Part 1 — MAX MÜLLER’S “CHIPS.” [119]

MAX MÜLLER’S “CHIPS.” [119]

Mr. Max Müller, the learned German professor, and Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, wrote, and in 1868 published, a collection of essays on the science of religion which he calls Chips from a German Workshop. He tells us this title was given him by the late Chevalier Bunsen, who, on advising him to undertake the translation of the Sacred Book of the Brahmins, the Rig-Veda, bade him give, from time to time, to the public some chips from his workshop. The intensely absorbing and delightful nature of his studies is to be seen very clearly by these specimens. They embrace two of the most important and most attractive branches of human science—that of the varied forms of human thought in its relations to God; and that of the multifold languages of the earth, and their mutual relations. Prof. Müller’s philological investigations are confined chiefly to the Indo-Germanic family, and confirm beyond possibility of cavil the intimate connection between the many branches of that family—the Sanskrit, the Brahmanic language in use at present, the Persian, the Greek, the Latin with its offshoots, the Italian, the French, and the Spanish, the Celtic and the English. In exemplifying what he says on this subject, he speaks of the meaning of the word Veda. Rig-Veda, he tells us, means praise of knowledge or wisdom—Rig or Rich signifying praise or hymn, and Veda knowledge or wisdom. He calls our attention to this word Veda in support of the theory of the connection of the Aryan or Indo-Germanic group of languages. The root of it, or the word deprived of its final vowel—Ved—is to be seen by substituting the interchanging consonants in the English words wit, wot, the German weiss, Gothic vait, Anglo-Saxon wat, Greek οἶδα, to which may be added the Latin word video, to see, evidently closely connected with this Sanskrit word signifying to know, for knowledge is intellectual vision.

What impresses us most, at first sight, is the practical conclusion to be drawn from the advanced state of philological studies. We have here a striking proof of the unity of the race of man. Max Müller speaks of this proof in favor of the unity of the Aryan races as beyond gainsaying; words are there to establish the truth. Now, if we see such differently constituted peoples—such as the English and the Hindoo, the French and the Persian, the Celt and the Italian—all members of one family, can any one be so rash as to wish to exclude from fellowship with that family the tawny Arab, the swarthy Malay, or the dark son of Africa, simply because they are to be classed under the heads of Semitic and Turanian? It is well known among physiologists that the differences of facial angles and cranial thickness constitute nothing essential; while the investigations of national thought and customs, hitherto veiled by unintelligible languages, tend continually to demonstrate and confirm the unity of man, to show that all men are of one common stock, of one man and of one woman, all made after the one type—that which exists, as the Bible tells us, in God. So far, in fact, is real science from doing harm to revelation, that when it attains its perfection it confirms the truths that have been revealed. Whence we may draw this conclusion: that men who are wise will take care to have revelation for their guide, even in science; they will, it is clear, be saved from going astray, since their ultimate examinations confirm its truth. It is not unfrequently the case that the eager scientific man, by a logical process, draws his conclusion without the slightest suspicion of error in his premises. It is no wonder he is tenacious of his conclusion; but how often are his ideas overthrown by “chance,” that strange discoverer of more than one great treasure of the human race! And how often sober, thoughtful men, meeting to determine the basis on which they stand, have to say, as did the Geological Congress of Paris in 1867: “The state of the science is not such as to enable us to make deductions wholly free from danger of error”! or, certainly it is most just that we should love science and follow it faithfully, but always with an eye to that old and familiar adage, “It is human to err.” There is really nothing after all that saves a man from mistakes and confusion so much as a proper estimate of his own conclusions, and a readiness to have them corrected by others. It is a habit of mind that distinguishes really great men, like the sounder portion of the Prehistorical Congress of Bologna, in the autumn of 1871: “There is nothing in prehistorical discoveries that is in contradiction with revelation.” Bacon has bid us all put aside the idola, and thus free our minds from prejudice. We should begin by banishing the idol of self, the reliance on our own judgment, so as to be ready at once to abandon cherished ideas, and to look on the principles of science as more or less liable to be one day, by further investigation, shown to be other than we think them. This is all the more important because false principles always do practical harm, and, if nothing else, they retard the attainment of what we are searching for, in putting us on the wrong path. We do not wish to be thought to condemn all scientific principles as one day liable to be proven false. There are some, the essential agreement of whose subject and predicate absolutely excludes all danger of error, others which the constant experience of the human race has shown to be true, such as, for instance, the mathematical, and many of those that form the basis of natural science. These do not contradict revelation, and will never be proven false. The history of the past, however, is too full of the débris of systems of every kind that any one of solid information should not take warning from them, and be on his guard against looking on any proposition in natural science as irrefragable which the concordant testimony of men since the enunciation of it has not shown to be so. The Ptolemean system, after an undisputed sway, yielded before the assaults of Copernicus and Galileo, and its solid spheres, whose music filled the poet’s mind with delight, and charmed the privileged spirits to whom it was given to hear it, came down in awful ruin, and their sounds were hushed for ever. Then those whose years did not begin with the century can recall how eagerly they drank in the doctrine of the imponderable principles; and lo! what has become of them? The progress of the age has substituted for it the teaching of the unity of forces, and motion answers for them all. The solidity of the sun and its dark spots, under the telescope and the combined investigations of astronomers, have disappeared, and gaseous substance and interruption in its continuity have taken the place of both. And in the recent brilliant discoveries in regard to the constituent gases of the sun, who is to make us sure that the lines in the spectrum, by which we profess to know the existence in the sun of certain determinate objects, may not be produced by other causes of which we know nothing? All these theories, we grant, have great probability in their favor, and we do not cite them with any intent to discredit the labors of the gifted men who have formed them; but it is wise not to look on them as the end of all investigation and beyond all controversy. As we think of these vicissitudes of science, there occur to us, though not in a spirit of disregard for true science, the words written long ago: “I have seen the trouble which God hath given the sons of men to be exercised in it. He hath made all things good in their time, and hath delivered the world to their consideration, so that man cannot find out the work which God hath made from the beginning to the end.” (Eccles. iii. 10, 11.) This, however, is a digression; let us return to our Chips.

By far the most important topic treated of by Prof. Müller is the knowledge of God existing among the varied nations of men. He gives great weight, and deservedly, to the result of his observation in this respect, and we can readily understand why he should lay so much stress on the importance of the study of the “science of religion,” or the comparative study of the different religions of the earth. As a matter of erudition, it must always be a subject of the greatest interest, not only in itself, but also because it serves to illustrate the words of the Apostle to the Romans, ch. i. 18-20: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those men that detain the truth of God in injustice: because that which is capable of being known[120] of God is manifest in them: for God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity, so that they are inexcusable.” We shall have occasion to return to these words. Here we may remark that this knowledge of God that transpires in all the citations the learned Orientalist has laid before us, is nothing more than what as Christians we expected to hear. But in this connection we have to say that the contrary effect is produced to that intended by Prof. Müller. This corroboration of the words of St. Paul, uttered more than eighteen centuries ago, and proclaimed long before by the author of the Book of Wisdom, ch. xiii., proves that, so far from the religions of the earth meriting praise for their reference to a Supreme Being, they deserve to be censured because they detained the truth in darkness—in injustice. The words of the Professor are: “We shall learn [from this comparative study] that there is hardly one religion which does not contain some important truth; truth sufficient to enable those who seek the Lord, and feel after him, to find him in the hour of their need.” The first portion of this assertion is true; the second is incorrect in its expression, and dangerous in its tendency. It is incorrect in its expression, inasmuch as it attributes to these religions, as such, the possession of truth—not all, to be sure, but some truth. We say, on the contrary, that the truth contained in these various religious systems is the common inheritance of the human mind.

The light of Almighty God’s countenance shines on us all, no matter who we are. The Psalmist asks: “Quis ostendet nobis bona?” and he answers: “Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui Domine!” It is wrong, therefore, to give credit to a false system for the truth it has enveloped in darkness. And the reason of this is palpable. If we turn to the words of the apostle, as given above, do we find him giving credit to the false religions of mankind for the truth they contain? Anything but this. He says: “The invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity, so that they are inexcusable. Because, when they knew God, they did not glorify him as God.... And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds and four-footed beasts, and of creeping things.” Here we have a sentence pronounced against these very religions our author speaks of as containing sufficient truth to enable those who seek the Lord and feel after him, to find him in the hour of their need. The apostle condemns them because “they detained the truth of God in injustice.”

This is to be said of these false religions even at their best. But what is to be said of them when we take into consideration the immense majority of those among the heathen do not attain to any refined spirituality, but are engrossed in the material, sensual forms of idolatry, like the conservative Parsees, so graphically described in the book before us? We must therefore conclude that, granting Prof. Müller intended to refer to man’s natural knowledge or his reason as a means of knowing God, to which the apostle bears witness, he has used an incorrect form of speech in attributing to these religions efficacy in finding God. It would have been in every way better to write that, in spite of the errors of these various systems, there was still light enough left to man, through his reason, to lead him to God—a truth not only substantiated by the teaching of theologians, but, as we have seen, expressly laid down in Holy Writ.

We have said the assertion of our author is not only incorrect in its form, but dangerous in its tendency. That tendency, with all respect to Prof. Müller’s expressed opinions, is latitudinarian; it would lead one to think that, after all, the heathen and all professing a false religion are in a comparatively safe state. If this be so, why do we find the apostle assaulting those systems so uncompromisingly, and asserting that the heathen are inexcusable? And how do we reconcile with this theory the words of the Gospel, “Unless ye be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven”? True, there is the baptisma flaminis, the resource of those who have not the blessing of the actual sacrament; but even this requires a rejection, absolute or implied, of the false system, and the act of faith in the true God, accompanied by a firm will of doing whatever it may be known he asks of a sincere soul. The language of the great theologians is certainly not in any way favorable to the safety of those who follow a false religion. They tell us that those who among the pagans of old were saved, were justified by their faith in a true God and in the Redeemer to come. The doctor of grace, the great St. Augustine, whose intellect was one of the most remarkable of any age, says in Serm. 3 on the 36th Ps., “All who were just, from the beginning of the world, have Christ as their head. For they believed he was to come, whom we believe to have come already; by faith in him they were saved, as we are.” Then, in the Comm. on the 128th Ps., he writes: “Has the church only existed now? The church is of old; from the time the saints were called the church is on earth. Once it existed only in Abel, and was warred against by a wicked and perfidious brother, Cain. Once the church was only in Enoch, and he was taken away from the wicked. Once the church was only in Noah’s house, and it suffered from all those who perished by the flood, and only the ark floated on the waters and escaped to the dry land. Once the church was only in Abraham, and we know how much he suffered from the wicked. The church existed only in Lot, and in his house in Sodom, and he bore with the iniquity and perversity of the Sodomites, until the Lord freed him from them. The church began to exist in the people of Israel, and it suffered at the hands of Pharaoh and the Egyptians. And in the very church itself, amid the people of Israel, there began to flourish a number of holy souls: Moses and other saints suffered from the wicked Jews. We come at last to our Lord Jesus Christ; the Gospel has been preached, and he has said in the Psalms: ‘I have brought the tidings, and I have spoken, and they are multiplied beyond number.’” (See also the writings of the same father against the Donatists.) The same idea of the necessity of faith in Christ is found constantly in the teaching of the church and in the writings of the fathers.

We ask after this, who deserve most credit as exponents of the essential requisites of salvation—the early fathers of the church, who explain the words of the apostle, “Without faith it is impossible to please God,” in the sense we have here in St. Augustine, and which too is had in the ancient Athanasian Creed; or gentlemen like our author, whose ideas of Christianity, even when they express them clearly, differ so widely from what was once held as revealed truth, and who moreover cannot come to an understanding among themselves as to what the truth of Christ is? And if we must give the preference to the former, what are we to say of an opinion that serves to lull people into a false security regarding that which is, of all things, the most vital in its importance and consequences?

Prof. Müller rightly says that the knowledge of the false religions of the world makes us appreciate more the Christian religion. Had he taken the view we have given, he would have had a vastly greater appreciation of it. He would not have put it in comparison with other religions, as differing from them by a superior degree of excellence, but would have shown that they differed essentially, as right differs from wrong, as truth from error, and therefore he would, while speaking charitably of individuals and leaving them to the judgment of God, infinitely just, have condemned and rejected these false systems of worship as the curse of the unhappy race of Adam. As we have said before, we are not inclined to charge Prof. Müller with the full consequences of his assertions, since in several places of his work he gives his unqualified acknowledgment of the claims of Christianity. Still we cannot but look on his loose assertions as the result of the rationalistic spirit that has begun so rapidly to pervade the most conservative of English universities. Only a few years ago, when called to give his testimony before the Board of Inquiry of the House of Lords regarding the state of the universities, Canon Liddon said that this tendency to rationalism had come in with the change in the system of studies and the introduction of the higher philosophical branches, and that it was making headway among the students in a marked manner. Nor, when we see those at the head of the university decide, as they did lately, that the Thirty-nine Articles are not to be insisted on for examination except in case of those who are candidates for the honorary degrees, and when we hear in our own country a board of Anglican bishops declare that the word “regeneration” in the formula of infant baptism does not imply any moral change in the one baptized—it does not seem to us that we are doing Prof. Müller injustice in thinking that he, a lay professor in the university directed by the Anglican Church, has, it may be unconsciously, taken in not a little of the leaven of rationalism.

To this may be referred his translation of the text of St. Justin, Ap. i., § 46, when he makes this Christian philosopher say, “Christ is the first begotten of God, and we have already proved him to be the very Logos (or universal Reason) of which mankind are all partakers.” In the Edit. of the Congr. of St. Maurus of the Works of St. Justin, this word universal does not occur; the Greek text has simply the accusative “Logon,” and the Latin simply “Rationem.” Certainly all Catholic theologians hold this doctrine of St. Justin, and teach that the Logos or Verbum or Ratio is the definite wisdom of the Godhead, by which God understands himself and all things in himself, and that all created wisdom or reason is but a participation of that Infinite Reason or Word. But in these days, when the locutions, universal soul, universal intellect, universal being, are used so much in a pantheistical sense, we think an author can hardly find fault with those who very probably misunderstand him when he uses expressions so liable to be misinterpreted, and charge him with some tendency which he seems in other places to disclaim. It seems to us the learned professor should have taken all the greater care in his translation, as St. Justin (in his Ap. ii. § 7) disclaims expressly all pantheistic teaching, which he declares to be “foreign to all sound thought, reason and mind.”

To show we do not wish to be unfair to this distinguished scholar, we will do him the justice to cite his condemnation of the pantheistic spirit of the times. He is speaking of Barthélemy St. Hilaire’s History of Buddhism, and he quotes the words of the preface of that writer:

“This book may offer one other advantage, and I regret to say that at present it may seem to come opportunely. It is the misfortune of our times that the same doctrines which form the foundation of Buddhism meet at the hands of some of our philosophers with a favor which they ill deserve. For some years we have seen systems arising in which metempsychosis and transmigration are highly spoken of, and attempts are made to explain the world and man without either a God or a Providence, exactly as Buddha did. A future life is refused to the yearnings of mankind, and the immortality of the soul is replaced by the immortality of works. God is dethroned, and in his place they substitute man, the only being, we are told, in which the Infinite becomes conscious of itself. These theories are recommended to us sometimes in the name of science, or of history, or philology, or even of metaphysics; and though they are neither new nor very original, yet they can do much injury to feeble hearts.”

And a few lines further on:

“It would be useful, however, if the authors of these modern systems would just cast a glance at the theories and destinies of Buddhism. It is not philosophy in the sense in which we understand this great name, nor is it religion in the sense of ancient paganism, of Christianity, or of Mohammedanism; but it contains elements of all worked up into a perfectly independent doctrine; acknowledges nothing in the universe but man, and obstinately refuses to recognize anything else, though confounding man with nature in the midst of which he lives. Hence all those aberrations of Buddhism, which ought to be a warning to others.” (P. 203, vol. i.)

We have one other charge against the learned professor for what, though savoring a little of rationalism, more particularly regards the Catholic Church. He says that “as the Oriental creeds degenerated into grosser forms, so Christianity degenerates into Jesuitism and Mormonism” (p. 185). We grant that the author is striving to be fair to the pagans, and shows an unwillingness to condemn them as a whole on account of the corrupt practices of a portion of them. But in doing so he has shown himself most unjust to a distinguished Order in the Catholic Church, whose piety, virtue, and learning claim for them everywhere from Christians a tribute of respect and gratitude, and nowhere more so than in our own free land. It is really lamentable to see what we must call a total want of knowledge in a person of such extensive information and real ability as Prof. Müller. ’Tis strange that it did not occur to him that there was a great incongruity in coupling the Society of Jesus with the corrupt and sensual community of the Mormons, and it is only another lesson to put us on our guard against prejudice, which has so wonderful a power in perverting the judgments of men so worthy of respect for their zeal in the cause of truth.

This undeserved condemnation of the Jesuit Fathers is not the only error into which Prof. Müller’s dislike of Catholicity has betrayed him. On page 190, he speaks of the Buddhist ceremonies, and in a foot-note refers to the work of the Abbé Huc in which he describes his travels in China and Thibet, and remarks the curious coincidence between the rites of the religion of the Grand Lama and the forms of Catholic worship. Our author tells us that the Abbé Huc pointed out the similarities between the Buddhist and Roman Catholic ceremonials with such naïveté that, to his surprise, he found his delightful Travels in Thibet placed on the Index. We confess our surprise at this information. We never heard of the abbé’s work having been signed with “the black mark of Peter,” but we have heard the book very highly praised by persons who would hardly have praised it had there been anything in it to merit the censures of the church. We have too at hand a copy of the Index coming down to six years after the publication of the Travels in Thibet, but after a careful search have not been able to find in it the name either of Abbé Huc or of this work. Moreover, it strikes us as very unlikely that this writer should have suffered for what has been stated pointedly by authors of the church from the first ages down to our time. Had Prof. Müller turned his attention to Tertullian’s book, De Præscriptione Hæreticorum, he would have found at § 40 the following passage:

“Who is to interpret the sense of what may further heresy? The devil, forsooth, whose office it is to distort the truth; who rivals by the mysteries of the idols the very actions of the divine sacraments. He too baptizes some as believers and faithful; he promises the putting off of sin by the laver; and, if I remember aright, Mithras there signs his soldiers on the forehead, celebrates the offering of bread, and uses the image of the resurrection, and gains the crown through the sword (martyrdom). What shall I say more? that he destines his high-priest for the nuptials of but one (wife)? that he has his virgins? that he has his celibates? But if we consider the superstitions of Numa Pompilius, if the priestly duties, emblems, and privileges, the sacrificial service and instruments, and the vessels of sacrifice, and the strangeness of their expiations and votive gifts, has not the devil manifestly imitated the observances of the Jewish law?”

In the seventeenth century Natalis Alexander, in his Ecclesiastical History (vol. ii. diss. iii. art. 3, § 3, No. vii.) replying to the objections of Spencer, in his Dissertation No. 3 on the Ritual Laws of the Hebrews, says: “It is far more probable that the devil, the rival of God, inspired the heathen to use in the rites of their divinities, or to carry about with solemn pomp, arks or mystic vases containing something hidden (arcanum),” than that the Israelites took their idea from them; and further on: “Who does not see that the conclusion can be drawn by just and better right? Therefore, the beaten vases had their origin in the rivalry of the evil spirit seizing on all that was splendid in the worship of God, and turning it to his own worship.” There are besides several rites well known to have existed among the heathen after the coming of Christ that bear so close a resemblance to Christian and Jewish forms, that we are warranted in following those archæologists who attribute them to imitation of the usages of revealed religion. Take, for instance, the taurobolium or criobolium, or baptism by the blood of a bull or goat. In this ceremony the person undergoing it was placed in a pit with a kind of sieve over his head, through which the fresh blood of the animal was made to fall upon his whole body. What is this but the corruption of baptism, the idea of redemption through blood, and of the sprinkling with blood that took place by divine command in the old law? It stands to reason that as the Christian religion gained influence, paganism would, by seizing on what was marked in it and perverting it to its own uses, strive to regain its credit by an imitation which in some way would deceive the ignorant. Prof. Müller can see from this that Catholics are not unaccustomed to making such contrasts, and that they are far from fearing them. And as for the case in point, history tells us that St. Thomas evangelized India and very probably the countries adjacent to it, while we know that St. Francis Xavier, as narrated in his life, found decided traces of Christianity among some of the Indians, though they had not the priesthood. This being the case, we can readily comprehend how the followers of Buddha should have adopted many of the forms in use among Christians, even the recitation of psalms, which we know from the New Testament to have been in use among the apostles, who, we are told, “went out from the supper-room after reciting a hymn with their Master.”

Such are the remarks we have thought well to make in the interest of truth in regard to these volumes of Prof. Müller, which, aside from these objectionable features, are full of learning and of interesting information, imparted in an easy and elegant style. They will be of value to the scholar, especially to those whose occupations do not allow them to consecrate much time to researches such as those in which the professor is engaged. They will have the effect of confirming the believer in the truth of Christianity, and of making him thankful for the gift of a faith that has saved him from such fearful enthralment of mind and body as he beholds his fellow-men condemned to in the many forms of Eastern paganism. It is true those who are not favorable to positive religious teaching will wrest not a little of what is said to their own damage—a danger we have tried to point out. Still, the learned author will, after all, be justified in remarking that, if such be the case, it is but another exemplification of the fact that the serpent draws poison from the same plant from which the bee sips its honey.