Chapter IX: Problems of the Arabian Culture (1)

(C)

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL

I[463]

Religion may be described as the Waking-Being of a living creature in the moments when it overcomes, masters, denies, and even destroys Being. Race-life and the pulse of its drive dwindle as the eyes gaze into an extended, tense, and light-filled world, and _Time yields to Space_. The plantlike desire for fulfilment goes out, and from primary depths there wells up the animal fear of the fulfilment, of the ceasing of direction, of death. Not hate and love, but fear and love are the basic feelings of religion. Hate and fear differ as Time and Space, blood and eye, pulse and tension, heroism and saintliness. And love in the race-sense differs from love in the religious sense in the same way.

All religion is turned to light. The extended itself becomes religious as a world of the eye comprehended from the ego as centre of light. Hearing and touch are adjusted to what is seen and the _Invisible_, whose workings are sensed, becomes the sum of the dæmonic. All that we designate by the words “deity,” “revelation,” “salvation,” “dispensation,” is in one way and another an element of illumined actuality. Death, for man, is something that he sees, and knows by seeing, and in relation to death birth is _the other_ secret. They are the two visible limits of the sensible cosmic that is incarnate in a live body in lighted space.

There are two sorts of deeper fear--one is fear (known even to the animals) _in presence of_ microcosmic freedom in space, before space itself and its powers, before death; the other is fear _for_ the cosmic current of being, for life, for directional time. The first awakens a dark feeling that freedom in the extended is just a new and deeper sort of dependence than that which rules the vegetable world, and it leads the individual being, sensible of its weakness, to seek the propinquity and alliance of others. Anxiety produces speech, and our sort of speech is religion--every religion. Out of the fear of Space arise the numina of the _world-as-nature_ and the _cults of gods_; out of the fear for time arise the numina of _life_, of sex and breed, of the State, centring on _ancestor-worship_. That is the difference between Taboo and Totem[464]--for the totemistic, too, always appears in religious form, out of holy awe of that which passeth all understanding and is for ever alien.

The higher religion requires tense alertness against the powers of blood and being that ever lurk in the depths ready to recapture their primeval rights over the _younger_ side of life. “_Watch_ and pray, that ye fall not into temptation.” Nevertheless, “liberation” is a fundamental word in every religion and an eternal wish of every waking-being. In this general, almost prereligious, sense, it means the desire for freedom from the anxieties and anguishes of waking-consciousness; for relaxation of the tensions of fear-born thought and search; for the obliteration and removal of the consciousness of the Ego’s loneliness in the universe, the rigid conditionedness of nature, the prospect of the immovable boundary of all Being in eld and death.

Sleep, too, liberates--“Death and his brother Sleep.” And holy wine, intoxication, breaks the rigour of the spirit’s tension, and dancing, the Dionysus art, and every other form of stupefaction and ecstasy. These are modes of slipping out of awareness by the aid of being, the cosmic, the “it,” _the escape out of space into time_. But higher than all these stands the genuinely religious overcoming of fear _by means of the understanding itself_. The tension between microcosm and macrocosm becomes something that we can love, something in which we can wholly immerse ourselves.[465] We call this _faith_, and it is the beginning of all man’s intellectual life.

Understanding is causal only, whether deductive or inductive, whether derived from sensation or not. It is wholly impossible to distinguish being-understood from being-caused--both express the same thing. When something is “actual” for us, we see it and think it in causal (_ursächlich_) form, just as we feel and know ourselves and our activities as things originating, causes (_Ursache_). The assignment of causes is, however, different from case to case, not only in the religious, but also generally in the inorganic logic of man. A fact is thought of at one moment as having such-and-such, at another moment as having something else, as its cause. Every kind of thinking has for every one of its domains of application a proper “system.” In everyday life a causal connexion in thought is never exactly repeated. Even in modern physics working hypotheses--that is, causal systems--which partially exclude one another are in use side by side; for instance, the ideas of electrodynamics and those of thermodynamics. The significance of the thought is not thereby nullified, for during a continuous spell of waking-consciousness we “understand” always in the form of single acts of which each has its own causal inception. The viewing of the entire world-as-nature in relation to the individual consciousness as a single causally-ordered concatenation is something perfectly unrealizable by our thought, inasmuch as our thinking proceeds always by unit acts. It remains a belief. It is indeed Faith itself, for it is the basis of religious understanding of the world, which, wherever something is observed, postulates numina as a necessity of thought--ephemeral numina for incidental events which are not again thought of, and enduring numina as place-definite indwellers (of springs, trees, stones, hills, stars, and so forth) or as universals (like the gods of Heaven, of War, of Wisdom) which can be present anywhere. These numina are limited only in virtue of the individualness of each separate act of thought. That which to-day is a property of the god is to-morrow itself the god. Others are now a plurality, now a unity, now a vague Ent. There are invisibles (shapes) and incomprehensibles (principles), which, to those to whom it is vouchsafed, may become phenomenal or comprehensible. Fate[466] in the Classical (εἰμαρμένη) and in the Indian (_rta_) is something which stands as origin-thing (_Ur-Sache_) above the picturable divinities; Magian Destiny, on the contrary, is the operation of the one and formless supreme God. Religious thought ever lets itself graduate values and rank within the causal succession, and leads up to supreme beings or principles, as very first and “governing” causes; “dispensation” is the word used for the most comprehensive of all systems based upon valuation. Science, on the contrary, is a mode of understanding which fundamentally abhors distinctions of rank amongst causes; what it finds is not dispensation, but law.

The understanding of causes sets free. Belief in the linkages discovered compels the world-fear to retreat. God is man’s refuge from the Destiny which he can feel and livingly experience, but not think on, or figure, or name, and which sinks into abeyance for so long--only for so long--as the “critical” (literally, the _separating_) fear-born understanding can establish causes behind causes comprehensibly; that is, in order visible to the outer or inner eye. It is the desperate dilemma of the higher grade of man that his powerful will to understand is in constant contradiction with his being. It has ceased to serve his life, but is unable to rule it, and consequently in all important conjunctures there remains an insoluble element. “One has merely to declare oneself free, and one feels the moment to be conditioned. But if one has the courage to declare oneself conditioned, then one has the feeling of being free” (Goethe).

We name a causal linkage within the world-as-nature, as to which we are convinced that no further reflection can alter it--Truth. Truths are established, and they are timeless--“absolute” means detached from Destiny and history, but detached also from the facts of our own living and dying--and they are an inward liberation, consolation, and salvation, in that they disvalue and overcome the incalculable happenings of the world of facts. Or, as it mirrors itself in the mind, men may go, but truth remains.

In the world-around something is established--that is, fixed, spellbound. Understanding man has the secret in the hands, whether this be, as of old, some potent charm or, as nowadays, a mathematical formula. A feeling of triumph, even to-day, accompanies every experimental step in the realm of Nature which determines something--about the purposes and powers of the god of heaven or the storm-spirits of the ground-dæmons; or about the numina of natural science (atom-nuclei, the velocity of light, gravitation); or even about the abstract numina that thought conceives in contemplating its own image (concept, category, reason)--and, in determining, fixes it in the prison of an unalterable system of causal relations. Experience in this inorganic, killing, preserving sense, which is something quite different from life-experience and knowledge of men, takes place in two modes--_theory and technique_,[467] or, in religious language, _myth and cult_--according as the believer’s intention is to open up or to confine the secrets of the world-around. Both demand a high development of human understanding. _Both may be born of either fear or love._ There is a mythology of fear, like the Mosaic and the primitive generally, and a mythology of love, like that of early Christianity and Gothic mysticism. Similarly there is a technique of defensive, and another technique of postulant, magic, and this, no doubt the most fundamental, distinction between sacrifice and prayer[468] distinguishes also primitive and mature mankind. Religiousness is a trait of soul, but religion is a talent. “Theory” demands the gift of vision that few possess to the extent of luminous insight and many possess not at all. It is world-view, “_Weltanschauung_” in the most primary sense, whether what one sees in that world is the hand and the loom of powers, or (in a colder urban spirit, not fearing or loving, but inquisitive) the theatre of law-conform forces. The secrets of Taboo and Totem are beheld in god-faiths and soul-faiths, and calculated in theoretical physics and biology. “Technique” presupposes the intellectual gift of binding and conjuring. The theorist is the critical seer, the technician is the priest, the discoverer is the prophet.

The means, however, in which the whole force of intellect concentrates itself is the _form_ of the actual, which is abstracted from vision by speech, and of which not every waking-consciousness can discern the quintessence--the conceptual circumscription, the communicable law, name, number. Hence every conjuration of the deity is based on the knowledge of its real name and the use of rites and sacraments, known and available only to the initiated, of which the form must be exact and the words correct. This applies not merely to primitive magic, but just as much to our physical (and particularly our medical) technique. It is for this reason that mathematics have a character of sanctity and are regularly the product of a religious milieu (Pythagoras, Descartes, Pascal); that there is a mysticism of sacred numbers (3, 7, 12) in every religion,[469] and that Ornament (of which cult-architecture is the highest form) is essentially number felt as shape. It is rigid, compelling forms, expression-motives and communication-signs[470] that the microcosm employs in the world of waking-consciousness to get into touch with the macrocosm. In sacerdotal technique they are called precepts, and in scientific, laws--but both are really name and number, and primitive man would discover no difference between the magic wherewith the priests of his villages command the dæmons and that wherewith the civilized technician commands his machines.

The first, and perhaps the only, outcome of man’s will-to-understanding is _faith_. “I believe” is the great word against metaphysical fear, and at the same time it is an avowal of love. Even though one’s researches or accumulation of knowledge may culminate in sudden illumination or conclusive calculation, yet all one’s own sense and comprehension would be meaningless unless there were set up along with it an inward certainty of a “something” which as other and alien _is_--and is, moreover, exactly under the ascertained shape--in the concatenation of cause and effect. The highest intellectual possession, therefore, known to man as a being of speech-deduced thought, is the firm and hard-won belief in this something, withdrawn from the courses of time and destiny, which he has separated out by contemplation and labelled by name and number. But _what_ that something is remains in the last analysis obscure. Was it the something of secret logic of the universe that was touched, or only a silhouette? And all the struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious investigation directs itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair. He needs in his intellectual boring of belief a _final_ something attainable by thought, an end of dissection that leaves no remainder of mystery. The corners and pockets of his world of contemplation must all be illuminated--nothing less will give him his release.

Here belief passes over into the knowledge evoked by mistrust, or, more accurately, becomes belief in that knowledge. For the latter form of the understanding is radically dependent upon the former; it is posterior, more artificial, more questionable. Further, religious theory--that is, the contemplation of the believer--_leads to_ priestly practice, but scientific theory, on the contrary, _liberates itself_ by contemplation _from_ the technical knowledge of every day life.[471] The firm belief that is bred by illuminations, revelations, sudden deep glimpses, can dispense with critical work. But critical knowledge presupposes the belief that its methods will lead to just that which is desired--that is, not to fresh imaginings, but to the “actual.” History, however, teaches that doubt as to belief leads to knowledge, and doubt as to knowledge (after a period of critical optimism) back again to belief. As theoretical knowledge frees itself from confiding acceptance, it is marching to self-destruction, after which what remains is simply and solely technical experience.

Belief, in its primitive, unclear condition, acknowledges superior sources of wisdom by which things that man’s own subtlety could never unravel are more or less manifest--such as prophetic words, dreams, oracles, sacred scriptures, the voice of the deity. The critical spirit, on the contrary, wants, and believes itself able, to look into everything for itself. It not only mistrusts alien truths, but even denies their possibility. Truth, for it, is only knowledge that it has proved for itself. But if pure criticism creates its means out of itself solely, it did not long go unperceived that this position assumed the reality of the result. _De omnibus dubitandum_ is a proposition that is incapable of being actualized. It is apt to be forgotten that critical activity must rest upon a _method_, and the possibility of obtaining this method in turn by the way of criticism is only apparent. For, in reality, it follows from the momentary disposition of the thought.[472] That is, the results of criticism themselves are determined by the basic method, but this in turn is determined by the stream of being which carries and perfuses the waking-consciousness. The belief in a knowledge that needs no postulates is merely a mark of the immense naïveté of rationalist periods. A theory of natural science is nothing but a historically older dogma in another shape. And the only profit from it is that which life obtains, in the shape of a successful technique, to which theory has provided the key. It has already been said that the value of a working hypothesis resides not in its “correctness” but in its usableness. But discoveries of another sort, findings of insight, “Truths” in the optimistic sense, cannot be the outcome of purely scientific understanding, since this always presupposes an existing view upon which its critical, dissecting activity can operate; the natural science of the Baroque is one continuous dissection of the religious world-picture of the Gothic.

The aim of faith and science, fear and curiosity, is not to experience life, but to know the world-as-nature. Of world-as-history they are the express negation. But the secret of waking-consciousness is a twofold one; two fear-born, causally ordered pictures arise for the inner eye--the “outer world” and as its counter-image the “inner world.” In both are true problems, and the waking-consciousness is not only a look-out, but is very busy within its own domains as well. The Numen out there is called God; in here Soul. By the critical understanding the deities of the believer’s vision are transmuted in thought into mechanical magnitudes referable to its world, but their essence and kernel remain the same--Classical matter and form, Magian light and darkness, Faustian force and mass--and its mode is ever the same dissection of the primitive soul-belief, and its end is ever the same, a _predetermined_ result. The physics of the within is called systematic psychology and it discovers in man, if it is Classical science, thing-like soul-_parts_ (νοῦς, θυμός, ἐπιθυμία); if Magian, soul-substance (ruach, nephesh); if Faustian, soul-_forces_ (thinking, feeling, willing). These are the shapes that religious meditation, in fear and in love, then follows up in the causal relations of guilt, sin, pardon, conscience, reward, and punishment.

Being is a mystery that, as soon as faith and science turn their attention to it, illudes them into fateful error. Instead of the cosmic itself being reached (which is completely outside the possibilities of the active waking-consciousness) the sensible mobility of body in the field of the eye, and the conceptual image of a mechanical-causal chain abstracted therefrom, are subjected to analysis. But real life _is led_, not cognised. _Only the Timeless is true._ Truths lie beyond history and life, and vice versa life is something beyond all causes, effects, and truths. Criticism in both cases, critique of waking-consciousness and critique of being, are contrary to happening and alien to life. But in the first case the application of a critique is entirely justified by the critical intention and the inner logic of the object that is referred to; in the second case it is not. It follows that the distinction between faith and knowledge, or fear and curiosity, or revelation and criticism, is not, after all, the ultimate distinction. Knowledge is only a late form of belief. But _belief and life_, love springing from the secret fear of the world, and love springing from the secret hate of the sexes, knowledge of inorganic and sense of organic logic, Causes and Destinies--_this_ is the deepest opposition of all. And here we distinguish men, not according to what their modes of thinking are--religious or critical--nor according to the objects of their thought, but according to whether they are thinkers (no matter about what) _or doers_.

In the realm of doing the waking-consciousness takes charge only when it becomes _technique_. Religious knowledge, too, is power--man is not only ascertaining causations, but handling them. He who knows the secret relationship between microcosm and macrocosm commands it also, whether the knowledge has come to him by revelation or by eavesdropping. Thus the magician and conjuror is truly the Taboo-man. He compels the deity through sacrifice and prayer; he practises the true rites and sacraments because they are causes of inevitable results, and whosoever knows them, him they must serve. He reads in the stars and in the sacred books; in his power lies, timeless and immune from all accident, the _causal_ relation of sin and propitiation, repentance and absolutions, sacrifice and grace. His chain of sacred origins and results makes him himself a vessel of mysterious power and, therefore, a cause of new effects, in which one must have faith before one may have them imparted.

From this starting-point we can understand (what the European-American world of to-day has wellnigh forgotten) the ultimate meaning of religious ethics, _Moral_. It is, wherever true and strong, a relation that has the full import of _ritual act and practice_; it is (to use Loyola’s phrase) “_exercitium spirituale_,” performed before the deity,[473] who is to be softened and conjured thereby. “What shall I do to be saved?” This “what?” is the key to the understanding of all real moral. In its deeps there is ever a “wherefore” and a “why,” even in the case of those few sublimate philosophers who have imagined a moral that is “for its own sake”--confessing in the very phrase that deep down they feel a “wherefore,” even though but a sympathetic few of their own kind can appreciate it. _There is only causal moral_--that is, _ethical technique_--on the background of a convinced metaphysic.

Moral is a conscious and planned causality of the conduct, apart from all particulars of actual life and character, something eternal and universally valid, not only without time, but hostile to time and for that very reason “true.” Even if mankind did not exist, moral would be true and valid--this is no mere conceit, but an expression of the ethical inorganic logic of the world conceived as system that has actually been used. Never would the philosopher concede that it could have a historical evolution and fulfilment. Space denies Time; true moral is absolute, eternally complete and the same. In the depths of it there is ever a negation of life, a refraining and renunciation carried to the point of askesis and death itself. Negation is expressed in its very phrases--religious moral contains prohibitions, not precepts. Taboo, even where it ostensibly affirms, is a list of disclaimers. To liberate oneself from the world of fact, to evade the possibilities of Destiny, always to look upon the race in oneself as the lurking enemy--nothing but hard system, doctrine, and exercise will give that. No action must be causal or impulsive--that is, left to the blood--everything must be considered according to motives and results and “carried out” according to orders. Extreme tension of awareness is required lest we fall into sin. First of all things, continence in what pertains to the blood, love, marriage. Love and hate in mankind are cosmic and evil; the love of the sexes is the very polar opposite of timeless love and fear of God, and therefore it is the prime sin, for which Adam was cast forth from paradise and burdened man with the heritage of guilt. Conception and death define the life of the body in space, and the fact that it is the _body_ that is in question makes the former sin and the latter punishment. Σῶμα σῆμα (the Classical body a grave!) was the confession of the Orphic religion. Æschylus and Pindar comprehended Being as a reproach, and the saints of all Cultures feel it as an impiety that has to be killed off by askesis or (what is nearly related thereto) orgiastic squandering. Action, the field of history, the deed, heroism, delight in battle and victory and spoil, are evil. For in them the pulse of cosmic being knocks on the door too loudly and disturbingly for contemplativeness and thought. The whole world--meaning the world-as-history--is infamous. It fights instead of renouncing; it does not possess the idea of sacrifice. It prevails over truth by means of facts. As it follows impulse, it baffles thought about cause and effect. And therefore the highest sacrifice that intellectual man can offer is to make a personal present of it to the powers of nature. _Every moral action is a piece of this sacrifice_, and an ethical life-course is an unbroken chain of such sacrifices. Above all, the offering of sympathy, com-passion {sic}, in which the inwardly strong gives up his superiority to the powerless. The compassionate man kills something within himself. But we must not confuse this sympathy in the grand religious sense with the vague sentimentality of the everyday man, who cannot command himself, still less with the _race-feeling of chivalry_ that is not a moral of reasons and rules at all, but an upstanding and self-evident _custom_ bred of the unconscious pulsations of a keyed-up life. That which in civilized times is called social ethics has nothing to do with religion, and its presence only goes to show the weakness and emptiness of the religiousness of the day, which has lost that force of metaphysical sureness that is the condition precedent of strong, convinced, and self-denying moral. Think for instance of the difference between Pascal and Mill. Social ethic is nothing but practical politics. It is a very Late product of _the same_ historical world whose Springtime (in all Cultures alike) has witnessed the flowering of an ethic of high courage and knightliness in a strong stock that does not wince under the life of history and fate; an ethic of natural and acquired reactions that polite society to-day would call “the instincts of a gentleman”; an ethic of which vulgarity and not sin is the antithesis. Once again it is the Castle versus the Cathedral. The castle character does not ask about precepts and reasons. In fact, it does not ask questions at all. Its code lies in the blood--which is pulse--and its fear is not of punishment or requital, but of contempt and especially self-contempt. It is not selfless; on the contrary, it springs from the very fullness of a strong self. But Compassion likewise demands inward greatness of soul, and so it is those selfsame Springtimes that produce the most saintly servants of pity, the Francis of Assisi, the Bernard of Clairvaux, in whom renunciation was a pervading fragrance, to whom self-offering was bliss, whose _caritas_ was ethereal, bloodless, timeless, historyless, in whom fear of the universe had dissolved itself into pure, flawless love, a summit of causal moral of which Late periods are simply no longer capable.

To constrain one’s blood, one must have blood. Consequently it is only in knightly warrior-times that we find a monasticism of the great style, and the highest symbol for the complete victory of Space over Time is the warrior become ascetic--not the born dreamer and weakling, who belongs by nature to the cloister, nor again the scholar, who works at a moral system in the study. Putting cant aside, that which is called moral to-day--a proper affection for one’s nearest, or the exercise of worthy inclinations, or the practice of _caritas_ with an _arrière-pensée_ of acquiring political power by that means--is not honour-moral, or even a low grade of it, according to Springtime standards. To repeat: there is grand moral only with reference to death, and its sources are a fear, pervading the whole waking-consciousness, of metaphysical causes and consequences, a love that overcomes life, a consciousness that one is under the inexorable magic of a causal system of sacred laws and purposes, which are honoured as truths and which one must either wholly belong to or wholly renounce. Constant tension, self-watching, self-testing, accompany the exercise of this moral, which is an art, and in the presence of which the world-as-history sinks to nothingness. Let a man be either a hero or a saint. In between lies, not wisdom, but banality.

II

If there were truths independent of the currents of being, there could be no history of truths. If there were one single eternally right religion, religious history would be an inconceivable idea. But, however highly developed the microcosmic side of an individual’s life may be, it is nevertheless something stretched like a membrane over the developing life, perfused by the pulsing blood, ever betraying the hidden drive of cosmic directedness. Race dominates and forms all apprehension. It is the destiny of each moment of awareness to be a cast of Time’s net over Space.

Not that “eternal truths” do not exist. Every man possesses them--plenty of them--to the extent that he exists and exercises the understanding faculty in a world of thoughts, in the connected ensemble of which they are, in and for the instant of thought, unalterable fixtures--ironbound as cause-effect combinations in hoops of premisses and conclusions. Nothing in this disposition can become displaced, he believes. But in reality it is just _one_ surge of life that is lifting his waking self and its world together. Its unity remains integral, but _as_ a unit, a whole, _a fact_, it has a history. Absolute and relative are to one another as transverse and longitudinal sections of a succession of generations, the latter ignoring Space, and the former Time. The systematic thinker stays in the causal order of a moment; only the physiognomist who reviews the sequence of positions realizes the constant alteration of that which “is” true.

_Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis_ holds good for the eternal truths also, as soon as we follow their course in the stream of history, and watch them move on as elements in the world-picture of the generations that live and die. For each man, during the short space of his existence, the _one_ religion is eternal and true which Destiny, through the time and place of his birth, has ordained for him. With it he feels, out of it he forms, the views and convictions of his days. To its words and forms he holds fast, although what he means by them is constantly changing. In the world-as-nature there are eternal truths; in the world-as-history there is an eternally changing trueness.

_A morphology of religious history_, therefore, is a task that the Faustian spirit alone could ever formulate, and one that it is only now, at this present stage of its development, fit to deal with. The problem is enunciated, and we must dare the effort of getting completely away from our own convictions and seeing before us everything indifferently as equally alien. And how hard it is! He who undertakes the task must possess the strength not merely to imagine himself in an illusory detachment from the truths of his world-understanding--illusory even to one for whom truths are just a set of concepts and methods--but actually to penetrate his own system physiognomically to its very last cells. And even then is it possible, in a single language, which structurally and spiritually carries the whole metaphysical content of its own Culture, to capture transmissible ideas of the truths of other-tongued men?

There is, to begin with, over the thousands of years of the first age,[474] the colourless throng of primitive populations, which stand fearfully agape in the presence of the chaotic environment, whose enigmas continually weigh upon them, for no man amongst them is able logically to master it. Lucky in comparison with them is the animal, who is awake and yet not thinking. An animal knows fear only from case to case, whereas early man trembles before the whole world. Everything inside and outside him is dark and unresolved. The everyday and the dæmonic are tangled together without clue and without rule. The day is filled with a frightened and painful religiousness, in which it is rare to find even the suggestion of a religion of confidence--for from this elementary form of the world-fear no way leads to the understanding love. Every stone on which a man stumbles, every tool that he takes in his hand, every insect buzzing past him, food, house, weather, all can be dæmonic; but the man believes in the powers that lurk in them only so long as he is frightened or so long _as he uses them_--there are quite enough of them even so. But one can love something only if one believes in its _continued_ existence. Love presupposes the thought of a world-order that has acquired stability. Western research has been at great pains, not only to set in order individual observations gathered from all parts of the world, but to arrange them according to assumed gradations that “lead up” from animism (or other beginnings, as you please) to the beliefs that it holds itself. Unfortunately, it is one particular religion that has provided the values of the scheme, and Chinese or Greeks would have built it quite differently. In reality no such gradation, leading a general human evolution up to one goal, exists. Primitive man’s chaotic world-around, born of his discontinuous understanding of separate moments and yet full of impressive meaning, is always something grown-up, self-complete, and closed off, often with chasms and terrors of deep metaphysical premonition. Always it contains a system, and it matters little whether this is partially abstracted from the contemplation of the light-world or remains wholly within it. Such a world-picture does not “progress”; nor is it a fixed sum of particulars from which this one and that one ought to be (though usually they are) picked out for comparison irrespective of time, land, and people. In reality they form a _world of organic religions_, which, all over the world, possessed (and, where they linger, still possess) proper and very significant modes of originating, growing, expanding, and fading out, and a well-established specific character in point of structure, style, tempo, and duration. The religions of the high Cultures are not developed from these, but different. They lie clearer and more intellectual in the light, they know what understanding love means, they have problems and ideas, theories and techniques, of strict intellect, but the religious symbolism of everyday light they know no more. The primitive religiousness penetrates everything; the later and individualized religions are self-contained form-worlds of their own.

All the more enigmatic, therefore, are the “pre-” periods of the grand Cultures, still primitive through and through, and yet more and more distinctly anticipating and pointing in a definite direction. It is just these periods, of some centuries’ duration, that ought to have been accurately examined and compared amongst themselves and for themselves. In what shape does the coming phenomenon prepare itself? In the case of the Magian religions the threshold period, as we have seen, produced the type of the Prophetic religion, which led up to the Apocalyptic. How comes it that this particular form is more deeply grounded in the essence of this particular Culture? Or why is it that the Mycenæan prelude of the Classical is filled from one end to the other with imaginings of beast-formed deities?[475] They are not the gods of the warriors up in the megaron of the Mycenæan castle, where soul- and ancestor-worship was practised with a high and noble piety evidenced still in the monuments, but the gods of down below, the powers believed in in the peasant’s hut. The great menlike gods of the Apollinian religion, which must have arisen about 1100 out of a mighty religious upheaval, bear traces of their dark past on all sides. Hardly one of these figures is without some cognomen, attribute, or telltale transformation-myth indicative of its origin. To Homer Hera is invariably the cow-eyed; Zeus appears as a bull, and the Poseidon of the Thelpusan legend as a horse. Apollo comes to be the name for countless primitive numina; now he was wolf (Lycæus) like the Roman Mars, now dolphin (Delphinius), and now serpent (the Pythian Apollo of Delphi). A serpent, too, is the form of Zeus Meilichios on Attic grave-reliefs and of Asclepios, and of the Furies even in Æschylus;[476] and the sacred snake kept on the Acropolis was interpreted as Erichthonios. In Arcadia the horse-headed figure of Demeter in the temple of Phigalia was still to be seen by Pausanias; the Arcadian Artemis-Callisto appears as a she-bear, but in Athens too the priestesses of Artemis Brauronia were called “_arktoi_” (bears).[477] Dionysus--now a bull, now a stag--and Pan retained a certain beast-element to the end. Psyche (like the Egyptian corporal-soul, _bai_) is the soul-bird. And upon all this supervened the innumerable semi-animal figures like sirens and centaurs that completely fill up the Early Classical nature-picture.[478]

But what are the features, now, of the primitive religion of Merovingian times that foreshadow the mighty uprising of the Gothic that was at hand? That both are _ostensibly_ the same religion, Christianity, proves nothing when we consider the entire difference in their deeps. For (we must be quite clear in our own mind on this) the primitive character of a religion does not lie in its stock of doctrines and usages, but in the specific spirituality of the mankind that adopts them and feels, speaks, and thinks with them. The student has to familiarize himself with the fact that primitive Christianity (more exactly, the early Christianity of the Western Church) has twice subsequently become the expression-vehicle of a primitive piety, and therefore itself a primitive religion--namely, in the Celtic-Germanic West between 500 and 900, and in Russia up to this day. Now, how did the world mirror itself to these “converted” minds? Leaving out of account some few clerics of, say, Byzantine education, what did one actually think and imagine about these ceremonies and dogmas. Bishop Gregory of Tours, who, we must remember, represents the highest intellectual outlook of his generation, once lauded the powder rubbed from a saint’s tombstone in these words: “O divine purgative, superior to all doctors’ recipes, which cleanses the belly like scammony and washes away all stains from our conscience!” For him the death of Jesus was a crime which filled him with indignation, but no more; the Resurrection, on the contrary, which hovered before him vaguely, he felt deep down as an athletic _tour de force_ that stamped the Messiah as the grand wizard and so legitimated him as the true Saviour. Of any mystic meaning in the story of the Passion he has not an inkling.[479]

In Russia the conclusions of the “Synod of a Hundred Chapters,” of 1551, evidence a wholly primitive order of belief. Shaving of the beard and wrong handling of the cross both figure here as deadly sins--they were affronts to the dæmons. The “Synod of Antichrist,” of 1667, led to the vast secession of the Raskol movement, because thenceforward the sign of the cross was to be made with three fingers instead of two, and the name “Jesus” was to be pronounced “Yissus” instead of “Issus”--whereby, for the strict believer, the power of this magic over the dæmons would be lost.[480] But this effect of fear is, after all, not the only one nor even the most potent. Why is it that the Merovingian period shows not the slightest trace of that glowing inwardness and longing to sink into the metaphysical that suffuses the Magian seed-time of Apocalyptic and the closely analogous period of the Holy Synod (1721-1917) in Russia? What was it that from Peter the Great’s time on led all those martyr-sects of the Raskolniki to celibacy, poverty, pilgrimage, self-mutilation, and asceticism in its most fearful forms, and in the seventeenth century had driven thousands, in religious frenzy, to throw themselves _en masse_ into the flames? The doctrines of the Chlysti, with their “Russian Christs” (of whom seven are counted so far); the Dukhobors with their Book of Life, which they use as their Bible and hold to contain psalms of Jesus orally transmitted; the Skoptsi with their ghastly mutilation-precepts--manifestations, one and all, of something without which Tolstoi, Nihilism, and the political revolutions are incomprehensible[481]--how is it that in comparison the Frankish period seems so dull and shallow? Is it that only Aramæans and Russians possess religious genius--and, if so, what have we to expect of the Russia that is to come, now that (just in the decisive centuries) the obstacle of scholarly orthodoxy has been destroyed?

III

Primitive religions have something homeless about them, like the clouds and the wind. The mass-souls of the proto-peoples have accidentally and fugitively condensed into _one_ being, and accidental, therefore, is and remains the “where”--which is an “anywhere”--of the linkages of waking-consciousness arising from the fear and defensiveness that spread over them. Whether they stay or move on, whether they alter or not, is immaterial so far as concerns their inward significance.

From life of this order the high Cultures are separated by a deep soil-boundness. Here there is a mother-landscape behind all expression-forms, and just as the State, as temple and pyramid and cathedral, _must_ fulfil their history _there_ where their idea originated, so too the great religion of every Springtime is bound by all the roots of its being to the land over which its world-image has risen. Sacral practices and dogmas may be carried far and wide, but their inner evolution stays spellbound in the place of their birth. It is simply an impossibility that the slightest trace of evolution of Classical city-cults should be found in Gaul, or a dogmatic advance of Faustian Christianity in America. Whatever disconnects itself from the land becomes rigid and hard.

It begins, in every case, like a great cry. The dull confusedness of terror and defence suddenly passes into a pure awakening of inwardness that blossoms up, wholly plantwise, from mother earth, and sees and comprehends the depth of the light-world with _one_ outlook. Wherever introspectiveness exists as a living sense, this change is felt and welcomed as an inward rebirth. In this moment--never earlier, and never (at least with the same deep intensity) later--it traverses the chosen spirits of the time like a grand light, which dissolves all fear in blissful love and lets the invisible appear, all suddenly, in a metaphysical radiance.

Every Culture actualizes here its prime symbol. Each has its own sort of love--we may call it heavenly or metaphysical as we choose--with which it contemplates, comprehends, and takes into itself its godhead, and which remains to every other Culture inaccessible or unmeaning. Whether the world be something set under a domed light-cavern, as it was for Jesus and his companions, or just a vanishingly small bit of a star-filled infinity, as Giordano Bruno felt it; whether the Orphics take their bodily god into themselves, or the spirit of Plotinus, soaring in ecstasy, fuses in henosis with the spirit of God, or St. Bernard in his “mystic union” becomes one with the operation of infinite deity--the deep urge of the soul is governed always by the prime symbol of the particular Culture and of no other.

In the Vth Dynasty of Egypt (2680-2540), which followed that of the great pyramid-builders, the cult of the Horus-falcon, whose _ka_ dwelt in the reigning monarch, faded. The old local cults and even the profound Thot religion of Hermopolis fell into the background. The sun-religion of Re appears. Out from his palace westward every king erects a Re-sanctuary by his tomb-temple, the latter a symbol of a life directional from birth to sarcophagus-chamber, the former a symbol of grand and eternal nature. Time and Space, being and waking-being, Destiny and sacred Causality are set face to face in this mighty twin-creation as in no other architecture in the world. To both a covered way leads up; that to the Re is accompanied by reliefs figuring the power of the sun-god over the plant and animal worlds and the changings of seasons. No god-image, no temple, but only an altar of alabaster adorns the mighty terrace on which at day-break, high above the land, the Pharaoh advances out of the darkness to greet the great god who is rising up in the East.[482]

This youthful inwardness proceeds always out of a townless country-side, out of villages, hovels, sanctuaries, solitary cloisters, and hermitages. Here is formed the community of high awareness, of the spiritual elect, which inwardly is separated by a whole world from the great being-currents of the heroic and the knightly. The two prime estates, priesthood and nobility--contemplation in the cathedral and deeds before the castles, askesis and _Minne_, ecstasy and high-bred custom--begin their special histories from this point. Though the Caliph was also worldly ruler of the faithful, though the Pharaoh sacrificed in both holy places, though the German King built his family vault under the cathedral, nothing gets rid of the abyssal opposition of Time and Space that is reflected in the contrast of these two social orders. Religious history and political history, the histories of truths and facts, stand opposed and irreconcilable. Their opposition begins in cathedral and castle, it propagates itself in the ever-growing towns as the opposition of wisdom and business, and in the last stages of historical capacity it closes as a wrestle of intellect and power.

But both these movements take place on the _heights_ of humanity. Peasantdom remains historyless under it all, comprehending politics as little as it understands dogmatics. Out of the strong young religion of saintly groups, scholasticism and mysticism develop in the early towns; reformation, philosophy, and worldly learning in the increasing tumult of streets and squares; enlightenment and irreligion in the stone masses of the late megalopolis. The beliefs of the peasant outside remain “eternal” and always the same. The Egyptian hind understood nothing of this Re. He heard the name, but while a grand chapter of religious history was passing over his head in the cities, he went on worshipping the old Thinite beast-gods, until with the XXVIth Dynasty and its fellah-religion they regained supremacy. The Italian peasant prayed in Augustus’s time just as he had done long before Homer and as he does to-day. Names and dogmas of big religions, blossoming and dying in turn, have penetrated to him from the towns and have altered the sounds of his words--but the meaning remains ever the same. The French peasant lives still in the Merovingian Age. Freya or Mary, Druids or Dominicans, Rome or Geneva--nothing touches the innermost kernel of his beliefs.

But even in the towns one stratum hangs back, historically, relatively to another. Over the primitive religion of the country-side there is another popular religion, that of the small people in the underground of the towns and in the provinces. The higher a Culture rises--Middle Kingdom, Brahman period, Pre-Socratics, Pre-Confucians, Baroque--the narrower becomes the circle of those who possess the final truths of their time as reality and not as mere name and sound. How many of those who lived with Socrates, Augustine, and Pascal understood them? In religion as otherwise the human pyramid rises with increasing sharpness, till at the end of the Culture it is complete--thereafter, bit by bit, to crumble.

About 3000 in Egypt and Babylon two great religions began their life-courses. In Egypt the “reformation” period at the end of the Old Kingdom saw solar monotheism firmly founded as the religion of priests and educated persons. All other gods and goddesses--whom the peasantry and the humble people continued to worship in their former meaning--are now only incarnations or servants of the one Re. Even the particular religion of Hermopolis, with its cosmology, was adapted to the grand system, and a theological negotiation brought even the Ptah of Memphis into harmony with dogma as an abstract prime-principle of creation.[483] Exactly as in the times of Justinian and Charles V, the city-spirit asserted mastery over the soul of the land; the formative power of the Springtime had come to an end; the dogma was essentially complete, and its subsequent treatment by rational processes took down more of the structure than it improved. Philosophy began. In respect of dogma, the Middle Kingdom was as unimportant as the Baroque.

From 1500 three new religious histories begin--first the Vedic in the Punjab, then the Early Chinese in the Hwang-ho, and lastly the Classical on the north of the Ægean Sea. Distinctly as the Classical man’s world-picture and his prime symbol of the unit body is presented to us, it is difficult even to guess the details of the great Early Classical religion. For this lacuna we have to thank the Homeric poems, which hinder rather than help us in comprehending it. The new notion of godhead that was the special ideal of this Culture is the human-formed body in the light, the hero as mediator between man and god--so much, at any rate, the Iliad evidences. This body might be light-transfigured by Apollo or disjected to the winds by Dionysus, but in every case it was the basic form of Being. The σῶμα as ideal of the extended, the cosmos as sum of these unit bodies, “Being” and “the one” as the extended-in-itself and “Logos”[484] as the order thereof in the light--all this came up before the eyes of priest-men, grandly visible and having the full force of a new religion.

But the Homeric poetry is purely aristocratic. Of the two worlds--that of the noble and that of the priest, that of Taboo and that of Totem, that of heroism and that of sanctity--only the one is here living. It not only does not understand, but actually despises, the other. As in the Edda, so in Homer, it is the greatest glory of an immortal to know the way and code of nobility. The thinkers of the Classical Baroque, from Xenophanes to Plato, regarded these scenes of god-life as impudent and trivial, and they were right; they felt exactly as the theology and philosophy of the later West felt about the Germanic hero-sagas and even about Gottfried of Strassburg, Wolfram, and Walther. If the Homeric epics did not vanish as the hero-songs collected by Charlemagne vanished, it was only because there was no fully formed Classical priesthood, with the result that the Classical cities, when they arose, were intellectually dominated by a knightly and not a religious literature. The original doctrines of this religion, which out of opposition to Homer linked themselves with the (probably) still older name of Orpheus, were never written down.

All the same, they existed. Who knows what and how much is hidden behind the figures of Calchas and Tiresias? A mighty upheaval there must have been at the beginning of this Culture, as at that of others--an upheaval extending from the Ægean Sea as far as Etruria--but the Iliad shows as few signs of it as the lays of the Nibelungs and of Roland show of the inwardness and mysticism of Joachim of Floris, St. Francis, and the Crusades, or of the inner fire of that _Dies Iræ_ of Thomas of Celano, which would probably have excited mirth at a thirteenth-century court of love. Great personalities there must have been to give a mystical-metaphysical form to the new world-outlook, but we know nothing of them and it is only the gay, bright, easy side of it that passed into the song of knightly halls. Was the “Trojan War” a feud, or was it also a Crusade? What is the meaning of Helen? Even the Fall of Jerusalem has been looked at from a worldly point of view as well as from a spiritual.

In the nobles’ poetry of Homer, Dionysus and Demeter, as priests’ gods, are unhonoured.[485] But even in Hesiod, the herdsman of Ascra, the enthusiast-searcher inspired by his folk-beliefs, the ideas of the great early time are not to be found pure, any more than in Jakob Böhme the cobbler.[486] That is the second difficulty. _The great early religions, too, were the possession of a class_, and neither accessible to nor understandable by the generality; the mysticism of earliest Gothic, too, was confined to small elect circles, sealed by Latin and the difficulty of its concepts and figures, and neither nobility nor peasantry had any distinct idea of its existence. And excavation, therefore, important as it is in respect of the Classical country-faiths, can tell us as little about the Early Classical _religion_ as a village church can tell us about Abelard or Bonaventura.

But Æschylus and Pindar, at any rate, were under the spell of a great priestly tradition, and before them there were the Pythagoreans, who made the Demeter-cult their centre (thereby indicating where the kernel of that mythology is to be sought), and earlier still were the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic reformation of the seventh century; and, finally, there are the fragments of Pherecydes and Epimenides, who were not the first _but the last_ dogmatists of a theology in reality ancient. The idea that impiety was a heritable sin, visited upon the children and the children’s children, was known to Hesiod and Solon, as well as the doctrine (Apollinian also) of “Hybris.”[487] Plato, however, as an Orphic opponent of the Homeric conception of life, sets forth very ancient doctrines of hell and the judgment of the dead in his _Phædo_. We know the tremendous formula of Orphism, the Nay of the mysteries that answered the Yea of the agon, which arose, certainly by 1100 at latest, as a protest of Waking-Consciousness against Being--σῶμα σῆμα, that splendid Classical body a grave! Here man is no longer _feeling_ himself as a thing of breeding, strength, and movement; he _knows_ himself and is terrified by what he knows. Here begins the Classical askesis, which by strictest rites and expiations, even by voluntary suicide, seeks deliverance from this Euclidean body-being. It is an entirely erroneous interpretation of the Pre-Socratics to suppose that it was from the view-point of enlightenment that they spoke against Homer. It was as _ascetics_ that they did so. These “contemporaries” of Descartes and Leibniz were brought up in the strict traditions of the old great Orphism, which were as faithfully preserved in the almost claustral meditation-schools--old and famous holy places--as Gothic Scholasticism was treasured in the wholly intellectual universities of the Baroque. From the self-immolation of Empedocles the line runs straight forward to the suicide of the Roman Stoic, and straight back to “Orpheus.”