Chapter XI · The Religious Temperament of the Eastern and Western Peoples.

A more interesting and fruitful ground of comparison is that which looks at the inward sentiment or psychic emotion of the different religions, at the personal emotional relation of the individual towards the godhead. As I observed before, a clear judgment on this question is only possible when the religious memorials of a people are numerous, varied, and personal, so that some of them at least may be regarded as the expression of the individual spirit. Even if the priest or the ritual dictates the expression, the pious and frequent votary may come to feel genuinely what is dictated to him. Hence we can gather direct testimony concerning the ancient Babylonian as we can of the ancient Hebrew religious temper and emotion; for though most of the Mesopotamian documents are concerned with the royal ceremonial, which does not usually reveal genuine personal feeling, yet in this case the royal inscriptions, whether religious narrative or liturgies or prayers, are unusually convincing as revelations of self. And besides these, we have many private hymns of penance and formulae of exorcism.

On the other hand, the ancient Western world and even historic Greece is singularly barren of this kind of religious testimony. We know much about the State religion, but we have very few ritual formulae or public or private prayers. Our evidence is mainly the religious utterances of the higher poetry and literature and a few lyric hymns composed not for the solitary worshipper, but for common and tribal ritual-service. But we have also the mythology and the art and the general manifestations of the Hellenic spirit in other directions that enable us to conclude something concerning the religious psychology of the average man in the historic periods, and if we find this markedly different from that of the oriental, we shall find it hard to believe that the Babylonian spirit could have worked with any strong influence on the proto-Hellene.

In fact, it is only in the latest periods that we find in Hellas an individual personal religion approaching the Babylonian in intensity. The older cult was communal and tribal rather than personal; even the household gods, such as Zeus Κτήσιος and Ἑρκεῖος, the gods of the closet and storehouse, the hearth-goddess, were shared by the householder in common with the nearest circle of kindred. These cults were partly utilitarian, and the moral emotion that they quickened was the emotion of kinship: they do not appear to have inspired a high personal and emotional faith and trust. Nor usually had the average Hellene of the earlier period the conception of a personal tutelary divinity who brought him to life, and watched over his course, preserving, rebuking, and interceding for him. The Babylonian fancy of the great king sitting in infancy on the lap of the goddess and drinking milk from her breasts would not commend itself to the religious sense in Greece.

The other trait that should be considered here in the religious spirit of the Mesopotamian Semites is fanaticism, an emotional quality which often affords a useful basis of comparison between various religions. This religious phenomenon is best known by its deadly results; but in itself it is most difficult to define, as are other special moral terms that imply blame and are highly controversial. It is only found among those who feel their religion so deeply as to be relatively indifferent to other functions of life. We impute fanaticism when the tension of religious feeling destroys the moral equilibrium or stunts development of other parts of our nature, or prompts to acts which, but for this morbid influence, would excite moral indignation. It may display itself in the artistic and intellectual sphere, as by iconoclasm or the suppression of arts and sciences; or in the discipline of individual life, as by over-ascetic self-mortification. Its coarsest and most usual manifestation is in war and the destruction of peoples of alien creed. A war or a slaughter is called fanatical, if its leading motive is the extermination of a rival religion, not for the sake of morality or civilisation, but as an act in itself acceptable to one’s own jealous god. The ascetic type of fanaticism is specially a product of the Far East: the murderous type is peculiar to the Semitic spirit, when unchastened by a high ethical sympathy or a sensitive humanism; for the chief record of it is in the pages of the history of Israel, Islam, and Christianity, so far as this last religion has been in bondage to certain Semitic influence. It is a question of interest whether we find fanaticism of this type in the Mesopotamian area and in the ancient polytheistic communities of the Western Semites. We might expect to find it because of the intensity of the religious spirit that seems to have been a common inheritance of all these stocks. The more fervent the worship, the more is the likelihood that the dangerous idea of a “jealous” god will emerge, especially when races are living under the illusion of the “fallacy of names.” By a fatal logic of devotion, the jealous god may be thought to favour or ordain the destruction of those who worship the deity under other names, which meant, for the old world, other gods. Only this must be carefully distinguished from the other more innocent idea, proper to all tribal religions, that the deity of the tribe, like a good citizen, will desire victory for his people’s arms.

From other polytheistic Semitic communities we have no record, so far as I am aware, that bears on the phenomenon that we are considering, except the famous Moabite Stone, of which the style is in this respect strikingly Biblical. Mesha regards himself as sent by his god Chĕmosh to take Nebo from Israel, and he explains why he slaughtered all within the walls, man, woman, and child, “for I had devoted it to Chĕmosh.” Fanaticism does not so naturally belong to polytheism as to monotheism; yet it seems that at times the polytheistic Semites could be as prone to this vice of the religious temper as the monotheistic Israelites.

Speaking generally, and in comparison with the ancient Semitic and the mediaeval and even later spirit of Europe, we must pronounce the Hellenic temperament of the earlier and classical period as wholly innocent of fanaticism. The history of Hellas is not stained by any “war of religion”; and no religious hierarchy in Hellas ever possessed the power or displayed the will to suppress art or persecute science and thought. It might occasionally happen that individuals were in danger of punishment if they insulted or openly flouted the civic worship or introduced new deities; but that the State should protect itself thus is not fanaticism. The least tolerant of cities was the enlightened Athens. But her record in this matter is a spotless page compared with the history of any later European State. Hellas owed this happy immunity to her cooler religious temper, to the equilibrium of the other life-forces within her, and to her comparative freedom from dark and cruel superstitious fears.

It is specially in regard to such salient features of the religious temperament as we have been considering that the early Hellene asserted his spiritual independence of the East.