Note 42.1 — The Evolution of Religion

As regards the third group in my classification, external symbols and liturgical objects, we might suppose that these mainly belong to the minutiæ of archæological study. A philosopher may ignore them as trivial facts; but they have been the cause of too much bloodshed and strife to be ignored by the history of religions, and the feelings they excite are still powerful enough to divide the churches and the sects of Christendom. Besides, if one religion borrows its symbols and sacred objects from another, it probably borrows much more besides. The use of candles and incense in churches, the fashion of certain ecclesiastic vestments, can be shown to have descended to us from a pre-Christian world. And it was quite natural that the new faith should take over the religious property of paganism, whatever at least it could receive without violation of its own essential principles. It is only the anthropological study of these particulars, apparently insignificant in themselves, that enables us to understand certain modern controversies, as for instance concerning incense, and also to appreciate the extraordinary tenacity with which the successive generations cleave to the smaller things of cult. These latter are felt to be part of the spell which is exercised upon us by an immemorial tradition, a spell that is all the stronger because it works upon the “subconscious” self; and those who maintain them are rarely aware of the aboriginal reason which prompts them. And often the question about the symbols or the sacred objects of worship, as distinct from the ideas and personalities, becomes obviously of prime importance for the comparison and classification of religions. Thus the distinction between iconic or idolatrous and aniconic or non-idolatrous cults is of deep significance, for it may correspond to the distinction between a more and a less anthropomorphic conception of the divinity, or to a belief that the embodiment of him in material objects is right and seemly or wrong and unseemly. The more spiritual a religion becomes, the greater is its inclination to dispense with the idol and even to reprobate it; the worshipper of Jahvé was thus set in antagonism to the surrounding tribes, and in the Iranian region the Zarathustrian votary to the worshipper of the Daevas. The history of Christianity in regard to this matter is familiar to us all: in spite of the vehement protests of its apostles and earlier propagandists who inherited the spiritual Judaic view, we know that all the efforts of the iconoclastic emperors could not suppress the veneration of images in the later period. Even in the Teutonic north, Christianity came, in the days before the Reformation, to assume an iconic character which is not accounted for by the ancestral tradition of our pagan forefathers: who certainly carved images, in spite of what Tacitus tells us, but do not appear to have been markedly idolatrous. We infallibly detect here the abiding influence of Greco-Roman paganism, in which idolatry had taken so deep a root, satisfying as it did the artistic-religious cravings of the people. We have records of the transformation of the old statues into Christian images; in an epigram we find Heracles pathetically complaining that he is forced to become St Luke:42.1 a beautiful head of Aphrodite in Athens is rudely stamped with the cross, perhaps to convert her into the Virgin:42.2 at the present day there exists in South Italy an image of a Madonna del Granato, holding a pomegranate, which by a curious chain of evidence can be traced with some probability back to the Hera of Argos, carved by Polycleitos.