The Idea of God in Early Religions Part 4

'Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, And cleanse me from my sin.

For I acknowledge my transgressions: And my sin is ever before me.

Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.

Cast me not away from thy presence.'

The earliest prayers offered by any community probably were, as we have already seen, those which were sent up in time of trouble and inspired by the conviction that the community's G.o.d had been justly offended. The psalms, from which quotations have just been given, show the same idea of G.o.d, conceived to have been justly offended by the transgressions of his servants. The difference between them is that, in the later prayers, the individual self-consciousness has come to realise that the individual as well as the community exists; that the individual, as well as the community, is guilty of trespa.s.ses; and that the individual, as well as the community, needs forgiveness. That is to say, the idea of G.o.d has taken more definite shape: G.o.d has been revealed to the individual wors.h.i.+pper to be 'My G.o.d'; the wors.h.i.+pper to be 'Thy servant'; and what is feared is not merely that the wors.h.i.+pper should be excluded from the community, but that he should be cast away from communion with G.o.d. The communion, aspired to, is however still such communion as may exist between a servant and his master.

Material and external blessings, further, are, together with deliverance from material and external evil, still the princ.i.p.al subjects of prayer in the Psalms both of the Old Testament and of the cuneiform inscriptions; and, so far as this is the case, the wors.h.i.+pper's prayer is that his individual will may be done, and it is because he has received material and external blessings, because his will has been done, that his joyful lips praise and bless the Lord.

That is to say, the idea of G.o.d, implied by such prayer and praise, is that He is a being who may help man to the fulfilment of man's desires and to the realisation of man's will. The a.s.sumption required to justify this conception is that in man, man's will alone is operative, and never G.o.d's. This a.s.sumption has its a.n.a.logy in the fact, already noticed, that in the beginning the individual is not self-conscious, or aware of the individuality of his own existence. When the individual's self-consciousness is thus but little, if at all, manifested, it is the community, as a community, which approaches its G.o.d and is felt to be responsible for the transgressions which have offended him. As self-consciousness comes to manifest itself, more and more, the sense of personal transgression and individual responsibility becomes more and more strong. If now we suppose that at this point the evolution, or unfolding, of the self ceases, and that the whole of its contents is now revealed, we shall hold that, in man, man's will alone can operate, and never G.o.d's. It is indeed at this point that non-Christian religions stop, if they get so far. The idea of G.o.d as a being whose will is to be done, and not man's, is a distinctively Christian idea.

The pet.i.tion, which, as far as the science of religion enables us to judge, was the first pet.i.tion made by man, was for deliverance from evil. The next, in historical order, was for forgiveness of sins; and, then, when society had come to be settled on an agricultural basis and dependent on the harvest, prayer was offered for daily bread. In the Lord's Prayer, the order of these pet.i.tions is exactly reversed. A fresh basis, or premiss, for them, is supplied. They are still pet.i.tions proper to put forward, if put forward in the consciousness of a fact, hitherto not revealed--that man may do not his own will but the will of Our Father, who is in heaven.

Prayer is thus, at the end, what it was at the beginning, the prayer of a community. But whereas at the beginning the community was the narrow and exclusive community of the family or tribe, at the end it is a community which may include all mankind. Thus, the idea of G.o.d has increased in its extension. In its intension, so to speak, it has deepened: G.o.d is disclosed not as the master and king of his subjects and servants, but as the Father in heaven of his children on earth. It has however not merely deepened, it has been transformed, or rather it is to be approached in a different mood, and therefore is revealed in a new aspect: whereas in the beginning the body of wors.h.i.+ppers, whether it approached its G.o.d with prayer for deliverance from calamities or for material blessings, approached him in order that their desires might be fulfilled; in the end the wors.h.i.+pper is taught that approach is possible only on renunciation of his own desires and on acceptance of G.o.d's will. The centre of religion is transposed: it is no longer man and his desires round which religion is to revolve.

The will of G.o.d is to be the centre, to which man is no longer to gravitate unconsciously but to which he is deliberately to determine himself. As in the solar system the force of gravity is but one, so in the spiritual system that which holds all spiritual beings together is the love which proceeds from G.o.d to his creatures and may increasingly proceed from them to Him. It is the subst.i.tution of the love of G.o.d for the desires of man which makes the new heaven and the new earth.

From the point of view of evolution the important fact is that this new aspect of the idea of G.o.d is not something merely superposed upon the old: if it were simply superposed, it would not be evolved.

Neither is the disclosure, to the soul, of G.o.d as love, evolved from the conception of Him as the being from whom men may seek the fulfilment of their desires. To interpret the process of religious evolution in this way would be to misinterpret it, in exactly the same way as if we were to suppose that, only when the evolution of vegetable life had been carried out to the full in all its forms, did the evolution of animal life begin. Animals are not vegetables carried to a rather higher stage of evolution, any more than vegetables are animals which have relapsed to a lower stage. If then we are to apply the theory of evolution to spiritual life, as well as to bodily life, we must apply it in the same way. We must regard the various forms, in the one case as in the other, as following different lines, and tending in different directions from a common centre, rather than as different and successive sections of one and the same line. Spell no more becomes prayer than vegetables become animals. Impelled by the force of calamity to look in one direction--that of deliverance from pestilence or famine--early man saw, in the idea of G.o.d, a refuge in time of trouble. Moved at a later time by the feeling of grat.i.tude, man found in the idea of G.o.d an object of veneration; and then interpreted his relation as that of a servant to his lord. Whichever way this interpretation was pushed--whether to mean that the servant was to do things pleasing to his lord, in order to gain the fulfilment of his own desires; or to imply that his transgressions stood ever between him and his offended master--further advance in that direction was impossible. A new direction, and therefore a fresh point of departure, was necessary. It was forthcoming in the Christian idea of G.o.d as the heavenly Father. That idea when revealed is seen to have been what was postulated but never attained by religion in its earlier stages. The pet.i.tions for our daily bread, for forgiveness of sins, and for delivery from evil, had as their basis, in pre-Christian religions, man's desire. In Christianity those pet.i.tions are preferred in the conviction that the making of them is in accordance with G.o.d's will and the granting of them in accordance with His love; and that conviction is a normative principle of prayer.

V

THE IDEA AND BEING OF G.o.d

Men thought, spoke and acted for long ages before they began to reflect on the ways in which they did so; and, when they did begin to reflect, it was long before they discovered the principles on which they thought, spoke and acted, or recognised them as the principles on which man must speak, if he is to speak intelligibly; on which, as laws of thought, he must think, if he is to think correctly; and on which, as laws of morality, he must act, if he is to act as he should act.

But though many thousands of years elapsed before he recognised these laws, they were, all the time, the laws on which he had to think, speak and act, and did actually think, speak and act, so far as he did so correctly. When, then, we speak of the evolution of thought, speech and action, we cannot mean that the laws of thought, for instance, were in the beginning different from what they are now, and only gradually came to be what they are at present. That would be just the same as saying that the law of gravitation did not operate in the way described by Newton until Newton formulated the law. The fact is that science has its evolution, just as thought, speech and action have.

Man gradually and with much effort discovers laws of science, as he discovers the laws of thought, speech and action. In neither case does he make the laws; all that he does in either case is to come to recognise that they are there. But the recognition is a process, a slow process, attended by many mistakes and set-backs. And this slow process of the gradual recognition or discovery of fundamental laws, or first principles, is the process in which the evolution of science, as well as the evolution of thought, speech and action, consists. It is the process by which the laws that are at the bottom of man's thought, speech and action, and are fundamental to them, tend to rise to the surface of consciousness.

It is in this same process that the evolution of religion consists. It is the slow process, the gradual recognition, of the fundamental idea of religion--the idea of G.o.d--which tends to rise to the surface of the religious consciousness. Just as laws of thought, speech and action are implied by the very conception of right thought or speech or action, so the idea of G.o.d is implied by the mere conception of religion. It is implied always; it is implicit from the very beginning. It is disclosed gradually and imperfectly. The process of disclosure, which is the evolution of the idea, may, in many instances, be arrested at a stage of very early imperfection, by causes which make further development in that direction impossible; and then, if further progress is to be made, a fresh movement, in a fresh direction must be made. Just as men do not always think correctly, or act rightly, though they tend, in different degrees, to do so; so too, in religion, neither do they always move in the right direction, even if they move at all. They may even deteriorate, at times, in religion, as, at times, they deteriorate in morality. But it is not necessary to infer from this undoubted fact that there are no principles of either morality or religion. We are not led to deny the existence of the laws of logic or of grammar, because they are frequently disregarded by ourselves and others.

The principles, or rather some particular principle, of morality may be absolutely misconceived by a community, at some stage of its history, in such a way that actions of a certain kind are not condemned by it. The inconsistency of judgment and feeling, thus displayed, is not the less inconsistent because it is almost, if not entirely, unconscious. In the same way a community may fail to recognise a principle of religion, or may misinterpret the idea of G.o.d; still the fact that they misinterpret it is proof that they have it--if they had it not, they could not interpret it in different ways.

And the different interpretations are the different ways in which its evolution is carried forward. Its evolution is not in one continuous line, but is radiative from one common centre, and is dispersive. That is the reason why the originators of religious movements, and the founders of religions, consider themselves to be restoring an old state of things, rather than initiating a new one; to be returning to the old religion, rather than starting a new religion. But in point of fact they are not reverting to a bygone stage in the history of religion; they are starting afresh from the fundamental principles of religion. From the central idea of religion, the idea of G.o.d, they move in a direction different from any hitherto followed. Monotheism may in order of time follow upon polytheism, but it is not polytheism under another name, any more than prayer is spell under another name.

It is something very different: it is the negation of polytheism, not another form of it. It strikes at the roots of polytheism; and it does so because it goes back not to polytheism but to that from which polytheism springs, the idea of G.o.d; and starts from it in a direction which leads to a very different manifestation of the idea of G.o.d. And if monotheism displaces polytheism, it does so because it is found by experience to be the more faithful interpretation of that idea of G.o.d which even the polytheist has in his soul. In the same way, and for the same reasons, polytheism is not fetis.h.i.+sm under another name. The G.o.ds of a community are not the fetishes of individuals. The difference between them is not a mere difference of name. Polytheism may, or may not, follow, in order of time, upon fetis.h.i.+sm; but polytheism is not merely a form of fetis.h.i.+sm. The two are different, and largely inconsistent, interpretations, or misinterpretations, of the same fundamental idea of G.o.d. They move in different directions, and are felt by the communities in which they are found, to tend in the direction of very different ends--the one to the good of the community, the other, in its most characteristic manifestations, to the injury of the community. In fetis.h.i.+sm and polytheism we see the radiative, dispersive, force of evolution manifesting itself, just as in polytheism and monotheism. The different lines of evolution radiate in different directions, but those lines, all point to a common centre of dispersion--the idea of G.o.d. But fetis.h.i.+sm, polytheism and monotheism are not different and successive stages of one line of evolution, following the same direction. They are lines of different lengths, moving in different directions, though springing from a common centre--the soul of man. It is because they have a common centre, that man, whichever line he has followed, can fall back upon it and start afresh.

The fact that men fall victims to logical fallacies does not shake our faith in the validity of the principles of reason; nor does the fact that false reasoning abounds the more, the lower we descend in the scale of humanity, lead us to believe that the principles of reason are invalid and non-existent there. Still less do we believe that, because immature minds reason often incorrectly, therefore correct reasoning is for all men an impossibility and a contradiction in terms. And these considerations apply in just the same way to the principles of religion and the idea of G.o.d, as to the principles of reason. Yet we are sometimes invited to believe that the existence of religious fallacies, or fallacious religions, is of itself enough to prove that there is no validity in the principles of religion, no reality in the idea of G.o.d; that because the uncultured races of mankind are the victims of error in religion, there is in religion no truth at all: the religion of civilised mankind consists but of the errors of the savage disguised in civilised garb. So far as this view is supposed to be the outcome of the study of the evolution of religion, it is due probably to the conception of evolution from which it proceeds. It proceeds on the a.s.sumption that the process of evolution exhibits the continuity of one and the same continuous line.

It ignores the radiative, dispersive movement of evolution in different lines; and overlooks the fact that new forms of religion are all re-births, renaissances, and spring not from one another, but from the soul of man, in which is found the idea of G.o.d. It further a.s.sumes not merely that there are errors but that there is no truth whatever in the lowest, or the earliest, forms of religion; and that therefore neither is there any truth in the highest. But this a.s.sumption, if applied to the principles of thought, speech or action, would equally prove thought to be irrational, speech unintelligible, moral action absurd; and evolution would be the process by which this fundamental irrationality, unintelligibility and absurdity was worked out.

Either this is the conclusion, or some means must be sought whereby to distinguish the evolution of religion from the evolution of thought, speech and morals, and to show that--whereas in the case of the latter, evolution is the process in which the principles whereon man should think, speak and act, tend to manifest themselves with increasing clearness--in the case of religion, there is no such progressive revelation, and no first principle, or fundamental idea, which all forms of religion seek to express. But any attempt to show this is hopeless: the science of religion is engaged throughout in ascertaining and comparing the ideas which the various races of men have had of their G.o.ds; and in tracing the evolution of the idea of G.o.d.

The science of religion, however, it may be said, is concerned exclusively with the evolution, and not in the least with the value or validity, of the idea. But neither, we must remember, is it concerned to dispute its value or to deny its validity; and no man can help drawing his own conclusions from the established fact that the idea is to be found wherever man is to be found. If, however, by the idea of G.o.d we mean simply an intellectual idea, merely a verbal proposition, we shall be in danger of drawing erroneous conclusions. The historian of religion, in discussing the idea of G.o.d, its manifestations and its evolution, is bound to express himself in words, and to reduce what he has to say to a series of verbal propositions. Nothing, therefore, is more natural than to imagine that the idea of G.o.d is a verbal, intellectual proposition; and nothing is more misleading. If we start from this misleading notion, then, as words are but words, we may be led to imagine that the idea of G.o.d is nothing more or other than the words: it is mere words. If however this conclusion is, for any reason, displeasing to us, and if we stick to the premiss that the idea of G.o.d is a verbal proposition, then we shall naturally draw a distinction between the idea of G.o.d and the being of G.o.d; and, having thus fixed a great gulf between the idea and the being of G.o.d, we shall be faced with the difficulty of crossing it. We may then feel it to be not merely difficult but impossible to get logically to the other side of the gulf; that is to say, we shall conclude that the being of G.o.d is an inference, but an inference which never can be logically verified: the inference may be a correct or an incorrect inference, but we cannot possibly know which it is. From the idea of G.o.d we can never logically infer His being. Since then no logic will carry us over the chasm we have fixed between the idea and the being of G.o.d, if we are to cross it, we must jump it: we must take the leap of faith, we must believe the pa.s.sage possible, just because it is impossible. And those who take the leap, do land safely--we have their own testimony to that--as safely as, in _King Lear_, Gloucester leaps from the cliff of Dover; and they well may

'Think that the clearest G.o.ds, who make them honours Of men's impossibilities, have preserv'd them.'

But, in Gloucester's case, there was no cliff and no abyss; and, in our case, it may be well to enquire whether the great gulf between the idea and the being of G.o.d has any more reality than that down which Gloucester, precipitating, flung himself. The premiss, that the idea of G.o.d is a mere verbal proposition, may be a premiss as imaginary as that from which Gloucester leaped. If the idea of G.o.d is merely a proposition in words, and if words are but words, then the gulf between idea and being is real. If the being of G.o.d is an inference from the idea of G.o.d, it is merely an inference, and an inference of no logical value. And the same remark holds equally true, if we apply it to the case of any finite personal being: if the being of our neighbours were an inference from the idea we have formed of them, it also would be an inference of no logical value. But, fortunately, their being does not depend on the idea we have formed of them: it partially reveals itself to us in our idea of them, and partially is obscured by it. It is a fact of our experience, or a fact experienced by us. We interpret it, and to some extent misinterpret it, as we do all other facts. If this partly true, and partly false, interpretation is what we mean by the word 'idea,' then it is the idea which is an inference from the being of our neighbour--an inference which can be checked by closer acquaintance--but we do not first have the idea of him, and then wonder whether a being, corresponding more or less to the idea, exists. If we had the idea of our fellow-beings first--before we had experience of them--if it were from the edge of the idea that we had to leap, we might reasonably doubt whether to fling ourselves into such a logical, or rather into such an illogical, abyss. But it is from their being as an experienced fact, that we start; and with the intention of constructing from it as logical an idea as lies within our power. What is inference is not the being but the idea, so far as the idea is thus constructed.

The idea, thus constructed, may be constructed correctly, or incorrectly. Whether it is constructed correctly or incorrectly is determined by further experience. What is important to notice is first that it is only by further experience, personal experience, that we can determine how far the construction we have put upon it is or is not correct; and, next, that so far as the construction we have put upon it is correct, that is to say is confirmed by actual experience, it is thereby shown to be not inference--even though it was reached by a process of inference--but fact. The process of inference may be compared to a path by which we struggle up the face of a cliff: it is the path by which we get there, but it is not the firm ground on which eventually we rest. The path is not that which upholds the cliff; nor is the inference that on which the being of G.o.d rests. The being of G.o.d is not something inferred but something experienced. It is by experience--the experience of ourselves or others--that we find out whether what by inference we were led to expect is really something of which we can--if we will--have experience. And that which is experienced ceases, the moment it is experienced, to be inferential.

The experience is fact: the statement of it in words is truth. But apart from the experience, the words in which it is stated are but words; and, without the experience, the words must remain for ever words and nothing more than words.

If then by the idea of G.o.d we mean the words, in which it is (inadequately) stated, and nothing more, the idea of G.o.d is separated by an impa.s.sable gulf from the being of G.o.d. Further, if we admit that the idea is, by its very nature, and by the very facts of the case, essentially different from the being of G.o.d, then it is of little use to continue to maintain that the being of G.o.d is a fact of human experience. In that case, the supposed fact of experience is reduced to something of which we neither have, nor can have, any idea, or consciousness, whatever. It thereby ceases to be a fact of experience at all. And it is precisely on this a.s.sumption that the being of G.o.d is denied to be a fact of experience--the a.s.sumption that being and idea are separated from one another by an impa.s.sable gulf: the idea we can be conscious of, but of His being we can have no experience. We must therefore ask not whether this gulf is impa.s.sable, but whether it exists at all, or is of the same imaginary nature as that to which Gloucester was led by Edgar.

That there may be beings, of whom we have no idea, is a proposition which it is impossible to disprove. Such beings would be _ex hypothesi_ no part of our experience; and if G.o.d were such a being, man would have no experience of Him. And, having no experience of Him, man could have no idea of Him. But the experience man has, of those beings whom he knows, is an experience in which idea and being are given together.

Even if in thought we attend to one rather than to the other of the two aspects, the idea is still the idea of the being; and the being is still the being of the idea. So far from there being an impa.s.sable gulf between the two, the two are inseparable, in the moment of actual experience. It is in moments of reflection that they appear separable and separate, for the memory remains, when the actual experience has ceased. We have then only to call the memory the idea, and then the idea, in this use of the word, is as essentially different from that of which it is said to be the idea, as the memory of a being or thing is from the being or thing itself. If we put the memory into words, and p.r.o.nounce those words to another, we communicate to him what we remember of our experience (modified--perhaps transmogrified--by our reflections upon it) but we do not communicate the actual experience, simply because we cannot. What we communicate may lead him to actual experience for himself; but it is not itself the experience. The memory may give rise, in ourselves or in others to whom we communicate, to expectation and antic.i.p.ation; and the expectation is the more likely to be realised, the less the memory has been transmogrified by reflection. But, both the memory and the antic.i.p.ation are clearly different from actual experience. It is only when they are confused with one aspect of the actual experience--that which we have called the idea--that the idea is supposed to be detachable from the being of whom we have actual experience. The idea is part of the experience; the memory obviously is not.

If then it be said that the being of G.o.d is always an inference and is never anything more, the reply is that the being of anything whatever that is remembered or expected is, in the moment of memory or of antic.i.p.ation, inferential; but, in the moment of actual experience, it is not inferred--it is experienced. And what is experienced is, and from the beginning has always been, in religions of the lower as well as of the higher culture, at once the being and the idea of G.o.d.