UNIVERSAL
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OU 166505
UNIVERSAL
LIBRARY
SYMBOLISM AND BELIEF
Gifford Lectures
by the same author
HELLENISM AND CHRISTIANITY SIBYLS AND SEERS
THOUGHTS ON INDIAN DISCONTENTS THE HOPE OF A WORLD TO COME
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HISTORY OF EGYPT UNDER THE PTOLEMIC DYNASTY
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JERUSALEM UNDER HIGH PRIESTS
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LATER GREEK RELIGION
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WORLD OF GREECE AND ROME
(T. Nelson & Sons)
STOICS AND SCEPTICS THE POEMS OF LEONIDAS OF TARENTU^
(Clarendon Press^ Oxford)
SYMBOLISM AND BELIEF
by
EDWYN BEVAN
London
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD Museum Street
^RSX PUBLISHED IN I938
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PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY UNWIN BROTHERS LTD., WOKING
TO MY FRIEND
ALFRED EDWARD TAYLOR
without whose prompting and encouragement these lectures would never have been written
PREFACE
JL HE lectures contained in this volume were given for the University of Edinburgh on Lord Gifford’s founda- tion in the years 1933 and 1934. I have delayed their publication in the hope that with process of time I might, by further reading and thought, be able to expand and modify them, so as to make them more worthy of presen- tation to the public in the form of a book. This hope has been so meagrely realized that it now seems best to let them go forth, with all their imperfections on their head, hardly at all altered from the form in which they were delivered. Some changes in arrangement have been made in the order of lectures: the two on Time now follow immediately the two on the spatial symbol of Height. Four lectures have been omitted altogether from the present volume, those on image-worship and doctrines :ondemning the manufacture of images in antiquity and in the Christian Church. Since in the rest of the lectures ^he symbolism of material objects in worship was not the kind of symbolism under consideration, these four lectures seemed somewhat of a digression from the main line of argument. I hope later on to issue them as a small book by themselves.
As is generally known. Lord Gifford’s Will prescribes :hat lecturers on his foundation are not to ask their ludience to believe any str^tement on the ground of any special revelation, whether contained in Scripture or the dogma of a Church, but to rest what they affirm solely
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upon grounds of reason. That is to say, their basis must be the facts of the world so far as they are accessible to the reason common to mankind. I hope that I have nowhere transgressed this restriction imposed by the munificent benefactor to whom these lectures owe their existence. Of course beliefs entertained by the Christian Church, or by Theists, are, as psychological facts, among the indisputable facts of the world, and a Gifford lecturer is, I take it, permitted to point to them, as such, though he may not ask his hearers to accept them on the authority of Church or Scripture.
Since my two lectures on Time were writfen, a note- worthy contribution to the subject, from a Christian standpoint, has been made by Mr. F. H. Brabant in his Bampton Lectures, Time and Eternity in Christian Thought (delivered in 1936, published in 1937). It was unfortunate for me that I had not Mr. Brabant’s book before me, when I wrote my two lectures.
Of one thing I am sure: that the questions I have raised regarding the element of symbolism in our religious conceptions take us to the very heart of the religious problem. How inadequate my attempts to answer them have been no one can be more conscious than I am. But if I have succeeded in putting the questions themselves in a somewhat clearer light, so that the thought of others may be directed upon them with richer result, that at any rate is something which I trust the University which honoured me by appointing me to this lectureship will accept as something worth doing.
January 1938
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Contents
LECTURE
Preface
I. Introductory
II. Height
III. Height (continued)
IV. Time
V. Time (continued)
VI. Light
VII. Spirit
VIII. Spirit (continued)
IX. The Wrath of God
X. The Wrath of God (continued)
XI. Distinction of Literal and Symbolical
XII. Symbols Without Conceptual Meaning
XIII. Pragmatism and Analogy
XIV. Mansel and Pragmatism
XV. Rationalism and Mysticism
XVI. The Justification of Belief Index
PAGE
7 1 1 28
58
82
102
125
177
206
231
252
275
297
318
341
387
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LECTURE ONE
iNTRODUCTOR'^S
"Symbolism and Belief” is the subject chosen for these lectures. In his little book on Symbolism Professor Whitehead gives a definition of that term with which we may start. “The human mind,” he says, “is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, re- specting other components of its experience.” That definition will perhaps have to be qualified for our purposes as we proceed. A symbol certainly, I think, means some- thing presented to the senses or the imagination — ^usually to the senses — ^which stands for something else. Sym- bolism in that way runs through the whole of life. Every moment we are seeing objects or hearing sounds or smelling smells which bring to our minds a vast complex of things other than themselves — ^words, for instance, as spoken or written signs. And if symbolism thus runs through life as a whole, it is a factor of the first importance in religion.
But we have, for our purposes, to make a distinction at the outset between two different kinds of symbols. There are visible objects or sounds which stand for something of which we already have direct knowledge. Such symbols are not intended to give us any information about the nature of the thing or things symbolized, but to remind
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US of them, or tell us something about their action at the particular moment, or prompt us to act in a certain way at the particular moment because of them. The Union Jack does not give a patriotic Briton any information about his country or the part it has played in the world, but it reminds him of a whole world of things which he knows otherwise. The sound of a trumpet announcing the arrival of a king to inspect his army, or the tolling of a bell to announce his death do not tell those who hear the sound anything about the appearance or character of the king: nor would it give them any idea of what coming to inspect an army meant, or what dying meant, if they had not already the idea of those things^ in their minds: the sound tells them merely that the man they otherwise know is going to perform the action, or has suffered the experience, which they otherwise knew, at that particular moment of time. Or, thirdly, the trumpet which orders the troops to get up in the morning or begin their march, does not tell them anything about getting up in the morning or marching which they do not know already; it tells them only that these actions, of which they have already definite ideas, acquired otherwise, have to be performed now.
The other kind of symbols purport to give information about the things they symbolize, to convey knowledge of their nature, which those who see or hear the symbols have not had before or have not otherwise. There is the old story of someone born blind having explained to him what the colour scarlet was by his being told that it was like the sound of a trumpet. Whether that was a happy analogy or not, it is plain that the only possible way in which a person born blind could be given any information regarding colour is by the use of some things within his own experience, as symbols working by analogy.
This difference between the purpose of the two
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ditterent kinds ot symbol implies a ditterence in their essential character. The symbols of the first kind, which remind, or signal, or command need have no resemblance at all to the thing symbolized. A Union Jack is not like our country: the word “lion” is not like a lion. Their connexion with the thing symbolized is either a matter of deliberate human arrangement, of convention, vd/iy not <l>va€i in the Greek phrase, or has come about by a natural connexion in the actual events of our past experi- ence which causes the presentation of certain objects to our senses now to call up a mass of other things which in the past We have experienced as accompanying or follow- ing the things we ‘now see or hear or imagine. The connexion in either case is not one of similarity. The smell of a flower may now call up for us the days of our child- hood, may in that way stand for them or symbolize them to us, though the smell does not resemble the other experiences connected with it in childhood.
But in the case of the second kind of symbols, those which purport to give information about the nature of something not otherwise known, resemblance is essential. The man born blind could not get any good from being told that scarlet was like the blowing of a trumpet unless there were a similitude of some kind between the two things — it may be the resemblance in the emotional reaction which each provokes. No doubt in the case of the other kind of symbols, resemblance may come in as well to reinforce the action of certain symbols upon the mind — ^many words, for instance, or phrases are onoma- topoeic. “Quadrupedante pedum sonitu quatit ungula campum” does resemble in sound the galloping of a horse. The weeping-willow, taken by the Elizabethans as a symbol of unhappy love, does resemble in its lines the drooping head and hanging hands. But the resem- blance in the case of symbols of the former kind — ^those
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which remind or signal or command — is an extra tnrown in : it is not essential. It would be possible to call up in the imagination the idea of a horse galloping in words that had no resemblance to the sound of galloping, or if convention had once made a holly-bush instead of a weeping-willow the symbol of unhappy love, an association would in time be created in the mind between them, so that the sight of holly would immediately suggest the other. But in the case of symbols which purport to give information about something not otherwise known the resemblance, as has just been said, is essential.
When we turn from these general considerations about symbols to the field of religion, we see at once that symbols of both kinds have an important place there. Visible objects in great variety, sounds in words and music and bells, smells in incense, are used to remind men effectively of great complexes of things they know or believe otherwise, or signal some special moment in the cultus, or prompt to some immediate religious act. But also in religion things are presented to the senses, or ideas presented to the mind, which purport, not to call to mind other things within the experience of the worshipper, but to convey to him knowledge of things beyond the range of any human experience. They are like the blowing of a trumpet to the man born blind, something chosen within the worshipper’s experience to tell him about something lying outside his experience. We see now how Professor Whitehead’s definition of symbolism, if we applied it to the religious field we are studying, would be inadequate, unless we took the view that human experience covers all the Reality there is and there is nothing outside it. I do not think that Professor Whitehead meant to affirm that : he was only thinking of symbolism as applied to the field of human experience which it was the task of his little book to consider.
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In these lectures we shall not have to do with symbols of the former class. We shall not go into the history of religious ritual, the vast mass of symbolical actions by which different peoples have expressed their devotion according to their different conceptions of the deity or the peculiar suggestions of their natural environment. But our time will be given to a consideration of the other kind of symbols, those which purport to give information about the unseen world, those in which resemblance of some sort between the symbol and the thing symbolized is essential.
That all the conceptions we can have of God or of the spiritual w'orld are inadequate symbols is now a religious commonplace. But it is odd to think that this belief which we to-day take for granted has not always been held by men. Milton, indeed, represents it as having been told to the first man by the sociable archangel during a pleasant conversation one sunshiny day in the bowers of Eden.
High matter thou injoinst me, O prime of men,
The secrets of another world, perhaps Not lawful to reveal. Yet for thy good This is dispenc’t, and what surmounts the reach Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik’ning spiritual to corporeal forms.
As may express them best, though what if Earth Be but the shadow of Heav’n, and things therein Each to other like, more than on earth is thought
It is Milton rather than Raphael who speaks in that last phrase, for by general opinion on earth the archangel could hardly have meant what was thought by a single human couple, or perhaps by Adam alone. But it is odd to look back in the real history of men and see how far from having been general in antiquity the idea was that there was a world to which our conceptions of material
1 Paradise Lost, v. 563-576.
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form and time did not apply. I do not know that you find it earlier than Plato among the Greeks. You no doubt find many expressions in the fragments of earlier Greek literature, dwelling on the limitations of human know- ledge, like the well-known fragment of Xenophanes “That man has never yet been born, nor ever shall be, who knoweth the certain truth about the gods and about the things I utter concerning the universe; for even though he should hit the mark most perfectly in his speech, he himself knoweth not when he doth so: everything is a matter of opinion.” Or a fragment of Pindar: “What conceit hast thou of wisdom, wherein one min is but a little stronger than another? Yea, by no manner of means shall a man search with his human mind into the thoughts of the gods: surely of a mortal mother was he born.” No doubt the idea that the universe was very big and the part of it a man knew very little, the idea that the life of supernatural beings was something more splendid and glorious than any life lived by men, such ideas were quite common. But that is something different from recognizing the existence of a world to which our categories of space and time do not apply. The world in which disembodied souls were thought of as living was invisible, but it was thought still to be spatial and the disembodied souls to be material, like a breath or a vapour. Perhaps one may see an approach to the idea of a mode of existence, wholly different from man’s existence in space and time, in the teaching of Parmenides and the Eleatics that the variety and motion which man’s senses seem to show him are illusions and that the world is really uniform and stationary. But with Plato you get clearly laid down that the world of eternal ideas, the world which alone is truly real, is non- material and timeless. You get the recognition that men can speak of that world only in language which is groping and inadequate.
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This idea went on through later generations in the mode of thought derived from Plato, like a rivulet, till it mingled in the tradition of the Christian Church. But it was a rivulet flowing through the midst of alien philosophies. Neither the Stoic nor the Epicurean school gave it any reception, and the Stoic school was the most popular one in the two centuries before and the century after the Christian era. For the Stoics there was no spiritual world beyond the world we touch and see. God was a pneuma, but not a Spirit in the Jewish and Christian sense. He was a pneuma in the sense of a material element, a kind of fiery gas. The world in which the highest beings of divine nature lived was not an unseen world, but the outermost envelope of fiery aether encompassing the material world into which you could look up from the earth on starry nights. And when this order of things came to an end and God was for another spell alone in His pure being, that was not a non-spatial, non-temporal mode of existence, but God’s existence as a kind of Fire in the literal senie for a definite period of time. Of course, the Stoics we/e not materialists in the ordinary sense of that word now, because they attributed to these material things, to the Divine Fire encompassing the world, to the Divine pneuma interpenetrating the world, the qualities of mind — consciousness, thought, wisdom. But these were not things so different from anything within human experi- ence that human language could apply to them only by symbol and analogy. They were things about which you could speak as adequately and literally as about the doings of your next-door neighbour. Similarly to the Epicureans there was no spiritual world beyond the world made of material atoms. There was not even any mind or conscious- ness in our region of the universe other than human mind and consciousness, and that was a mere epiphenomenon of the soul, while the soul itself was a collection of fine
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atoms which would be dissipated and cease to exist at tne individual’s death. And if Epicurus believed — as he probably quite sincerely did — ^that divine beings greater and happier than man existed in the empty spaces between the worlds, their existence was not, for him, existence in a mode inconceivable to human thought. He specially insisted that the gods had a bodily shape similar to the human, and conversed as men do.
What then for us to-day is a commonplace — that about God and the spiritual world you can speak only in language which is inadequate and symbolical — ^was far from being a commonplace in the ancient Greco-Roman world, the parent of our European civilization. Yet there were always people, after Plato, who continued to say it, carrying on Plato’s thought.
In Neo-Platonism, which from about a.d. 200 took the place of Stoicism as the dominant philosophy of the Greco-Roman world, the idea is emphatically and fre- quently expressed. We have only to go to Plotinus. If on the higher level of intellectual contemplation, the Mind can apprehend the intelligential world directly, when we descend again to the everyday world of the Soul, wc need an image to make the things we then apprehended real to us — “desiring to behold the archetype, as it were by means of an image’’ (olov iv eiKovt to apxirxmov decapelv €04Xovt€s) (V. 3, 6).
Since we are powerless to find the terms with which it would be appro- priate to speak of the Supreme Reality, we take inferior characteristics from inferior things and apply them metaphorically to Him, making such and such statements about Him. Yet there is no way by which we can apply anything in the proper sense (/tupitoj) to Him as a predicate, or even make any statement in the proper sense about Him : everything comes short of Him, all beauty, all majesty. He Himself is the source of these things. Yet even to call Him the source is in some sense wrong (VI. 8. 8).
“Good,” if by that we mean the Supreme Reality, cannot connote belonging to any genus of good things or good persons. We call the
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Supreme Reality [to 7rpo)rov, **the First”] the Good in itself, the Good to which no predicate can be applied ; we are obliged to use such a form of speech, because we have no other way of expressing it. . . . What ! Is that which Is by its own nature not good ? Yes, it is good, but not good in the way in which the Supreme Reality is good. It [the Supreme Reality] does not have goodness as a quality belonging to it : it is good in itself (VI. 2. 17).
Shall we say that Necessity made itself into a Reality [in order to explain the existence of the Supreme Reality] ? Nay, we cannot even say that it ever became a Reality, since everything real has come into existence only subsequently to It, and through It. How then could we say of that which is antecedent to all realization that it was made real by something else — or even by Itself? This then which cannot be said to have become real — what is if? Nay, all we can do is to depart in silence. We must leave the matter as something which brings our mind to a standstill and search no further. . . . When we have bethought us of the absurdity involved in the very way our minds work, we no longer set any outline about Him, no longer draw, as it were, a circle round Him, describing Him as just so big. We recognize that bigness is not any property attaching to Him. Quality, as such, does not attach to Him. No form belongs to Him, not even one for the Intellect. No relation to anything else. For He subsists by Himself, before there is any other. What meaning can there be any longer in saying : “This and this property belongs to Him ?” How can we use such an utterance, when everything else said about Him is only a negation ? So that instead of saying : “This and this property belongs to Him,” it would be truer to say : “Not even this or this property belongs to Him.” The belonging to Him of property of any kind is impossible (VI. 8. II).
Plotinus indicates his own procedure. Since no phrase you can use about the Supreme is adequate to the Reality, all you can do is to throw out your phrase at It and then deny that the phrase is true. This leaves a kind of impres- sion or idea in the hearer’s mind, but at the same time prevents him from committing himself to it too fast and fixedly. In the later Neo-Platonists the practice comes up which went on in the later mystical tradition, of calling the higher apprehension of the Supreme Reality nescience because it is a knowledge which transcends knowledge in the ordinary sense, transcends knowledge consisting in
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a relation between intellectual concepts, expressible in language. The philosopher Isidorus (5th century a.d.), we are told in the fragments' of the life of him written by Damascius, “did not care to offer homage to images; he went to the gods themselves direct, the gods who are hidden, not in the holy places of temples, but hidden within the soul, in the inexpressible region, whatever it may be, of nescience (dyvwata). How then did he go to gods such as these? He went by a kind of mighty love, itself inexpressible. What we mean by this love those who have experience of it know, but to say what it is in ‘words is impossible, even to conceive it in thought is not any easier” {Fita Isidori § 38).
This conviction that ultimate Reality was indescribable in human language was the result amongst the Greeks of a process of intellectual activity, a thinking about the universe and about the way in which the human mind worked in its attempt to understand the universe. When we turn to the other great tradition which has gone to make up our European culture, the Hebrew, we cannot expect to find there the same philosophical interest. The apprehension of Reality which we see in the Old Testa- ment prophets was of quite a different kind. Yet here too we find the conviction that God is, to use Rudolf Otto’s phrase, the Ganz Andere, the wholly different from man, speaking with a power of command from an invisible world. If we leave out of account the peculiar development of pantheistic mysticism in India, seen already in the Upanishads, which are perhaps older than Amos and Hosea (8th century b.c.), it cannot be denied that the idea of God in the Old Testament, as we have it, is less anthropomorphic than the idea of God in any other religion of the ancient world, till we come to the philoso- phical transformation of the religious tradition in Greece.
It was not, of course, philosophy, but a religious sense
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of what was appropriate — ^wnetner you regara mat as auc to the action of the Divine Spirit in the minds of men or not — ^which made the Hebrew prophets remove from Jehovah all those mythological accessories — a visible form, a consort, a family — ^which other peoples attached to their gods. We find the idea insisted upon that Jehovah cannot be seen. This may well at the outset have been such an idea as was common to Israelites and other peoples — that it was dangerous to see a divine being. Indeed, that is clearly the idea in some Old Testament passages. “We shall surely die,” Manoah says (Judges xiii. 22) “because we have seen God.” “And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for, said he, I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved!” (Genesis xxxii. 30). But such a primitive idea might pass gradually, as men’s minds became more mature, into the idea that man could not see God because man’s faculties were incapable of apprehending the Divine Reality. When Deuteronomy forbids the making of any image of Jehovah “for ye saw no form on the day that Jehovah spoke unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire” (iv. 1 5), it is implied that Jehovah actually has no form of a visible kind. How important it was felt to insist upon this characteristic of Jehovah is shown by the prominence given in Judaism after the Exile to the law which forbade the making of images. How careful Ezekiel is, when he does, in the chariot vision, represent Jehovah by the figure of a man, to insist that it was an appearance only, by an odd reitera- tion of words to guard against the supposition that he was describing the reality as it was! “Above the firmament ivas” — not a throne but — “the likeness of a throne . . . md upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it. And I saw as the colour of amber, as the appearance of fire round about vithin it, from the appearance of his loins even upward.
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and from the appearance of his loins even downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire” (i. 26, 27).
All this is not, of course, equivalent to a philosophical belief that God and the spiritual world are essentially indescribable by any categories drawn from human earthly experience, but it certainly points that way. When a Jew, with his inherited belief in the impossibility of seeing God and the impiety of attributing to God any material form like that of a human body, came into contact with the Platonic philosophy which taught the essential incomprehensibility of God by human thought, the two lines of tradition were congenial and -easily fused. We see this in Philo.
Of the Reality (to 6v) above the particular Divine Powers nothing is apprehended save that it is. The Divine (to delov) visible and appre- hensible and appearing everywhere is in truth invisible and inapprehensible and in no place, even as the oracle says: “Here am I standing before thee” [TTpo rod oe (Exodus xvii. 6), which Philo elsewhere explained as meaning “before thou wast,” that is, God has steadfast being before any part of the transient world exists], seeming indeed to be shown and to be apprehended, though transcending created things before all showing and before all appearance.”^
Philo explains the passage in Exodus, in which Moses is allowed to see the back, but not the face, of God, as meaning :
Everything which is subsequent to God the virtuous man may appre- hend : God alone is inapprehensible. That is to say, God is inapprehensible by direct frontal approach — for such approach would imply God’s being disclosed such as He is: but He is apprehensible through the Powers which are consequent upon His being; for those Powers do not present His being, nature, essence (ova La) but only His existence (vTrap^ts) from the resultant effects (II, p. 37).
And what wonder [Philo asks] if the Supreme Reality (to ov) is inapprehensible to men, when even the mind in each one of us is some- thing we cannot know ? For who knows the nature, essence (ovala) of
1 II. p. 255 (in Cohn and Wendland’s Edition), as emended by Wendland.
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the Soul? (III. p. I sS). When even the Logos is unspeakable, so must the Supreme Reality be, and therefore inconceivable and inapprehensible, so that when Scripture says : “The Lord appeared unto Abraham” we are not to suppose that the Ground of the Universe Himself shone forth to Abraham and was manifested to him — ^what human mind would be capable of containing the greatness of such an appearance? — but only that one of God’s subordinate Powers, His Royalty, was caused to appear
(HI. p. 159).
What comes to the same thing is Philo’s application of the term dnotos (“without qualities”) to God. “Anoios ydp 6 Beos, ov fiovov ovK dv0pcii7r6fju>p<ftos, “God is not Only not human' in form; He is without qualities at all” (I. p. 70). In one place -indeed, even to say that God is diroios seems to Philo to make a statement about God which man has no right to make. The expression attributed in Genesis to God, “I have sworn by myself,” means, Philo says:
None of the things which serve as warrants can be a firm warrant concerning God; for God has not shown His nature to any of them; He has made it invisible to the whole race. Who would have power to affirm positively that the Ground of the Universe is bodiless or that He is body, that He is of a certain quality or that He is without qualities, in a word to make any statement about His essence or character or mode of relations or movement? God alone can make an affirmation about Himself, seeing that He alone knows His own nature infallibly and exactly (1. 1 59).
By calling God airows Philo does not mean that He is without positive character. He only means that no human expression which attributes a particular quality to God can be adequate to the Reality. Every such statement is in some degree a mis-statement. The same thing some thinkers of our own time have expressed by saying that the only true mode of speech in regard to God is in the second person, ‘Thou’;^ God is the supreme ‘Thou’; in addressing himself directly to God man can come into
1 This has been said, probably quite independently, by the Protestant professor of philosophy at Thbingen, Karl Heim, and by the French philoso- pher, Gabriel Marcel, now a Catholic.
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contact with the Ground of the Universe and have a sense of the Reality which touches him; but the moment he makes a statement about God in the third person — even though it is that God is good — he is more or less dis- figuring the truth. To say indeed that God may properly be addressed as ‘Thou’ is in a way to state that He is personal, since you cannot with any meaning address an impersonal thing as ‘Thou’: you give it fictitious per- sonality, if you do. Nevertheless, the thinkers we refer to would no doubt say that though your action in addressing God as ‘Thou’ was wholly right, nevertheless, if in your justification of it you bring in such a term as .‘personal,’ if you make a statement about God in which by the copula ‘is’ personality, or anything else is attached to Him as something other than Himself, as an idea which can be applied to Him, then your form of words can be no more than a futile attempt to express the inexpressible. That, no doubt, is what Philo meant by calling God anoMs. We have seen that Plotinus later on declared that the Supreme Reality was without properties, and there is a precise parallel in Vedantic Hinduism, according to which the supreme brahma is nirguna^ without gunaSy the Sanskrit word for qualities or properties.
In Christian theology it became a fixed dogma that God is incomprehensible, that all human language applied to Him tries by figures and parables to state truth about a Reality which infinitely exceeds all man’s powers of understanding or imagination. It would be a waste of time to prove by a series of quotations something which runs through all Christian literature. The classical expression of this conviction was already given in the great phrase of St. Paul. “For now we see through a glass darkly,’’ “through a mirror in a riddle.’’ Later on, no doubt, formulations of the belief in God’s being essentially incomprehensible owed a good deal to the Neo-Platonic
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tradition, which infiltrated into the Church mainly through the Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagites. The belief, of course, as formulated by that writer, finds its most extreme expression in the doctrine of the via negativa, that God can be reached only by stripping off every quality which the human mind has attributed to Him, so that the ultimate and perfect apprehension of God can be described as nescience (dyvwcria, “unknowing”).^ Similarly, some Christian mystics have felt it appropriate to describe God as “Nothing.”* Even ordinary Christian theology, which may shrink from this extreme of paradox, insists that God is essentially incomprehensible.
But if that were all that Christianity had to say of the Ground of the Universe, Christianity would be indis- tinguishable from the most complete Agnosticism. The difficulty is that while Christian theology asserts that God is unknowable, it simultaneously asserts that God can be known. And not Christianity only, but any form of belief which can be called theistic is bound to assert that in some sense God can be known.
We must expect to hear ever afresh some hostile critic of Christianity look round with triumph after uttering, as if it were a new penetrating thrust, the word “anthropo- morphic.” There are no doubt views of God which are ca/kJ impersonal and which have had wide prevalence among men — those embodied in religions which are pantheist or tending to pantheism. But it is a mistake to call such ideas of God impersonal in the same sense in which a material force like electricity or gravity is imper- sonal. For although all these religions deny that God is an individual person in the way a man is, they form their
^ Kal iaxiv aiiBig ^ Beiordri] rod Beod yvwaig 1} <5i* dyvayalag yivwaKOfJiivrj. Pseudo-Dionys. De Di*uin. Nomin. Ch. vii, p. 872 (Mignc).
• Kal h irdai ndvra iazl, Kal iv oddivi o^div, Pseudo-Dionys., loc. dt. “Dum vero (divina bonitas) incomprehcnsibilis intelligitur, per excellentiam non immerito nihilum vocatur.’*John Scotus Erigena.
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idea of God out of elements which we know only as constituents of a human personality, and can imagine only as belonging to a personality 'analogous to man's.
Thus, Vedantic Hinduism ascribes to its Supreme Reality the characteristic of joy {anandd)\ the Stoics ascribed to their Divine Fire which interpenetrated the kosmos the characteristics of infallible wisdom and reason; Mr. Wells, in one of the phases of his speculation, asked us to believe that behind all the movement of the world was a Purpose which might be written with a capital letter, even if it must not be taken to imply any individual Person. A criticism urged against all such 'views of the Ground of the Universe is that to speak of a joy which is not the joy of someone who rejoices or a wisdom which is not the wisdom of someone who is wise or a purpose which is not the purpose of someone who purposes is a form of words without meaning. If that criticism is just, such views make the distinction in human personality, between that which is merely human (or at any rate belongs only to finite individuality) and that which is analogous to God, in the wrong place; in taking away from God personal individuality they make it meaningless to attach to Him the ideas of joy or wisdom or purpose. Whether the criticism is just or there is some sense in which joy or wisdom or purpose can be conceived to exist in a diffused manner, like the ether, without any individual centre, we need not now inquire. What is plain is that even if personal individuality can be taken away from God, and joy or wisdom or purpose left Him, such a view is still anthropomorphic.
Not to get rid of anthropomorphism, which is impossible if man is going to have any idea of God at all, but to make the division between right and wrong anthropomorphism where it ought to be made — ^that is the main problem for all philosophy of religion.
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Such questions as these regarding the relation of man’s symbolical conceptions to Reality we shall have in our course of lectures to consider. In the present course we shall consider first three mental images drawn from men’s earthly experience, which have had a very wide use in religion, as presenting something which is believed to characterize the Divine life — images which at the outset were no doubt understood by men as literal descriptions of God or of the Divine world, and which, although we no longer understand them literally, we cannot discard, we cannot eliminate from discourse about God, so inextricably af e they woven into the fabric of our religious thought and language. The first we shall take is the symbol of spatial height — the tendency of men every- where to regard the chief Divine Power as living in the sky, to place Him as high up as is imaginable, which goes with the odd, but universal, association of distance from the earth’s surface with spiritual or moral worth, seen in such words as “superior,” “sublime.” We shall next in Lectures IV and V consider the application to God of expressions taken from men’s experience of Time, the idea of endless duration. Then we pass to a symbol of almost equal extension, that of light, in its double reference to knowledge and to glory. This will be the subject of the Vlth lecture. The fourth symbol we shall consider will be that of Spirit, breath, air in motion ; this will take up the Vllth and Vlllth lectures. After this we shall come to a symbol taken, not from material nature, but from the inner life of man, the “Wrath” of God (Lectures IX and X). The remaining six Lectures will deal no longer with any particular symbol, but with the general relation of symbolism to truth and belief.
LECTURE TWO
HEIGHT
The Divine Being whom the prophet Isaiah says that he saw in a vision he describes as “sitting on a throne high and lifted up/’ Another prophet whose writings are incorporated with those of Isaiah describes the same Divine Being as “the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.” The idea which Hebrew prophets in these words apply to the Supreme Being of the Universe, as they conceive Him, was far from being peculiar to them. If there are two characteristics upon which men all over the world from the earliest stages of human thought traceable, have agreed in attributing to the Chief Being of the Universe, they are height and length of life. So much is this the case that when man reached a stage of thought in which he came to understand clearly that height was not to be attributed to God in a literal spatial sense, the idea of height, as an essential characteristic of supreme worth, was so interwoven in the very texture of all human languages that it is impossible for us even to-day to give in words a rendering of what was meant by the metaphor. We are inevitably forced, if we try to explain the metaphor, to bring in the very metaphor to be explained. Supposing we say that what it means is that God is superior to all other beings, the word “superior” is simply a Latin word meaning “higher.” If we say that
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it means that God “excels,” “celsus” again is a Latin word for “high.” If we say that it emphasizes God as “transcendent,” transcendence embodies the metaphor and suggests a visual image of God occupying an other- wise empty space above the space occupied by all the created Universe. The Sanskrit word, brahman (neuter), Rudolf Otto tells us in his book on the Aryan deities^ — the word which is specially used to denote the divine, or, as Otto expresses it in his terminology, “numinous” power — is explained in the Indian tradition as derived from a word meaning “height.” Brahman was used with noticeable frequency for a hymn of praise to a deity. But also the word for “height” i^riK) was similarly used. The singer summons men to sing a song” to the god.
“Here,” Otto comments, “the word for ‘high’ is clearly used to signify what is sublime, wonderful, worthy of admiration.”
Language does not, of course, apply the metaphor of height to God alone, but generally equates height with value, or with a kind of value — the value which makes something deserve admiration or reverence. The word “superior” is commonly used as connoting the possession of more of this value. We contrast “higher” with “lower” pleasures, “high” thoughts with base thoughts, and so on. To call God the Most High means that this value belongs to God in a supreme degree. I cannot say that, observe, without bringing in the word “supreme” and the word “degree”; a degree is in its literal meaning a step by which we may move up and down in space.
Our survey of symbols in religion showed that the symbols by which man has tried to express his idea of the Divine arer taken partly from the material world accessible to his senses, partly from constituents of conscious life as he knows it in himself from within and in others, that
1 Gottheit und Gottheiten der Arier (1932), p. 47.
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is to say from human emotions, acts of will, values. Of those symbols which are taken from the outside material world the significance of height seems to have come to men everywhere immediately and instinctively. We may feel it to-day so obvious as not to call for any explanation. And yet if one fixes the attention on what height literally is, the reason of this universal instinct may seem problem- atic. For height literally is nothing but distance from the earth’s surface or extension of something on the earth’s surface in a direction at right angles outwards. The proposition : Moral and spiritual worth is greater or less in ratio to the distance outwards from the earth’s surface, would certainly seem to be, if stated nakedly like that, an odd proposition. And yet that is the premiss which seems implied in this universal association of height with worth and with the divine.
To survey in detail the imaginations connected in the multitudinous religions of mankind with the belief that the gods — or the chief of the gods — live in the sky would take a volume by itself, and would perhaps in the end be for our purposes only a proving of the obvious. Sir James Frazer, a Gifford Lecturer in this place nine years ago, gave from the immense store of his knowledge in the anthropological field an invaluable presentation of facts, and he himself refers those who desire fuller data to the work of Professor Pettazzoni of Rome (published in 1922) on primitive beliefs in the Sky-God.^ We shall, however, note that some recent researches, especially those of Father Wilhelm Schmidt, who has a chair of anthropology in Vienna, have made certain views regard- ing the primitive belief in the Sky-God which seemed a little while ago to be taken as proved appear exceedingly questionable.
The belief in the Sky-God may have, of course, two
1 Sir J. G. Frazer, The Worship of Nature^ Vol. I (1926).
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forms according as the sky itself is personified, is identified with the Person up there, or as the Person is conceived more anthropomorphically, as a being with a form more or less like that of a man, and the sky is regarded simply as the place in which he lives. In the ancient civilizations which have advanced beyond the primitive stage — the Babylonian, Persian, Greek — the Sky-God is definitely a Person like a man who lives in the sky, not identical with the sky. “The Babylonian Sky-God Anu,” Sir James Frazer writes, “was naturally conceived as dwelling in the radiant heaven; there was the throne on which he sat, and from which, as occasion served, he also stood up” (p. 67). Ahura Mazda, as he is conceived in Zoroas- trianism, is certainly not identical with the sky. In one passage of the Avesta, quoted by Frazer, he is represented as saying, “I maintain the sky, there above, shining and seen afar, and encompassing this earth all around.” . . . “It is like a garment inlaid with stars, made of a heavenly substance, which Mazda puts on” (p. 34).
The theory, however, has been largely held in recent times that this belief in a Divine Person living in the sky is the modification of a more primitive belief according to which the sky itself was believed to be animate, to be a god. Primitive man, we are told, did not regard conscious- ness as belonging only to men and animals, but supposed all kinds of natural objects — rocks and trees and rivers — to be endowed with conscious life. It was a later advance in rationalism which made men realize that consciousness went only with human or animal form. Thus, the primi- tive idea that the sky itself was a god gave place to the idea that someone of form like the human lived in the sky. You may find such a view put forward especially in regard to the Sky-God, who, we are told, was the deity of the prehistoric Indo-Europeans, Dyahs in Sanskrit, Father Dyaus, Dyauspitar, and who is seen changed into
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an anthropomorphic deity in the Greek Zeus and the Roman Jupiter. Look, for instance, at the opening of Professor A. B. Cook’s monumental and immensely erudite work on Zeus. There arguments are put forward for accepting this view as the true one. But notice, Professor Cook quite frankly admits that there is no actual document showing us this prehistoric god identified with the sky. It is a conjectural reconstruction of what the belief of primitive Indo-Europeans must have been in days before Dyafis or Zeus had changed from being the sky itself to being the man-like deity living in ihe sky. The arguments are linguistic. Even in historical times you have phrases imbedded in Greek, such as endioSy “at midday,” or the Latin dies, and so on, which still. Pro- fessor Cook urges, reflect the old belief for which Dyafis meant the shining sky itself. You must suppose that such a phase of thought had existed, in order to account for such forms of speech, although you have no direct proof of it. The process by which the change took place to the anthropomorphic idea of Zeus is one. Professor Cook says, wholly hidden from us in the past, something of a mystery.
But now we have Rudolf Otto, in his book on the deities of the Aryans, declaring outright that there is no reason to suppose that the Indo-Europeans ever had this supposed Sky-God. The apparent analogy between the Sanskrit Dyauspitar and the Roman Jupiter is, Otto holds, misleading. And it must be remembered that Otto is a specialist in the field of Sanskrit studies, so that, if the arguments for believing in the primitive Aryan Sky-God are linguistic, as A. B. Cook allows, Otto’s judgment on such a matter must have singular weight. Otto’s theory is that, although dyau in the Rigveda is a common word for “sky,” another word naka is the older word for sky; dyau originally meant simply “shining,” and dyaus,
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“shining one,” came to be equivalent to deva^ a god, apart from any particular reference to the sky. Dyau, “shining,” was at first applied to the sky simply as a kind of orna- mental epithet, just as a word meaning “broad” was commonly applied to the earth. After the idea of marriage between Heaven and Earth became current (Otto does not seem to think that this belongs to the earliest phase of Indo-European belief), the two epithets, contrasting the two members of the pair, “the shining one” and the “broad one,” came to have the value of actual names for the sky and the earth, as you find to be the case in the Vedas. The. Greek Zeus is, of course, linguistically equivalent to the Sanskrit Dyafis, but it originally de- scribed Zeus simply as a shining one, a god, and did not connote any special connexion with the sky.
The Latin phrase ''sub Jove.,'' meaning “under the open sky,” has been used to show that Jupiter was originally the sky, but the phrase, Otto maintains, meant, at the outset, “under the god” literally. A god was believed to live in the sky and it gave ancient man a feeling of discomfort that he had nothing between him and this awe-inspiring numen, but this does not mean that the word for the god originally meant the sky. And as for the supposed parallel of Dyauspitar and Jupiter, “father,” Otto says, means something quite different in the two cases. Dyafis becomes “father” only after the idea of his marriage with Mother Earth is current; and in regard to that you may notice that the idea of a marriage with Earth is not specially connected with Zeus: Hera is not the earth. In Jupiter, on the other hand, the term “father” is simply a mode of address which might be used in Latin religion for any male deity in the cult: Jupiter is originally a vocative.
Otto recognizes that later on the sky becomes the special abode of the Supreme God or the gods generally.
Symbolism and Belief
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B
They are represented, he says, as conquering the sky: he uses the term “Cdlisierung” for this process in thought about the gods — “Caelization,” “En-sky-ment.” If the gods do not belong to the sky, to start with, sooner or later they become dwellers in the sky.
But to all such arguments it may be objected that an important consideration has been left out. Granting that there is no direct proof of a primitive Indo-European god identical with the sky, it is not enough simply to analyse the data of Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages. You must consider the beliefs of other peoples outside the Indo-European sphere: if you find evidence elsewhere that at the most primitive level of human culture the sky was regarded as itself a god, if you find such a belief amongst the races on the most primitive level to-day, then it is reasonable to suppose that a similar belief preceded the belief in anthropomorphic deities living in the sky which we know in Indian and classical mythology. Yes: but do you, as a matter of fact, find the belief in question among very primitive people ? Professor Foucart, when he wrote the article on “Sky Gods” in Hastings’s Encyclopedia oj Religion and Ethics, thought that you did. But he recognized — rightly — that it was a doubtful business to reduce the childish thoughts of primitive man, so far from our own, to clear, logical expression in terms of our own thought. On the question how far primitive man thought of the sky-deity as someone living in the sky, how far as the sky itself. Professor Foucart tried in that article to describe what he imagined the thought of primitive man to be. This is how he did it:
Personification, in its fundamental processus, starts from the idea that under the appearance and within or behind the material exterior there exists a being, or rather a personal force (of course, it cannot yet be con- ceived as immaterial) closely bound to the substance of which it is the energy and the life, unable to exist without this substance, but distinct
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from it and, if necessary, separable from it — at least momentarily. The sky-god is therefore radically difierent from the substance which forms the material sky. He lives in it; he lives by it; he is mingled with it; the physical sky is not merely his habitat — ^it is his very substance; but the personification of a substance is distinct and separable from the sub- stance which it animates; it is superior to it, and yet the substance is indispensable to its existence, for without it, it would return to the vorter of the impersonal forces of chaos.
This careful and subtle statement, which its delicate avoidance of making the union between God and material sky too close on the one hand, and of minimizing its closeness on the other hand, is certainly thought expressed by a highly cultured modern French scholar, expressed as no primitive man could ever have expressed it. In spite of this it might still be true that Professor Foucart was giving accurately what primitive man would have said about his ideas in our language, if he had been able to think them out clearly. But one cannot help fearing that Professor Foucart’s description, like some other descrip- tions of the mind of primitive man, was an able exertion of the imagination, constructing a primitive man to correspond with what a present-day scholar supposes that primitive man ought to be like. For here comes along Father Wilhelm Schmidt with his substantial volumes on the Origin of the Idea of Godf and has a very different story to tell.
It should be explained that Father Schmidt begins by pointing out how misleading it is to talk at all about primitive man in the general. Amongst the primitive men still surviving to-day there are marked differences of cultural level, with corresponding differences of religious belief and practice. He accordingly devotes his attention specially t6 the most primitive of the primitive, those most backward in the arts of life — that means, to some, not all, of the Australian aborigines, some of the American
1 P. W. Schmidt, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, Vols. I.-VI. x 926-1 935.
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Indians, some of the Andaman Islanders, the African Pygmies. With regard to these races. Father Schmidt claims to have established the astonishing result that you find a purer form of religious belief than among the more advanced races — a Supreme God of ethical character- istics, who is really worshipped, and practically no magic. Of course, this result is very like that arrived at a genera- tion ago by a distinguished Scot, Andrew Lang. When Andrew Lang called attention in some of his later books to belief in the High God among very primitive men, he was not taken very seriously by anthropologists,* partly, no doubt, as Professor Rose says in the introduction to his translation of a book by Father Schmidt, because Lang was a brilliant man of letters and it seemed incredible that anyone who wrote capital light verse could be much good in anthropology. Father Schmidt tells us openly that he regards Andrew Lang as a predecessor whose conclusions have been confirmed by his own very much more extensive inquiries. They seem to show that the belief of the most primitive people surviving to-day does not at all support the theory that behind the idea of a god living in the sky was the earlier idea of a god actually identical with the sky.
Father Schmidt says in his Origin of Religion (translated by Professor Rose) :
The Supreme Being of the Primitive culture is not nearly so indis- solubly connected with the sky as he is in later cultures, especially that of the pastoral nomads. Among most peoples it is said that he used formerly to live on earth with men, whom he taught all manner of good and instructed in their social and moral laws. (Southern Andaman Islanders, South-East Australians, North Central Californians, Indians of the North- West, many Algonkin tribes.) However, another story is often told among North American primitives, namely that he came down to this earth from the sky, while among practically all peoples of primitive culture, the important doctrine is propounded that he left the earth, generally because of some sin of mankind, and went op to heaven where he now lives. . . . While the connexion of the primitive Supreme Being with the sky is
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undoubtedly clear, it is equally manifest that he is an independent and separate personality; there can be no possible identification of him with the material sky itself {Origin and Growth of Religion, pp. 264, 265).
In many cases the conception of him is anthropomor- phic : in the Andaman Islands he is imagined as very old with a long white beard. In a whole list of cases his form, if thought of as like that of men, is distinguished by a supernatural radiance: he is described as “shining white” or as “like fire.” “Among the Maidu of North Central California we are assured that the whole form of the Supreme Being shines like the light of the sun, but that his face is always covered and no one has ever seen it, except the Evil Spirit, who did so once.” But there are a number of cases amongst the most primitive people — including the people of Terra del Fuego, the Boni Negrillos of East Africa, and some of the Andamanese — ^who have a conception much more spiritual. The Supreme Being cannot be seen, but can only be heard or felt: he is like the wind, inapprehensible; he is without shape like the sky. The last description is that given by the Samoyeds : it does not apparently identify the Supreme Being with the sky, but only uses the sky as a figure of his freedom from spatial limitation.
Father Schmidt uses the result of his inquiries to tilt quite outspokenly against the theory of evolution in religion, the theory that all higher religions come by a gradual process of change from savage superstitions and magic. If it is found that the beliefs of the most primitive existing races show a relatively high ethical belief in a Supreme God, that fact may no doubt be pointed to as supporting the belief in a primitive revelation. And since Father Schmidt is a Roman Catholic, some other anthro- pologists have naturally suggested that he may have been led to his conclusions by a subconscious desire to establish the traditional belief of the Catholic Church. Still, there
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the facts are which Father Schmidt has put forward with elaborate documentary attestation; his competence as an anthropologist has not, I think, been questioned; and some other anthropologists who are not Roman Catholics have accepted his results as generally true. The suggestion put forward by some anthropologists, when attention was first drawn by Andrew Lang to these primitive beliefs in a High God, that they were derived from the influence of Christian missionaries, seems to be disproved by the facts and is now, I gather, no longer offered by the anthro- pologists of recognized authority as an explanation. Now, while it is perfectly true that a man who holds the Christian belief may be infiuenced by that presupposition in esti- mating facts, it is absurd to suppose that the Christian is the only person who comes to the study of anthropological material with a presupposition. The theory of evolution may equally be a presupposition which leads an anthro- pologist to pick and choose amongst facts in such a way as to establish the conclusion at which he wants to arrive.
I think in the present state of knowledge we can at any rate say that the theory of this supposed primitive identi- fication of the Supreme God with the sky rests on very weak evidence. But it remains true that the Supreme God is regularly associated with the sky. The sky, according to the primitive belief as Father Schmidt describes it, is where he now lives. And Rudolf Otto, who denies that the Aryans had a Sky-God to start with, admits that sooner or later the process of Colisierung took place, by which the gods were regarded as having the sky for their home. Father Schmidt in one passage which I read out, indicated that in the pastoral nomad phase of primitive culture the con- nexion between the deity and the sky became closer than it had been on the more primitive level. Wherever the myth of a marriage between Sky and Earth came into currency, the Sky itself was necessarily regarded as itself a person.
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In Egyptian religion the Sky-deity seems, as repre- sented pictorially, to be the sky itself. It may be impossible to say how far Egyptians in the historical period took such imagery literally. The Sky-deity, feminine in Egypt, is represented as arched over the body of her husband the Earth-god, as the real sky is arched over the earth. Her whole body and limbs are bespangled with stars and her son, the Sun-god, is sometimes spoken of as entering her mouth when he sets, and traversing her whole body till he reappears at the opposite extremity of it the next morning. The identification of the Sky-deity with the sky itself seems here tb be close.
You cannot, of course, say that it is utterly impossible, even on Professor Wilhelm Schmidt’s theory, that the anthropomorphical conception of the Person up in the sky which you get in Babylonian, Persian and Greek religion, was preceded by a phase of thought in which the sky itself was personified. Only on Professor Schmidt’s theory this personification of the sky would not be the most primitive human view. It would itself be the degradation of a view which had thought of the Supreme Being more anthropomorphically, as the Person in the sky. The view of the Babylonians, Persians and Greeks would then be a return to anthropomorphism, not an advance to something quite new. But the anthropomorphism of the Babylonians and Greeks at any rate would be, on this view, much more gross than the primitive anthropomorphism inasmuch as it attributed to the gods human characteristics, bodily shape, passions, appetites, of which the primitive concep- tion of the great God in the sky had been free. (The Zoroastrian conception of Ahura Mazda is much more spiritual.)
If it is true that the anthropomorphic conception of those ancient peoples was preceded by a phase in which the sky itself was personified, then it is curious to observe
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that Greek thought in some of its later forms returned to the view which identified God with the sky. This was the case in Stoicism, the most' popular and widespread of philosophies in the centuries immediately preceding and immediately following the rise of Christianity. Stoicism was, of course. Pantheist in so far as it asserted that every- thing was made out of God and that everything periodi- cally returned into God, into the one Divine Fire. But in such a state of the world as that in which we are now living, a state in which there is a manifold of elements and things, only one region of the world retains its Divine quality, the outer envelope of the spherical universe which consists still of the Divine Fire in its proper state. And it is to that outer envelope which we look up whenever we look up into the sky. There plain before our eyes is God. Stoicism was of course unlike modern materialism in endowing this Fire, although a material element, with some of the characteristics of personality. The Fire was itself supremely wise, the fashioner of the world according to the best pattern, the director of all movement in the world to the ends of greatest worth. It was of one being with the spark of reason in each individual man. Yet it also had spatial extension as matter and formed, in fact, the sky. It had its purest individual embodiment in the fiery stars, all gods supremely intelligent, the highest kindred of man, to whom he could look up with his corporeal eyes any cloudless night.
Before Stoicism, the identification of the sky with Zeus had been made a current idea in the Greek world by the fifth-century sophists. It is put forward in the much- quoted verses of Euripides (Fragment, 935):^
^ 'Opdg rdv rdvS^ dneipov aldipa Kal yfjv nipiS ix^vO* vypaig iv dyKdXaig; rovTov vdfiiCe Zfjva, rdvd* i^yoiS dedv.
For other passages in Euripides, see Paley’s edition, Vol. I. p, xxviii.
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Thou seest yon infinite Aether high above,
Engirdling Earth with soft intangible arms :
Hold this for Zeus ; give this the name of God.
Herodotus had explained Persian religion to the Greeks by finding this idea in it: “The Persians,” he had said, “call the whole round of the sky Zeus” (I. 131). Ennius, familiar as he was with the philosophic notions current amongst the Greeks, introduced this idea to the Romans. A line is quoted from one of his plays :
Yon high, shining vast above us which men pray to, and call Jove.*^
But the idea as given by Euripides and Ennius was probably different from the idea in Stoicism. Euripides and the sophists he drew from may have meant that men, by a mere imaginative fiction, attributed personality to something which was in truth impersonal, the airy expanse overhead : these verses may be just an expression of philosophical scepticism. The Stoics, on the other hand, believed quite seriously that the sky (the outmost aether, that is to say, which one could see through the region of air) was really and literally God, was Divine Reason.
The Stoic view which identified God with the outer fiery envelope of the kosmos, the highest heaven from the point of view of an inhabitant of the earth, was, of course, prepared for by the philosophy of Aristotle, which taught that the outer envelope of the world was composed of a fifth element, aether, finer than any of the old four elements. Since the doctrine of a fifth element appears in the Epinomis, and Professor A. E. Taylor has shown that there is no good reason for doubting that the Epinomis is a work of Plato himself in his old age, Aristotle was in this respect following the master of his youth. The fifth element, as Aristotle conceived it, was not indeed itself
1 Adspice hoc sublime candens, quern invocant omnes Jovem (Ennius, quoted by Cicero, De Natura Deorum^ IL S 65).
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Gpd: Aristotle’s God was not in space at all; the primum mobile whence all movement in the universe was derived was itself moved by love of the transcendent God: the aether was only a material substance. Yet it was of all material substances the finest, the nearest, if we may say so, to soul. The bodies of the stars, which were for Aristotle, in his earlier phases at any rate, as for Plato, conscious divine beings, were made of aether. The pneuma^ by which the life of a rational being was trans- mitted from human parent to human child — the pneuma^ not “spirit” in our sense, but a fine air-like substance concealed in the semen — ^was, Aristotle says in one place, ^ “analogous to the element of which the bodies of the stars were made.” The sphere of ether, therefore, up there, was for Plato and Aristotle, a diviner world than earth, the home of visible gods, the region of perfect regularity. The Stoics only took the step of bringing God into the world from outside it, of identifying him with the element composing the outermost sphere. They did not commonly distinguish this element as a fifth from the ordinary four; they called it fire; but they explained that it was a fire of a finer sort than the earthly fire we know, which burns; so that their view practically differed little from that which called it a fifth element, ether.
Thus, all the three great schools of philosophy which shaped the thoughts of men in the ancient world from Alexander to the last days of paganism, Platonic, Peri- patetic, Stoic, co-operated to make them think that the sky into which they looked up was divine — ^was God Himself in the Stoic view, was the home of gods made of the matter nearest to soul in the Platonic and Aristotelian view. In the last century before the Christian era the epithet v^urros “Highest,” “Most High,” had come to be attached in popular cults to various gods to express
* Tie gen. amm., II. 3, p. 736.
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their pre-eminent dignity. But it was specially attached .to Zeus. It may well be, as Cumont supposes, that if Zeus Hypsistos or Theos Hypsistos came to be a name under which the chief god was worshipped, that was in part due to the influence of Hellenized Syrians and Babylonians, who represented their own Baal Shamln, “Lord of the Sky,” by such a Greek phrase. It is unquestionable that Jews of the Dispersion sometimes presented Jehovah to pagans as Theos Hypsistos, and that cults sprang up of mixed Jewish and pagan character addressed to the Supreme God under this name.^ We may see in the extensive use of such a name evidence of a general feeling in the Graeco-Roman world that it was particularly important to emphasize height in connexion with the Divine Being. In Latin inscriptions sometimes language is strained by a new compound superlative form. Jupiter is not merely high, he is ^'Exsuperantissimus" The same term is applied by Apuleius to the Supreme God : 'Summus atque exsuperantissitnus divom" (De Mundo, 27). “*Sumtni exsuperantissimi deorum omnium" (De Platone, I. 12.)
One psychological motive behind the general belief in a system of concentric spheres surrounding the earth may have been the desire always to push God still higher beyond the highest heaven so far reached in imagination. This seems clear in Gnosticism, for whom the world of the Supreme is the Abyss, the Silence, in the utmost beyond. Sometimes the actual identification of God with the sky is found not merely in philosophical thought, but actually in popular worships', there are dedications in Latin to the personified sky, to Caelus.^ We need not doubt that the dedicator did think of the material sky as
^ See the passages in F. Cumont’s Les Religious Orientates given under “Hypsistos” in the Index j also the atricle in the Hamjard Theological Revienjo, xxix, No. I (January 1936), by C. Roberts, T. C. Skeat and A. D. Nock.
* Caebis aetemus Jupiter, CIL. vi. 81. Kroll, D, Lehr, d, Herm, Trism,, p. 99.
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a person, since in Stoicism qualities of personality were, as we have seen, seriously attributed to the material sky, and the ideas of ordinary men were in various degrees affected by the teachings of the philosophic schools.
The influence of Plato would, of course, tell against the identification of God with a material expanse. So we find the Platonist Macrobius commending Cicero because he called the universe the temple of God : this, Macrobius says, definitely corrected the view of those who recog- nized no other god than the sky itself with the visible heavenly bodies it contained. Cicero wanted to show that the supreme God was not a God who could be seen by human eyes: He was the Invisible Being for whom the whole visible universe was only the temple.^ In the Hermetic tract entitled “Asclepius” there is a curious combination of the Stoic with the Platonic view. The visible sky is indeed a god, caelum^ sensibilis deus\ but it is not the Supreme God, who, as Platonism teaches, is invisible and porjros, apprehended by the mind.^ No doubt this conception could find some support in the Timaeus. The world is there called an aladr^ros 0e6s, a sensibilis deus, the image of the God who is apprehended only by mind, and Plato describes the world in that passage as els ovpavos o8e, “this one heaven,” ovpavos here meaning not the sphere of heaven exclusively, but the outer sphere together with everything it contains.®
Amongst the ancient Hebrews, so far as their ideas are preserved in the Old Testament, there is no trace of an identification of Jehovah with the sky. Jehovah is a Person who sits enthroned in the sky. It is impossible to trace the process by which the cruder anthropological conception gave place to a more spiritual conception in the Hebrew writers, because the old anthropomorphic
^ Comm, in Somn Sap., i. 14. 2. • Asclepius, I. 3c.
• W. Scott, Hermitica, iii. p. 19,
44
language continued to be used as symbolical imagery long after the belief in its literal truth had disappeared, and the change in idea took place invisibly below the apparent uniformity of the language. Christians and Jews to^ay habitually speak of the Hand and Eyes of God, of God’s throne in the heavens, and so on. No doubt the process by which what was once understood literally came to be understood symbolically was a gradual one, with many confused intermediate stages in which the idea hovered between the literal and symbolical. It is hard to say how far the Psalmist meant it literally when he spoke of God looking down from heaven on the children of men, when the writer of another Psalm wrote: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision.” We can be pretty sure that the Hebrew who first put into writing the story of Babel, how Jehovah came down from heaven to see the city and the tower which the children of man had builded, or the story of Sodom, how Jehovah said: “I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know,” understood it quite literally, and that the later Hebrew who incorporated these old documents in the book of Genesis understood them as figures. In the matter of the Sodom story we have a curiously close parallel in Greek mythology as given by Ovid. Jupiter, before the Deluge, sets before the gods the wickedness of men, and says: “The evil report of the present days had come to my ears. Hoping that it might be false, I glided down from heaven and travelled through the earth disguised in human form. It would take too long a time to describe all the evil which I found everywhere: it is enough to say that the reality was even worse than the report.”^
We may say at any rate that by the time that the
1 Metamorphoses, i. 211-215.
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constituent of the book of Genesis, which modern critics call the “Priestly Code,” and which they believe to belong to a time near that of Ezra, was composed, a conception of God as locally circumscribed by His sitting in the sky had given place to a more worthy one. The first chapter of Genesis is assigned to the Priestly Code and in its first verse it demolishes in a single phrase any idea of God as coinciding with the idea of the sky. “In the beginning God created the heavens.” If God created the heavens, He must have existed in almighty power before there was any heaven there at all. Perhaps one does not easily realize in the case of a verse so familiar what a breach it meant with the conception hitherto almost universal in the religious traditions of mankind.
To the Jews at the beginning of the Christian era the belief that God had a being independent of any material thing had become a matter of course. They no doubt still believed, as the early Christians did, that heaven was literally a place up there overhead, in which the glory of God was manifested to the multitude of heavenly beings, the angels, as it was not manifested to men. When St. Paul speaks of his having been carried up to the third heaven, he was, as we know, going upon a current idea, traceable back into Babylonian conceptions of universe, according to which there was a series of heavens one above the other. The hero Etana in the old Babylonian story is carried up by the eagle as far as the third heaven, but fails to get any higher. At the beginning of the Christian era, as we have just seen, an idea of the universe had come to be widely accepted, according to which the earth was a globe at the centre of things, surrounded by a series of concentric spheres, the outermost region being held to be the divinest. This Greek astronomical scheme fitted in with the old Babylonian mythology in so far as anyone proceeding to the highest heaven, that is the heaven
46
furthest away from the earth, would have to travel through the intermediate spheres or heavens, in order to get there.
It is odd to find that amongst the Jews of the early Christian centuries, amongst people for whom any identification in idea of God with the sky, as we have seen, was out of the question, an identification of God with the sky in language became customary. Now that it had come to be felt as reverent to avoid speaking of God directly as God, allusive or symbolical ways of referring to Him were often adopted in common speech, “the Holy One, blessed be He” — “Our Father in heaven” — and other such expressions.' It is curious to note that among such verbal substitutes for the name of Jehovah or the word “God,” the word “heaven,” shamayyim, was used. The usage has been prolonged into modern speech, in such phrases as “Heaven knows,” “It is the will of heaven.” The usage arose amongst the Jews probably after the Exile. In the first book of Maccabees, whose Semitic original belongs, it is generally believed, to the second century b.c., we read, according to the best-supported text: “With heaven it is all one to save by many or by few” (iii. 1 8), where “heaven” is simply a substitute for the word “God.” The phrase “kingdom of heaven” in St. Matthew is, of course, simply an equivalent for the phrase “kingdom of God” found in the other two Synoptists. It is a question whether Jesus himself used the more direct mode of speaking of “God,” and the Aramaic-speaking disciples who reported his words in St. Matthew’s form substituted, according to the Jewish scruple, “heaven” for “God,” as is generally supposed, or whether Jesus himself followed Jewish practice in this case, speaking of “the kingdom of heaven,” and “heaven” was afterwards translated by the term God for the benefit of Greek-speaking Gentiles, as Dalman holds.
A still odder way of identifying God verbally with
47
heaven was another substitute term: in Rabbinical Hebrew, God is often spoken of as “the Place,” hamma- quom^ and that this usage too goes back to the very beginning of the Christian era is shown by the equivalent word in Greek, ho tofos, being known to Philo of Alex- andria, as a mode of designating God. There can be no question that when Jews spoke of “Heaven” or “the Place,” and meant “God,” they were as far as any people could be from really identifying God with the material sky: the identification was purely verbal. It was just accidental that it happened to coincide in verbal expression with the primitive belief.
In view of the great body of facts, in the field of human thought and language, which we have glanced at in this rapid look backwards, it is surely not too much to say that the idea which regards the sky as the abode of the Supreme Being, or as identical with Him, is as universal amongst mankind as any religious belief can be, and is traceable back to the most primitive stages of culture known to us. With the belief as it existed among our savage ancestors the belief in God held by philosophical Theists to-day is connected with a continuous process of intellectual modification. Each of the two alternative forms which we have noted among the civilized peoples of antiquity could be maintained against the other on grounds of Rationalism. The common mythological form was due, we have seen, to the rational induction which concluded that personality goes only with the human form: this mythological view, holding fast to the primitive belief that there is a person, or a company of persons, up there, conceived these persons as like men in form, action and individuality. Such a conception, however, while it satisfied Rationalism in retaining the association between personality and the human form, offended Rationalism in anothter way: the
^ Rabbinic parallels. SchUrer, Jahrb,f, prot, ThcoL, 1876, pp. 166 ff.
48
supposition of persons in human form living up in the air did not correspond with what Rationalism inferred regarding the nature of the universe. If that supposition was rejected and yet the belief in a Person up there was retained, it could only be by going back upon the infer- ence which had made the human form an invariable accompaniment of personality. Rationalism thus yielded the other form of belief, found in Greek Stoicism, that the fiery aether which constituted the outer sky was itself, although a widely extended material substance, neverthe- less personal. The highest kinds of persons, it was insisted, had not human form, but the form of globes — the sphere of the universe as a whole, the fiery globular stars, human souls when they quitted the body and rose upwards in the shape of balls. There was thus a clash between Rationalism and Rationalism: one side insisting that personality could not be divorced from the human shape, and the other insisting that beings of human shape could not live in the sky.
And it was, of course, not only the early tentative efforts of Rationalism embodied in the traditional mythology which placed persons of human shape some- where up there. In the full tide of Greek philosophical thought the rival school to Stoicism, the Epicurean, which always boasted that it delivered man from the terrors of religion, still did not give up the belief that there were persons up there. Epicurus thought that gods existed in the spaces between the worlds, and on purely rationalist grounds, he argued that if they were persons they must be like men in shape, not balls, as the Stoics foolishly supposed, and if they were persons like men they must converse with each other, and if they conversed with each other they must talk a language not so very unlike Greek, the most perfect of human languages.
No doubt in separating the idea of God from the
49
human form, in applying it to the spherical world as a whole, and in especial to its envelope of fiery aether, the Stoics inevitably to some’ extent blurred the idea of personality in God. This Divine Being could not be personal quite in the same way a human individual was. Nevertheless the attributes of consciousness, rational providence and benevolence, which the Stoics continued to emphasize as belonging to Him are inconceivable otherwise than as belonging to personality. The dilemma of either attributing personality to an expanse of inorganic matter or of supposing the existence of beings in' human form somewhere in the sky the Platonists escaped, by denying this association of the Divine Personality with matter in any form. By them it was first clearly asserted that God had no local position in any part of our three- dimensional space: the most real Reality was not spatial at all ; the spiritual world was not the sky or any region in space above the sky. Of the three elements of primitive belief — the Person, in human form, up there in the sky — they had discarded the human form; they had discarded “up there in the sky”; they still held fast to the third element, the Person. At the time of the Christian era this Platonic belief had spread to the Alexandrine Jews — Philo emphasizes the immateriality of God and explains that all the Old Testament language which spoke of His hand, or of His eyes, was purely figurative. That was commonly repeated by Christian Fathers when they had to put forth a philosophy of Christian beliefs.
To present this process as a fact is felt by some dis- believers in Theism to be in itself sufficient refutation of a belief in God. The belief in a Personal God, or a God with some of the constituents of personality, is shown to be a mere attenuated relic of a primitive delusion, all the rest of which has been corroded and dissipated by the action of Rationalism in the course of the centuries. It
50
seems natural to conclude that the sooner this relic goes too, the better. We shall then clearly recognize that, not only was there no man-like Person in the sky, but there is no Reality corresponding to the idea of Grod at all.
We can call the attempt to refute Theism by displaying the continuity of the belief in God with primitive delusion the method of anthropological intimidation. If we look squarely at it, we shall see that it has no cogency at all. It has no cogency because the process described is equally compatible with the hypothesis that the belief in God is true and with'the hypothesis that the belief in God is false. The fact that there is a process is by itself no evidence for either. If the belief in God is a delusion then, it is true, we can by knowledge of the process understand how it is that such a delusion survives amongst civilized men to-day : the existence of the belief is accounted for as we see one bit after another of a universal primitive delusion dissipated by Rationalism, till nothing remains but the form of theistic belief prevalent to-day. But, equally, if the belief in God is true, and if it was the Divine plan that man should apprehend the truth in successive stages, more and more clearly, that involves just such a process as we have traced, in which the conception of God becomes gradually freed from the fancies of man’s childhood.
We may think of a man looking at a human figure through shifting mists. His idea of the figure he sees may at first be largely falsified by the wreaths of mist : he may not distinguish it from neighbouring trees or rocks : as the mists thin, he will gradually correct his first impressions by seeing bits of the figure more truly: some of his first illusions may remain longer than others: in the end the reality may come through clearly and he may recognize the human face. His ultimate recognition, “That is a face,” will be the end of a continuous process going back
St
to his first supposition, that it is a strange-looking tree If you gave an account of the process simply as a series oi changes in his mind, you ‘ could show how each ne\v supposition arose by modification out of the one which went before. But the mere fact that such a process has taken place would not prove that his present belief “Thai is a face” is a delusion. It would be compatible indeed with the hypothesis that his present idea was just as much a delusion as the preceding ones which he had rejected; there might really be no person there at all: his whole series of suppositions might be mere fancies suggested by the various play of light in the mists; biit it would be also compatible with the hypothesis that the changes in his mind had been in part caused by a real face showing through clearer and clearer. We could only determine which hypothesis was right by examining the circum- stances as they are now, ascertaining whether he has good ground now for believing “That is a face.” Accord- ing to the result of that inquiry the previous process will take on a different character. If we find that there really is somebody there facing him, we explain the process as one in which a real person became increasingly clear: if we find that now there is nobody there, we explain the process as a series of fancies. Just so the fact that a Theist’s belief in God to-day is connected with the primitive belief about someone up in the sky does not yield any evidence whether the belief is true or false. Theism has to be examined on its own merits as a view of the universe. If our consideration of the universe as a whole up to to-day, including, of course, the spirit manifested in man, leads us to the conviction that the belief in God is a delusion, then we interpret the process of belief in the past in one way; if we come to the con- viction that the belief in God is justified, then we interpret that process in another way. But there is no reason why
5^
we should be intimidated by the process being simply pointed to.
In the case of the person looking at a human figure through the mist, if he looks back from his ultimate discovery of the figure over the series of suppositions which preceded it, he sees that even from the beginning there was something true in all his suppositions. It was not a series of completely different ideas, each of which was wholly rejected when he adopted another one ; it was a series which had running through it something that remained, the true element mixed at first with a great volume of false imaginations but persisting and gradually increasing as the proportion of true perception to false imagination became greater. Similarly, if we have come now to the conviction that the belief in God is true, then, when we look back at primitive man’s belief of someone like a man up in the sky, we do not see it as wholly false : we see it as a rudimentary apprehension of the Reality, mixed with a volume of childish imaginations. It is of course solely from the ground of the ultimate conviction that we can determine what was true and what was false in the earlier suppositions. Rashdall used to remind us that the mathematical conceptions of the most advanced mathematicians at the present day were connected with the most rudimentary ideas of primitive men about numbers by a process of gradual correction and expansion. That does not cause us to regard the ponceptions of mathematicians to-day as a survival of primitive fancy.
Once upon a time it was common to suppose a spring of occult wisdom in the earlier generations of mankind: it was supposed that they deliberately hid that wisdom in symbols which were handed down in the various religious traditions. Such a supposition was connected with the belief in a primitive revelation which the fathers of man- kind had received, a revelation which the polytheistic
53
religions, it was supposed by Christians, had distorted and corrupted out of recognition. Modern knowledge of the past of mankind has made it impossible for most people to retain such a view. We are sure 'that if a primitive man told his children that there was a Great Person up in the sky he was not enshrining any occult knowledge in a symbol, but meant what he said in the most literal naif way. And yet any belief in God is inseparable from belief in some kind of revelation. The figure I used just now, of the face gradually showing through mists, failed in one point to correspond with the actuality, as all Theists must believe it to be. The face was spoken of as if it were passive throughout the process, simply there to be seen and nothing more. But no Theist can think of God as simply passive in the process by which men come to fuller apprehension of Him. An impersonal system of law behind phenomena, or an impersonal pattern of the universe, might be thought of as progressively discovered by the human spirit without any activity of will on its part towards man. But if the Reality is itself spirit, it cannot be merely passive. God must be active upon and in man, as man is active in his movement towards God. The process by which man discovers God must be throughout a process in which God reveals Himself.
The idea of a primitive revelation is not altogether incompatible with the modern Darwinian view of human origins. It has only to be supposed that at some point of time, after the creature whose body came by descent from lower animal ancestors had become man, ideas of a certain kind arose in some one man or some set of men, through the operation within the human mind of the Divine Spirit, and that these ideas were passed on with various corrup- tions or distortions to later generations. And this would, I take it, be the view of Father Wilhelm Schmidt. He would regard the belief in the High God found to-day
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amongst the most primitive peoples as a relic, preserved comparatively pure, of such an early revelation, and the wild superstitions rife everywhere in savage religion as the outcome of a declension. No doubt, to-day, few anthro- pologists outside the Roman Church would subscribe to such a hypothesis; and the facts actually ascertained (so far as my knowledge goes) may be presented in a way compatible with the ordinary view that the races which to-day exhibit a rank growth of magic and superstition show what the most primitive religion was, rather than the Pygmies and Bushmen with their comparatively pure belief in a great Sky-God of ethical character. Yet there is perhaps one consideration which goes to support Professor Schmidt’s view. The idea that religion advances by a process of gradual evolution does not seem true of the period of which we have historical knowledge. Advances can almost always be traced to the irruptive action of great personalities, for whom the field may indeed have been prepared by a gradual process before their coming, but whose coming means a stormy crisis, whereby some portion of mankind is impelled along a new path in religion ; and it is common to see their teaching disfigured and mixed with more primitive elements in subsequent generations. The view then that at some moment in the past of mankind before the purview of history begins, certain individuals came forward with ideas about God, which, from the modern theistic standpoint, were higher and purer than those which constitute primitive religion as pictured by the generality of present-day anthropolo- gists is a view not out of accord with what one finds in the historical period.
Rudolf Otto in his book on the Aryan deities already referred to insists that advances in religion in prehistoric times, just as advances in art, are not to be thought of as due simply to a sense — a, religious sense or an artistic
ss
sense — diffused equally through the whole community.^ They were due to an initiation on the part of certain peculiarly endowed individuals, to intuitions which at the outset they had, and other men did not have. If such intuitions, as Theists believe, came from the action of a divine Reality upon the mind of these men, they may not inappropriately be described as revelation.
But the belief in revelation does not stand or fall with the belief in a primitive monotheism. Even if it is true that the earliest stage of religious belief was a mere mass of savage superstitions and that the view of ' modern Theists was evolved from that by a process of successive purifications, it is still unthinkable, from the theistic standpoint, that each advance to clearer truth was made without the active operation of the Reality upon the mind of man. There is indeed a conception of revelation which it is hard for a modern man to accept. We cannot think of any apprehension of the truth which primitive man had as a miraculous putting into his mind of a belief about the universe framed in the logical and metaphysical conceptions at which man in his later progress arrived. Such a bit of advanced thought thrust into the midst of primitive mentality would be a monstrosity not at all corresponding with the mode of God’s working which human history leads us to expect. If primitive man had an apprehension of God in essence true, it must still have been a thought of God like the thought of a child, mixed up with much naive imagination. For primitive man him- self the High God’s location in the sky was not a symbol : it was literal fact.
Some of the imaginative accessories which primitive man attached to the idea of the Divine have ceased to have any significance for us at all, except as characterizing primitive psychology. They are just fancies which the
1 Gottheit und Gottheiten der Arier, p. i8.
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advance of knowledge has discarded, ideas blown away for good into limbo. On the other hand some imaginations of primitive man, while to us absurd in the literal sense, may seem to be primitive man’s translation into sensuous imagery of something that his heart told him truly about God. Into which category can we put the association of the Divine with spatial height, the location of God in the sky?
The universality of this idea amongst mankind may, I think, give us pause if we are inclined to say that it is nothing but fancy.
57
LECTURE THREE
HEIGHT
{continued)
Although it is, perhaps, not impossible that all races of mankind everywhere might by an accident have lighted upon one and the same fancy which was wholly baseless, it would certainly be very odd. And if one believes that man’s thought about God was in any way guided by God Himself, it is all the more difficult to suppose that an imagination as universal as that which connects the Divine with height was not in some sense veridical. As I said in my last lecture, it is not conceivable that such a feeling meant an intellectual apprehension of truth as we should express it to-day, but it does seem possible that it was something we may call a feeling of appropriateness which outran intellectual understanding. It seemed somehow appropriate to primitive man to think of the chief Being as very high, as living up there in the sky. That kind of instinctive feeling of appropriateness seems to me to constitute on the side of human psychology — of primitive human psychology — ^what may be revela- tion looked at from the Divine side. There seems nothing monstrous in supposing such a feeling of appropriateness in minds still very backward in knowledge of the universe and in logical thought. For even in the psychology of modern man a feeling of appropriateness, a sense, a flair ^
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often outruns clear established knowledge, often even the possibility of rational justification. Yet it may turn out — in poets especially — ^when clear established knowledge comes, to have been veridical. No doubt such feelings may also turn out to have been false lights, ignes fatuix it is only when looked back upon from the standpoint of larger knowledge, from the ultimate practical result, that true and false feelings of appropriateness can be dis- tinguished. Yet we certainly believe that some truths, before they are grasped by the intellect, do throw by anticipation a veridical image of themselves upon the feelings — ^whatever the psychological or philosophical explanation of that may be — and we pronounce after- wards that the men who followed such feelings did right.
In regard then to this particular imagination of primi- tive man, that the Divine is the Most High, that His abode is up there, can we find things in our own con- ception of God, which made those images really appro- priate, which continue to give them value for us, as symbols ? We are here brought on to a field of speculative conjecture. I can only put forward with a query what seem to me the constituents of the feeling attached to the idea of height.
In the first place, that feeling does not seem to me to be derived from one aspect or implication of spatial height only but to be a focusing in one compound feeling of different aspects and implications. We noted in the last lecture that it is not with the Divine only that the idea of height is conjoined, but with value generally — as in our word “superior.” We have to ask. How is it that “more distant from the ground” comes to mean “better” ?
One constituent, I think, is the greater power which a blow delivered from a height has because it is reinforced by gravity. The taller man would have the advantage over the shorter in primitive warfare. A man lying on the
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ground is comparatively helpless against a man standing over him. The symbolism thus instinctively chosen by inferiors to express their recognition of the greater power of their superiors — a recognition which is often used by suppliants or captives to mollify and conciliate the stronger — is an actual lying on the ground in prostration, or a shortening of the stature in kneeling. But there is another advantage which distance from the ground gives — a larger range of vision. The commander who needs to see what the multitude of those under his command are doing has to be placed high. The idea of high position comes then to be associated with command. The throne of the king must be high. In Homer the two adverbs associated with KpeUop, “ruling,” “commanding,” are one, €vpv, “wide” — the range of command — and the other iitarfif “lofty,” the high position of the commander. “High on a throne of royal state” in Milton’s hell, Satan exalted sat. In the common use, extending, I suppose, to all languages, of the prepositions meaning “over” and “under” to signify authority or power on the one side and subjection on the other — someone is “set over a king- dom,” “I would never work under such and such a man,” and so on — it is difficult, I think, to say whether the metaphor is derived from the advantage which height gives ih striking a blow or the advantage which it gives in increasing the range of vision. Perhaps both associa- tions have coalesced in the idea of authority.
But into the feeling with regard to height there enters something not derived from any differences between man and man but from the difference between the human individual and natural objects very much higher than himself. Possibly the awe which a man feels in looking up a huge mountain wall is not based on any explicable ground, but is something primary and unanalysable. All the same the feeling must, I think, depend in part upon
6o
man’s experience of gravity. His subconsciousness suggests the question what would happen to him if that immense wall of rock leant outwards and fell upon him: it is that which gives him his feeling of utter smallness and helplessness. If he saw an equal expanse of rock on the level in front of him, he would not feel emotionally the disproportion in size between that and his own body: it is because the rock towering upwards might fall upon him.
But perhaps there is another element in it. For it is looking'up into the sky which gives man most chiefly awe in regard to height, and, although the Celts who presented themselves to Alexander the Great are said to have told him that the only thing they were afraid of was that the sky might some day fall upon them, there is, so far as I know, no evidence that the possibility of the sky falling was a common obsession of primitive man. It is in regard to the sky especially that man has the feeling of the sublime, and that sense we have some warrant for thinking as unanalysable as the sense of beauty. To describe the object which affects us in that way as sublime, of course, tells nothing, since “sublime” is simply one of the Latin words for high. We are, apparently, just confronted with the fact that great height above him gives man a peculiar feeling which can be known only by having it. Yet it may be possible to discern certain qualities of the sky which give man the feeling in question.
One, I think, is its difference from the terrestrial world. Nature offers the eyes of man, from the outset, two different worlds. There is the earth’s surface, in which the two dimensions constituting a plane surface predominate, all a world more or less accessible to man. Even the mountains with some trouble he can climb, and he can cross the water in his canoe. And there is the wholly separate world he sees overhead in the direction of a third
6i
dimension. He can see it there as plainly as he sees the rocks and trees around him; but it is a world utterly inaccessible. In it some of the natural phenomena which have the most terrifying resemblance to the expressions of human anger — the roaring winds, the lightning, the thunder — occur. And, especially on starry nights, it gives, as nothing else can give, the vision of overarching immensity. And there are two other characteristics of the world overhead, (i) It is the world of light, in the daytime all shining with the light of the sun, in the night-time covered with the luminous dust of innumerable stars. (In another lecture we shall consider the connexion of light with the Divine.) (2) It, that is to say, its higher region above the clouds, is the world of order. While the terrestrial world offered primitive man a region in which regular law seemed to prevail only in particular strands (fire always burnt, and so on) amongst promiscuous irregularity, the movements of the shining bodies seen in the world overhead repeated themselves with invariable regularity.
Henri Poincar^ has remarked somewhere that this spectacle of law in the sky gave the first impulse to systematic science among mankind: if, he says, the sky had always from the time man was on the earth been covered with clouds so densely that men never saw the heavenly bodies, scientific speculation would probably have started very much later. It is no doubt not accidental that the man who is regarded as the initiator of scientific philosophy amongst the Greeks, Thales of Miletus, was noted primarily as an astronomer. Primitive man, when he looked at the moving heavens, may have had small interest in scientific speculation, but he must even so have been impressed, as Meredith’s sonnet tells us that Lucifer once was, by that regularity undeflected by any of the chances and changes of the terrestrial world.
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Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.^
Yet one other constituent perhaps entered into the association of height with the divine or with worth generally. The law of gravity, we have seen, gave addi- tional force to a blow from above, but the same law of gravity operating on a man’s own body, made the ascent of an altitude seem like a conquest of difficulty, an attain- ment. Probably this is more pronounced in our use of the metaphor of “height” in ethical connexions — “higher interests,-” “lofty thoughts,” and so on. There is, I think, in such phrases the suggestion of climbing a mountain, or achieving something by a deliberate direction of the will against the pull of the “lower” nature. “Vice,” some well-known verses of Hesiod say, “it is easy to acquire in abundance: the road thereto is smooth and the thing sought is near : but between men and virtue the immortal gods ordained much sweat: the track is long and steep upwards, rough at the outset, though when a man has arrived at the summit, then it becomes easy.”* This figure no doubt describes a quality in moral goodness which men have instinctively felt everywhere. It is a movement of will against gravity: to follow the worser impulses is the line of letting yourself go, like being carried by gravity down a slope. If the Christian doctrine of original sin is found by many people difficult of acceptance in our day, if it has been maintained on the other side that man is naturally good, or at any rate that his good impulses and bad impulses are pretty equally matched, it certainly requires some explanation how it is that all over the world to follow the good impulses has seemed like going uphill, and to follow the evil ones like going downhill.
To climb a mountain is a continued achievement of will
^ George Meredith, the sonnet entitled “Lucifer in Starlight.”
* Hesiod, Works and Days^ pp. 287-292.
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against gravity, and at the same time the range of vision increases with the altitude. There is something in intellec- tual, artistic, moral, spiritual achievement which gives a feeling that man instinctively recognizes as analogous. The higher summits of a mountain were for primitive man, if not utterly inaccessible as the sky was, at any rate very difficult of access, and those upper mountain regions were, if not quite unknown, at any rate a world very rarely seen, very little known, a world apart from the familiar places through which primitive man roamed. Thus the great gods were sometimes thought of in the mythology of many different peoples as enthroned on the top of a mountain. Here again it would be waste of time for me to go through material which anyone can find in the article on Mountains and Mountain-Gods in Hastings’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics^ though the data there seem tumbled out without much discoverable arrangement according either to chronology or ethnological affinity. It would, I think, be a mistake to suppose that the idea which located the seat of the Supreme God upon a mountain-top was more primitive than the idea which placed his seat in the sky. Some wit has said that the ancient Greeks believed that the gods had their dwelling on the top of Mount Olympus till one day someone climbed the mountain and found it untenanted: then, and not till then, the Greeks began to say that the high gods lived in the sky. Against such a theory is the fact, if Professor Wilhelm Schmidt’s researches are sound, that the belief which puts the chief god in the sky goes back to the most primitive stage of human culture we know. It seems better to suppose that the location of the seat of the gods in the sky and the location of it on a mountain-top were not really two alternative beliefs, but the same belief differently ex- pressed. When the distance of the heavenly bodies was not known, and when men seldom or never ascended to 64
the highest mountain regions, it was possible for them to think of a mountain summit as actually reaching the sky.
It is a proof how strange the higher mountain summits were to the peoples of Greek or Roman antiquity, that a popular belief from Homer onwards supposed the highest peaks actually to reach beyond the region of clouds and meteoric disturbances. We find it laid down by the early Peripatetics, and accepted generally as a truth, that when a sacrifice was offered on a high mountain-top and the place was visited a year later, the ashes might be seen quite undisturbed by any wind. When Dante says, in regard to the earthly paradise at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, that the only movement of air there was the unchanging circular movement round the earth which corresponded with the movement of the spheres, he was merely repeating established Aristotelian doctrine about high mountains.^ To the earthly paradise Dante could perfectly logically apply a description such as Homer had given of the Elysian plain. In the upper parts of the mountain of Purgatory there was no rain nor hail nor snow nor dew nor hoar frost, no clouds either dense or rare, no lightning, no rainbow (Purg. xxi. 46—50). Homer had said of the Elysian plain : “There is no snow there and hardly any storm or rain; only the uniform blowing of a soft west wind” (Od. iv. 565). There could, of course, be no snow or rain in a region above the clouds. How the ancients accounted for the fact that the higher peaks of mountains could be seen from below covered with snow I do not know. The fact that such a belief as I have just indicated can have gone on for all the centuries of the ancient civilization uncorrected is a curious proof how weak that civilization was in regard to scientific
^ Philoponus on Arist., Meteor j i. 3. p. 33, 3 fF. (Hayduck), quoted in W. CapelJe, Berges und Wolkenhtihen bet griechischen Physikem (1916), p. 35.
65
Symbolism and
C
verification, for all its intellectual and logical nimbleness. The ancients seem to have made mountain ascents only for the purposes of occasional sacrifices, and the higher regions continued to be for them largely an unknown world.
But before we leave the subject of mountains it may be worth while noticing an odd belief which sometimes crops up in Rabbinical Jewish literature and which illustrates the close association in the human mind between material height and spiritual dignity. It was maintained, in defiance of ascertainable fact, 'that the land of Israel was higher above sea-level than any other land, the Temple-hill being the highest point in the land of Israel.^ Philo has to admit that the site of the Temple is relatively low, but he asserts that, in spite of that, the Temple itself rises to a height which does not come short of the loftiest mountains.^ The germ of the belief goes back to the Old Testament. “A glorious throne set on high from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary” (Jeremiah xvii. 12). Ezekiel represents Jehovah as calling the Temple Hill “mine holy mountain, the mountain of the height of Israel” (xvii. 23, xx. 40). If these phrases do not go as far as to assert that the Temple Hill is actually higher than any other hill, Isaiah, or whoever wrote the opening verses of chapter ii in our book of Isaiah, does not indeed claim that the Temple Hill is, at the present time, higher than all other hills, but he looks forward to this being brought about in the glorious future. “It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord’s House shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills” (Isaiah ii. 2).
That unknown world at the top of the mountains and
^ Heincmann, Philos griechische und jUdische Bildungy 1932, p. 30.
• De Special, Leg,, i, § 73.
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th6 inaccessible sky-world were all one world up there in which the gods dwelt, or the Chief Being dwelt. But so far as the mountain was thought of as a kind of staircase leading thither, men, if they never reached the top of the staircase, could scale its lower steps and experience, as they did so, the effort of conquering gravity. This gave to the idea of height, even as applied to the inaccessible sky, the idea of something which it would be a supreme attainment for man to reach, if any human effort could so far triumph over the downward pull. But it was felt also that any attempt of man to emancipate himself from the limitation of his condition was a sin against the law of the universe, an attempt which the gods rightly resented: “Lo, man would become as one of us.” The mythological heroes who made the attempt came to a bad end. M-qris avOpoyirmv is topavov TroT’^adw. “Let no man fly up to heaven,” says the old poet Aleman, and Horace gives the attempt of Daedalus to fly as a stock instance of human presumption, sin, scelus, which could only call forth Jove’s thunderbolt.^
If the constituents I have suggested really do in com- bination give the idea of height its peculiar significance in religion and ethics, the further question, what aspects of God height may still properly symbolize for modern men, is one which can obviously be answered only according to the particular idea of God each modern man has. For there is, of course, not one modern idea of God, but various contradictory modern ideas. Some of them represent God as immanent, some as transcendent, some as both immanent and transcendent, in different ways. One can say, of course, immediately, that it is the idea of God as transcendent with which the symbol of spatial
^ Caelum ipsum petimus stultitia neque per nostrum patimur scelus iracunda lovem ponere fulmina. {Oi/es, i, 3. 38*40.)
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height corresponds. The very term transcendent, as was observed at the beginning of our last lecture, brings in the image of an otherwise empty space which God occupies above all the created universe, and it may be impossible to state what we mean by God’s transcendence without the use of spatial metaphors. It is the difference of God from man, the essential infinite unannullable difference, which the term transcendence proclaims. That, of course, is an idea which has been very repugnant to some forms of religion — those of a Monist cast. In the advaita forms of Hinduism, it is expressly denied. The idea of God as different, as transcendent, that doctrine teaches, is merely an illusory image of still immature religious apprehension: the sage penetrates the illusion and makes the supreme discovery of his fundamental identity with God — “That art thou.” In Stoicism the identity of God and the ruling principle in man was asserted in a cruder way: the reason in man was a little bit of the fiery aether which surrounded and penetrated the universe and was God. In the ideal wise man it was of precisely the same quality as it was in the rest of God : so that when the Stoic teachers declared that the wise man was in no way inferior to Zeus — shocking as it might seem to Hebrew and Christian ears — it was simply a logical consequence of the Stoic theory of the universe.
If we survey the religious beliefs of mankind at the point now reached by human history, and if we rule out of consideration the beliefs of the people on a savage or primitive level, the remaining religions, the religions, that is to say, of the relatively civilized peoples in Europe, Asia, and the other hemisphere, do not present a multitude of wholly different and unconnected forms of belief, as is sometimes supposed. Anyone, to-day, who has to decide for himself to what religion he is going to give his adherence has had his choice made simpler for him by
68
the operation of time. For lime has eliminated for good a number of the religions which once commanded the allegiance of great, and relatively civilized, peoples. No sane person now could contemplate becoming a wor- shipper of the Egyptian Isis or the Babylonian Marduk or the Greek Apollo or the Roman Mars. If, indeed, a man were going to found a wholly new religion for him- self, not continuous with any religion which has hitherto existed amongst mankind, the universe might offer him a bewildering number of possibilities. But any such religion would labour under the improbability of its initial supposition. It would profess to be a relatively true apprehension of the Reality behind phenomena, the Reality which has always been there from the beginning impinging upon the minds of men, and yet it would have to declare that the Reality had never, throughout the ages in which man has contemplated the universe, ever till now shown through the veil. That would seem improbable if the Reality were believed to be impersonal : if the Reality has any kind of personal character, it would be unthinkable that all the attempts of man to apprehend it hitherto had been uniformly futile.
But if the idea of a wholly new religion, unconnected with anything in the religious traditions of mankind, is once ruled out, one of the paths now being followed by man must be taken to be the line which, more than any other, has led to apprehension of the Reality. Now, if one line among these actually being followed has to be taken — it may not be as giving absolute truth, but as going further along the way to truth than the rest — the choice of a man to-day is limited by the fact that the actual religions of civilized mankind are divided into two great groups, and two only, according to the basic belief about God. Within each group there are, no doubt, great differences; but the first question is: Inasmuch as the
69
one group is divided from the other by a different idea of God, which idea is the truer?
The religions of one of the groups are based upon the idea of God which was affirmed by the ancient Hebrews. These religions are Christianity, Judaism and Islam. One may also include in the group Zoroastrianism, since Zarathushtra’s doctrine, although not in the Hebraic tradition, shows a parallel line of remarkable affinity to the Hebraic tradition. Zoroastrianism, however, can hardly to-day come into consideration as a religion for anybody outside the small Parsee community. The religions of the other group are those based on an Indian idea of God, the various forms of Hinduism and Buddhism. It is as if at a point in the pilgrim’s progress of the human family, they had come to a forking of the ways; part went to the right and part to the left. After the two groups had separated, there came further diver- gences within each group; but the initial question is: At that great forking of the ways which divided the two main groups, which group took the right direction?
It is that division, the division between the Hebraic and the non-Hebraic religions, which is the real division, not, as people sometimes fondly suppose, the division between Western and Oriental. Christianity has some- times been commended to Indians on the ground that Christianity too is an “Oriental” religion: Jesus, it is said, was an “Oriental.” The question whether a religion arose in a country nearer to, or further from, the longitude of Greenwich is completely irrelevant in this connexion. No doubt Palestine, nineteen centuries ago, and ancient India had certain features in common iii so far as both were still untouched by modern Western civilization; but these resemblances were as nothing compared with the immense difference between the Hebraic view of God, which was the view of Jesus, and which underlies the
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present religion of Europe, and the Indian view of God,. East and West has nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact, the view of the universe prevalent in old Europe, before it was conquered by a Hebraic religion, was much more like the Indian view. Greek thought, too, ran into Monism, as Indian thought has done. “Ah! The Aryan view then against the Semitic!” someone may exclaim. But no, that will not do either, since the Zoroastrian Persians, who have to be classed with the Hebrews, were Aryans.
The truth is that these labels which purport to indicate an illuminating scientific generalization in the background are mostly vain pretence. If one were obliged to stamp a geographical or ethnological mark upon the Hebraic- Zoroastrian group of religions, one could not label them either eastern or western, either Aryan or Semite. One could only say that they all arose in some country of the Nearer East, west of India and east of Europe. From the fact that Zoroastrianism was one of the group and that Zoroastrianism is in some rather problematic way connected with the people called Magi, Otto Spengler, in his book, The Decline of the West, gives the whole group the label of “Magian” religions. Even if that book is a mass of pretentious pseudo-scientific generalizations and the name “Magian” in this connexion most unhappy and misleading, Spengler was right in seeing that those four great religions formed a group with certain common presuppositions which distinguished them alike from Graeco-Roman religion on the one side and Indian religion on the other. But I question whether any valuable conclusion regarding their character can be drawn from the fact that they all arose within a particular geographical area.
The common ground upon which the Hebraic religions and Zoroastrianism all stand is a conception of God which
7*
emphasizes His infinite transcendence, His eternal differ- ence from any created being. Primitive man had expressed his feeling that the chief Being was transcendent and eternally different by thinking of Him as in the sky. In the stage of naif polytheism represented by the older phase of Indian and Greek religion (which continued in popular religion after the rise of philosophic thought in the leading class) the elements which point to the differ- ence of the Divine from man and the elements which point to identification are there side by side. The gods are thought of as living in the sky and as living endlessly: that points to the difference. But the gods have come to be thought of as exceedingly human in their appearance and passions and characters: that points to identification. There is no great gulf between men and gods. In an instructive passage of Pindar the two sides are presented in combination:
There is one self-same race of men and gods; and from one mother have vre both the breath of life ; only faculties altogether diverse distin- guish us; since man is a thing of nought, and those have brazen heaven for a sure abiding home. And yet we have some likeness, either by greatness of soul or by fashion of body, to the Deathless Ones {Nem., vi. 1-6).
One might say that such a naif polytheism had in it the potentiality of development either in the direction taken by Hebraic religion, if the difference between the Divine and the human is emphasized, or in the direction of Indian and Stoic thought if the resemblance is empha- sized. Supposing it is true that Hebrew religion arose by a process of purification out of an earlier naif polytheism, both Hebraic religion and Indian-Greek thought will have branched apart from the road which Hebrews and Indians and Greeks had once alike trod, and the figure used just now of a forking of the ways will not be far from the historical truth. Indian thought emphasized the
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resemblance, not the difference, between men and gods. As appearances, the differences might still be there for popular Hindu religion; Indian Monism was quite compatible with polytheism understood in a certain way; there were gods and there were men, but below the differences there was one Divine Something, the same in gods and in men, and to deeper thought the differences vanished: “That art thou.”
If the road taken by the Hebrews at the forking of the ways was the right one, then the movement of mind in the other group which led to this conclusion — the ultimate identity of God and man — ^was not a movement to deeper truth, but a disastrous aberration, a darkening of the mind to the essential difference which it was the beginning of true religion to recognize. When Ezekiel sees the glory of the Lord, he falls upon his face (Ezekiel i. 28). “The Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him” (Habakkuk ii. 20). “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job xlii. 5, 6). “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.”
I believe that the two attitudes are in truth incom- patible, that, as the human family had to choose one of two alternative ways, when the division came, so always the individual man has to choose between regarding the infinite difference of God as ultimate truth and Monism as profoundly wrong, and regarding man as himself essentially divine and the Hebraic attitude of adoration as unworthy. There are numerous people to-day in Europe who find the Hindu-Stoic view the only satisfactory one. Some have tried to combine it with Christianity: the mystical tradition in Christendom, largely derived, as it ultimately is, from Neo-Platonism through Augustine and the Pseudo-Dionysius, has always been liable to incline
c* 73
in that direction, though Catholic theology has made a dogmatic fence to save Christian mysticism from tumbling over into the Monistic abyss, and has condemned would- be Catholic teachers who went, in its judgment, too near the edge, such as Meister Eckhardt.
In Hinduism itself not all religion is Monistic in the full sense : there are the sects which denounce an advaita view of the universe as definitely wrong and assert the eternal difference between God and any human soul. The great religious teacher of the eleventh century, Ramanuja, whose followers in South India to-day number millions, attacked the absolute Monism of Sankara with an outfit of philosophical learning and a dialectical ability as great as any exponents of that view. His writings have been recently made more accessible in the German translations by Rudolf Otto, who has devoted especial attention to this remarkable development in Hinduism and done much to make it better known.^ Ramanuja’s opposition to absolute Monism made his view of the universe so far accord with the Christian view, and since there had been a Christian church in South India for at least three centuries before the time of Ramanuja, it has been suggested that this form of Hinduism was due to Christian influence.* This, however, the best authorities seem to think unlikely: the doctrine of Ramanuja can be explained, they think, as a spontaneous development in Hinduism, and there is no sign in it of any impulse from outside.
Again, not all Greek thought was Monistic. It would perhaps be a question how far Neo-Platonism implied an ultimate identification of the human soul with God,
^ R. Otto, Vischna^Ndrdyana (1923), Siddhdnta des Ramanuja (and cd., 1923), India's Religion of Grace and Christianity (1930).
• G. A. Grierson, in his article on “Bhakti-Marga” in Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, thinks Christian influence probable } A. Berriedde Keith, article Ramanuja** in the same Encyclopedia, thinks the supposition unneces- sary.
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because it is hard to say exactly what in the Neo-Platonic system can properly be called “God” in any sense like that which the Hebraic religions attach to the name. But Plato himself was decidedly not a Monist. In his theology, as set forth in his latest work, the Laws, God is the supreme Soul, an individual Soul definitely distinct from any human soul. Nor was Aristotle a Monist, though his God, without concern for the world and occupied solely in thinking about thinking, has much less resemblance than Plato’s to what the Hebraic religions have under- stood by “God.” It is a strange irony of history that in Europe the most impressive Monistic view of the universe should have been put forward by a Hebrew, Spinoza. The Synagogue which banned him may have been too narrow- minded to understand the reach and significance of his thought, but the Synagogue may nevertheless have been right in holding that his view of the world was an abandon- ment of the essential ground of the Jewish faith.
The attempt to amalgamate Christianity with a Monist view — to suppose that one can hold a Christian view of the universe and go on talking about the human soul as a portion of God, a little pool of the one Divine ocean, and so on — surely shows an undiscriminating woolliness of thought which blurs the real alternatives in religion. What may obscure the absoluteness of the division is that, though Christianity asserts the otherness and transcendence of God, it also teaches that God is always active in the souls of men and that He “came down” Himself — it is im- possible to avoid using the spatial metaphors of height and descent — in the Person of a particular Man. That is to say, while Christianity regards it as an evil aberration for any man but that one to say, “That art thou,” when he explores the inner core of his own being, it teaches that this is precisely what that One Man could say — ^He
IS
alone. No doubt, modern versions of Christianity have denied this uniqueness of Jesus and asserted that his difference from other men was only in degree, not in kind : all men at the core of their being are God, but Jesus realized that more clearly than other men. We are not discussing now which view is right : at present it is only a matter of recognizing the difference of such a view from what has in the history of men been Christianity. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is not another way of saying what the Indian means when he asserts the essential identity of man and God. The doctrine of the Incarnation has its point solely on the Hebraic pre- supposition of the otherness, the transcendence of God. It is because God is infinitely above the world that His coming down into the world is wonderful. What gives its whole meaning to the Christian recognition of God in Christ is that this is the same God before whom man’s proper attitude is that of Job — adoration and confession of his own utter unworthiness.
In our own day we have seen a strong movement among Christian thinkers for asserting with new emphasis the difference, the transcendence, of God, and repudiating the tendencies shown by certain Christian groups in the nineteenth century to regard God as immanent in a way which came near the actual identification of the Divine and the human spirit. The movement, reasserting God’s transcendence, has not been in one Christian communion only. It was manifested as signally by the Roman Catholic philosopher, Baron Friedrich von Htigel, as it is in some later developments of German Protestantism. Baron von Hiigel was, as everyone knows, closely asso- ciated with the group in the Roman Church called Modernist, the group charged by a Papal Encyclical with going astray in the direction of Immanentism. Possibly, it was precisely because he had been in close
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touch with those who had such tendencies, persons with whom on questions of Biblical criticism he was mainly in agreement, that Baron von HUgel recoiled all the more vehemently from an immanental philosophy which went against his profoundest religious instincts. It may be remembered how the very word “Immanentism” came to be charged, when he used it, with sinister meaning. No one could attribute to the Baron a lack of sympathy for mysticism or a lack of interest in it: it was the subject to which his largest book was devoted; but a mysticism which went the length of identifying the worshipper with the God worshipped it would be impossible to repudiate more strongly than he did.^
In German Protestantism the Otherness of God is asserted to-day as the central thing in his message by Karl Barth. But before Barth was heard of it had been asserted by another German Protestant thinker, to whom Barth is on many points opposed, Rudolf Otto. It was Otto who brought into currency as a mode of describing God the phrase '"das ganz Andere" — “the altogether Other.” In his widely read book, Das Heilige (called “The Idea of the Holy” in the English translation) Otto gave an account of what he believed to be the essential quality of religion. He found it in a feeling of awe sui generis^ a feeling for which Otto coined the now current term “numinous.” It was the feeling of awe which man felt in the presence of an unknown something charged with dread mystery, mysterium tremendum. The element in religion therefore which expressed itself in such ideas as the fear of God, inward prostration before a Being felt as incom-
^ “I have had for years, increasingly, a double sense : of the large, spacious range of our ethical, etc., capacities, and of the necessity and value of an ideal and indefinite exercise for them ; and of all this not being God, not one bit, not one bit. Until a man feels this, sees this, till it pierces his soul ... he has not, I think, waked up to the specifically religious consciousness . . . God is emphatically simply our Highest Selves** {Selected Letters^ p. 124.)
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prehensibly great, was not a lower element which religion, as it becomes purified and rationalized in civilized man, could throw off: without it religion lost its essential character, although, no doubt, religion in its higher forms expressed that element in a different way from primitive man.
The symbol of diverse dimensions is now a favourite one with German religious thinkers to express this differ- ence of God’s being from our own. “Senkrecht von oben” “Vertically down from above,’’ is a phrase in which Karl Barth likes to describe the Divine action on the plane of human life. It does not belong to this plane at all : nothing we do can lead up to it: it cannot be explained by a process which has gone on in human experience or will: it smites upon this plane sheer down from a wholly different dimension; from the point of view of our life the Divine action must necessarily be something para- doxical, impossible.
Nothing in God that is given fact, nothing that can be contemplated, nothing that constitutes an object. If there were, God would not be God ! There is no intrusion of man into that realm, nor projection of that realm into this world. We are precisely the men for whom God is, definitively and along the whole range of our knowledge, the Other, the Stranger. And our world is precisely that world within which God is, definitively and in the whole of its compass— outside it
It is sentimental, Liberal self-deception to suppose that there is any direct way leading from Nature and History, from Art, from Morals, from Science, from Religion itself, to God’s impossible possibility.^
No doubt it would be unfair to Barth to take some few of his violent paradoxes apart from the whole body of his writing in which they will be found counterbalanced in many cases by apparently contradictory assertions. But, even if his philosophy as a whole, so far as any consistent system can be drawn from his rhetorical self-contradictions
1 Der RSmerbrief (1929), p. 301. * Ibid., p. 321.
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is unsatisfactory, we may perhaps agree that the strong assertion of the Otherness of God, the distinction of the Divine from human life as something in a different dimension, does emphasize an element in religion of which too little account had been taken.
Another Christian thinker, in Germany, Karl Heim, who holds a chair of philosophy in Tubingen, has put forward in his book, Glaube und Denkefty a philosophy of religion, in which the symbol of diverse dimensions is worked out further than in Barth. So far as he insists that God acts upon the life of this world from a wholly different dimension, that God can never be rightly regarded as an object of which man can speak, Heim represents the same tendency of the day which we see in Barth, though Heim’s criticisms of Barth are largely adverse and severe. For Heim, too, as for Otto and for Barth, God is “das ganz Andere."
When once we have recognized that the Hebraic- Christian view and the Indian-Greek Monist view are incompatible alternatives, that any attempt to amalgamate them means hopeless mental confusion, we are in a better position to make our choice between them.
There are, as I said, people to whom this whole Hebraic way of looking at things is repugnant. They prefer to think of God — ^whatever they may mean in this case by “God” — as only immanent in the world-process; or they are attracted by the Vedantic view that if a man, any man, can push his introspection to the very core of his own being, he discovers that he is identical with God.
In such a case the judgment of value is so fundamental that it is impossible to prove its rightness by any deducing of it from value-judgments still more fundamental or more generally recognized: a man’s choice is the expression of his own personal reaction, of which he can only say: “I have a conviction that this is right,” just as he can only
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say, in justification of his thinking something beautiful, “I see it so.” No doubt each of the alternative attitudes to the universe is rightly judged only as giving its character to a whole mode of life and way of thinking about things. A man’s self-abasement before a goodness, a holiness, a wisdom, a beauty, infinitely above him and yet stooping down to him in a strange love, so far as it is genuine, must give a particular kind of note to his life and personality. The life and personality of another man, whose view of the universe leaves no place for such self-abasement before anything higher than himself, higher, at any rate, than his own best self, will have a difference in it which those associating with both will probably be able to feel.
We may, I think, say so much: if there are people to whom the view which identifies the human soul with God is attractive, there are others to whom it is just this view which is repulsive. There is in them a religious exigence which cannot be satisfied except by the adoration of a Being not themselves, reaching to heights above them beyond all power of thought, to an infinite height which rules out for ever for any finite being what would be a sad attainment, the arrival at an end, a limit, at which it might be said: “There is no more in Reality than this, than my own being.” Worship, adoration, prostration of spirit, confession of unworthiness, is ignoble and servile only when it is prostration before the unworthy — prostration of the mean-spirited, for instance, before arbitrary power. To normal men the natural reaction to the revelation of some supreme beauty in man or nature is the impulse to bow down before it. No one thinks such adoration of the beautiful an unworthy self-abasement: it is the right recognition of consummate worth. It is not accidental that in early expressions of Christian worship this note is prominent. “Thou art worthy^ O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power” (Revelation iv.
8o
ii). '*Vere dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare te quidem^ Dotnine, omni tempore . . . praedicare . , .et ideo cum angelis et archangelis . . . cumque omni militia caelestis exercitus^ hymnum gloriae tuae canimus."
If such a view of the Divine transcendence is the right view, then, when we look back upon the primitive tendency to regard the sky as the special domain of the Chief Being, we see it as a singularly apt anticipation of the truth. It expressed in a vivid way the feeling of the otherness of God: the sky was the other world removed from the accessible world round about man by distance in a third dimension ; its distance when he looked upwards gave him a feeling of the sublime which we can recognize as analogous to the feeling which, for us, is the ground- tone of worship, the recognition of God’s incomparable worth; in the phenomena of wind and lightning and thunder primitive man saw a revelation of overwhelming power, and, if Otto is right, no religion even to-day can dispense with an element akin to fear: in the higher starry region primitive man saw the revelation of perfect order, unvarying law, and Christians to-day face the spiritual disorders of the world about them with the belief that there is a sphere of being in which there is no disharmony and no evil: “Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven.”
8i
LECTURE FOUR
TIME
In our last lecture we were considering the use of a spatial figure, that of height, to express beliefs about the Divine Reality. We must now consider the application of the idea of endless duration in time to God. The Divine Being was described by the old Hebrew writer not only as the ‘‘High and Lofty One,*^ but as the Being who “inhabiteth eternity.” “I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High,” says a Psalmist (Ixxvii. lo). Amongst all peoples the attribute of “death- lessness,” “immortality,” is the chief characteristic of the gods. When we use the spatial metaphor of “height” in regard to God, no one to-day would doubt for a moment that this was just a figure of speech. God, it is recognized, does not occupy any particular position in space and no spatial measurements can be applied to Him. Can we say the same thing about ideas of time applied to God ? The old Hebrews spoke of the life of God as going on through an indefinite number of ages or generations — endless temporal duration. Must such a mode of speaking be for us a mere metaphor just as when God is spoken of as the “Most High”.^ Yes, we are told. It is generally agreed to-day that God is no more in time than He is in space. The application of temporal measures to His life— even though infinite temporal measures — is declared 82
to be just as inappropriate as spatial measures. God’s mode of being is Eternity, and Eternity is not time prolonged to infinity: it is the negation of time, some- thing without duration, without successiveness; a Nunc Stans, a Now that remains unchanging, with no past and with no future. We shall have to consider this view.
Time is regarded as a problem not only for religious philosophies but for practically all metaphysics. The ques- tion raised is whether time is real. If you are, both in religion a Theist, and in philosophy an upholder of the view that time is not real, you, of course, must hold that all temporal language applied to God is a purely sym- bolical way of referring to ^ mode of being which is altogether timeless. The religious interest in the question is not precisely the same as the metaphysical. Even an atheist may have the metaphysical interest, the desire to ascertain whether it is only our human (or animal) mode of apprehending reality which causes our experience to appear as a sequence in time, the reality which the mind apprehends in this way being itself timeless. The religious interest, on the other hand, is first and foremost the desire to apprehend God, and one may say, I think, that there are three main questions to which the religious interest in the problem of time is directed: (i) Ought we to think of God as above time in the sense that for Him there is no movement from past to present, no after or before? (2) The time process of which we experience a little bit, what are we to think of it as a whole ? Is it ordained and guided by God to realize a Purpose whose full meaning can be understood only when the Purpose reaches its completion? (3) We are concerned to know how far finite human spirits, if the life of God Himself is timeless, ought to, and can, transcend time, and experience time- less eternity, and this question would have two applica-
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tions: it may be asked with regard to men still in this life, how far men can rise in spirit into the sphere of the timeless, or it may be asked 'with regard to the existence of men beyond death, how far it is to be thought of as timeless.
To attempt, in the time at our disposal, to grapple with all the problems raised for metaphysics by our experience of time in general would be absurd. All I can hope to do is to throw out a few observations which may bear more directly on our special problem, how far we are to regard all temporal language applied to the being of God or the life of finite beings in the spiritual world as symbols of a Reality which is timeless. The problem of Time, we are told, is both the most central problem of metaphysics and also one of the most baffling. My impression is that the attempt to define Time, or explain Time, or understand Time, is one doomed necessarily to eternal frustration. Time can only be known and pointed to, but never defined or explained or understood. And the reason of this is that time is something wholly unique, unlike anything else we know. For immediate experience time is no problem at all. When St. Augustine said: “If nobody asks me what Time is, I know; if I want to explain it to anyone who asks me, I am at a loss,” he was stating what is an elementary truth. When we actually witness any event, we know quite well the difference between “before” and “after,” and everyone to whom we speak of something happening before or after some- thing else knows quite well what we mean. But if we try to define or explain time we have to do so in terms of other things, and because time is , something unique, unlike anything else, every such attempt must misrepre- sent the reality. If you keep terms of temporal significance out of your explanation, it is wide of the mark: if you admit them, your definition, or explanation, is circular,
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presupposing a knowledge of the very thing to be defined or explained.
The view, for instance, which I believe has been expressed at some time by Lord Russell, that the differ- ence between past, present and future can be resolved simply into differences in our cognitive relations to different events, seems to me to take us nowhere, because the moment you try to describe what the difference in our cognitive relation to the past and our cognitive relation to the future is you have to bring in the differences of past and future as something already known to explain it. There are some sentences in Professor Taylor’s Gifford lectures which, taken by themselves, might seem to imply an intention to define time. “The past means that from which we are turning away, the future that to which we are turning,”^ or again: “If we were asked to say what a present or ‘now’ /V, as it is actually lived and experienced we should not be far wrong in saying that whatever we experience as one satisfaction of endeavour is experienced by us as one ‘now.’ ’’ If we took these words as purporting to define what time is or means in terms of conation, I think the definition would be circular. Conation implies time, is inconceivable apart from time, is the way in which time most comes home to us, but time is not, and does not mean, conation. I do not even think that time is inconceivable apart from conation.
There are, no doubt, certain obvious analogies between time and some spatial objects and this has led to the description of time in spatial figures. It is represented as a line infinitely prolonged both ways with the present occupying some point in it between the past and the future. But, except for the fact that both a period of time and a line in space can be measured and one bit of it pronounced to be equal or unequal to another bit, time ^ The Faith of a Moralist, I. p. 88.
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is not at all like a line in space, and any language used about time as if it were like a line in space inevitably leads at once to self-contradictions. Another figure, which naturally suggests itself and is used for time in all lan- guages, is that of a stream flowing. But sometimes it is the series of events which is said to flow through Time, as if Time were a stable medium and the events only which flowed. In truth, of course, neither does Time, nor do events, flow. Events follow each other in temporal succession, but there is no way you can express what that means more lucidly or precisely than by saying that they happen before and after, no way in which you could explain toanyonewhat“before” and “after” meant, who did not already know. Sometimes, the standpoint of theobserver is regarded as stationary, and the events are thought of as moving past him like a pageant, sometimes it is the temporal order which is represented as existing already there, stationary, and it is the observer who moves along it, like a boat, in a figure used by Professor Gunn,^ gliding past a row of houses on the bank, or like a policeman who goes along a row of houses at night, in Professor Broad’s figure, lighting them successively with his bull’s-eye lantern.
However you describe the unique fact of Time in terms drawn from other things, you fall into self-contradictions, and it has mainly been these inevitable contradictions, I think, which have led some modern philosophers to declare that Time must be unreal. Our idea of it is, they say, self-contradictory. The contradiction is not in Time but in the inappropriate conceptions, drawn from other fields of experience, applied to Time. McTaggart’s argu- ment, for instance, that to the same event the terms “past,” “present” and “future” could be applied, and these terms were incompatible in reason,^ overlooks the
^ J. A. Gunn, The Problem of Time (George Allen & Unwin Ltd).
* “The Unxeality of Time/* Mind^ October 1908.
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fact that it is in the time-process, and in the time-process alone, that this odd thing happens, that a present event becomes a past event, and you cannot say what is com- patible or incompatible in the time-process by arguing from what is compatible or incompatible in things apart from time.
Again, in regard to the controversy whether the present is an instant of no duration between the past and the future or a bit of time of a definite length, thfe question, it seems to me, is raised because the inappropriate figure of the line in space haunts men’s minds when they think of Time. It is certain that in order that we may apprehend in perception a bit of Time, it must have a certain length, and that our “specious present,” in the phrase made now familiar by psychologists, is of more or less measurable duration. In the stock instance of someone listening to a bar of music, he does not, we are told, so much remem- ber the earlier notes when he hears the last one, as apprehend the whole bar together in one immediate perception. The length of time which can be apprehended in this way as a whole differs apparently very much from one individual to another. Professor Gunn tells us that the most recent experiments, when he wrote, had estab- lished its length as varying from half a second to four seconds. I question, however, whether any exact measure is possible, because the series of recent sense impressions fades gradually in vividness, as they are further from the last one, and I do not see how it is possible to draw a hard and fast line between the specious present within which you have immediate perception and the past in regard to which you have only memory.
If anyone goes out of the room in which we are sitting and shuts the door behind him, our knowledge that he has gone out and shut the door remains for more than four seconds, I think, not a mere memory but a kind of
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perception. The sound of the door shutting abides in our consciousness for a while as the ghost of a sound or a perceived resonance after the actual sound has ceased, and fades away by degrees. Our thoughts may have been engaged in reading when the person went out and we may have taken no conscious note of the fact, yet if anyone else in the room with us who could not see whether the person in question was still in the room or not were to ask us a minute or two after we had heard the door shut whether so-and-so had left the room, we should attend to the sound we had just heard of the door shutting, as to a direct perception we could still recover before it passed into a mere memory.
The question, however, of the “specious present” and its length, does not appear to me one of consequence for the metaphysical problem of time: it is of psychological interest only, concerned with the manner in which we apprehend the passage of events and the minimum bit of time we can detect: it is quite separate from the ques- tion whether there is an actual objective instantaneous present of no duration at all. I think we must say that there is, if Professor Broad is right, as I think he is, in describing the future as non-existent and giving, as the characteristic of the present, that it precedes literally nothing at all.^ That is to say, the time-process at each moment has a definite end, though an end always moving forward and adding new reality to the reality which exists and has existed. If we have to make a spatial symbol of time, in regard to this characteristic, it would not be that of a line in which the future was represented as continuous with the past, but that of a comet or a rocket shooting through the void, the luminous head symbolizing the present, and the trail of light behind it the past. In front of it, there is nothing but emptiness and blackness,
1 Scientific Thought, p. 66,
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though, as it moves onward, more and more of that emptiness is changed into its line of light. Of course, like all spatial figures of Time, it misrepresents; but it illus- trates the character of the present as an end, the end of something which is continuous behind it. But the actual end of anything, whether a line, or the point of a spear, or a temporal process must be without any thickness at all, just the end and nothing more.
Thus, it seems to me that when Professor Taylor gave it as his conviction in his third Gifford lecture (p. 73) that the purely instantaneous present, the knife-edge, is a product of theory, not an experienced actuality, he was right in holding it not to be experienced actuality, if you lay stress on “experienced,” but hardly right in thinking it was only a product of theory, not something which actually exists. Of course, you cannot see the point of a spear apart from the rest of the spearhead to which the point is the end, and you cannot perceive the instan- taneous present apart from a bit of past time with which it is continuous. Yet you can distinguish the point of the spear, as the end, from all the rest of the spear- head, and within the specious present, you can distinguish a before and after. You may apprehend the notes of the bar as a whole, yet it is a whole within which there is clearly marked temporal succession; the notes are not perceived as simultaneous. Thus the specious present itself has an end, the real present, though you can never take note of the real present, because the act of perceiving allows no time for simultaneously thinking about it. When you begin to think about it, it is already no longer present but past, and you think about it only as you remember it or apprehend it as a past bit of the specious present. This is certainly true of any momentary sensation: you can in a way think about the present in regard to a sensation still continuing. If you think about a toothache,
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while you still have it, you are no doubt thinking mainly about the sensation of pain you have had in the preceding seconds or preceding minutes, but you are conscious in doing so that the sensation is still going on in the real present. If your toothache suddenly stops and you think about it a fraction of a second later, your thought is different from what it would be if the pain were still there. You can thus think about the present as included in a little bit of time all the rest of which is past, but you cannot think about the present otherwise than so included.
The question has been discussed whether you can properly attribute existence to the future and to the past. Professor Broad pronounces, as we have seen, the future to be non-existent, to be nothing, but he regards the past as existing. Some people have maintained that the future already exists, only that we have not got to it yet. This would correspond with the view which symbolizes the conscious self as a man in a boat gliding past the row of houses on the bank and seeing them one after another, or the policeman lighting them up successively with his bull’s-eye lantern. It is supposed that the succes- sion of events in time is the translation into a temporal order of an order which exists already complete, though not a temporal one. The figure on which this theory proceeds seems to be that of a gramophone record. On the record there is an arrangement of minute prominences all there together, a definite order mum simuh when the record is run off on the gramophone, this order is trans- lated into a temporal order, a succession of sounds.
The trouble, I think, about such a theory is that it leaves the fact of time as inexplicable as before. The gramophone record does not make the temporal order; because Time is there already, you can produce a tem- poral succession of sounds which corresponds with a previously existing spatial order. Supposing that there
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does exist somewhere, in the mind of God, or anywhere else, a fixed scheme already complete of the events in the universe throughout the whole time-process, you might in that case, no doubt say with St. Augustine, “futura iam facta sunt,” yet it would remain true that the realization of the part of the scheme not yet realized lay in a future which so far does not exist. The running off of the scheme as a temporal succession would imply the reality of Time as something different from the scheme.
It is important not to confound the proposition that the future is already determined with the proposition that the future already exists. The two propositions are not identical in meaning. The gramophone view might be true, and Professor Broad nevertheless be right in saying that the future does not exist. If, for instance, it is already a fixed event in the world-plan that I am going to have a toothache the day after to-morrow, my actually having the toothache is an event which has not yet occurred. Only the time-process has been transferred by this view from the series of events to the subject who experiences them, and the subject at the present moment has not yet got to the toothache of the day after to-morrow. It remains as true as ever that if the toothache is already in some sense a part of reality, I have not yet had it.
Of course, the belief in such a complete scheme of events to the end of time (if time has an end) already existing would be incompatible with belief in the reality of any volitional choices. We seem by our free choices so to determine each successive present that if we decide in one way the future will be different from what it would have been if we had decided in a different way. If the whole series of events is already fixed, this appear- ance of freedom of choice must be an illusion. We should have to say that the gramophone record was always
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being run off in our inner life as well as in the events round about us. That brings us again to the eternal controversy about Free Will. And this much is plain — that any such view of the time-process as the running off of a gramophone record is utterly abhorrent to those who feel the reality of volitional choices to be essential to belief in moral values, and thus to any view of God which regards God as caring for righteousness. Certainly when St. Augustine said, “futura iam facta sunt” he was far from meaning to state the gramophone view: his phrase was deliberately rhetorical. Christians have always believed that the history of the universe in its main lines follows a Divine plan, there from the beginning, though it is essential to the Christian or Hebrew view to believe that within those main lines, bad volitions, at any rate, are choices which are not pre-ordained by God. What St. Augustine no doubt meant was that many things in the future would correspond with an already existing Divine Plan, and that, in that sense, they were already a part of reality, though in the literal sense they were not yet facts.
If there were some overwhelmingly strong reason for taking the gramophone record view of the time-process, we might not be able to reject it simply on the ground that it conflicted with our moral feeling. But there seems no reason at all for taking it. It is an arbitrary fancy. There are no facts of the universe which it is required to explain. This may be disputed by some people who have been impressed by instances of apparent foreknow- ledge of the future alleged, for instance, in the recent book by Mr. Dunne, An Experiment in Time. Yet if when you have allowed for a certain play of coincidence and distortion in reporting, some cases remain established in which future events are foreseen, this does not prove that the events were real before they happened. So far as
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men have made out the pattern of the universe, they can predict a large number of events which actually occur — we may remember stories of how Europeans have domi- nated the minds of savages by predicting eclipses. An experienced physician can often predict accurately the future course of a disease perhaps by minute signs he could not completely set out in words. If, therefore, it has been proved by Mr. Dunne, or by anyone else, that in certain abnormal psychic conditions particular people have foreseen future events, the hypothesis that the future already exists is quite unnecessary. People in abnormal psychic conditions may be affected by a number of things in the present, ordinarily imperceptible, which may indi- cate, the course which things are likely to take, just as a number of subtle symptoms do to a physician. Or, rather than suppose anything so irrational as that the future already exists, one could believe that there are discarnate intelligences cognizant of a multitude of present facts which no man in the flesh can know, so that they can forecast future events just as an astronomer forecasts an eclipse, and that the medium or the dreamer comes somehow into rapport with these intelligences. We may then be impressed by the fulfilment of the prevision, just as savages are impressed when they see the darkness foretold by the white man really come over the sun. But probably before anyone can be required to believe in such hypotheses far more thoroughly proved cases of prevision have got to be established than we have at present.
The question whether God foreknows what choices will be made by those of His creatures endowed with volitional freedom is somewhat different from the question whether the whole series of events exists already as a Divine Plan. On the gramophone hypothesis, every event, including all our volitional choices, is already fixed on the record, but it has been believed by many people to
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be possible to reconcile the view that future choices are not yet determined, that bad choices at any rate are not willed by God, with the view that God nevertheless knows what all future choices are going to be. This is the view, of course, maintained in the philosophy officially approved by the Roman Church. Dante tries to make it intelligible by a figure. The image of a ship going down a river is reflected in the eye of a distant observer; the observer does not cause the movement of the ship, he only mirrors it. So in the case of future contingent events, events, that is, which may or may not occur, they are not necessitated by God; He only sees them as present.^ St. Thomas himself has a slightly more elaborate figure: if a number of men are going, one after another, at intervals, down a road, the foremost man cannot see the men behind him, but an observer on a distant hill may see the whole series of men in one inclusive purview.® So each of us cannot see following events, but to God, the whole series of events is present as a totum simul.
The theory, indeed, that for God there is no after and no before, but that everything which for us is past or future is for God one eternal present implies that God knows the future in the same way in which He knows the present and the past. This view, as was said just now, is concerned to secure both God’s complete knowledge of everything that is going to happen and the complete freedom of rational beings to choose between alternative lines of action. The two things appear incompatible; to affirm both together seems a plain self-contradiction. Some thinkers have pronounced them to be really incompatible and have declared that God does not know what the voluntary choices of rational beings will be. Till the choice has been made it does not exist, and God cannot know the non-existent as if it did exist. God’s general
* taradua, xvii. 40. * Summa, Pan. I. Qu. xiv. Art. 13.
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plan for the universe, we are told, will be carried out, what- ever individual rational agents decide to do, but their freedom of choice makes it impossible for God to know at present in detail how His plan will be carried out. Most of you probably will remember William James’s figure of the supreme chess-player playing against a poor opponent: he does not know precisely what moves his opponent is going to make, but he knows, whatever the moves may be, he will win in the way he intends. A similar view was maintained by James Ward in his Realm of Ends (p. 478). God’s “purpose or creative ideal,” Ward wrote, “is perfectly definite, unchangeable and assured. But the world’s future history, the course by which that purpose is to be attained, depends not on Him alone, but also on the free agents, whom He sustains, but never constrains. This course then is not part of His creation; nor is it, we seem entitled to conclude also, part of His knowledge.”
Of course, if you take this view, the teaching of Dr. Inge’s philosophia perennis — that all time, what to us is past, present, and future, is equally present to God without any “after” or “before” — must be definitely wrong. There is a view which essays a kind of middle way between the Thomist doctrine that there is no temporal successiveness in God’s knowledge and the view of William James and James Ward, which supposes that God does not know the future so far as it will depend on the voluntary choices of His rational creatures. This is the view maintained by two previous Gifford Lecturers, Royce in his World and the Individual^ and Professor Sorley in his Moral Values and the Idea of God (p. 465). It brings in the idea of the “specious present,” or, as Professor Sorley calls it, the “time-span.” You have to suppose that, just as there is for us a little bit of time, alleged, as we saw, to be from half a second to four
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seconds, which we apprehend by a single perception, so the whole time-process is apprehended by God in one act of cognition. There would then be successiveness indeed in time for God, as for us — it would not be true to say, as the Thomist philosophy says, that there is for God no after or before, but God would know the whole series of events, as Professor Sorley puts it, “in a single or immediate intuition.” Professor Sorley thinks that this saves the reality of choice by free agents. The future, so far as it will depend on my volitions, is not at the present moment known by God, but for God that future, when it becomes present, is separated from the present moment by an interval so brief, that God apprehends both moments of time in a single act; God’s ignorance, at present, of what I am-going to do is so instantaneously for Him succeeded by knowledge, that we can hardly make any distinction between the present moment, when He does not yet know, and the future moment, when He will know. This theory is an admirably ingenious mode of effecting the reconciliation between God’s omniscience and human freedom of choice; but I cannot say that it gives me personally peace. It does not seem really to get rid of the supposition that at the present moment God does not know what the future volitions of rational creatures will be. This surely is inevitably implied if there is a real successiveness in Time for God. I do not see why you may not as well say frankly, with James and Ward and others, that God does not know the future so far as it depends on these free volitions. It seems to me also to theorize about the psychology of God in a way which it is absurd for human beings to do. This is also true, I think, of the doctrine of iht philosophia perennis — that all events are present to God in zNunc Stans, without any successiveness at all. How do we know? What ground have we for making any such statement ?
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It is, I think, apparent at the outset that the language commonly used in Christian theology, to the effect that the eternity attributed to God is not Time infinitely prolonged, but something wholly different from Time, different not in quantity, but in quality — it is apparent that all this language has come into Christian theology from the Greek Neo-Platonic infiltration. There is nothing in the Jewish or Christian scriptures to support it. So far as the language of the Bible goes, there is nothing to show that the eternity of God is understood in any other sense than that of unending Time. When St. Paul says: “The things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal,” there is no reason to suppose that he meant anything else than that the things which are seen come to an end in time, but that the things which are unseen do not. Where God is called, as He is in the book of Revelation, “He which was and which is and which is to come,” that suggests rather an existence going on through infinite Time than a timeless existence. The theory, made popular in theological circles by Frederick Denison Maurice, that alwvios in the New Testament means something different from endless time, is not, I believe, confirmed by a study of the use of the term in the Hellenistic Greek spoken and written by contemporary Jews.^ When, later on, Christian theolo- gians began to say that all these terms in their scripture were to be understood only figuratively, of a mode of existence in which there was no distinction of past, present, and future, but only an eternal Now, a Nunc
^ There are, it is true, some passages in HelJenistic Jewish literature in which aldmoQ is applied to limited periods of time. But I think that here a term strictly meaning “everlasting** is used with a kind of poetical exaggeration, as when we speak of “the everlasting hills.** Mr. Brabant, in his Bampton Lectures {Time and Eternity in Christian Thought^ i937)> examines the question in detail, and his conclusion is that though **ald)VLOi; could at a pinch always (except perhaps where it is used of God) be translated ‘age-long,* the context generally inclines the balance towards the sense of ‘everlasting* ** (p. 258).
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Symboliim and Briief
D
Stans^ that was definitely due to suggestion got from the pagan Platonic schools.
It is curious to note that, .after this theory has become a commonplace of Christian theology, other views have been still maintained quite incompatible with it. For instance, the doctrine of God’s eternity being timeless, without distinction of past, present and future, is clearly laid down by St. Thomas, on Neo-Platonic lines: but in another section of his great work, he discusses the old question whether God can change the past, can make what has happened not to have happened, and he pro- nounces decisively in the same sense as the ancient Greek poet Agathon, who said:
One power there is that God Himself hath not —
The things which have been done to make undone.^
God’s omnipotence, according to the Scholastic philo- sophy, means only that He can do whatever is “possible” — possible being explained to mean “not involving a self-contradiction.” To make something which has hap- pened not to have happened would involve a self- contradiction, and therefore that is something which God cannot do. But consider what such a doctrine implies — that the distinction between past and future does hold good for God. If events in time are divided for God into two main parts — on the one side the past which is fixed beyond His power to alter it, on the other side the future which He can still fashion as He will, how can one say that temporal differences do not enter into His mode of existence.? It might be said in answer that the past was fashioned precisely to correspond with His will, as the future will be, and that, since His will cannot change,
^ fidvov yap a^oiJ Kal dedg oreplaKeTai dyivfira TToieiv daa* dv fj Treirpaypiva.
(Quoted by Aristotle, Et^s, 1139 ^.)
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the whole series past, present and future equally corre- sponds with it. But if the series is thus determined as a single block by God, why lay stress, as St. Thomas does, on God’s inability to change the past} This implies that for God there is no similar inability in regard to the future. Or why should not St. Thomas have said that God cannot make the present different from what it is, or the future different from what it is going to be.?
Probably, so far as people dimly picture what a Nunc Stans would be, they picture it as a state of things enduring perpetually without change. But that must be quite wrong. Duration is essentially temporal. Of the objects round about us some change much less than others with the passage of time. If there were absolutely no change at all in ourselves or in surrounding things. Time would either not exist or be imperceptible. We could hardly be conscious, since we should not be able to think, thought being essentially a play or movement of mind. When we apprehend anything as enduring or changeless we do so only because we measure its duration by some- thing else which is changing. Should change cease in the universe round about us, the universe would still endure in Time if we, looking on, could measure Time by the succession of our heart-beats or the play of our thought. There would still be past, present and future, not, for us at any rate, a Nunc Stans. A Nunc Stans, if it can be pictured at all, would be much more like an instantaneous flash, only a flash after which nothing more came.
It is conceivable that a particular individual might be removed from the passage of Time, his state at the present moment continuing without change, without any new perception, while change went on in the universe round about him. This is what is supposed to have happened in those stories we all know, about a monk, or someone, listening to a mysterious bird and then finding, when he
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returned home, that a hundred years had gone by, in what had seemed to him only a few minutes. If this can be imagined in regard to a hundred years, it can be imagined in regard to a million years, or an infinite number of years. In the latter case, the experience which an individual has at a particular moment would be for him his final experience. For those looking on at him from the outside, in his ecstasy, his unchanging experience would seem to be spread out through Time, but for the individual himself there would be no duration, because no further event would come for him in contrast with which his present moment would become past. There would thus seem, so far as the individual experience goes, no difference between time ending for me to-morrow in a Nunc Stans^ and my being annihilated to-morrow. Supposing my last experience were to see the flash and hear the report of a rifle, and I were annihilated imme- diately afterwards, that last experience would have for me no perceptible duration because there would be no more any I to perceive a next event; similarly, if I myself did not come to an end but that last experience were not succeeded by any other, then even if time continued for others who were looking on, I should know nothing but the flash and report, and that momentary experience would be the last I should have.
These considerations suggest incidentally that the controversy which has gone on between those who have maintained that the ultimate fate of lost souls is to be annihilated and those who have maintained that their punishment is eternal, may be a controversy about expres- sions which stand for no essential difference. If a painful experience becomes a Nunc Stansy which is never followed by a re-beginniiig of time, that is for the sufferer precisely the same as if, after his last moment of experience, he were annihilated. The difference would be only for others,
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whose experience was still successive in time. Any other spirit who could enter into the experience of the lost soul at intervals, say, of a thousand years, would always find the experience there the same as it had been a thousand years before, but for the lost soul itself there would be no protraction of its experience through periods of time; it would all be shrunk up into one moment with nothing afterwards. I do not at all mean to imply that there seems to me any good ground for believing that this will actually be the case with any human soul. I merely point out that when we argue about the state of persons beyond death, there may be possibilities in a different apprehension of time which we cannot know, and which may make all our arguments wide of the mark. But if this is the best conception we can get of what a Nunc Stans would be, it would seem an inappropriate conception for the eternal life of the blessed and an even less happy symbol for the unimaginable life of God than Royce's idea of a specious present.
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LECTUHE V
TIME
{continued)
In our last lecture we were considering the problem of Time in connexion with the question: How far are temporal modes of expression, when applied to God, symbolic of a Divine Life which is wholly timeless ? It is obvious that if Time, as some philosophers have held, is not real, if it belongs merely to the way in which the human mind apprehends a timeless Reality, then it certainly follows that there can be no Time in the life of God. But I have suggested that the Scholastic theology, in adopting from Neo-Platonism the doctrine of God's life being a Nunc Stans^ a mum simul in which there is nothing like temporal succession, claims to know more about God’s life than man without absurdity can do.
Idealist philosophy has often been moved to deny the reality of Time just as it denies the reality of Space, and make both merely phantoms of the human mind. But I should follow those who hold that this coupling together of Time and Space has been the cause of a good deal of confusion in thinking. Time and Space are not analogous, except in respect to a few of their characteristics — such as that of being measurable. We saw in our last lecture how people entangled themselves in contradictions by applying spatial figures of speech to Time. Time is unique. Time
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also, it is plain, belongs much more intimately to the life of the spirit than space. Spatial objects are around us, outside us; our feelings and thoughts have no spatial dimensions but they have temporal succession. We can, I think, imagine a universe in which there was no space, but only a succession of feelings and emotions: we cannot imagine a universe in which there was no Time, that is to say, no events. Bishop Berkeley, who first clearly asserted that all spatial objects were merely ideas produced in the human mind by God, still believed that there was a real temporal succession in each individual’s experience. And we can see, I think, that even if we not only went with Berkeley in denying that the spatial world had any existence outside the mind recipient of sensations, but went further than Berkeley in denying that there was any temporal process outside conscious minds, those minds’ experience of Time would still not be subjective in the same sense as their ideas of space were subjective. It would be an absolute truth that the experiencing indi- vidual did have that series of sensations and feelings in that temporal order. You might deny that there was any temporal order outside to which the order in his mind corresponded, that his idea of Time was an illusion in so far as he regarded his sensations and feelings as indicative of a reality outside; the fact would remain that a particular being in the universe had those feelings and sensations one after the other in a succession through Time. That psychological fact would be a fact not only for him but for any other intelligence who could be cognizant of what was going on in his mind. And the fact that only one individual in the universe had a temporal experience would constitute in regard to him, the reality of Time, for even if it was only in regard to him that the series of events occurred, it would not be only in his supposition. It would be an absolute truth that they occurred, and in experiencing
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the succession the individual would apprehend a bit of reality.
But if one may believe that Time is real, one must, I think, make a distinction between Time as an order of succession and the sense of duration. It seems easier to believe that the order of succession belongs to ultimate reality than that the sense of duration corresponds to any absolute measure of Time. The sense of duration, the pace at which Time seems to go, differs from person to person, and in the same person differs according to his mood and circumstances.
There is nothing illogical, or even inconceivable, in the supposition that the same series of events as experienced by one sentient being might move much more quickly than as experienced by another. The medieval story about the monk who, when out walking, listened to the song of a peculiar bird and found when he returned to the monastery that a whole century had gone by, which was referred to in our last lecture, does not contain anything which we cannot imagine as true for some kind of being not living under human conditions. The relativity of temporal duration is suggested by our own every-day experience. But it is quite a different matter with the order of succession. That is something irreversible. And the order of succession has especial significance for the spirit. Ezekiel describes two supposed cases, one that of a man who lived a righteous life almost up to the end, but at the end turned to wickedness, and the other that of a man who lived a wicked life almost up to the end, but at the end repented and turned to God, and, speaking in the name of the Lord, he declares that God’s way of treating one man will be the opposite to His way of treating the other .1 It is the order of temporal succession which makes one spiritual process to have an altogether different value
^ Ezekiel xviii. 21-28.
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from the other. Whether I feel hostility to someone before he has shown me kindness or after, makes all the difference to the spiritual quality of my attitude.
Is there any public time, an order in which events actually happen apart from the perception of the events by different individuals ? Your answer to this question is surely Yes or No, according as you believe, or do not believe, in the real existence of things apart from the sensations of individual minds. If you are sufficiently a Realist to believe in any objective existence of the external world, you must believe in the objective reality of the time in which events of the external world happen. The Now which is now for me is the same now for the whole universe to the furthest star.
I am afraid that in saying this I go against the opinion of someone whose judgment is based on a far larger philosophical knowledge than mine. Professor A. E. Taylor. “I should frankly concede that a ‘universal’ Time is an impossibility and a ‘common Time’ a makeshift, derived for specific necessary purposes, like a common creed, or a common party programme. The ‘lived’ Time of each of us is a ‘perspective’ peculiar to himself.”^ I am, however, bound to put things as they appear to me. If we are going to deny any public Time on the ground that we perceive events from an individual standpoint which makes our perspective different from that of anyone else, we ought on the same ground to deny any real external world at all. If there is any process in the universe which realizes a Divine Purpose the events of that process must happen in a Time which belongs to the process as a whole. Professor Gunn, in speaking of the theory that God apprehends the whole of Time as a process indeed, but one comprised in a single “specious present,’’ observes that God must in that case at least know at any moment 1 The Faith of a Moralist^ i. p. 117.
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“where in the time-order His world has got to” (p. 140). I think that is so, and this implies a public Time, not indeed a common sense of. duration, but an order of succession in which events, apart from variations in the perception of them, actually happen.
To some people it may appear that such a belief has been shaken by Einstein and the doctrine of Relativity. But the doctrine of Relativity, so far as I can gather, leaves the public Time in which events happen quite untouched. What that doctrine is concerned with is the measurement of periods of time and the different times at which the same event is perceived by observers with different standpoints. It may no doubt be true that it is impossible to get any absolute unchanging standard by which to measure one bit of duration in respect of another. It is certainly true that what to some observers might seem a single flash of light may seem to others a series of flashes. It would even be possible, if an observer could travel away from the earth through space at a speed greater than that of light, and catch up successively the rays which had left the earth in a series of moments before, he might see the events on earth in the reverse order to that in which they happened. But that leaves the time in which they happened quite unaffected, just as unaffected as the time in which a man takes off his clothes is unaffected by the process being shown afterwards in reverse order on the cinematograph. We may have seen such a film, in which the coat the man had really taken off and thrown on to a chair seemed to rise spontaneously from the chair and fly on to his back.
Einstein says: “I call two events simultaneous for a given observer when they are perceived or seen at the same time by that observer while he is equidistant from both.”^ But why should the recognition of simultaneity be made by Einstein to depend on the observer being
1 The Theory of Relativity,
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equidistant from both events, except on the supposition that there is a real time, apart from the observer, in which light travels from the two events ? The very word “simul- taneous,” in such a proposition, has no sense except in reference to an objective public time. When an astronomer tells us that the light of a fixed star visible to us left the star 400,000 years ago, the immense distance of Time between our perception of an event in that star and the perception of the same event by an observer on the star itself (if one existed) does not invalidate belief in an objective Time common to that star and to the earth: it implies It. It means that the event on the star which we see to-day was really simultaneous with events on the earth 400,000 years ago. Relativity shows how widely the order in which a series of events are perceived by observers elsewhere may differ from the order in which we perceive them. In that sense It is possible for an event to be still future for us which is past for another observer. If an event occurred 200,000 years ago on the fixed star just referred to it would, for an observer to-day on the star, belong to a past as remote as that; we on earth could not perceive that event till the year a.d. 201,934. But all this has only to do with the order of perception, not the order in which the perceived events happen. And it is to be noted that however wildly the order of perception may differ for different observers after the event has happened, no ej^onei^of the theory_.Qf_Relativitv has shown that any event can be perceived before it has happened. The actual moment of happening in objective public Time sets a limit behind which variation in perception cannot go. But this is so because all perception is perception (more or less true) of an order of events in objective public Time.
One phrase made current by recent theories in Physics is, I believe, unhappy, and, to the general public, mis- leading: that Time is a “fourth dimension.” The phrase
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seems nonsense, and, although it may no doubt be under- stood by physicists in a sense which gives it value, it is, I think, as it stands, really nonsense. Each of the three dimensions we know of old is a direction in space at right angles with either of the other two dimensions. 1 do not think that anyone has claimed that Time is at right angles to each of the other three, but, unless it is, it cannot properly be called a dimension. What I believe the phrase means might be expressed more intelligibly by saying that for the existence of things in space. Time is a fourth factor which has to be taken account of in addition to the three spatial dimensions. And I do not question that that is true. That, however, does not seem to me to establish an essential difference between the time of physicists and time as we experience it. If it is true that their time has no present, but only an after and before, this is also true of our time when it is past.
The philosophy of Bergson has lost some of the prestige it had when it was new, twenty or thirty years ago, but it appears to me that his protest against the coupling together of Space and Time as two things of the same order will remain as the assertion of a valuable truth. Professor Alexander no doubt would dissent from such a statement, connecting the two things as he actually does by a hyphen. And I might feel it presumptuous of me to assert the contrary view in the face of an authority so eminent, were it not that I am in the company of others who find Professor Alexander’s philosophy in this respect inacceptable. It may be true that there could be no measurement of objects in space apart from the factor of Time, but it does not seem to me true, as I said at the beginning of this lecture, that spatial perceptions or sensations are necessary to the experience of Time, even if in the actual experience of men on earth the two things go together.
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No spiritual life — surely so far, at any rate, Bergson is right — can be imagined apart from Time, not only in its volitional activity (it is admitted that for the will and for all the moral values connected with the will Time is essential) but even for the exercise of the intellect. Thought is movement, play about some object. Perfectly unmoving thought is a contradiction in terms : you could not even contemplate such a truth as that the inner angles of a triangle are equivalent to two right angles without a movement of thought bringing general concepts to bear upon perception. It may be objected that in the mystical ecstasy you can have unmoving contemplation in which there is no flicker of thought round the object, but, if so, the contemplation would consist in feeling without intellectual content. We cannot imagine any worthy spiritual life which would consist entirely in such unmov- ing contemplation. No doubt the Christian doctrine of the beatific vision enjoyed by the redeemed in heaven may be believed to point to some kind of experience to which the unmoving contemplation of the mystic has a certain resemblance; yet a life in which the movement of thought and will was not in any way represented would be a poor life as compared with what the movement of thought and will, as we know it here in man’s earthly life, leads us to hope for hereafter. In what way such a beatific vision could involve something analogous to thought and will we cannot, of course, now imagine. We can say so much: if there will be anything in it analogous to thought and will, then there must be something in it analogous to Time. The unmoving contemplation of the mystic cannot be taken to represent all that it will be.
It may, of course, be fully admitted that the doctrine of God’s existence as timeless came into Christian theology from the pagan Greeks and is not found in the Scriptures written by men of Hebrew race, and at the same time be
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maintained that the doctrine is true. But if it was not the authority of their Scriptures which led Christian thinkers to adopt so largely the Neo-Platonic view of eternity as timeless, what was it that commended the doctrine to them? There must have been something which moved them to adopt it.
I think we can see the enormous difficulty to thought if we suppose God to experience Time as we experience it — always supposing that there is really a Being who fulfils the requirements which must be fulfilled, if the exigences of the spirit in man are to be satisfied. What has driven on Christian thought is the underlying assump- tion that a Being must exist to whom nothing can attach that would present itself to thought as an imperfection: no other Being can properly, for Christian or Theist feeling, be called “God.” This is why we find Christian theology affirm with such confidence that the existence of God, the life of God, must be of such and such a character. In contrast with the Hebrew writers who had regarded man’s life as imperfect simply because it did have an end and such a speedy one, the Christian theologians who adopted the view that God’s eternity was timeless felt that the imperfection of human life went further than this — they felt not merely that threescore years and ten was such a short bit of time, but that all experience in Time, however long, must be imperfect.
Partly, perhaps, we must allow for the psychological effect of prolonged time being for men associated with fatigue. We cannot think of any kind of activity as indefinitely prolonged without our having a sensation of physical fatigue or mental tedium. From the imagination of a series of changes going on and on the spirit recoils, and cries out for a cessation of the process, for a stationary rest — the cry expressed in an ancient Collect, “that we who are wearied by the labour and the changes of this
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transitory world may repose upon thy eternal change- lessness.” But it seems to me a naiveti to use this fact against the supposition of a prolonged activity in heaven, since plainly it is possible to suppose that only the condi- tions of physical life on earth make fatigue the necessary consequence of prolonged activity. So far as our recoil from the idea of endless Time is determined by this accidental association (it may be without our realizing it) the recoil is hardly reasonable. If we are to show that there is something in temporal experience which makes it impossible to attribute it to God, we must show that it is beset, not merely with an unpleasant accompaniment in consequence of the laws of animal physiology, but by an essential imperfection. This, I think, can be done. In the first place, any temporal experience, if its character is reflected upon, must disclose our state as one of helpless- ness, of subjection, to an irresistible power not ourselves. We cannot arrest the process which carries us inexorably on. “0 lente^ lente, currite^ noctis equi" — the line of Ovid in his mistress’s arms which is quoted grimly by Mar- lowe’s Faustus when his moment to be carried off by Mephistopheles is almost come. But no one can make those horses stay in their course. There is nothing that anyone can do to prevent the present living moment turning instantly into the dead past. To think of God’s experience as Time prolonged is to think of Time as stronger than God.
Secondly, Time, as we experience it, means continual loss and deficiency — loss in so far as all the successive moments which were each ourselves, our being, in the past, are gone and non-existent for ever, deficiency in so far as all the moments which will be ourselves, our being, do not yet exist at all. Only the moment in which we feel and act is real, exists; as soon as we reflect on our feeling or action, it is already a bit of the dead, unchangeable
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past. We cannot keep our own being more than a moment.
But if our temporal experience is thus in its essence beset with imperfection, we could only attribute it to God, if He is to that extent imperfect, and if He is imperfect at all. He no longer is what we mean by “God.” Christian theologians seem therefore to have been fully justified in saying that if there is a Being than whom none greater can be conceived. His life cannot be a temporal sequence like man’s. But it may be questioned whether they were wise in going beyond this negative statement, in trying to give, under Neo-Platonic influence, a state- ment which sounded positive about that in God’s life to which our temporal experience is analogous. To call it eternity says nothing, eternity is a mere x denoting some- thing of which all we know is that it cannot be Time like the Time we experience. Still less is it helpful to describe it by such a phrase as a Nunc Stans\ for the only meaning we can connect with “now” is the meaning it gets from our experience of the present in contrast with past and future, and to be stationary means nothing except to persist without change throughout a period of time.
It seems to me utterly idle for us to speculate in this way at all on what God’s life is for Him; but that also makes it idle to deny that there is anything analogous to successiveness in God’s apprehension of the universe. I referred in my last lecture to the suggestion of Royce and Sorley that God apprehended the time-series as a succes- sion, but a succession grasped in a single act of cognition, like man’s apprehension of the “specious present.” I indicated that the theory did not seem to me easy to accept. Yet it may come nearer the truth than the idea of a Nunc Stans in which there is no temporal after and before. It is better to confess that we do not know and cannot know.
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With regard to the picture of the cosmic consummation of the time-process or the picture of what awaits the individual after death, it would be absurd to take literally the imagery given us in the traditional Christian escha- tology. But to substitute the mythology of Plotinus, in regard to the Higher World and to Aion, for the Christian mythology in regard to the end of the world and the coming of the Son of Man, is, I think, a doubtful advan- tage. The Christian traditional eschatology may be truer than the mythology of Plotinus in the value it gives to the time-process and to the consummation of the Purpose of God in Time.
Any Theism which recognizes God as the Creator must at least say that, if Time is an essential characteristic of the universe we know, God must will that there should