The Evolution of Religion
Reading edition
LECTURES I. AND II. THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS: ITS METHOD AND PROBLEMS
If the comparative study of religion is to examine, as on the ground of its title it must, the various recorded or discoverable religions of every branch of the human family, then a part of anthropology, limited, as it has usually chosen to limit itself, to the study of the savage races, is obviously a sub-department of the whole. And its work, conducted often under great difficulties, has been solid, well-organised, and of high importance. Even those who deny its claim to be called a science, whatever that word may mean, must admit that it is at least an indispensable branch of historic inquiry, and that it has deepened the self-knowledge of mankind.
Some of its pioneers may have been overeager in their theorising, premature in their attempts to reveal the origin of all religion in some savage ritual or in the background of savage thought, for instance in ancestor-worship or totemism. Such rash generalisations are inevitable in the opening periods of a new study, and may be discredited or abandoned without discrediting the investigations that gave rise to them. We may have come to be aware of the excesses of the students of totemism: we may have come to the conviction that neither theirs nor any other special and single hypothesis has as yet supplied us with the master-clue by which we can penetrate to the aboriginal source of human religion: we may have found scientific reasons for rejecting the belief that all gods arose as ghosts of departed ancestors. But if we discard such theories of origin, we owe this negative result to the maturer study of anthropology itself; and we may owe to it the positive induction that the religious product at the different stages and in the different branches of mankind was a complex growth from many different germs.
It has taught us also much more than this. It has shown us that all through the present societies of savage men there prevails an extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local variation, in ritual and mythology, a uniformity so striking as to suggest belief in an ultimately identical tradition, or, perhaps more reasonably, the psychologic theory that the human brain-cell in different races at the same stage of development responds with the same religious speech or the same religious act to the same stimuli supplied by its environment.
We have learnt to discover a certain savage style, as we may call it, in myth and ritual; and anthropology has performed a twofold work of comparison; for it has not only compared the various savage races of mankind, but it has compared the results of this colligation with the religious phenomena of the higher races, and has revealed the savage style in much of their mythology and ritual. It was first discovered by the earlier investigators of the antiquity of Northern Europe, such as the brothers Grimm and Mannhardt, that underlying the religion of Christendom lay a stratum of peasant-ritual and belief, not yet extinct nor likely soon to be, that reveals the same mental condition in early Europe that exists among our savage contemporaries in various parts of the world. Then the sacred edifice of Hellenism was attacked; and the complacency of Hellenic scholars was sometimes disturbed by the revelation, through a strict comparative method, of the same savage style in much of Hellenic ritual and Hellenic myth. Thus for the first time we came to understand the true significance of many of the crude and repulsive facts in Hellenic religion—the human sacrifices, the reverence paid to animals, stones, and trees, the demonology and magic rites. Many of these practices had lost their meaning for the more advanced generations, who nevertheless retained them under the strong constraint of religious conservatism; but if we find the same practices among existing races who perform them with a living and plenary faith as part of a quasi-logical structure of belief, we can place them back into their proper setting when we discover them still surviving in the higher and alien society. Greek religion especially, having never violently broken with its own past, is a bed of rich deposit still inviting exploration. And now Hellenic scholars are ransacking the same treasure for further anthropological material; while Assyriologists and Egyptologists are treating a part of the phenomena of their special departments in the same spirit.
But a stricter anthropology can correct the over-narrow hypotheses of its immaturity, and can render masterly aid to the evolutionary study of the higher religions; for each of these, in spite of revelation or transforming enthusiasm that would obliterate the past, contains a mass of mysterious dead matter; and it is for the anthropologist to show the prior functional organic significance of this. But if, in obedience to the currently accepted limitation of his subject, he confines himself mainly to the study of savage life and to the dead matter of the higher religions, and yet is tempted to deal with the more vital and essential elements in these, he will be liable to the special bias of his own study. We may note such bias in recent attempts to explain the essential features of the Eleusinian Mysteries in the light of merely savage anthropology. And of course we are all apt to lose the sense of proportion and to exaggerate the importance of the special phenomena to which we confine our regard. The folk-lorist will be liable to over-emphasise the part played by mythology in religion, and may ignore the higher importance of prayer and ritual; for the most conscientious cobbler is never really able to stick to his last. In fact, though the whole exposition of the higher religions is impossible without anthropology, there is some danger at present lest the part be at times mistaken for the whole. For instance, we may feel with some uneasiness that recent expositions of Hellenic religion tend, unintentionally no doubt, to distort the view of the reader and to produce a false impression by exaggerating the savage and primitive facts, missing the true perspective and misjudging the whole. Our appreciation of Greek mythology may suffer in the same way, unless we can keep the keen edge of our appreciative faculty: the Greek myth has often its striking affinities with the Arunta or the Pawnee, and it is necessary for comparative folk-lore and anthropology to point this out, and often to insist on the beauty of the legend and the dignity of the religious thought among savages: but it is unfortunate if these studies should result in our loss of the perception that Greek mythology, after all, is the most beautiful of any of which we have record.
The fallacy which I have so far tried to indicate arises from the temper of mind that a special study is liable to engender. On the other hand, there is a particular fallacy of method to which the modern study of anthropology, as it has chosen to limit itself, specially exposes us. It is liable to withdraw us from the immediate entourage of a particular fact—a particular legend or a religious service—to the distant circumference. It was inevitable for the earliest pioneers of the study to travel far, for the circumference was unexplored, and there were facts lying at the distant points that concerned us. But, after all, our first object of study should be the more immediate environment of the thing which we wish to understand. The student of Hellenic religion and myth may have ultimately to roam, in a literary sense, into Central Australia and the byways of America; but he ought first to explore the Mediterranean regions and the lands of anterior Asia. It is interesting, and may be necessary, to know “the Pawnee version of the Eleusinia”; but, for the true understanding of the great Greek mystery, certain elements in the Egyptian religion, in Mithraism, and in Christianity itself will probably afford a more illuminative comparison. The mind of our student is sometimes tempted, in fact, to travel too easily and too cheaply to the other side of the globe, and to leave undone work that should first have been done nearer home.
To reduce these ideas to something like a working formula of method, may we say that the anthropology which the comparative study of any one of the more complex and advanced religions immediately demands is “an adjacent anthropology”? For religious ideas, legends, and ritual are most contagious, and tend to propagate themselves over large contiguous areas: for, to reverse a stereotyped question, “what is less its own than a people’s gods?” We greatly desiderate an anthropology of the Mediterranean basin, including anterior Asia; for there are strong reasons for the belief that from very early times the frequent intercourse of the leading peoples in this region endowed them with a common stock of religious ideas, ritual, and legend which have probably left their impress on the higher religions of the world. It is these that specially interest most of us, and we feel we cannot solve their problems by means of savage anthropology alone. Why, after all, should the latter term be restricted, as it usually is, to the study of savage life? Doubtless we cannot so extend the use of the word as to cover its full etymological signification: else it would come to include the whole of human history from the beginning down to the present, and would lose its value as a mark of any special science. But we might somewhat enlarge its present connotation with advantage to the comparative method, and without a too wide departure from current usage. We might define the anthropological study of any one of the higher religions as an evolutionary study of its embryology: the evolutionary law might appear in the first instance as a proximate law of growth. For probably every one of the world-creeds has inherited, apart from its own achievement, a double tradition, a tradition from the more remote and one from the more immediate past. The first may descend from immemorial antiquity, and from really primitive or savage mental and social life; and it has been the task of primitive anthropology to expound and explain the facts that this tradition has deposited. But many if not most of these facts may be regarded as functionally dead matter surviving in the more advanced system of belief, and as not belonging to its essential life. On the other hand, from the immediate tradition much will be found to have been taken over by an inevitable law of assimilation, certain potent ideas which, though transformed, will enter into the very life-blood of the new creed. And these are to be discovered and analysed by what I have ventured to call an “adjacent” anthropology, which will include a comprehensive study of the literature and monuments belonging to the more proximate past of the race which develops the new faith as well as of the races that are its nearer neighbours.
Such a method, though not hitherto styled anthropological, has already been applied by various scholars in the different parts of our field; the exposition of the Babylonian elements in Judaic religion, of the Judaic and pagan elements in Moslemism, are examples of it. On the present occasion I would prefer to illustrate it by noting its application to the scientific study of Christianity itself, of which the remarkable complexity, the variety of forms that it has assumed in different parts of Christendom at different periods, seems specially to invite the higher anthropological treatment. Moreover it probably contains a richer deposit than any other of the world-religions from the various streams of thought and belief that nourished the life of early civilised or semi-civilised man. The illustration drawn from our own religion will be also more personally interesting to ourselves; and though the limits of time and my own knowledge may prevent me from putting forth any original statement, yet something may be gained and a more extended interest awakened by a brief notice of what has been and what remains to be done.
There is now no need for apology if one wishes frankly to consider the genesis of the fundamental ideas and prevailing institutions of earlier and later Christianity, although hitherto a certain religious shyness, which belongs to the national character, may have made English scholars reluctant to attempt the anthropology of our national faith; and the progress of the subject owes more to foreign workers. Our own theological students of distinction have not evaded the question as to the early influences that may have moulded the religious thought of Christ and St Paul; but these were naturally sought mainly in the later Judaism; and though the debt of the developed Christianity to Hellenic philosophy has never been ignored, yet that neither our sacred books nor Judaic literature nor Greek philosophy explain the whole complex of historic Christianity, is a conviction of recent growth, and the investigations to which it has prompted are recent. For instance, it was a new departure of great promise for the future of our science when, in a course of Hibbert lectures delivered some years ago, Dr Hatch publicly expounded the deep indebtedness of Christianity in respect of ritual, organisation, and even religious concept to the Eleusinian Mysteries and other mystic societies of Greek lands. And the few students of Hellenic religion in England have often noted its many ties of affinity with our own, though of these there has been as yet no complete and authoritative account. We may admit that the triumph of a new and great creed may imply a potent revelation, perhaps a sudden mental transformation in the catechumens difficult to equate with any formulated law of evolution. Still we cannot gainsay the experience that as the religion establishes and organises itself, it draws nourishment from the old soil which is full of the living germs of past organisms. Therefore it was inevitable that Hellenic religion should leave a deep impress upon earlier and later Christianity; partly because the religious temper in the Greek world throughout the centuries immediately preceding the adoption of Christianity was more powerful and fervid than it had been in the days of Homer or Pericles, and mainly because Hellenic converts became the pillars of the Church. But the comparative student must pursue the problem further afield and beyond the track of Hellas. The old Phrygian religion, which Professor Ramsay’s travels and investigations have assisted us to know, must be seriously taken into account; for Phrygia was one of the earliest homes of Christianity, its aboriginal religion had germinated in ideas strikingly akin to some that are primary in all or many of the creeds of Christendom; and the morbid and ecstatic temperament of the native Phrygian, which gave so distinct a colour to the Cybele-Attis cult, seems to have appeared again in certain schismatic forms of Christian doctrine in Phrygia, especially in the heresy of Montanism. Finally, we may learn much, even adopt much, from our enemies. The most dangerous antagonists of Christianity were, after all, the worship of Isis and Mithraism. It may be possible to trace the influence of these on their conqueror: the great work of M. Cumont on Mithras cult suggests at least many interesting religious parallels; and even the older Zoroastrian literature must be considered within the range of necessary and legitimate comparison.
As I am here concerned with illustration of method rather than with positive proof, I can only offer a very brief summary of the results which the anthropological study of Christianity has hitherto achieved, and may yet achieve.
As regards the legend just mentioned, we may suppose direct borrowing, or at least direct mental suggestion from an older mythology and faith. To the other examples which I have adduced—probably only a few among many that might be quoted—the theory of borrowing may be inappropriate.
It may be more scientific, and certainly it is at present more expedient, to be content with the assumption that for thousands of years over contiguous human areas a similarity of religious temperament, religious institutions, religious crises may tend to produce a common stock of legend; whether the legend is true or false is not our present concern.
Idolatry in this sense is a higher form of fetichism, which, strictly defined, is the veneration of material objects, often shaped by art and handled in such a way as to endow them with divine potency, which bring good fortune to the owner. It is supposed to connote savagery, but survivals of it are found in most civilised communities, and we probably all inherit some faint impress of the fetichistic spirit, nor need we be startled if we find it in the higher religions.
It would be wrong to attribute the fetichistic proclivities discovered in the Christian communities wholly to the Hellenic or Mediterranean strain in our religion; for we must reckon with the survival among the later ritual-observances of the superstitions of the Northern peoples, and fetichism was certainly characteristic of the early Teutonic, Celtic, and Slavonic races. In this matter, as in others, we have to note that the puritanism of the early Church could not prevail against the strength of habit and immemorial tradition.
The celibacy of the priesthood is, again, a question that has agitated and divided the churches, nor does it appear that we ourselves have finished with it. To trace its origin and inner significance, a wide anthropological study is necessary, and I may be able to return to it in another association in a later lecture. Within the history of the Church, we may trace back the religious ideas underlying the dogma of celibacy to the ascetic enthusiasm of the third and fourth centuries, and we may be right in connecting it with the growth of Mariolatry. But the original source of the phenomenon lies far in the background of our religion; the impulse to religious celibacy had long been congenial to the temperament of some of the Anatolian races. We find it powerful in the Judaic sect of the Essenians; and in the anthropology of primitive societies we are often confronted with the idea that the virgin body is the only fit organ for the full divine afflatus.
Finally, there remains the question, of greater moment and perplexity than all the preceding, concerning the affinities of the Christian and pre-Christian religions in primary ideas and essential belief. To point out resemblances is not necessarily to ignore contrasts; only it is of more avail for present science to emphasise the former, as the latter are obvious enough and have always been emphasised. But we must guard against accepting too rashly the fact of resemblance for proof of actual origin; nor must we ignore the truth that two religions may be vitally different in effect, while they use the same materials of thought and belief. The subject demands great knowledge and critical insight, and I can only indicate here clues that have already been followed and might be followed further. There is probably no need to call to your notice the fact that the incarnation of the Godhead in human form was a familiar conception to the civilised and half-civilised races of the old world, and was attached equally to mythic personages as well as to actual men. That such a personality could serve as a mediator between man and the Supreme God was conceivable to the Hellenic, Egyptian, even the Latin imagination; and though the idea does not seem to have been woven into any fabric of faith by these races, it appears as a natural product in the higher stages of polytheism, and in many primitive and advanced societies it has dominated men’s views concerning the person and position of the King.
I will close these illustrations with the most obvious example of the contribution of anthropological study to our knowledge of actual Christendom. One of the most fruitful offshoots of the older Hellenic system was hero-worship, which itself may have arisen as a development of ancestor-cult. At first confined to the mythic figures of the past, it came to be applied to founders of colonies, legislators, and even to athletes; in its final development in the last centuries before Christ it was chiefly consecrated to kings and dynasts, the founders of religious societies, men of science, and political benefactors. The divine worship of the mortal, an idea abhorrent to Judaism, and not accepted by the severer Zoroastrian, was part of the state system of earlier and later Egypt, and was finally imposed on the Greco-Roman world. The soil in which it had most rankly flourished was Greek, and Greece and Anatolia were crowded with chapels consecrated to recently living men or to faded figures who were supposed to have once lived on earth, some of them perhaps actual ancestors, some imaginary personages of the epic or legendary world, some merely functional divinities of subordinate departments, like the hero of the ploughshare or the tutelary hero of the potters. This growth of polytheism had struck its roots so deeply that Christianity, in spite of its monotheistic ideal, was unable to eradicate it. The ancient hero may sometimes be lurking under the later disguise of the saint: the mediæval guild, like the Attic fraternity of potters, had its sacred tutelary patron; and it is curious to observe that in the matter of canonisation the Pope came to play exactly the same part as the Delphic oracle had played in the public consecration of the hero-cult: the divine authorisation is given or withheld by the vicar or agent of God. The importance of this inherited tradition in determining our religious estimate of historical Christendom is of the highest: for whatever may have been or may be the orthodox dogma of the Church concerning the status of the saint, such worship inevitably means polytheism from the point of view of the popular faith: and we gather that in many outlying communities of Christendom, as of the ancient Greek world, the lower cult overshadows the higher. And this is one of the most salient and sure examples that we can quote of the direct influence of the older religions upon the later. This special influence is mainly Greek, though the pagan North, the Celtic and Lithuanian, and perhaps the Teutonic peoples, have contributed much to the tradition of saint-worship.
The illustrations given may suffice as a sketch of the various applications of a comparative method to the problems that the phenomena of Christianity offer to the student. In the choice of illustration I may seem to have ignored the strength of the Judaic element in determining the evolution; but I have considered it unnecessary to touch on this, as it has long been the familiar theme of scientific theology. I have also ventured to suggest that our own religious history should be traced back to the period of our ancestral paganism. And I would strongly recommend to the student of comparative religion in England a devoted attention to the world of the Norse Saga: for this has been strangely and fatally neglected by our English system of culture, with grievous loss to our poetic imagination, and to our knowledge of the early law and the religious institutions and temperament of our ancestors. Such a work as Golther’s Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie shows us what a harvest may be reaped in that field for the science of religion. The subject in its own right claims our interest, and certain phenomena in the old Teutonic religion, its fatalistic ideas, its eschatologic beliefs concerning a “day of judgment,” demand consideration in the light of more advanced creeds. On the other hand it may be wrong to attribute to it any direct influence on the inner development of Northern Christianity; for there may be reason for the view that, when the new religion conquered the Teutonic North, it found there in some sense a religious vacuum, the old ritual and faith having lost its vitality and hold; and certainly our ancestral paganism made no such struggle to survive as did the Greco-Roman. Nevertheless the history of its institutions may be necessary, as has been suggested already, to explain the struggle between Church and State in Teutonic lands; and, further, it is only the pages of the Norse Saga-book that can yield us an answer to the question whether we may not have inherited from remote times a certain average racial law of religious temperament resulting in a characteristic attitude towards matters of religion that may have determined our religious history. If the answer were affirmative and definite, the fact would have a practical no less than a speculative importance. At least we shall not know ourselves completely in this or in other matters if we continue to think that Greece and Rome and Palestine are our sole intellectual and spiritual ancestors; in fact we may say that no account of the history of Christianity in any European State can be real and complete unless we can get back to the pre-Christian past of that community.
Yet, while making full allowance for the influence of special ancestral traditions, those who work on the lines which have been indicated in the illustrations of method which I have selected, will acquire the ever-growing conviction that Hellas has dominated the creed as she has dominated the intellectual history of Christendom; that the new faith, in spite of its fierce or contemptuous intolerance of the past, was only able to transform but not to abolish the Mediterranean tradition: that in fact Sir Henry Maine’s often quoted aphorism, while by no means wholly true, was truer in respect of religious history than he himself was aware.
I have been speaking hitherto mainly on the relations of anthropology to the comparative study of religion. And it may be well now to point out that anthropology, as I have tried to define and distinguish its functions, though an essential part, is only a part of the whole. For we must know not only the past but the present conditions, not only the embryology but the perfected growth. And, again, we compare religions not merely to test theories of origin, ancestry, and indebtedness, but also to form the proper estimate of each one, and to correct the one-sided judgment that is always quick to pronounce this phenomenon or feature in any particular system as unique. If the comparison reveals more divergences than parallels, the result is no less important. And the comparative method should be applied not merely to ritual, liturgy, hieratic institutions, legends, and dogmas, but also to the varying phenomena and expressions of the religious temperament in the various races. Only the study of the latter can enable us to test the living force of a faith, the degree with which it possesses the national mind; and such a study is only possible when a nation has produced a rich religious literature or monuments of art embodying the public and private worship and religious sentiment. We know what we have gained by the discovery of the sacred books of the East, by the interpretation of the Babylonian inscriptions, and from their revelation to us in the Vedic, Iranian, and Mesopotamian cult-centres of a fervour as deep and passionate as any that we find in Hebraic or Christian writings. On the other hand, when a religion has passed away, as is the case with that of pre-Hellenic Rome, without leaving any articulate expression of its inner life, our knowledge of it can be superficial only, confined to mere ritual, fragments of liturgies, and the externals of cult.
A dispassionate and uncontroversial study of that which is at least one of the greatest forces in human society cannot but be interesting, and fruitful also for other branches of inquiry, such as the history of early law and morals, of which in many primitive communities the religion is the only record. It may even solve certain problems concerning the early migrations of races, as I have been convinced by the investigation of various Greek cults. In England the trained workers in this field are still unfortunately few, perhaps because a certain latent prejudice, born of religious partisanship, is not yet extinct, and may act somewhat as a deterrent. I have avoided hitherto alluding to any of the practical and controversial considerations which the methodical pursuit and propagation of this science may excite, though I am well aware that its practical effects may be of high importance; but they are not immediately our concern at present. There is, however, one such consideration that it is pertinent to touch on before concluding the survey of the methods and functions of this branch of historical inquiry, which deals much with origins and with the evolution of higher forms of religion from the lower. Discoveries of origins may appear to affect the validity of a creed or certain articles of creed. That this is actually the case in regard to the great problem with which the illustrations I have put before you are mainly concerned, namely, the genesis of Christianity, has been recently frankly admitted by a leading dignitary of the Roman Church: who, moved by a rumour of anthropological research, has promptly turned it to the profit of his cause by maintaining that the Roman ritual and communion gains in force and validity by the discovery that it has inherited and absorbed the religious thought and practice of ancient Greece and Rome. On the other hand, others may find the exposition of the so-called pagan elements in the essence of Christianity repugnant to their sentiment; and hence are inclined to accept the dictum “that origin does not affect validity.” I imagine the facts of religious psychology make somewhat against this aphorism. But it only concerns the science of comparative religion, because in the history of creeds validity has been very often found to maintain itself mainly by an appeal to origin; and as our science, to reiterate, is much concerned with origins, it is indirectly concerned with those claims of validity that support themselves by such an appeal.
Another cause of the paucity of workers in this field is the complexity and difficulty of the subject, which can be handled successfully only by the advanced and mature student. The pre-requisites of competence are an exact philological as well as an archæological training, with a view to the proper appreciation both of texts and monuments; secondly, a general acquaintance with the problems and history of philosophy, and especially of ethics, and with the history of early social institutions and law; thirdly, a comprehensive study of anthropology. To this must be added a sympathetic and minute knowledge of at least two of the great world-religions, whereby alone a critical insight into the essential and significant phenomena of the religious experiences of our race can be obtained. The comparative science of religion has now become possible, thanks partly to the labours of philological specialists in the ancient languages of Europe and Asia, and partly to the organisation of anthropological travel.
Let me conclude with remarking that subdivision of labour is imperative in this field: and it is especially in Oxford that the opportunities for the requisite preliminary training are plentiful. It would be a gain for more than science if we could see a group of mature students organised here exploring the various departments of this complex subject in co-operation and with mutual assistance.
LECTURE III. THE RITUAL OF PURIFICATION AND THE CONCEPTION OF PURITY: THEIR INFLUENCE ON RELIGION, MORALITY, AND SOCIAL CUSTOM
Among all the varied religious acts of man, there is probably none that has been so widely prevalent throughout the different races of mankind as the ritual of purification, nor does any idea seem to have possessed so strong a legislative power in the various departments of our life as the concept of purity. We can trace it back to instincts that we appear to share with the higher animals, and we can track it upwards through the complex rites of the higher religions. The record presents us with a vast mass of phenomena which, as far as I am able to discover, have not yet been reduced to system or unified by any constructive theory of evolution. In this lecture I venture to attempt the systematisation of the subject, first giving a brief summary of the main facts which are well known to the students of primitive anthropology and comparative religion and which confront us in nearly all the societies that have been explored.
In the stage of our conscious life which we may call, relatively to man’s growth, primeval, certain bodily acts and states and certain material substances are regarded as unclean and impure, likely to imprint a stain upon the person. It is impossible here to attempt to enumerate all the examples, and it is enough to mention a few that are salient and typical. The generative processes of life, the states and activities of the male and especially the female organism connected with them, the bodily changes incident on puberty, are among the most familiar phenomena with which the idea of impurity in some peculiar sense has been universally associated. A chief centre or “nidus” of impurity is child-birth; but still more dangerously impure is its counterpart, death and all the phenomena of death. In respect of child-birth the idea is fading away from our civilised consciousness; but it has left a deep deposit in our conscious or subconscious self in regard to death. The material substance that has been most generally felt to be impure is blood; the curious feeling that the mere mention of the word often excites in certain modern people is a faint reflex of the savage mental state in respect to the thing; and the influence of this disposition upon advanced society raises the most interesting question in which comparative law, ethics, and religion are jointly concerned, and which will be considered later. To continue our enumeration we may not find that the objects of the inanimate world outside ourselves are usually regarded by primitive thought as in themselves impure, but all or most of them are capable of catching the infection from ourselves, from death or child-birth for instance: hence it may be necessary to break or destroy or purify the utensils and furniture of the house where a death or a birth has occurred. At a somewhat more advanced stage, certain food-stuffs come to rank as impure, and a complicated code of “tapu” is established for specially sanctified persons. Then we are confronted, but not apparently in the most primitive period, with the distinction between pure and impure animals, which also dictates certain rules and practices of diet.
But the savage ritual of purification does not by any means tend necessarily to self-preservation, but at times may lead to self-destruction, and no hygienic or utilitarian or secular considerations will carry us far in explaining the cathartic code of Leviticus or the Zend-Avesta, or Buddhism, or the impurity of tabooed animals. These codes, while some of their prescriptions may be such as modern utilitarian ideas might dictate, are obviously instinct with religious or superstitious beliefs, and to explain the distinction between the pure and the impure animals would need a long excursus into primitive religion; the distinction is certainly not one between wholesome and unwholesome, or pleasant and unpleasant, meat.
In the Zend-Avesta code, after drying for a whole year under the light of the sun, the corpse at last becomes pure; for by the same natural instinct that caused the aversion to blood, the sun’s light comes to be regarded as the purest thing in the world: meat cooked by its warmth is more sanctified than fire-cooked meat; and certain acts and states of man have a greater defilement in the sun’s face.
The more interesting side of the inquiry now presents itself, the question about the influence that these cathartic ideas may have exercised upon religion, morality, and law. We may endeavour, for the sake of systematisation, to maintain this tripartite classification, although we find it becoming more and more illusory the further our investigation travels back to the earlier social life of man.
But before attempting to survey the special facts that present themselves within these three departments, it is well to note one phenomenon that concerns religion and morality in equal measure, and is of perhaps greater importance than all others in the varied process of the evolution of the cathartic idea. We have mainly been dealing so far with facts that seem to belong to the most primitive deposit of human consciousness and not properly to be ethical in the modern sense at all: the stain of blood, even incurred by ruthless murder, the stain of childbirth and the sexual processes, the contagion of the corpse, are all for the same reason “suspect” to primitive man because they involve vague and mysterious danger, not because they are associated with the concept of sin. Nor does this latter concept necessarily enter in, even when a more articulate animism has taken possession of the superstition, and the impurity means the presence of an evil spirit: the leper, the man who has come into contact with the dead, the blood-stained murderer, are all regarded as suffering from the same trouble, though in greater or lesser degree. The idea of purity and impurity, in fact, whether corporeal and external or whether spiritual in the sense of its association with the world of spirits, is still non-ethical, and we must not apply our moral standards to it until a later stage. It arrives at this stage and at its higher significance for morality when it has evolved the conception of a pure heart, a pure soul. And that this latter, which is one of the most pregnant of the concepts of developed ethics, was actually evolved from the primitive ritualistic and demoniac superstition can, I believe, be proved by the evidence, and accords with a well-known psychologic law of early thought.
These ideas belong to very old-world thought, yet their reflex abides with us still in the heart of a spiritual creed; for their association is clear with the Christian conception of the transference of sin and of the divine victim that takes upon himself the sins of the people.
As far as we have examined it as yet, the concept of a “pure heart” is not necessarily wholly ethical; it is often coexistent with the ideas of sin that do not clearly recognise moral responsibility or the essential difference between deliberate wrong-doing and the ritualistic or accidental or involuntary sin. In the middle stage of ethical-religious growth, an innocent Œdipus may yet be regarded as πᾶς ἄναγνος, impure body and soul. The final point is reached when it is realised that the blood of bulls and goats cannot wash away sin, that nothing external can defile the heart or soul, but only evil thoughts and evil will. This purged and idealised concept will then in the progressive religions revolt against its own parentage, and will prompt the eternal antagonism of the prophet against the ritual priest, of the Christ against the Pharisee.
It is with a feeling of relief that we now turn to the survey of the Hellenic phenomena, passing by as we must the Vedic and the Islamic, which appear to be of lesser importance so far as I have been able to study them. The Hellenic religion more than all others of the ancient world is the mirror of the manifold civilisation of a people; for its lesser intensity allowed it more varied application, and it was obliged to reconcile itself speedily with the utilitarian and secular forces of rational progress, which there was no sacerdotal caste strong enough to oppose. And it is in the light of this religion therefore that the concept of purity can best be studied in its relations to law and morality. The history of the cathartic ritual in Greece does not begin till the eighth century; for the Homeric age was strikingly sane, cheerful, and secular in its views about such things. Though Hektor feels, as any modern gentleman would feel, that it was wrong to go to a religious service “bedabbled in gore and filth,” though Odysseus purifies his house with sulphur-fumigation after the carnage of the fight, the world for whom Homer sang does not appear to have been burdened with the ceremoniousness of purification or with dread of the impurity of blood and death, or with any sort of care for the vengeance or miasma of the ghost. An age that could rise to the height of such a sentiment as “best of omens is it to fight for one’s country,” was likely to be healthy-minded in all such matters. The first mention of purification for bloodshed is in a poem of Arctinos of the eighth century; and a certain ritual-code of purity begins to emerge in Hesiod. Henceforward cathartic legislation comes to be very rife in Greece, emanating chiefly from two centres as it seems, Delphi and Crete. The gods to whom the domain of ritual-purity belongs especially are Apollo, Zeus, and Dionysos; at the same time the ghostly terrors of the underworld appear to be gaining a greater hold on the Hellenic imagination, and “catharsis” is specially needed to deal with these. Probably all this is only a revival of aboriginal practices and superstitions rooted in the Hellenic soil, a religion which the intellectualism of Homeric civilisation had happily suppressed for a time, but which asserted itself with renewed strength when that civilisation was overthrown. Yet the revival, though apparently a “set-back,” bore fair fruit for morality, law, and even religion. The history of Greek ethic must reckon as it has not yet done with the ritual of purity, and the history of Greek law with the fear of the ghost and the miasma of bloodshed.
From the same primitive view of the relations between our body and the spiritual world has arisen the enforcement of celibacy upon the priesthood. To trace the phenomenon, which is commonly or exceptionally found in all human societies, throughout the history of the churches, would require a separate chapter. It is not a late growth in religion, nor of necessity a sign of high development. And here again the original psychological motive is not a spirit of self-mortification, but the belief that the chaste body is the purer abode for the Divine Spirit, and the mental experience that such self-abnegation usually engenders a stronger consciousness of religious power. There are signs that the idea is losing its hold on the modern consciousness, but we see the deep impress it has made upon some of the ideas and dogmas of our religion. The institution of a sacerdotal rule of celibacy corresponds to the view prevalent in any given society of the priestly function; it is likely to be enforced when the priest is invested with a specially prophetic and mystic character, and is required to mediate between the society and God by means of frequent communion with the divinity: it is rare when the civic and semi-secular view of the sacerdotal office prevails, rare therefore among the Northern Aryans and in the pre-Christian Greek and Roman states, although the Hellenic ritual generally required virginity, or at least a prolonged chastity, in the prophetess and occasionally in the ordinary priest. It was common in the ecstatic religions of Anatolia, and in the worship of Cybele was pushed to an unnatural extreme. It is interesting again to trace the association between the Phrygian-Christian heresy of Montanism and the older Phrygian paganism; and we have noted that Montanus, its founder, the champion of celibacy, is reported to have been in his unconverted days a priest of Cybele.
The facts which I have collected and exposed, incomplete as the statement is, may justify what was said at the outset of the inquiry, that the aboriginal idea of purity has struck deep roots in the soil on which much of our ethical thought and feeling, many of our legal and religious institutions, have grown and developed. The concept, owing perhaps to its immemorial continuity of life and deep primeval instinctiveness, if the word may pass, is liable to fantastic exaggerations. It has sometimes proved itself an insurmountable barrier to moral and legal progress. When it has crystallised into a hard “pharisaic” form, it has arrested and imprisoned the life of a hitherto progressive people. On the other hand, though its innate quality, so to speak, is never secular-utilitarian, its contributions to our civilisation have been, as we have seen, of inestimable service. It has engendered the modern horror of murder and bloodshed, and the ideal of the chaste life: we owe to it in great degree the delicate sensitiveness of spiritually gifted characters. For good and for evil, it has been an instinctive religious force more potent than any other of these in the mental evolution of man.
LECTURE IV. THE EVOLUTION OF PRAYER FROM LOWER TO HIGHER FORMS
Again, we may compare the phenomena from the point of view of the progress in aspiration. In the primitive period, when the struggle is to live at all rather than to live well, the objects of prayer must be material blessings, and these are still prominent in the liturgies of the civilised societies. There is a sameness in all these, and the chief distinction to note is between the prayers that look to the individual alone and those that look to the good of the community. A higher stage is reached when moral and spiritual qualities become the object of prayer; and when this is attained, the principle of prayer is likely to become more and more spiritual, and the petitioner more and more diffident in the expression of his material wants, and with a growing consciousness that the Deity knows best what is good for man, may rise to the height of the formula, “Thy will be done.” It is interesting to note in how many races some such utterance has been heard; and at times men may have been helped to it by the consciousness which scientific advance had awakened, that the laws of the material universe cannot be capriciously altered to suit the temporary needs of the individual: a formula of acquiescence appears then to be the deepest and truest prayer. Finally, in the evolution of prayer we may consider that the consummation is marked by the theory, maintained by later Greek philosophy and early Christian fathers alike, that the true intention of prayer is not the mere petition for some special blessing, but rather the communion with God, to whom it is a spiritual approach. Here as often elsewhere, the highest spiritual product of human thought reveals its affinity with some dimly remote primeval concept; for much of the spell-ritual at which we have been glancing implies an idea of such communion, the human agent endeavouring to charge himself with a potency drawn from a quasi-divine source.
The belief that the name belongs to the essence of the personality explains the curious formula in the Umbrian prayer preserved in the Tabulæ Iguvinæ, where the god Grabovius is implored to be propitious to the “Arx Fisia” and to “the name of the Arx Fisia,” as if the name of the city was a living and independent entity.
What maintained the use of the spell-prayer in full vigour throughout the earlier and medieval epochs of Christendom, even in the orthodox ritual, was chiefly the practice of exorcism and the belief in demons and demoniac possession; and the legal institution of the ordeal contributed also to its maintenance. As modern society has abandoned such institutions, and the modern mind is no longer possessed with demonology, so in the modern worship prayer has become more and more purified from the associations of the spell; the traces that remain of the latter are faint and usually unintelligible to the modern worshipper. And on the other side there is a progressive tendency beginning to be felt, making for a reform of our liturgy in respect of the objects for which prayer should be proffered. But in this respect, as the comparison has shown, we cannot be said to have advanced as yet beyond many of the old-world religions.
The special subjects of these last two lectures, the history of purification and prayer, have only been presented in an inadequate sketch. The full and exhaustive treatment of either would serviceably fill a gap in the library of comparative religion. But they have served my present purpose, if they have been able to illustrate and to some extent test the value of the comparative study of the various theologies of mankind.
[The End]
INDEX
Aion, 36, 37.
Anthropology, value of, 5: occasional defects in its method of treating religious problems, 12-17: suggested improvements in method, 17-23.
Apostolic succession, 49-50.
Babylonian spells and prayers, 218-224.
Baptism, a cathartic ritual, 156-158: of infants, 56-57.
Buddhism, ideas concerning purity, 107.
Celibacy of priesthood, 154-156.
Christianity, comparison with earlier “Mediterranean” religions in mythology, 25-30; in terminology, 30-39; external symbols, 39-48; institutions and organisation, 48-58; in dogma and belief, 59-75: vide Prayer.
Collideriani, 72.
Comparative religion, method of study, 81-85: short survey of its growth, 1-6.
Confession, 54-56, 158-160.
Cursing-ritual, a form of spell, 196-198.
Eschatological beliefs, 63-64.
Fasting, a cathartic ritual, 153-154.
Festivals, influence of pagan on Christian, 58.
Fetichism, 44-47: in Hellas, 44-45: in Christianity, 45-47.
Hellenism, influence on Christianity, 23.
Hero-worship, 75-76.
Hilaria, 62.
Homicide, cathartic origin of law concerning, 140-152.
Human incarnation of divinity, 59-60.
Human sacrifice, legends concerning, 27-28.
Idolatry, 40-44.
Indo-Germanic spell, 193.
Ischtar, legend of, 29.
Kalevala, 184, 191.
Kore, 33: gnostic-pagan worship of, 34-35, 65.
Mariolatry, 65, 69, 72.
Mexican religion, 3.
Montanism, 67.
Mother of God, 38, 66.
Names, religious influence of, 32, 184-192.
Parthenos, 37-38: cf. 65, 69, 70.
Peruvian religion, 3.
Phrygian religion, 24, 62, 66-68.
Prayer (vide Spell) definition of, 165: distinction between prayer and spell, 167-169: antagonism between them, 193-194: objects of prayer, progress from material to spiritual, 173-174: prayer a form of communion with the deity, 174: Christian theory of prayer, 227-228: survival of spell in Christian liturgy, 228-230: Egyptian prayer, 188; dominated by spell, 224-227: English, earliest example of spell-prayer, 194: Eleusinian spell-prayer, 194: Hellenic prayer, 187, 200-205, 207; Hellenic spells, 196; spell prayer, 199-200; theory of prayer in Hellenic philosophy, 206: Iranian liturgical magic, 199; prayers and spells in Zarathustrian ritual, 213-218: Latin prayer, 185: Roman spell-prayer, 195: Peruvian prayer, 183 n. 3: savage examples of real prayer, 182-183: Umbrian prayer, 186: Vedic spell-formulæ combined with prayer, 208-213.
Purification: primitive ideas concerning pure and impure substances, 89-91: analysis of primitive sensation of impurity, 92-98: purification after battle, 94; after funerals, 96: logical development of idea of purity, 98-101: psychological effect of impure contact, 102-103: purity connected with belief in spirits, 103-104; dualism of good and evil spirits, 105: with belief in gods, 106: earliest concept non-moral, 110-111: evolution of idea of “pure heart,” 111-115: cathartic sacrifice, 120-122: opposition between spiritual and ritualistic purity, 123: Iranian ideas, 97, 101, 107, 115, 127-132: Jewish, 124, 126: Hellenic, 132-139; influence on Hellenic law, 140-152: influence of idea of purity on religious institutions, 152-160.
Rebirth, mystic sense of, 57.
Resurrection, belief in, 60-62: resurrection of divinity, 68.
Sacrifice, 64, 120-122.
Saint-worship, 77.
Savagery, survival of, in higher religion, 10, 11, 15, 17.
Scapegoat, cathartic use of, 119, 120.
Spell, examples of spell-prayer, 169, 170, 175, 180: spell-value of the name in lower and higher religions, 184-192: use of narrative as a spell-form of suggestion (Navajo prayer), 181-182: knowledge of origin of person or substance useful for spell-purposes, 190-193: progress from spell to prayer, 171-173.
Teutonic religion, 41, 51, 53, 55, 57, 78-80: ideas of purity, 107-109.
Thiasoi, 48-49.
Totemism, 13.
Transference of sin, 116-119.
Trinitarian ideas, 73-74.
Virginity, exaltation of, 70-71.