The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Thomas Henry Huxley (reading the story of the TXT) 📗

the Israelitic ideas of the Messiah and of sacrificial atonement coalesce with one another and with the embodiment of the Logos in Jesus, until the apotheosis of the Son of man is almost, or quite, effected. The history of Christian dogma, from Justin to Athanasius, is a record of continual progress in the same direction, until the fair body of religion, revealed in almost naked purity by the prophets, is once more hidden under a new accumulation of dogmas and of ritual practices of which the primitive Nazarene knew nothing; and which he would probably have regarded as blasphemous if he could have been made to understand them.

 

As, century after century, the ages roll on, polytheism comes back under the disguise of Mariolatry and the adoration of saints; image-worship becomes as rampant as in old Egypt; adoration of relics takes the place of the old fetish-worship; the virtues of the ephod pale before those of holy coats and handkerchiefs; shrines and calvaries make up for the loss of the ark and of the high places; and even the lustral fluid of paganism is replaced by holy water at the porches of the temples. A touching ceremony—the common meal originally eaten in pious memory of a loved teacher—becomes metamorphosed into a flesh-and-blood sacrifice, supposed to possess exactly that redeeming virtue which the prophets denied to the flesh-and-blood sacrifices of their day; while the minute observance of ritual is raised to a degree of punctilious refinement which Levitical legislators might envy. And with the growth of this theology, grew its inevitable concomitant, the belief in evil spirits, in possession, in sorcery, in charms and omens, until the Christians of the twelfth century after our era were sunk in more debased and brutal superstitions than are recorded of the Israelites in the twelfth century before it.

 

The greatest men of the Middle Ages are unable to escape the infection. Dante’s “Inferno” would be revolting if it were not so often sublime, so often exquisitely tender. The hideous pictures which cover a vast space on the south wall of the Campo Santo of Pisa convey information, as terrible as it is indisputable, of the theological conceptions of Dante’s countrymen in the fourteenth century, whose eyes were addressed by the painters of those disgusting scenes, and whose approbation they knew how to win. A candid Mexican of the time of Cortez, could he have seen this Christian burial-place, would have taken it for an appropriately adorned Teocalli.

The professed disciple of the God of justice and of mercy might there gloat over the sufferings of his fellowmen depicted as undergoing every extremity of atrocious and sanguinary torture to all eternity, for theological errors no less than for moral delinquencies; while, in the central figure of Satan,<35>

occupied in champing up souls in his capacious and well-toothed jaws, to void them again for the purpose of undergoing fresh suffering, we have the counterpart of the strange Polynesian and Egyptian dogma that there were certain gods who employed themselves in devouring the ghostly flesh of the Spirits of the dead. But in justice to the Polynesians, it must be recollected that, after three such operations, they thought the soul was purified and happy. In the view of the Christian theologian the operation was only a preparation for new tortures continued for ever and aye.

 

With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recommenced, and arrived at a temporary resting-place in the confessions of the various reformed Protestant sects in the sixteenth century; almost all of which, as soon as they were strong enough, began to persecute those who carried criticism beyond their own limit. But the movement was not arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by Galileo, by Hobbes, by Descartes, and especially by Spinoza, in the seventeenth century; by the English Freethinkers, by Rousseau, by the French Encyclopaedists, and by the German Rationalists, among whom Lessing stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century, until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more predominating over false science. Once more ethics and theology are parting company.

 

It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary concomitant, a constant elevation of the standard of veracity, the end of the evolution of theology will be like its beginning—it will cease to have any relation to ethics. I suppose that, so long as the human mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual conceptions. The science of the present day is as full of this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience of ignorant ages.

The difference is that the philosopher who is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality. So, it may be, that the majority of mankind may find the practice of morality made easier by the use of theological symbols. And unless these are converted from symbols into idols, I do not see that science has anything to say to the practice, except to give an occasional warning of its dangers. But, when such symbols are dealt with as real existences, I think the highest duty which is laid upon men of science is to show that these dogmatic idols have no greater value than the fabrications of men’s hands, the stocks and the stones, which they have replaced.

 

FOOTNOTES

 

(1) Even the most sturdy believers in the popular theory that the proper or titular names attached to the books of the Bible are those of their authors will hardly be prepared to maintain that Jephthah, Gideon, and their colleagues wrote the book of Judges. Nor is it easily admissible that Samuel wrote the two books which pass under his name, one of which deals entirely with events which took place after his death. In fact, no one knows who wrote either Judges or Samuel, nor when, within the range of 100 years, their present form was given to these books.

 

(2) My citations are taken from the Revised Version, but for Lord and God I have substituted Jahveh and Elohim.

 

(3) I need hardly say that I depend upon authoritative Biblical critics, whenever a question of interpretation of the text arises. As Reuss appears to me to be one of the most learned, acute, and fair-minded of those whose works I have studied, I have made most use of the commentary and dissertations in his splendid French edition of the Bible. But I have also had recourse to the works of Dillman, Kalisch, Kuenen, Thenius, Tuch, and others, in cases in which another opinion seemed desirable.

 

(4) See “Divination,” by Hazoral, <i>Journal of Anthropology,</i> Bombay, vol. i. No. 1.

 

(5) See, for example, the message of Jephthah to the King of the Ammonites: “So now Jahveh, the Elohim of Israel, hath dispossessed the Amorites from before his people Israel, and shouldest thou possess them? Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh, thy Elohim, giveth thee to possess?” (Jud. xi. 23, 24).

For Jephthah, Chemosh is obviously as real a personage as Jahveh.

 

(6) For example: “My oblation, my food for my offerings made by fire, of a sweet savour to me, shall ye observe to offer unto me in their due season” (Num. xxviii. 2).

 

(7) In 2 Samuel xv. 27 David says to Zadok the priest, “Art thou not a seer?” and Gad is called David’s seer.

 

(8) This would at first appear to be inconsistent with the use of the word “prophetess” for Deborah. But it does not follow because the writer of Judges applies the name to Deborah that it was used in her day.

 

(9) Samuel tells the cook, “Bring the potion which I gave thee, of which I said to thee, Set it by thee.” It was therefore Samuel’s to give. “And the cook took up the thigh (or shoulder) and that which was upon it and set it before Saul.” But, in the Levitical regulations, it is the thigh (or shoulder) which becomes the priest’s own property. “And the right thigh (or shoulder) shall ye give unto the priest for an heave-offering,”

which is given along with the wave breast “unto Aaron the priest and unto his sons as a due for ever from the children of Israel”

(Lev. vii. 31-34). Reuss writes on this passage: “La cuisse n’est point agitee, mais simplement <i>prelevee</i> sur ce que les convives mangeront.”

 

(10) See, for example, Elkanah’s sacrifice, 1 Sam. i. 3-9.

 

(11) The ghost was not supposed to be capable of devouring the gross material substance of the offering; but his vaporous body appropriated the smoke of the burnt sacrifice, the visible and odorous exhalations of other offerings. The blood of the victim was particularly useful because it was thought to be the special seat of its soul or life. A West African negro replied to an European sceptic: “Of course, the spirit cannot eat corporeal food, but he extracts its spiritual part, and, as we see, leaves the material part behind” (Lippert, <i>Seelencult,</i> p. 16).

 

(12) It is further well worth consideration whether indications of former ancestor-worship are not to be found in the singular weight attached to the veneration of parents in the fourth commandment. It is the only positive commandment, in addition to those respecting the Deity and that concerning the Sabbath, and the penalties for infringing it were of the same character.

In China, a corresponding reverence for parents is part and parcel of ancestor-worship; so in ancient Rome and in Greece (where parents were even called [secondary and earthly]). The fifth commandment, as it stands, would be an excellent compromise between ancestor-worship and monotheism. The larger hereditary share allotted by Israelitic law to the eldest son reminds one of the privileges attached to primogeniture in ancient Rome, which were closely connected with ancestor-worship. There is a good deal to be said in favour of the speculation that the ark of the covenant may have been a relic of ancestor-worship; but that topic is too large to be dealt with incidentally in this place

 

(13) “The Scientific Aspects of Positivism,” <i>Fortnightly Review,</i> 1869, republished in <i>Lay Sermons.</i>

 

(14) OEuvres de Bossuet, ed. 1808, t. xxxv. p. 282.

 

(15) I should like further to add the expression of my indebtedness to two works by Herr Julius Lippert, <i>Der Seelencult in seinen Beziehungen zur alt-hebraischen Religion</i> and <i>Die Religionen der europaischen Culturvolker,</i> both pubished in 1881. I have found them full of valuable suggestions.

 

(16) See among others the remarkable work of Fustel de Coulanges, <i>La Cite antique,</i> in which the social importance of the old Roman ancestor-worship is brought out with great clearness.

 

(17) Supposed to be “the finer or more aeriform part of the body,” standing in “the same relation to the body as the perfume and the more essential qualities of a flower do to the more solid substances” (Mariner, vol. ii. p. 127).

 

(18) A kind of “clients” in the Roman sense.

 

(19) It is worthy of remark that [Greek] among the Greeks, and <i>Deus</i> among the Romans, had the same wide signification.

The <i>dii manes</i> were ghosts of ancestors=Atuas of the family.

 

(20)