CHAPTER VI
NATIONAL RELIGION
We now leave behind us the beliefs and practices of savage and barbarous tribes, and turn to those of mighty empires. The gulf which lies between these two parts of our subject is obviously a wide one; and in many instances there is no bridge by which the student can pass from one to the other. Often it is a matter of inference rather than of direct proof that the great systems are built out of the materials accumulated, as we have seen, in the prehistoric period. But the inference is sufficiently strong to rest upon; in some cases we are able to see quite clearly how the religion of the empire arose by an uninterrupted growth out of that of the tribe; and in the cases where this cannot be so fully made out, we yet judge that the result came about in a similar way. We pause therefore at this point to ask what is the nature of the transition at which we have arrived, or, in other words, what constitutes the difference between the primitive and the later religions? The difference is probably not one of magnitude only; it consists not merely in the fact that the religion of the empire is that of a much larger number of people than that of the tribe; there is a difference in character as well as in dimensions. With a view to the examination of this point it will be found convenient to consider some of the proposed classifications of religions, as most of these, though for different reasons, place the religions of the early world in a different category from those known to us historically.
The old-fashioned Classification of Religions was that of the true and the false. This our principle forbids us to accept, since we regard the various faiths of the world as stages in the development of religion, and therefore all relatively true.
Another division which has done good service is that into natural and revealed religion. By natural religion has generally been understood such religion as human reason could attain to without supernatural aid. But this description does not apply to any religious system that ever prevailed largely in any country; the actual religions have all been the work of custom and age-long tradition, not of the deliberate operation of reason. Natural religion therefore is a term which is of no use to us in classification; since none of the actual religions which we have to study answers to that title. Nor is revealed religion a term we can conveniently use in such a work as this. Many religions claim to be the result of revelation, but few make it at the outset of their career. The title tells us nothing about the original character of a religion, but only that at some period in its career the claim was made for it that its origin was supernatural. If we grouped the revealed religions together we might find that the members of the group had no similarity to each other beyond the accidental circumstance that the claim of revelation had been made for them. Besides, science cannot possibly take the revealed character of any religion for granted, but must examine each such faith to see if its growth cannot be accounted for without that assumption.
The term "natural" religion has, however, other meanings than that just mentioned, and some of these we may find to be of more service. It is proposed to divide religions into "natural" and "positive," or into those which have grown up and those which have been founded. The earlier religions were not due to the personal action of outstanding individuals (at least if they were, as surely they must have been in part, the individuals and their struggles are unrecorded), but were the work of unconscious growth, and were produced by forces, which, as they were at work in every part of the early world, may be called natural. These religions do not appeal to the authority of any founder, but are borne forward by custom and tradition. Some of the later systems, on the contrary, bear the names of their founders, and are said to have been introduced into the world at a certain time and place. Their beginning is fixed, and they have a body of beliefs and practices which belong to their original constitution, and possess authority for all subsequent generations of believers.
This classification promises well at first, but it is difficult to apply it; some religions pass imperceptibly from the stage of custom to that of statute, and in many religions both elements are so largely present that it is difficult to strike the balance between them. We are led to the conclusion that the real difference between the earlier and the later religions is a more vital one than any of these classifications would indicate. The authority and the positive character of the later systems is a symptom of the change which has produced them, but the change itself lies deeper. The higher form of religion is due to a great step which has been taken in civilisation; it is one of the features of the advance of society to a new stage.
Rise of National Religion.—It is an immense step in human progress when a set of barbarous tribes unite to form a nation. Under the strong hand of some chief or under the pressure of some great necessity, they give up the isolation which is both the weakness and the strength of the tribal state of society, they choose some strong place for their centre, they submit to a common government, and while still remembering their separate tribal traditions and usages, they learn to act as members of a greater community than the tribe. This is the beginning of civilisation proper. Law takes the place of custom; the state undertakes to punish crime, and private vengeance is discouraged; the state also undertakes the protection of the weak, so that humane sentiment appears, and a security is engendered in which the arts and sciences can spring up and flourish.
When this takes place a new type of religion also makes its appearance. While each of the tribes may long retain its own gods, and its peculiar rites, some one god, perhaps the god of the strongest tribe, assumes a higher position than the rest; his worship becomes the central religion of the community, round which the other worships arrange themselves by degrees, until there comes to be a system embracing them all, but itself possessing a new character. In this way a national religion comes into existence. The details of this process are in every case beyond our observation. It is not perhaps for centuries after the national religion has come into operation, that reflection is turned towards it; not till the art of writing has come to some perfection is it described and formulated and made statutory; and by that time all accurate memory of its beginnings has faded away, and its origin is explained instead by a set of legends. But though its beginnings, like all beginnings, are obscure, the national religion is there. It has its history; the great man who brought the tribes together, or who first devised for them a higher form of worship, is remembered as its founder; the foundation is ascribed to the inspiration of the chief god himself; its sacred forms are written down and obtain the force of divine laws, the will of the deity is a thing clearly known and expressed in positive terms.
It is not asserted that this description will apply to the origin of all the national religions; the character and the circumstances of one nation differ from those of another, and it need not be supposed that they all reached their state worships in the same way. Some religions have become national by conquest rather than growth; while some which may truly be called national never attained to any national organisation. The process we have described, however, may be regarded as the typical one for the rise of a national out of tribal religions, and indicates to us what we may regard as the real and substantial difference between the stage with which we have been occupied and that to which we are now to turn. All other differences between the prehistoric and the historical religions may be traced to this one. Before the religion of a nation has systematised its doctrine and its ritual so as to merit the name of positive, before it has provided itself with a detailed ritual or a fixed creed, or a regular priesthood, or a set of sacred books, the momentous step has already been taken, the new form of religious consciousness has appeared. Men have begun to believe not only in the tribal but in the national god or gods, and a national religion has come into existence.
The advance from tribal to national worship is one of the most momentous in the whole history of religion. The nature of the change involved in it may be summed up as follows.
1. Men obtain a Greater God than they had before. Formerly a man believed in the god of his tribe, one deity among many, as his tribe was one among many, each having its own god; but now he comes to know a god who is higher than the other tribal gods, as the king whom the tribes have united to obey is greater than the tribal chiefs. The god stands at a greater distance than before from the worshipper; familiarity is lessened, and religion becomes capable of a deeper reverence and adoration. Although the worship of the tribal god is still kept up, yet if the new-born national consciousness is strong, the national form of religion rather than the tribal will determine the religious sentiment of the individual.
2. New Social Bond.—The nature of the social force exerted by religion is altogether changed. In tribal religion the tie of the worshippers both to their god and to each other is that of blood; the god is their common lineal ancestor, whose blood is in the veins of all the tribesmen. The social bond supplied by such a religion is limited to the members of the tribe; a man's fellow-tribesmen are his brothers, but all other men are his enemies; with them he is at war as his god is. Social duty is a matter of blood relationship, and extends only to the kindred. When a national religion is arrived at, a social obligation of a new kind will evidently make its appearance. The national god is related by blood to only one of the tribes composing the nation; the bond between him and the other tribes must be of another nature. He has conquered their gods or they have voluntarily accepted him as their chief god; in any case it is not the tie of blood that binds them to him, but some more ideal tie, like that between a king and his subjects, or between a patron and his clients. And they now have a religious connection also with men who are not their kindred. The national worship is inconsistent with the gross materialism of the system of kinship, and places instead of it the belief in a god further above the world, and therefore more spiritual, and obligations to men which, as they are not derived from a common blood, are somewhat more purely moral.
3. A Better God.—The new god of the nation as he is higher above the world is a being of higher and better character. He belongs to all the tribes, and is not the mere partisan of any; like the king, he is above tribal jealousies, and is interested in checking the violence of all, and securing justice to all. He may be appealed to by those who have suffered violence and who have no earthly helper; and thus he tends to become an ideal of justice and fatherly kindness, and to reflect in the world above the sentiments springing up in the world below, in favour of the repression of violence and the administration of even-handed justice.
In these directions the religion of the nation tends to rise above that of the tribe. The tribal worships may continue almost as they were, the tribal gods may still be worshipped, the tribal jealousies and conflicts still be carried on in spite of the new union, and all the superstitions of early religion may long survive; yet a new religious force has appeared which will in time produce a complete new system. The true principle of classification, therefore, must be drawn from the difference between tribal and national religion, as this is the most vital difference, and that from which all the others which we mentioned may be derived.
The transition thus sketched took place at widely different periods in different parts of the world; it began early and has taken place even in modern times, while very many tribes in various parts of the globe have not yet arrived at it. It is a transition of which it is manifestly impossible to exhibit the detail; in most cases the detail is not known, and it were a profitless task to trace how primitive religions met, united or remained apart, and how their crossings in one case led to a national religion, and in many others led to no such result. Much, no doubt, is to be found on such points in special works, and much still remains to be discovered. Various instances of the formation of national religions will meet us in our subsequent chapters.
The Inca Religion.—We give, however, at this point an example of the transition we have described, drawn from a quarter remote from the great movements of history, and in which the facts are plain and uncontested. Of the two great civilised communities of the New World, discovered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, Mexico presents a worship compounded of many elements, which, along with high and lofty morality and great magnificence of ritual, yet retains an extraordinary amount of cruelty and savage horror. In Peru, however, we find a state religion which superseded savage cults still remembered in the country, and from the Royal Commentaries of the Incas, written by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in the beginning of the seventeenth century,1 we are able to describe the religion of Peru both before and after the Inca reformation.
1 Printed by the Hakluyt Society.
"Before the Incas," this writer tells us, "each province, each nation, and each house had its own gods, different from one another, for they thought that a stranger's god could not attend to them but only their own." They worshipped all manner of deities; of these are mentioned herbs, plants, flowers, all kinds of trees, high hills, great rocks, and the chinks in them; caves, pebbles, emeralds. They also worshipped animals; the tiger, the lion, and the bear for their fierceness, and the monkey for his cunning; these they did not kill, but went down on the ground to worship them and would even suffer themselves to be devoured by them, since they regarded these animals as their own ancestors. All kinds of animals they treated in this way; there was not an animal, how filthy and vile soever, so the quaint words tell us, they did not look on as a god. Other Indians, again, worshipped things from which they derived benefit, such as great fountains and rivers; some worshipped the earth, and called it mother, because it yielded their fruits; some the sea, calling it Mamacocha; and a great number of other objects of adoration are mentioned. They sacrificed animals and maize, but also men and women, and these not only captives taken in war but also their own children, smearing the idol with the blood. (In other quarters of the globe this is a symbolic act showing that the idol and the worshippers all partake in the same life.) Some tribes were fiercer than others, and practised cannibalism more extensively. They were also well provided with sorcerers and witches.
All this the Incas altered. They were a princely family, regarding whose origin and accession to power various legends are told; the god they worshipped was the sun, and they considered and called themselves the children of the sun. Their father the sun, they said, had sent their forefathers to teach the tribes various things they very much needed to learn; to cultivate the fields, to breed flocks, to live in peace, to respect the wives and daughters of others, and to have no more than one wife. The Incas knew better, it was said, than the rest how to choose a god, and they declared that men should worship the sun, who gave light and heat and made things grow; they should be grateful for his benefits, and he would reward them if they were obedient. The Indians accordingly took the sun for their god "without father or brothers"; they considered the moon to be his sister and wife, but did not worship her. Besides this, we hear the Incas sought a supreme god, and called him "Pachacamac," that is "soul of the world." This being gave life to the world and supported it, but they did not build temples to him or offer him any sacrifice; they worshipped him in their hearts as an unknown god.
The practice of the Inca religion as described to us by several Spanish writers falls a good deal short of this doctrine. Many beings were worshipped besides the sun; a number of prayers were addressed to the Creator and the sun and thunder. Many sacred objects also were adored, such as embalmed bodies of ancestors and various idols. They practised all kinds of magic, and, worst of all, many boys and girls were offered in sacrifice, even before the Incas and on great public occasions. The reformation of the Incas is evidently not complete; if it had not been arrested by the arrival of the Spaniards it may be that the purifying agency of the new religion would have found much still to do. Enough, however, is seen to afford strong confirmation of the principle that religion gains infinitely in elevation when a national worship appears. The Incas were no doubt the heads of a tribe which had conquered others, and imposed its religion on them. The lesser conquered worships do not die out at once, but continue along with the central one. But the latter expresses the national spirit and aspirations; and, as settled life fosters the growth of intelligence and of public spirit, the central worship must more and more supersede the others, while itself casting off its superstitious and backward elements and becoming reasonable and elevating.
It will be convenient to indicate at this stage the further line of study to be followed in this volume. As it is our aim to trace, however inadequately, the growth of the religion of the world as a whole, it is necessary that we should confine ourselves to those parts of religious history which lie in the line of that growth, or which serve in a conspicuous manner to illustrate the principles according to which it has taken place. It is by no means our purpose to give an account of all the religions of the world, nor do we seek to form a complete magazine of the curious phenomena with which this vast field of study is in every part so well supplied. If we have interposed the foregoing brief account of the religion of the Incas, it is not because of its own intrinsic importance, but because it supplies within so brief a compass such an apt example of that process which occurs so often in the growth of religion, by which the unorganised rites of a multitude of clans and families give way when the nation comes into being, to the higher and better religion of the state. In the same way the great religions of which we must next speak have, no doubt, only a loose connection with the central line of the world's religious progress. No work professing to deal ever so cursorily with our subject could omit to deal with the religion of China nor with that of Egypt; yet neither of these faiths perhaps has permanently enriched the religious consciousness of mankind. The religion of Babylonia, with which each of these is connected, was also of isolated and independent growth, and is far away from us both in time and in historical connection. Like great and solitary mountains of ancient formation, each on a continent distant from ours, these faiths attract us not because we depend on them, but because they are interesting in themselves. It was out of the same jungle of primitive beliefs and rites, out of which our own religion has at length grown, that each of these lifted its head to such heights as it attained.
After disposing of these great systems we come to the developments, much later in point of time, which have led to the highest religion yet attained. And here two great races or groups of peoples have to be considered, each in its own way singularly gifted and each contributing in a distinctive manner to the growth of religion. These are the Semitic and the Indo-European families. Under each of these heads we find several well-marked religions; and the nature of the case itself points out our further procedure. Taking up first the Semitic group,—including Islam,—since this part of the subject lies at a greater distance from ourselves, we shall inquire whether there is any common element in the various religions it comprises, or, in other words, if there is a Semitic religion which may be regarded as the origin from which the Semitic religions alike sprang, and which gave them a common character; and we shall then proceed to discuss the Semitic religions each by itself. We shall then discuss the common belief of the Aryans, and go on to the religions of the more important Aryan nations. Our last chapters will deal with Christianity and will point out the nature of development which our study as a whole may have taught us to recognise in the religion of mankind.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
On the classification of Religions see Tiele's article on "Religion" in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition.
Alb. Reville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Native Religions of Mexico and Peru. Hibbert Lectures, 1884.
De la Saussaye, Third Edition, pp. 5-16, gives a good conspectus of the various classifications which have been proposed.
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