this book which is merely meant as a popular criticism of popular fallacies, often
indeed of very vulgar errors, I feel that I have sometimes given an impression of scoffing
at serious scientific work. It was however the very reverse of my intentions. I am not
arguing with the scientist who explains the elephant, but only with the sophist who
explains it away. And as a matter of fact the sophist plays to the gallery, as he did in
ancient Greece. He appeals to the ignorant, especially when he appeals to the learned. But
I never meant my own criticism to be an impertinence to the truly learned. We all owe an
infinite debt to the researches, especially the recent researches, of single minded
students in these matters; and I have only professed to pick up things here and there from
them. I have not loaded my abstract argument with quotations and references, which only
make a man look more learned than he is; but in some cases I find that my own loose
fashion of allusion is rather misleading about my own meaning. The passage about Chaucer
and the Child Martyr is badly expressed; I only mean that the English poet probably had in
mind the English saint; of whose story he gives a sort of foreign version. In the same way
two statements in the chapter on Mythology follow each other in such a way that it may
seem to be suggested that the second story about monotheism refers to the Southern Seas. I
may explain that Atahocan belongs not to Australasian but to American savages. So in the
chapter called "The Antiquity of Civilisation," which I feel to be the most
unsatisfactory, I have given my own impression of the meaning of the development of
Egyptian monarchy too much, perhaps, as if it were identical with the facts on which it
was formed as given in works like those of Professor J. L Myres. But the confusion was not
intentional; still less was there any intention to imply, in the remainder of the chapter,
that the anthropological speculations about races are less valuable than they undoubtedly
are. My criticism is strictly relative; I may say that the pyramids are plainer than the
tracks of the desert; without denying that wiser men than I may see tracks in what is to
me the trackless sand.
Last modified: 20th May, 1997
Martin Ward, Software Technology Research Lab, De Montfort University, Leicester.
Email: [email protected]
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