by Revilo P. Oliver
Professor of the Classics, Retired; University of Illinois, Urbana
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: RELIGION
Chapter 2: THE TRIPLE FUNCTION
Chapter 3: MONOTHEISM
Chapter 4: THEODICY
Chapter 5: RITUAL AND ARYAN WORSHIP
Chapter 6: SHAMANS
Chapter 7: LYING FOR THE LORD
Chapter 8: THEOKTONY
Chapter 9: ZOROASTER
Chapter 10: ZOROASTER’S CREATION
Chapter 11: THE GREAT ÜBERWERTUNG, PSYCHIC MAGIC, GOD’S HOUSE, BUDDHISM AND TAPAS
Chapter 12: AHURA MAZDA
Chapter 13: LATER ZOROASTRIANISM
INTRODUCTION
OF THE MANY PROBLEMS that confront us today, none is more vexing than that of the relation of Christianity to Western Civilization. None, certainly, causes more acrimonious controversy and internecine hostility between the members of the race which created that civilization. None more thoroughly counteracts their common interest in its preservation and renders them impotent and helpless. And that is not remarkable: what is in question is the essential nature of our civilization, and if there is no agreement about that, there can be no effective agreement on other questions.Around 1910, Georges Matisse, in Les Ruines de l’Idée de Dieu,* predicted that by 1960, at the very latest, the only churches left in the civilized world would be the ones that were preserved as museum pieces for their architectural beauty or historical associations. The scientific and historical knowledge accumulated by our race had rendered belief in supernatural beings impossible for cultivated men, and universal education would speedily destroy the credulity of the masses. "We have climbed out of the dead end of the dungeon into which Christianity cast us. The man of today walks in the open air and the daylight. He has won confidence in himself."
* Paris, Mercure de France, s.a. All translations from foreign languages in these pages are mine, unless otherwise noted.
In 1980, especially in the United States, there was a massive "upsurge" of Christianity. In November, one of America’s many bawling evangelists, Oral Roberts, had an interview with Jesus and took the opportunity to observe that Jesus is nine hundred feet tall. That datum so impressed his followers that within two weeks, it is said, they supplied him with an extra $5,000,000 to supplement the $45,000,000 they give him annually. A little earlier, another holy man, Don Stewart, reportedly made the big time in evangelism (i.e., an annual take of more than $10,000,000) by distributing to his votaries snippets of his underwear, which True Believers put under their pillows, since the bits of cloth that had been in contact with his flesh had absorbed the mana of his holiness. And in the quadrennial popularity contest to determine which actor was to have the star role in the White House, all three of the presidential candidates deemed it expedient to announce that they had "got Jesus" and been "born again."
More significantly, in both England and the United States, a considerable number of men who have received enough technical training to be called scientists, have been hired or inspired to prove the authenticity of the Holy Shroud of Turin by "scientific" proof that the coarse cloth was discolored by supernatural means, the mana of divinity. Some of these scientists, it is true, claim that the vague picture was formed on the fabric because the body of the deceased god was highly radio-active and emitted radiation of an intensity comparable to that produced by the explosion of an atomic bomb at Hiroshima, but obviously only a very supernatural force could have charged the cells of an organic body with such enormous and deadly energy. In many American colleges, professors of reputable academic subjects are teaching courses to demonstrate that human beings cannot be the product of the biological process of evolution, but must have been specially designed and manufactured by a god in a way that they more or less explicitly identify with the well-known account of the descent of mankind from Adam and his spare rib. The divinity school of Emory University (founded in 1836) offers, for the edification of Methodist ministers, a graduate seminar in the theology of America’s most distinguished automobile thief and rapist, a Black preacher named King, and, presumably for such exemplary Christianity, was rewarded with a gift of $100,000,000, the largest private benefaction on record.
The United States has always been noted for the multiplicity and fanaticism of its Christian sects, but on a much smaller scale a Christian "outreach" (to use the evangelical term) for souls and funds may be observed in several countries of Europe, even including, it is said, some in Soviet territory. And one wonders whether a survey in England today would maintain the statistics that permitted Professor A. N. Whitehead to conclude, in 1942, that "far less than one-fifth of the population are in any sense Christians today." I hear that the fraction would have to be significantly increased, and that Roman Catholicism, more than other sects, is constantly attracting a significant number of "converts." But the number of persons who attend churches or profess to believe some one of the numerous Christian doctrines is relatively unimportant. The domestic and foreign policies of all the nations of the Western world are based on ideas that their populations as a whole take for granted and accept without reflection or consideration – ideas which are obviously, though sometimes not explicitly, derived from Christian theology and are, so to speak, a residue of the ages when our race was, not inaccurately, called Christendom.
Matisse was egregiously wrong. His spectacular error, however, was a projection logically made from the evidence available to him in 1910, when he concluded that "the White race has conquered the whole world and slain the Dragon [of superstition]. And the race had to do it. If the human mind had been incapable of that achievement, the most difficult of all it’s achievements, it would have been doomed. Intellect would have ended in failure on this planet. It was a question of the life or death of intelligence... The indisputable proof of the innately superior power of the European mind today is atheism."
Matisse, of course, did not foresee the catastrophe of 1914 or sense the subterranean and occult forces that were secretly in operation even in 1910 to precipitate, not just another European war to alter the balance of power on the Continent, but a war that those forces converted into a universal disaster, even more destructive of rationality than of property and life, which may prove to have been the beginning of the end for our civilization and race. The question that Matisse so clearly posed therefore remains, not altered by the calamities he could not foresee, but instead now made even more vital and urgent.
The question is obviously, perhaps fatally, divisive, but it cannot be evaded or ignored. The question is one to which even reticence is an answer; and hypocrisy is demoralizing. I have therefore undertaken the exacting and almost impossible task of presenting in these pages an objective and dispassionate summary of the problem, condensing into a few pages what would more properly be the substance of several volumes, themselves compendious. I have necessarily refrained from debating side issues and from straying into scholarly controversies. I have tried to limit myself to skeletal essentials of what may with confidence be regarded as established fact and logical inference therefrom, and I assume that I need not tell intelligent readers that the subject is one on which it is flatly impossible to make any statement whatsoever that is not contradicted somewhere in the horrendous tonnage of printed paper on the shelves of even a mediocre library.*
* I have restricted the documentary notes to a bare minimum, limited to points that may not generally be matters of common knowledge. So far as possible, I have cited only works available in English, selecting from these the one or two that give, so far as I know, the most succinct and perspicuous treatment of the given topic.
To view our problem clearly, we must begin with its beginnings and indicate, as summarily as possible, its prehistoric origins, limiting ourselves to matters directly relevant to our own race, with which alone we need have a rational concern. And since Indo-European is best reserved for use as a linguistic term, and such words as Nordic and Celtic are too restrictive as designations of variations within our species, we shall use the only available word in general use that designates our race as a whole, although the Jews have forbidden us to use it. Aryan, furthermore, has the advantage that it is not a geographic term, and while some may think it immodest to describe ourselves as arya, ‘noble,’ that word does indicate a range of moral concepts for which our race seems to have instinctively a peculiar and characteristic respect, which differentiates it from other races as sharply as do its physical traits, and, like them, more or less conspicuously, depending on the particular contrast that is made. It is unfortunate that in the present state of knowledge we cannot trace our species, the Aryans, to the species of Homo erectus or Homo habilis from which it is descended.
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RELIGION
RELIGION, which we may define as a belief in the existence of praeter-human and supernatural beings, is a phenomenon limited to several human species, since it depends on rudimentary powers of reason and relatively developed powers of imagination. We may agree with Xenophanes that if oxen or horses or lions conceived of gods, each species would, like men, create its gods in its own image, but there is no slightest reason for supposing that mammals other than man have any conception of superior beings other than an instinctive recognition of predatory species that can prey on them and an instinctive suspicion of whatever is unfamiliar and may therefore be dangerous.
Anatole France, to be sure, identified dogs as religious animals, and he had a basis for doing so. A dog does venerate his master as a being with powers vastly superior to his own. He worships his god in his own way, seeking to conciliate his favor with propitiatory motions and caresses, learning to obey his wishes and whims, and even having a sense of sin when he knows that he has yielded to a temptation to do something that will displease his deity. A dog tries to appease his god’s anger, as men do, by humility and fawning and he will fight for his god, even at the risk of his own life. But we must not carry France’s analogy too far. The dog’s god is a living being, who normally feeds his canine worshipper, punishes him physically on occasion, and, if worthy of devotion, pets him affectionately. No dog ever worshipped a being that he could not see, hear, smell, and touch.
Eugène Marais, whose scientific investigations have at last been accorded the honor they long deserved, made observations of the highest importance for anthropological studies. He discovered that baboons collectively evince a degree of intelligence that, in certain respects, surpasses that of the apes that are usually classified as anthropoid, and, despite their lack of an articulated language, they may favorably be compared to the more primitive species that are classified as human. The chacmas whom Marais so patiently observed undoubtedly have rudimentary powers of reason, to which, indeed, they owe their survival in an environment that became overwhelmingly hostile when farmers and government undertook to exterminate them. In his articles for the general public, which were collected and translated under the title, My Friends, the Baboons (London, 1939), Marais describes a highly significant incident that occurred during his prolonged observation of a band of baboons that had, after long observation, come to accept him and his colleague as not hostile members of a species they justly feared. When many of the infant baboons were smitten by an epidemic malady, the elders of the band, its oligarchs, solicited human help and found a way to show that they believed or hoped that kindly members of our species, which, they knew by experience, had the power to inflict death miraculously with a rifle, also had the miraculous power to preserve from death beings they chose to protect. And at least one of the female baboons, mother of a dead infant, unmistakably believed or hoped that men had the power to resurrect the dead and restore them to life.
If the pathetic episode is reported correctly, the chacmas have something of the power of imagination that is requisite for religiosity. But we should not call them religious. They attributed to a mammalian species, which they knew to have powers incomprehensible to them, a power the species did not have. Baboons do fear night and darkness, but if they give a shape to what they fear, they probably think of it as a leopard. There is no evidence to suggest that they have even the most rudimentary notion of gods. No more can be said of some species of anthropoids that are classified as human because they have an articulate, though rudimentary, language. Anthropologists who had opportunities to observe those species before their native consciousness had been much corrupted by "missionaries" or by contact with higher races (which usually excites an almost simian imitativeness), report that the dim consciousness of those species, although possessing certain animal instincts and faculties that are weak or wanting in our race, is strictly animistic, attributing, so far as we can tell, the efficacy of a spear to some power inherent in the spear itself, and being unable to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. The creatures live in a world of perpetual mystery, incapable of perceiving a relation between cause and effect. Scrupulous observation has shown that the Arunta and other tribes of Australoids, admittedly the lowest species that is classified as human, propagated themselves for at least fifty thousand years without even guessing that there might be some causal relationship between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. For aught we know to the contrary, baboons may have more native intelligence. Obviously, where nothing is either natural or supernatural, there can be no concept that could be called religious.
Such facts should make us chary of trying to reconstruct the unknown pre-history of our race from observation of the primitive races that have survived to our own time. They, like the primitive coelacanth, which has survived much longer, may represent the dead ends of an evolutionary process that can go no farther. The work of Frobenius, best known in the English translation entitled The Childhood of Man(London, 1909), encouraged, more by its title than its content, an assumption once generally held as a residue of Christian doctrine. When the dogma that all human beings were the progeny of Adam and his spare rib could no longer be maintained, it was, as happens with all cultural residues, modified as little as possible, and it was replaced with the notion of human descent from a single hypothetical ancestral family. Now,that Dr. Carleton Coon, in his Origin of Races (New York, 1962), has shown, as conclusively as the exiguous data permit, that the five primary races owe their diversity to the differences between the several pithecanthropoid species from which they respectively evolved, we can no longer assume that, for example, the Hottentots of today represent a stage of evolution through which our ancestors once passed. There is simply no evidence that our race was ever animistic; its religiosity may have appeared in minds of basically different quality.
We have no certain trace of our race before comparatively recent times. If we overrule some dissenting opinions and identify the Cro-Magnon people as Aryan, we have gone as far as we can into our past, and that, for most of our evidence, is less than twenty thousand years. We may think it likely that the Cro-Magnons had a religion, but we have no means of knowing what it was. The confident statements that one so commonly sees are conjectures, formed largely on inadmissible analogies with modern primitives, and based entirely on two kinds of evidence: burials and the cave-paintings that evince an artistic talent that makes the Cro-Magnons unique among the peoples of the world in their time.
We are frequently told that care for the dead and painstaking burials are evidence of some belief in an afterlife and, hence, in ghosts, but that is a guess. Burial may be no more than a manifestation of an instinctive respect or affection for the dead and an unwillingness to see his corpse devoured by beasts or becoming putrescent near the camp. When a man’s possessions are buried with him, there may indeed have been some notion (as is attested in Egypt, for example) that the equipment would be useful to him in a postmortem existence, but it is equally possible that some or many instances of this custom may indicate the emergence of a strong sense of private property: the spear or the beads or the golden drinking horn were the dead man’s, and no one should steal from him when he dies and can no longer defend his own.
In the celebrated cave-paintings, we see men who wear the heads and hides of animals, so we are told, on the basis of conjectural analogies, that the figures are shamans making magic for a successful hunt. But the very cave ("Trois-Frères" in Haute-Garonne) that contains the best-known depiction of such a "sorcerer" also contains a painting that shows a man who wears the head and hide of a reindeer while stalking a herd of those animals, and his disguise has an obviously practical purpose. The isolated figures in animal costume that seem to be dancing may be merely cavorting for the amusement of their fellows or, conceivably, exhibiting extravagant joy over luck in hunting.
In one cave (Willendorf) is found a small figurine, carved with noteworthy skill from the tusk of a mammoth, which depicts a very plump woman with an elaborate coiffure in an advanced stage of pregnancy, clearly not her first. Some wit satirically calls it a "Venus," and we soon have our choice between several dissertations about fertility cults and the religion of which they were a part. The fact is that we do not know who carved the figurine or why. It does evince some interest in pregnancy – perhaps that of a husband who hopes for another offspring, perhaps that of a man who had a whim to carve something from a tusk.
We may, of course, form conjectures about the origin of religion. Statius was doubtless right: primus in orbe deos fecit timor. Early men did live in a world filled with terrors and dangers that they, no matter how natively intelligent, could not understand. Earthquakes are awesome, even when they are not destructive. Storms arise without perceptible causes; hurricanes and violent lightnings awaken atavistic fears in us, even if we, who know that they are merely natural phenomena, are in places of safety. The very seasons (especially in a time of climatic changes following the retreat of glaciers) seem mysterious at best, and even fearful when accompanied by prolonged rainfall, excessive snow, or desiccating drought. Even luck, that is, unexplained coincidences, makes some of our own contemporaries superstitious and, if adverse, may suggest the activity of mysteriously inimical forces. And, like the baboons, we instinctively dread darkness, which may conceal all the fearsome dangers that the imagination can conceive. Ignorance is terrible. So much is obvious.
We are reduced to precarious speculation, however, when we try to understand why our remote ancestors imagined that the incomprehensible phenomena amid which they had to live could be influenced by their own acts – that they could, for example, appease whatever caused storms or persuade whatever caused rain to end a drought. And was it because phenomena of which the cause is unknown seem capricious and thus like impulses and whims of men that they imagined that invisible beings, praeterhuman men, consciously produced the phenomena? Did many bands or tribes spontaneously and independently imagine supernatural beings as the causes of inexplicable phenomena, or did the notion first occur to some visionary individual, whose explanation was accepted and adopted ever more widely because no one could think of a better one? Or did adults transfer to the external world the sentiments excited when they were children and subject to whatever rewards or chastisements a parent chose to bestow or inflict? One may speculate endlessly why men began to attribute natural phenomena to supernatural persons. The only certainty is that they did, and whenever they did so, religion was born. It was an attempt to understand the world by identifying causes and classifying them, and crude as it seems to us, it evinces a more than animal intelligence.
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CHAPTER TWO:
WE LIVE IN A TIME in which there is much talk about "religious freedom." It is assumed that beliefs about the supernatural are a "private matter" which every individual has a right to determine for himself. Thus we have the dogma about the "separation of church and state" which was one of the basic principles of the American Constitution and survives today as one of the few bases of that Constitution that have not been officially repudiated or covertly abrogated.
This conception of religion is a recent one. It was a novelty when the Constitution was written, and it was then a compromise that many of our people accepted only reluctantly. It has consequences that very large segments of our population are unwilling to accept today. And it is now a source of infinite sophistry, hypocrisy, chicanery, and befuddlement.
We must therefore remind ourselves that religion is historically a social phenomenon and a concern of the collectivity much more than of the individual. From the earliest history of our race to the present, religion has, in varying degrees, served three distinct purposes: as a political bond, as a sanction for social morality, and as a consolation for individuals. These three functions became so intertwined that at any given time in our history, including the present, they seem inextricably interwoven, but to distinguish them clearly, we may consider them separately.
We may be certain that that instinctive sense was present in our remote biological antecedents of two or more million years ago, the Australopitheci, who hunted in small packs and even learned to use as simple weapons stones and the bones of animals they had killed and devoured. We may assume, however, that they, like wolves, assembled as packs only to hunt larger animals, and that the bond between individuals, other than mates, endured only during the hunt. This instinct for limited confederation must have been present, a million or more years later, in the various prehuman species, commonly called Homines Erecti, some of which, as Carleton Coon has shown in his Origin of Races, survived as distinct species of anthropoids that eventually developed into the extant races of mankind. It is a reasonable and perhaps necessary deduction from the available evidence that the species which survived to become human were those in which the instinct became strong enough to produce more permanent associations, a pack that remained together even after the successful termination of the hunt and the eating of its quarry, while the species that could form no larger permanent groups than do gorillas today were headed for extinction.
We must assume that the several species of Homines Erecti that became the ancestors of the various races now alive were as intelligent as baboons, hunted in packs of from ten to twelve adult males, remained together as a band or miniature tribe, as do baboons, and communicated with one another by uttering a variety of cries and other sounds, supplemented by gestures, again as baboons do. And it is probable that no association of individuals larger than such a band was possible for many thousands of years.
The Neanderthals, whom the Cro-Magnons wisely, though no doubt instinctively, exterminated in Europe and perhaps elsewhere, are now generally regarded as an extinct race of human beings, probably even lower than the Australoids and Congoids of our own time, and most biologists now include them in the taxonomic category that embraces the several races that have been ironically called homines sapientes. Although it is frequently assumed that the Neanderthals formed groups larger than a band of baboons, there is no valid evidence that they did, and such social cohesion as they had must have been entirely instinctive and subconscious. Although some anthropologists have found new grounds for dissent, the majority now believes that the Neanderthals were able to communicate with one another by means of a very crude and rudimentary language, that is, articulated sounds of definite meaning, as distinct from the variety of inarticulate cries and grunts, supplemented by gestures, by which baboons now communicate, andhomines erecti must have communicated, with one another. It is most unlikely, however, that the Neanderthals’ language was sufficiently developed to permit either generalizations or statements about the past and future rather than the present.
The success of the Cro-Magnon people in hunting such formidable game as mammoths is sufficient proof that they must have lived together in groups large enough to be called a tribe, and that they had a language that was in some way inflected to form tenses and thus indicate temporal relationships, thereby making possible conscious planning and specific reference to past experiences. This, in turn, permitted the generalizations that are a kind of rough classification and a conscious awareness of tribal unity, which could be communicated to the young by spoken precept and rule, however crude and elementary, thus forming what anthropologists call a culture.
What superstitions the Cro-Magnons had, and what rituals they performed, can only be conjectured by tenuous speculations, but a moment’s reflection will show that if they had a religion (as is, of course, likely), it must have been concerned with tribal purposes, such as success in hunting or the mitigation of an epidemic disease or the production of rain. And such religious ceremonies as may have been performed for such purposes were doubtless rituals that required the participation of the whole tribe or the part of it that was immediately concerned, such as all adult males, if hunting was involved, or all females, if fertility, and offspring were sought. The ritual thus became an affirmation of tribal unity.
The earliest religions of which we have knowledge are tribal, and their ceremonies are rituals in which the whole tribe (except children) participates or all of the part of the tribe that is concerned (e.g., all men of military age or all married women) or a group that has been selected to perform a dance or a sacrifice on behalf of the tribe as a whole. And when a number of tribes coalesce to form a small state, the demonstration of their effective unity and common purpose by religious unanimity becomes even more necessary, and it is affirmed by festivals in which every citizen is expected to participate, at least by abstaining from other activity and being present as a spectator, and in which aliens, whether visitors or metecs, are not permitted to participate and from which they may be so excluded that they are forbidden to witness any part of the proceedings. The number of citizens is now so large that active participation of all in a religious ritual is no longer feasible, and comparatively small groups must be selected to act on behalf of the whole state or the whole of a class in it. Alcman’s Partheneion, for example, was written for a choir of virgins who performed a ceremony on behalf of all the virgin daughters of Spartan citizens to conciliate for them the favor of Artemis. The Panathenaea, which celebrated the political unification of Attica, was a series of varied ceremonies (one of which was a reading of the poems of Homer) in honor of the goddess who was the city’s patroness, and although a fairly large number of individuals took part in the chariot-races, musical contests, choral performances, cult dances, and other ceremonies, only a small fraction of the citizen body could take an active part in the festival that was held for the benefit of the whole state, and on the last day, traditionally Athena’s birthday, metecs were even permitted to join the grand procession as attendants on citizens. At Rome, the twenty-four Salii solicited for the entire nation the favor of Mars and Quirinus by perfoming their archaic dance accompanied by a litany in Latin so archaic that its meaning was only vaguely known. And the feriae in honor of Jupiter on the Alban Mount, at which the presence of both consuls was mandatory, celebrated the political unification of Latium.
What many of our uninformed contemporaries overlook is the fact that participation in such ceremonies, including attendance at them, was essentially a political act by which citizens affirmed their participation in their state. It did not in the least matter, for example, whether the individual citizen "believed in" the gods who were propitiated and honored: if he disbelieved in their existence or spoke of them in injurious terms (except during the ceremonies themselves), and if the gods concerned took notice and resented his conduct, it was up to those gods (as Augustus had to remind some of his contemporaries) to take what action they deemed appropriate against him. And it did not really matter whether the rites were really efficacious: the important thing was that persons who refused to participate in them thereby exhibited their alienation from the state and seemed to be renouncing their citizenship. If a Roman who was an atheist was elected consul, his office obliged him to make the appropriate sacrifices to Jupiter at the Feriae Latinae and to preside at, or otherwise participate in, other religious rites, but he had no sense of incongruity or hypocrisy: he was performing an essentially political rite for which a religious faith was no more necessary than it was, e.g., for watching a chariot race in the circus, which officially was also a religious ceremony.
This function of religion is to affirm political cohesion. And it has retained that function almost to our own time. When the unity of Christendom was shattered by the Reformation and it became clear that it would not be easy for either the Catholics or the Protestants to exterminate the other party, an early compromise was the doctrine of cuius regio, eius religio. By agreeing that the ruler’s religion was to be that of all of his subjects (except of course, the Jews, who were always given special privileges), men hoped to maintain the effective unity of each state, and that was a political purpose that atheists could and did recognize as expedient. The establishment of the Anglican Church was one of the least unsuccessful applications of the principle, and from the political standpoint, the disabilities of the Catholics in England are less remarkable than the toleration that was accorded them. And it is perverse to refuse to understand the attitude of Louis XIV in Catholic France after he was convinced that Jansenists, although indubitably Catholic, were fracturing the nation’s political unity. The story that he at first refused to appoint a man to high office because he had heard the man was a Jansenist, but gladly appointed him as soon as he was reliably informed that the man did not believe in god at all, is undoubtedly true – was probably true on several occasions. The king was probably quite uninterested in the theological hair-pulling and cut-throat competition that was then making so much noise, but he had the common sense to perceive that by appointing an atheist he was not strengthening a faction of political trouble-makers. If he knew of Cardinal Dubois’s famous dictum that God is a bogeyman who must be brandished to scare the populace into some approximation of honesty, he may or may not have thought that the good cardinal was running a risk of post-mortem woe, but he recognized that Dubois’s opinions did not detract from his political efficiency in maintaining social stability.
The requirement at Oxford and Cambridge until quite recent times of an oath of affirmation in the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles has been perversely misunderstood. Everyone knew for centuries that many did not believe what they affirmed, and there was some truth in the hot-headed Sir William Hamilton’s charge that Oxford was a "school of perjury," but he naïvely became excited because he did not perceive that the requirement had not the fantastic theological purpose of pleasing a god in whom many who took the oath did not believe, but the strictly practical one of excluding fanatics who were emotionally attached to dogmas that would inspire trouble-making agitation over questions that, if not totally illusory, were incapable of rational determination. It was regrettable, of course, that adolescents like young Gibbon should, in effect, expel themselves from the university through a waywardness they would later regret, and that intelligent adults like Newman should develop emotional enthusiasms and a zeal for fruitless controversy that, the conservatives felt, was much better than bestowing the prestige of the universities on seditious fanatics.
In the United States, Benjamin Franklin certainly did not believe in any form of Christian doctrine, but that did not prevent him from approving, if he did not inspire, a state constitution which, by requiring an oath of belief in the Trinity, effectively excluded from political influence many of the Jews and such dissidents as the Quakers, who, for example, refused to defend with arms a society whose privileges they wanted to enjoy, and were, at least passively, disturbers of the political cohesion of the state of Pennsylvania. The persecution of the Mormons, which effectively gives the lie to Americans who want to boast about "religious freedom," was led by holy men who wanted to stamp out competition in their business, but some part of that episode was caused by an awareness, probably subconscious in the majority, that the political consensus requisite for national survival would be gravely impaired or destroyed if the population were split into two incompatible groups, one of which believed polygamy divinely ordained while the other insisted on pretending that Christian doctrine forbade every kind of polygamy.
The principle of the separation of church and state, which was one of the bases of the Federal Constitution, has been nullified by the various states and, hypocritically, by the Federal government itself by exempting nominally religious organizations from taxation, and is nullified in practice by the strenuous political activity of virtually all the Christian and other religious sects, which, of course, is laudable when they agitate and intrigue for political ends of which you and I approve, and damnable when they use their power to oppose them, as any theologian can prove in five minutes by reciting selected passages of Holy Writ and tacitly lying by pretending that contradictory passages do not exist. The separation of church and state has proved impossible in practice in the United States, and for all practical purposes the ostensibly religious organizations have become privileged political organizations, most of which are actively engaged in subverting what little cohesion the nation once had and are furthermore avowed enemies of the race to which we and many of their members belong.
The use of religion as an expression of cultural unity and political consensus cannot long survive the first practice of toleration by which the nation’s Established Church, whatever it is, is tacitly disavowed by failure to suppress openly dissident sects. That function of religion, once the most important of all, has, in little more than a century, been so completely forgotten that some of our contemporaries are astonished when they hear of it.
Organized society is made possible only by laws to govern the conduct of individuals, but since laws can always be secretly evaded by men who conceal their crime or their responsibility for it, gods were invented, deathless beings who, themselves unseen, observe, by psychic faculties that do not depend on sight or hearing, all the acts, words, and thoughts of men. And the founders of civilization attributed to the imagined gods the natural phenomena, the lightning and the whirlwind, that terrify men. By this noble fiction they replaced lawlessness with law.
Thus far, Critias simply described the theology of Hesiod as the invention of nomothetes, and it is at this point that our fragment of his play ends.* If he went on (and I do not claim that he did), he added that when men learned by experience that they could still violate the laws secretly with impunity, the lawgivers perfected their invention by claiming that men had souls which were immortal, so that the gods, who failed to use their lightnings to punish crime in this world, would infallibly inflict terrible penalties on the guilty and condignly reward the guiltless after death. Thus they placed their civilizing fiction beyond possible verification or disproof, and provided supernatural sanctions to buttress their laws and scare their people into honesty.
* It is quoted by Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math., IX.55 (= In phys., I.54). A good English translation by R. G. Bury may be found in Vol. III of the edition of Sextus Empiricus in the well-known Loeb Library.
Whether or not Critias carried his argument to its logical conclusion, it is clear that the effective use of religion as a political instrument to enforce morality required a doctrine that would promise to individuals after death the justice that the gods failed to administer in this world. This association of ideas has now become commonplace and is so taken for granted that our contemporaries often assume that a religion – any and every religion – must be primarily concerned with the provision of suitable rewards and penalties in an afterlife. This idea, however, was a startling and revolutionary one when it reached the Greeks in the sixth century B.C.
The notion that a person’s individuality does not wholly perish when he dies is, of course, a very old one and may be older than belief in the existence of gods. Its oldest and most elementary form, which still lingers in our subliminal consciousness, is the supposition that something of the dead man survives him and lives on in his tomb. Only later did men come to believe that the ghost of the dead migrated to a realm of the dead that was located either underground or, more poetically, in the west beyond the sunset. But the dead were phantoms, bodiless shades, doomed forever to an umbratile existence, mourning the life they had known and could never know again. When Ulysses, in the famous Nekyia, sailed beyond the Ocean to the sunless land, shrouded in mist and eternal twilight, he found only tenuous wraiths that were voiceless until he permitted them to lap up the blood of freshly slain sheep; and even Achilles, though he was the son of a goddess and half-divine, had become only a shadow in the gloom and could only say fretfully that it were better to be the meanest and most miserable slave among the living than king of all the dead.
Such was the immortality to which the heroes of the Trojan War could look forward – an immortality in comparison with which annihilation would have been a boon. And we may reasonably ask whether any of us today would have the courage to face such a future, to say nothing of the awesome strength to choose, as Achilles did, to die young with honor rather than live a long life of mediocrity.
It is easy to see why a promise of post-mortem comfort fascinated the minds of men and gained their allegiance to religions which promised it as a reward for obedience to a society’s moral code. There were, however, two quite different conceptions of the way in which such immortality could be obtained: if, as the Homeric eschatology assumed, our present life on earth is the only one, even the righteous man must be rescued from the common fate of mankind by some special and miraculous benefaction by gods capable of communicating to him something of their theurgic power; if, on the other hand, we assume that the dead survive by metempsychosis, we can construct an eschatology of the kind familiar to us from the Hindu doctrine of karma, assuming that when a man dies the spark of life within him enters another body, so that he will be reincarnated again and again forever and is doomed to repeat endlessly (and without knowing it) the peripeties and sorrows of the life we know, unless he, by exemplary moral conduct, finds a way to escape from the "grievous cycle of rebirth" and thus attain a beatific existence in a transmundane realm of enduring felicity.
The first of these alternative theories was adopted by the numerous mystery-cults of antiquity, the Eleusinian, Samothracian, Andanian, and others.
Despite the oaths of secrecy taken by the initiates and never deliberately violated, we know that the mystae, candidates for Salvation, had to be guiltless of gross violations of the prevailing moral code, underwent a prolonged initiation into divine mysteries by the hierophants – (the professional holy men in charge), and were eventually "born again" through the grace of some god, usually one who had himself experienced mortality by being slain and rising from the dead. Having thus been Saved, the mystes, sometimes a year after his first initiation, became an epoptes, seeing the god (or goddess) and experiencingenthusiasm (which, we must remember, was the state of irrationality and rapture that occurred when a mortal was literally possessed by a god). Although such hallucinations often accompany psychotic states that may in turn be provoked by extreme asceticism or overheated imaginations, the number of apparently rational persons who were initiated into the various mysteries is proof that the hierophants must have administered hallucinatory drugs to induce the temporary madness.
Aryans are innately suspicious of enthusiasm and similar irrationality, and many of them naturally preferred the alternative.
The most reasonable and most beautiful doctrine of immortality that I have seen was stated in the matchless verse of Pindar’s second Olympian, composed and declaimed in Sicily soon after 476 B.C. When an individual has passed through three or six* successive mortal lives in which he has observed strict justice in all his actions and lived with perfect integrity, he will have emancipated himself from the cycles of reincarnation and will transcend the limits of beyond mortality: he will pass beyond the Tower of Cronus to the fair realm that cannot be reached by land or sea, where the mildly bright sun stands always at the vernal equinox and gentle breezes from a placid ocean blow forever over the fields of asphodel. If you read Pindar, you will think all other Heavens insufferably vulgar. It would be a waste of time to talk about them.
* Whether three or six depends on the meaning of the words šstrˆj katšrwq i, which I do not know. Each of the commentators has his idea of what Pindar meant, and so do I, but the fact is that none of us can know the details of the doctrine, presumably "Orphic," that Pindar and Theron of Acragas took for granted.
Since we have spoken of Greek conceptions, we should remark that they and our racial kinsmen, the Norse, did not imagine an Elysium.† The idea of metempsychosis was not unknown, for some persons expected that a man would be reborn as his grandson or great-grandson, but it commanded little assent. A short passage in the Hávamál implies that death is annihilation, but that view was not widely held. The ghost of the dead man was thought to linger in his tomb or to go to Hel, where all were equal in wretchedness, although there is one mention of a yet more terrible abode (Nifhel) for the spectacularly wicked. Perhaps the most optimistic view was that brave men who die in battle are taken to the halls of Odin, Valhalla, where they will feast until the time comes for them and the gods themselves to perish in the final catastrophe, the Ragnarök.
† I am aware that a paradise is mentioned in Ibn Fadlán’s description of a funeral he witnessed when negotiating with the Rús on the Volga, but if the Arab is telliing the truth and did not misunderstand his interpreter, the belief, like the ceremony he witnessed, must have been exceptional.
A polytheism assumes the existence of numerous gods, each of whom is essentially the personification of some force of nature and may, in his or her own province act independently of other gods in his or her relations with mortals. The gods are thought of as immortal Übermenschen, forming, so to speak, an aristocracy unapproachably far above mortal men, but having human character and emotions, so that their acts are readily comprehensible and involve no theological mysteries, and it is natural to imagine them as anthropomorphic in bodily form as well as in mind, so that belief in them does not imply the paradox inherent in religions that try to imagine gods that do not look like men and women.
The members of the divine aristocracy are deathless and are far more powerful than mortals, but they are not omnipotent. As in all aristocracies the gods are not equal, some being more prominent than others, and they have a chief who has a certain authority over them but is himself bound by the social code of divinities. Jupiter/Zeus is styled pater hominum divômque and Odin is called Alfaðir, but, among the great gods, the Olympians and the Æsir, their chief is only primus inter pares, and while he is stronger than any one other god, his authority is limited by political realities and really depends on the voluntary allegiance of his peers. In the Iliad, it is clear that Zeus favors the Trojans and wants them to be victorious, and some of the other gods share his sentiments, but he and his sympathizers cannot inhibit the actions of the gods who are partial to the Greeks, and in the end, of course, it is the Greeks who will be victorious.
Each of the great gods has authority over some force of nature, sets it in motion, and may direct it to favor or harm mortals who have pleased or offended him, but in Aryan religions – and this is most important – all the gods together are not omnipotent. They dwell in a universe they did not create: one hymn in the Rig-veda specifically states that "the gods are later than the creation of the world," and in the following lines the author asks whether the world was created by giving form to what was "void and formless," and whether the creating force, if there was one, was conscious or unconscious. The gods, therefore, although they control such natural phenomena as the winds, the lightning, and sexual attraction, are themselves subject to the natural laws of the universe, much as among men rulers have power over their subjects but are themselves subject to the laws of nature. The Greeks and the Norse, with their mythopoeic imaginations and the tripartite modality of our racial mind, personified fate as three women, the Moerae, Parcae, Nornir, but their real belief was in an impersonal, inexorable, automatic force that was inherent in the very structure of the universe and which no god could alter or deflect: Moros, Fatum, Wyrd, Destiny. From that causality there was no escape: behind the capricious gods with their miraculous powers there lay the implacable nexus of cause and effect that is reality.
The gods are essentially personifications of natural forces, and like those forces, they are neither good nor evil but operate with a complete indifference to the convenience and wishes of mortals, except in special cases, when some mortal has won a god’s favor or incurred his displeasure. One god’s goodwill or enmity toward a given mortal does not influence his colleagues: they will remain indifferent or even, if they have cause, help that man. This gives us a fairly rational conception of human life, in which, as we all know, a man who is "lucky" at cards may be "unlucky" in love and on the sea and in battle. And the religious conception, although it does admit of miracles, i.e., the intervention of supernatural beings in natural phenomena, does not too drastically conceal the realities of a universe that was not made for man. The gods are not only the explanation of natural phenomena of which the causes had not yet been ascertained, but the conceptions of their characters, aside from a few whimsical myths, are really quite rationally drawn, although idealists, such as Plato, often miss the point.
Men always create their gods in their own image, and the gods, although endowed with supernatural powers, remain human in their minds and morality. Idealists whimper about the "immorality" of the gods and want something better, that is to say, something more fantastic, more incredible. Odin is the god of war and of an aristocracy that had a relatively high code of honor, but he is wily, for his votaries know that victory in battle depends less on sheer berserk courage than it does on strategy, which is simply the art of deceiving the enemy. Odin is treacherous, falling below the moral code of his votaries, because it is a simple fact that treachery is often victorious, and it is Odin who gives victory. That is unfortunate, no doubt, and we may wish to be morally superior to our gods, but if we claim that Odin is not treacherous, we are irrationally denying the fact that in this world treason is often so successful that none dare call it treason.
Venus is caught in adultery with Mars. Honorable wives will not imitate the goddess to whom they pray, but it is a fact, deplorable no doubt, that Helen and Paris are by no means the only example of adultery in this world, and it is a notorious fact that dissatisfied wives are apt to be especially attracted to men of military prowess and distinction. It was wrong, no doubt, of Venus to inspire Helen with love and desire for Paris, but it is a sad fact that in this world the force of sexual attraction very commonly operates in disregard of both morality and prudence. It does happen that beautiful women, even if married, are desired by, and attracted to, handsome young men, and it also happens that the young men form liaisons which, in societies that have not completely repudiated sexual morality, bring disaster on themselves and their families. If we imagine a Venus who is ideally chaste, we are lying to ourselves about the power of sexual attraction in the real world in which we live.
The ancient Aryans were often puzzled by themselves, and we, despite the best efforts of sane psychologists, find "in man the darkest mist of all" and admit that "we knowers are to ourselves unknown." Every man of letters is aware that in any creative process, such as the writing of poetry, his best thoughts usually come inexplicably into his conscious mind by "inspiration"; scientists and mathematicians confess that they "suddenly saw" the solution of a problem that long defied their most systematic efforts to solve it; and men of action, including victorious generals, have reported that they were guided by a "hunch" or "instinctively felt" which was the best of alternatives between which conscious planning had not enabled them to choose. The processes of strictly logical reasoning on the basis of ascertained data have their limitations, and the right decisions are often made by intuitive impulses that we now attribute to the subconscious mind, without being able precisely to explain them. In polytheism, thoughts which come to the conscious mind from a source outside itself are ideas injected by some god. When Achilles stayed his hand from drawing his sword on Agamemnon, he was too irate to reason that he would precipitate an irreparable division within the army that would end the Greeks’ chances of victory, but an impulse restrained him: Pallas Athena, the goddess of rational activity, took him by his blond hair and held him back, and she, invisible to all but him, soundlessly told him that he should not resort to violence against the commander of the host. Needless to say, the gods, for purposes of their own, may deceive, for "hunches" are often misleading, and Agamemnon will more than once have occasion to complain that Zeus tricked him with "inspirations" that made him blunder. The psychology may seem crude, but it compares favorably with some "scientific" superstitions now in vogue.
Much may be said for polytheism, especially in Aryan religions.
There are many gods – innumerable ones, if we count the minor and local deities who preside over a fountain and make it gush now and barely trickle at another time, or dwell in a river and make it overflow it’s banks or subside into a rill, or are the spirits of the wildwood and inspire awe or panic in the impressionable traveler. Even major gods are too numerous to be given equal worship, despite the risks of offending some by neglect. An Aryan people, with its tripartite thought, may select a trinity of gods as deserving special honor for their functions, such as the archaic and Capitoline triads at Rome, or the triad of gods that were joint tenants of the great Norse temple at Upsala, three specialists, as it were, who could care for most needs. If a worshipper wanted success in war, he naturally addressed Odin; if the weather and crops depending on it were his concern, he naturally turned to Thor; and if his problem was sexual, Freyr was there to help him.
Cities naturally selected a god or goddess as their special patron, the focus of their civic cults, and understood that courtesy among immortals precluded jealousy in such cases. Pallas Athena was the patron of Athens, but although Poseidon had hoped to be chosen in her stead, he did not prevent Athens from becoming a thalassocracy, while Athena was not offended by lavish rites in honor of Demeter and Dionysus. Other cities chose other tutelary gods.
The gratitude of worshippers whose prayers had been granted, and sometimes the civic pride of cities that had a local deity, often led to hyperbole that other gods politely overlooked. A few minutes with the great collections of inscriptions will enable anyone to compile an astonishing roster of gods, including even such as Osogoa, the patron of the small and declining town of Mylasa, who are enthusiastically described in Greek or Latin as maximus deorum, and when the Norse salute one of their gods as "most august" (arwurðost), they are indulging in the same extravagant emotion. The pious men and women who are moved to hyperbole because a god had heard their prayers and wrought some miracle for them are no more hypocritical that you are, when you have really enjoyed a dinner and tell your hostess it was the best you have ever had. Everyone understands such things, and no god feels slighted, while the worshipper will turn from his "greatest of the gods" to another, when he wants something in the other god’s special province.
This tendency, however, may lead individuals and even tribes to an odd modification of polytheism, in which, without in the least doubting the existence and power of the other gods, they decide to concentrate their worship on one of them. In individuals this is known as monolatry, and Euripides has shown in his Hippolytus the dangers carrying this tendency to the excess of slighting other deities that represent natural forces: he flattered he virgin Artemis but angered Aphrodite. Such indiscretion was very rare in the Classical world: one would naturally show special devotion to a god who had been particularly beneficent, but it would be very rash to put all of one’s supernatural eggs in one basket. The practice was more common among the Norse, a number of whom selected some god as their fulltrúl and entrusted to him the care of all their interests, thus ignoring the division of labor among the gods.
I mention this rare oddity only for contrast to an extremely un-Aryan form of polytheism, the Jewish religion shown in what Christians call the "Old Testament." The Jews selected a god, Yahweh, who was at first content to have no competitor associated with him in a temple and worshipped in his presence ("before me," "coram me") but eventually demanded exclusive veneration, and entered into a contract with the tribe to assist them in all their undertakings, if they would observe all his taboos and give him, in sacrifices, a share of the profits. According to the "Old Testament," the Semitic god thus chosen for a form of religion that is called henotheism was able to beat up the gods of other peoples whom the Jews wished to exploit, such as Dagon, whom Yahweh decapitated and crippled at night when no one was looking.
Such henotheism is utterly foreign to the Aryan mind, which, as it rejects fanaticism and holy ferocity as manifestations of savagery, naturally does not attribute such jealousy and malevolence to its gods.
***
MONOTHEISM
MONOTHEISM is a quite unusual form of religion and one which creates difficulties for even its most adroit theologians. If it is a theism, its god must be a superhuman person, conscious and accessible to his votaries. Thus religions which posit an impersonal force, such as the Classical Fatum or the Hindu’s impersonal Brahma (neuter), as the supreme power in the universe are excluded, as are all forms of pantheism which assume that the whole universe is a living but unconscious entity that cannot properly be called a god. And if the theism is mono, the God must be actually supreme and therefore omnipotent, although he need not be the only supernatural being in the universe. Men cannot readily imagine a hermit god, so viable monotheisms suppose a god who is indeed absolute master, but has his retinue of associates, companions, and servants who obey him and carry out his orders. But he must be supreme: all other gods must be thought of as his agents, and no other god can be represented as his rival and enemy. That, of course, rules out Christianity for the greater part of its history and as described in its Holy Book, which provides the Christian god with a rival god, Satan, and assumes that the two gods are slugging it out for mastery now, although it is predicted that one of them will eventually triumph. In quite recent years the clergy of most Christian sects have joined in killing off the Devil to make their religion a monotheism, so that, as an eminent Catholic theologian, Father Jacques Turmel, complained in the work which hepublished in an English translation under the pseudonym Louis Coulange, "Satan ... is now like the Son of Man, of whom the Gospel tells us that He had nowhere to lay His head." But so long as Christianity supposed the existence of a god and an anti-god, it was a ditheism, and that only on the assumption that its tripartite god counted as one and that the anti-god was the sovereign of all other gods, such as Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, and Dionysus, a point on which some of the early Fathers of the Church could not quite make up their minds.
The invention of monotheism is generally credited to Ikhnaton (Akh-en-Aton), a deformed and half-mad king, who ruled (and almost ruined), Egypt from c.1369 to 1354 B.C., and who cannot have been worthy of his lovely wife, Nefertiti, whom he later so hated that he erased her name from their joint monuments. His portraits show that he suffered from some disease or malformation that produced an enormously distended belly and heavy hips that are in painful contrast to his asthenic limbs and torso. He was a mongrel. His grandmother was a blonde Aryan, perhaps Nordic, princess, whose skull and hair attest her race. His father’s features may show some admixture of Semitic blood; the race of his round-faced mother is uncertain: she could have been an octoroon or even a quadroon; and his own protruding negroid lips attest a considerable black taint in his blood, while his oddly shaped jaw shows some clash of incompatible genes. A mind so divided against itself genetically must have matched the distortion of his body. It is quite certain that he venerated Aton, the solar disk, as the supreme god, and we must grant that heliolatry is a quite rational monotheism, since the sun is obviously the source of all life on earth. Whether the king admitted the existence of other and subordinate gods is a question on which Egyptologists are divided, but not, as we have indicated above, crucial to his claim to be the first monotheist. There is greater uncertainly as to whether the religious innovation should be credited to his father, Amenhotep III, with whom he may have ruled jointly for a few years.
Ikhnaton’s religion, for which he convulsed Egypt and forfeited her empire, must have been well-known to the contemporary Aryans on Crete and in the Mycenaean territories elsewhere, but there is no indication that they were in the least impressed by his monotheism. Some have conjectured that a tradition about him may have reached the Jews, who however, show no tendency toward monotheism until more than a millennium later, when they had quite different models before them.
The first Aryan known as a monotheist was Xenophanes (born c. 570 B.C., died c.470). He certainly repudiated the anthropomorphic gods of polytheism and posited one god, spherical because that is the perfect form, eternal, and unchanging; but we are also told that the god was an infinite sphere and identical with the universe. Now, was the universe conscious, and could men, whom Xenophanes thought the products of a kind of chemical reaction between earth and water, pray to the vast being of which they were an infinitesimal part? There is no evidence that Xenophanes thought they could, and I do not see how one could imagine that a man could attract the attention of the universe. Even assuming that Xenophanes thought of the universe as a living being (which, of course, is not unchanging), can we imagine one cell in our bodies as praying to us? My guess is that what has been called "the only true monotheism that has ever existed in the world" was, strictly speaking, atheism.* If there are no gods whom men can ask to intervene in human affairs, it is simply an abuse of language to call an impersonal, inexorable force ‘god.’ Xenophanes was certainly one of the great men in whom our race may legitimately take pride, but I do not see how we can properly term him a monotheist, although he may have influenced later Greeks to accept a monotheism.
* Xenophanes is known only from brief quotations, paraphrases, and allusions in later writers, and there are endless controversies about many points; he was a gentleman and a poet who wrote drinking songs with conventional allusions to gods, which some determined theists would take seriously. By far the best criticism and summation of the evidence known to me is in the first volume of W. K. C. Guthrie’s History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge University, 1962).
The spread of Stoicism in the Graeco-Roman world is one of the most remarkable phenomena of history. Many have remarked on the paradox that a Semite, a Phoenician merchant in the export trade, who went to Athens on business and happened to attend lectures by one of the Cynic philosophers and who could not speak grammatically correct Greek, should have set himself up as a philosopher in his own right and, despite his alien features and tongue, attracted a large following of Greeks. And there is the greater paradox that a doctrine which inspired the subversive agitations and revolutionary outbreaks that Robert von Pöhlmann identified as ancient Communism should have become the philosophy of the most conservative Romans. The first paradox may be explained by the fact that when Zeno went to Athens in the second half of the fourth century B.C., Greece was in the midst of a prolonged economic crisis and culturally demoralized, and many of the citizens felt the morbid fascination with the exotic and alien that in our time gave prominence to "soulful" Russians and Hindu swamis. As for the second paradox, Zeno’s successors so modified his doctrine that Panaetius, a Greek from Rhodes, was able to transform it into a philosophy that was attractive to Roman minds.†
† I need not say that I am making generalizations, which I believe valid, about a doctrine that had a long and complicated history and was represented by a great many writers and teachers, who introduced various modifications of the doctrine with, of course, endless controversies. The most systematic and complete study of Stoicism is in German: Max Pohlenz, Die Stoa (Göttingen, 2 vols., 1948). The modest little book by Professor Edwyn Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics (London, 1913), can be read with enjoyment as well as profit.
Stoicism became for several centuries the dominant philosophy of educated men in the Graeco-Roman world for four principal reasons.
1. It claimed to be based exclusively on the observed realities of the physical world and to "follow nature," and to reject all superstitions about the supernatural. This claim was reinforced by studies of natural phenomena, such as the causes of the tides, undertaken by a few of the prominent Stoics.2. A claim to be based strictly on reason, with no concessions to religious mysticism, and this claim was supported by a very elaborate system of logic and dialectics by which every proposition could infallibly be deduced from observed phenomena, thus providing complete certainty and satisfying minds, that could not be content with a high degree of probability, which is all that epistemological limitations permit us to attain.Stoicism, which was embraced by the majority of educated and influential men to the time of Marcus Aurelius and the twilight of human reason, was a philosophy, not a religion: it had no mysteries, no revelations, no gospels, no temples, no priests, no rituals, no ceremonies, no worship. But nevertheless, this eminently "respectable" doctrine, which extended its influence deep into the masses, was a monotheism.The Stoics claimed that the universe (which, remember, was for them the earth with its appurtenances, the sun, moon, and stars that circled about it) was a single living organism of which God was the brain, theanimus mundi. This cosmic mind ordained and controlled all that happened, so that Fate, the nexus of cause and effect (heimarmene),was actually the same as divine Providence (pronoia). This animus mundi, which they usually called Zeus and which some of them located in the sun, was conscious and had thoughts and purposes incomprehensible to men, who could only conform to them. Their Zeus, who, of course, was not anthropomorphic, was the supreme god, perhaps the only god. Few, however, were willing to spurn a compromise with the prevalent religions, and they accordingly admitted the probable existence of the popular gods as subordinates of Zeus, an order of living beings superior to men and more or less anthropomorphic, who were parts of the Divine Plan. They accordingly explained the popular beliefs and myths as allegories by twisting words and manipulating ideas with a sophistic ingenuity that made them expert theologians. Having made this concession to the state cults and popular superstitions, the Stoics insist that a wise man will perceive that the various gods which seem real to the populace are all really aspects of the animus mundi, and that there really is only One God.
3. It provided social stability by guaranteeing the essentials of the accepted code of morality and stigmatizing all derogations from that code as irrational and unnatural.
4. What was most important to the Roman mind, Stoicism (as revised by Panaetius) was the one philosophy which encouraged and even enjoined men to take an active part in political life and devote themselves to service of the state and nation. Patriotism and the morality that makes great statesmen and generals were disparaged by some other philosophical systems, especially the Cyrenaic, Cynic, and Epicurean, and virtually disregarded by the New Academy, which anticipated the methodology of modern science and represents the intellectual high tide of of Graeco-Roman civilization, but demanded a rationalism and cool objectivity of which only the best minds are capable. Everyone who has read Cicero’s De natura deorum will remember how he was taken by surprise when Cicero, in the very last paragraph, pronounces in favor of the Stoic position, although Cicero was himself an Academic and, furthermore, cannot have failed to see which of the arguments he has summarized was the most reasonable. In that last sentence the statesman silenced the philosopher with a raison d’état.
Cleanthes, Zeno’s disciples and successor at Athens, is best known for the eloquent prayer, commonly called a hymn, addressed to the One God, which begins "Lead me on, 0 Zeus!" After speaking of the majesty of the Universal Mind, he assures Zeus that he will follow willingly whithersoever the god leads him, but adds that if he were unwilling, it would make no difference, for he would be compelled to follow. This, of course, is simply Seneca’s oft-quoted line, Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt with which, by the way, Spengler appropriately concluded his Untergang des Abendlandes. It makes excellent sense because we recognize in fata the inexorable nexus of cause and effect in the real world. We are taken aback when we find it addressed to a god, who presumably can hear the prayer, and are then assured that Divine Providence has so unalterably arranged the sequence of events that what is destined will occur anyway. A sensible man will immediately ask, Why pray, if the prayer can make no difference?
The Stoics have an answer. Good and evil, pain and pleasure, are only in the mind, and what makes the difference is your attitude toward events: it would be wrong as well as futile to resist the Divine Plan, no matter what it ordains for you. The only important thing is the maintenance of your moral integrity, and so long as you do that, events have no power over you. They even insist that a wise man, conscious of his moral integrity, would be perfectly happy, even if he were being boiled in oil. So far as I know, this proposition was never tested empirically, although intelligent men must often have thought that it would be an interesting experiment to put Chrysippus or some other prominent Stoic in the pot to ascertain whether the boiling oil would alter his opinion.
The Stoics insisted that since all things happen "according to Nature," i.e., Providence, there can be no evil or injustice in the world. To maintain this paradox, they had to devise various arguments, usually packed into a long sequence of apparently logical propositions, spiced with endlessly intricate definitions, some of which were mere verbal trickery that passed unnoticed in the harangue. The most plausible proposition was a claim that whatever seems unjust or wrong to us is only part of a whole which we do not see. It may be simplified by the analogy that lungs or livers considered by themselves are ugly, but may form necessary parts of a beautiful woman.
The Stoics thus constructed a theodicy that was satisfactory to them. They were, of course, intellectuals busy, as usual, with excogitating arguments to override common sense.
What we have said will suffice to show how the Stoics made monotheism an eminently respectable creed. It became the hall mark of Big Brains.
There is much truth in an observation made by Professor Gilbert Murray in his well-known Five Stages of Greek Religion. Reporting the anecdote that an impressionable Greek,who had attended lectures by the Aristotelians and then heard the Stoics, said that his experience was like turning from men to gods, Murray remarks: "It was really turning from Greeks to Semites, from philosophy to religion." It is true that we know that Zeno and a few other Stoics were Semites and we suspect that quite a few others were, or perhaps were hybrids, half-Greek and half from some one of the pullulent peoples of Asia Minor that Alexander’s conquests had Hellenized, but the fact is that their doctrine did enlist Aryans (there is no reason to suppose that Panaetius was not of our race) and was unsuspiciously accepted by a majority of the Greeks and Romans of the educated classes. That is what gave it prestige.
Stoicism, furthermore, was not merely an alien ideology foisted on credulous Aryans. It contained elements congenial to our racial psyche. Professor Günther has observed that Aryans "have always tended to raise the power of destiny above that of the gods," and cites the belief in an impersonal, inexorable Moros, Fatum, Wyrd, to which we referred above. This was approximated by the Stoics’ animus mundi with its immutable Providence. Aryans accept the reality of the visible, tangible world of nature and instinctively reject the festering Semitic hatred of this world. "Never," says Günther, "have Indo-Europeans [= Aryans] imagined to become more religious when a ‘beyond’ claimed to release them from ‘this world,’ which was devalued to a place of sorrow, persecution, and salvation." Here again the Stoic belief that this world is the only one and that all things happen "according to nature" was consonant with our race’s mentality. The Aryan belief in the unalterable nexus of cause and effect does not lead to the passive slavish fatalism, kismet, of Islam, but fate is, instead, a reality that the Aryan accepts manfully: "The very fact of being bound to destiny has from the beginning proved to be the source of his spiritual existence." Thus the healthy Aryan "cannot even wish to be redeemed from the tension of his destiny-bound life," and Günther quotes Schopenhauer: "A happy life is impossible; the highest to which man can attain is an heroic course of life." The Aryan ideal, Günther continues, is the hero who "loftily understands the fate meeting him as his destiny, remains upright in the midst of it, and, is thus true to himself." Compare the Stoic insistence that the maintenance of one’s moral integrity is the highest good. The fatalism may seem passive, but Stoicism was in practice the creed of Cato of Utica and many another Roman aristocrat who lived heroically and died proudly, meeting his fate with unflinching resolution.
Stoicism was founded and to a considerable extent promoted by Semites, and although it included, by chance or design, much that was in conformity with the Aryan spirit and mentality, it was hybrid, a bastard philosophy, for it also contained much that was Semitic and alien to our race. As Gilbert Murray remarked, it had a latent fanaticism in its religiosity and it professed to offer a kind of Salvation to unhappy mankind; despite its ostentatious appeal to nature and reason, it was a kind of evangelism "whose professions dazzled the reason." It professed to deduce from biology an asceticism that was in fact fundamentally inhuman and therefore irrational, e.g., the limitation of sexual intercourse to the begetting of offspring. Although it was the creed of heroes, we cannot but feel that there was in it something sickly and deformed.
Stoicism, furthermore, was an intellectual disaster. It carried with it the poisonous cosmopolitanism that talks about "One World" and imagines that Divine Providence has made all human beings part of the Divine Plan, so that there are no racial differences, but only differences in education and understanding of the Stoics’ Truth. That is why we today so often do not know the race of an individual who had learned to speak and write good Greek (or Latin) and had been given, or had adopted, a civilized name. Our sources of information were so bemused by vapid verbiage about the Brotherhood of Man that they forgot to discriminate.
Professor Murray is right in saying that Stoicism was basically a religion, but it was so wrapped in layer after layer of speciously logical and precise discourse and required so much intellectual effort to understand its complexities that it was considered a philosophy. And I think we may accept it as such on the basis of one criterion: it had no rituals or ceremonies and it had no priests. That is an important point to which we shall return later.
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