In the eyes of the modern evolutionary4 enquirer5 the interest of the origin and history of this widespread idea is mainly psychological. We have before us a vast and pervasive6 group of human opinions, true or false, which have exercised and still exercise an immense influence upon the development of mankind and of civilisation7: the question arises, Why did human beings ever come to hold these opinions at all, and how did they arrive at them? What was there in the conditions of early man which led him to frame to himself such abstract notions of one or more great supernatural agents, of whose objective existence he had certainly in nature no clear or obvious evidence? Regarding the problem in this light, as essentially8 a problem of the processes of the human mind, I set aside from the outset, as foreign to my purpose, any kind of enquiry into the objective validity of any one among the religious beliefs thus set 002before us as subject-matter. The question whether there may be a God or gods, and, if so, what may be his or their substance and attributes, do not here concern us. All we have to do in our present capacity is to ask ourselves strictly9, What first suggested to the mind of man the notion of deity10 in the abstract at all? And how, from the early multiplicity of deities11 which we find to have prevailed in all primitive times among all human races, did the conception of a single great and unlimited12 deity first take its rise? In other words, why did men ever believe there were gods at all, and why from many gods did they arrive at one? Why from polytheism have the most advanced nations proceeded to monotheism?
To put the question in this form is to leave entirely13 out of consideration the objective reality or otherwise of the idea itself. To analyse the origin of a concept is not to attack the validity of the belief it encloses. The idea of gravitation, for example, arose by slow degrees in human minds, and reached at last its final expression in Newton’s law. But to trace the steps by which that idea was gradually reached is not in any way to disprove or to discredit14 it. The Christian15 believer may similarly hold that men arrived by natural stages at the knowledge of the one true God; he is not bound to reject the final conception as false merely because of the steps by which it was slowly evolved. A creative God, it is true, might prefer to make a sudden revelation of himself to some chosen body of men; but an evolutionary God, we may well believe, might prefer in his inscrutable wisdom to reveal his own existence and qualities to his creatures by means of the same slow and tentative intellectual gropings as those by which he revealed to them the physical truths of nature. I wish my enquiry, therefore, to be regarded, not as destructive, but as reconstructive. It only attempts to recover and follow out the various planes in the evolution of the idea of God, rather than to cast doubt upon the truth of the evolved concept.
In003 investigating any abstruse17 and difficult subject, it is often best to proceed from the known to the unknown, even although the unknown itself may happen to come first in the order of nature and of logical development. For this reason, it may be advisable to begin here with a brief preliminary examination of Christianity, which is not only the most familiar of all religions to us Christian nations, but also the best known in its origins: and then to show how far we may safely use it as a Standard of Reference in explaining the less obvious and certain features of earlier or collateral19 cults20.
Christianity, then, viewed as a religious standard, has this clear and undeniable advantage over almost every other known form of faith—that it quite frankly21 and confessedly sets out in its development with the worship of a particular Deified Man.
This point in its history cannot, I think, be overrated in importance, because in that single indubitable central fact it gives us the key to much that is cardinal22 in all other religions; every one of which, as I hope hereafter to show, equally springs, directly or indirectly23, from the worship of a single Deified Man, or of many Deified Men, more or less etherealised.
Whatever else may be said about the origin of Christianity, it is at least fairly agreed on either side, both by friends and foes24, that this great religion took its rise around the personality of a certain particular Galilean teacher, by name Jesus, concerning whom, if we know anything at all with any approach to certainty, we know at least that he was a man of the people, hung on a cross in Jerusalem under the procuratorship of Caius Pontius Pilatus. That kernel25 of fact—a man, and his death—Jesus Christ and him crucified—is the one almost undoubted historical nucleus26 round which all the rest of a vast European and Asiatic system of thought and belief has slowly crystallised.
Let us figure clearly to ourselves the full import of these truths. 004A Deified Man is the central figure in the faith of Christendom.
From the very beginning, however, a legend, true or false (but whose truth or falsity has no relation whatever to our present subject), gathered about the personality of this particular Galilean peasant reformer. Reverenced28 at first by a small body of disciples29 of his own race and caste, he grew gradually in their minds into a divine personage, of whom strange stories were told, and a strange history believed by a group of ever-increasing adherents30 in all parts of the Gr忙co-Roman Mediterranean31 civilisation. The earliest of these stories, in all probability—certainly the one to which most importance was attached by the pioneers of the faith—clustered about his death and its immediate32 sequence. Jesus, we are told, was crucified, dead, and buried. But at the end of three days, if we may credit the early documents of our Christian faith, his body was no longer to be found in the sepulchre where it had been laid by friendly hands: and the report spread abroad that he had risen again from the dead, and lived once more a somewhat phantasmal life among the living in his province. Supernatural messengers announced his resurrection to the women who had loved him: he was seen in the flesh from time to time for very short periods by one or other among the faithful who still revered33 his memory. At last, after many such appearances, more or less fully34 described in the crude existing narratives35, he was suddenly carried up to the sky before the eyes of his followers36, where, as one of the versions authoritatively38 remarks, he was “received into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God”—that is to say, of Jahweh, the ethnical deity of the Hebrew people.
Such in its kernel was the original Christian doctrine40 as handed down to us amid a mist of miracle, in four or five documents of doubtful age and uncertain authenticity41. Even this central idea does not fully appear in the Pauline epistles, believed to be the oldest in date of all our Christian 005writings: it first takes full shape in the somewhat later Gospels and Acts of the Apostles. In the simplest and perhaps the earliest of these definite accounts we are merely told the story of the death and resurrection, the latter fact being vouched42 for on the dubious43 testimony44 of “a young man clothed in a long white garment,” supplemented (apparently at a later period) by subsequent “appearances” to various believers. With the controversies45 which have raged about these different stories, however, the broad anthropological46 enquiry into the evolution of God has no concern. It is enough for us here to admit, what the evidence probably warrants us in concluding, that a real historical man of the name of Jesus did once exist in Lower Syria, and that his disciples at a period very shortly after his execution believed him to have actually risen from the dead, and in due time to have ascended47 into heaven.
At a very early date, too, it was further asserted that Jesus was in some unnatural48 or supernatural sense “the son of God”—that is to say, once more, the son of Jahweh, the local and national deity of the Jewish people. In other words, his worship was affiliated49 upon the earlier historical worship of the people in whose midst he lived, and from whom his first disciples were exclusively gathered. It was not, as we shall more fully see hereafter, a revolutionary or purely50 destructive system. It based itself upon the common conceptions of the Semitic community. The handful of Jews and Galileans who accepted Jesus as a divine figure did not think it necessary, in adopting him as a god, to get rid of their own preconceived religious opinions. They believed rather in his prior existence, as a part of Jahweh, and in his incarnation in a human body for the purpose of redemption. And when his cult18 spread around into neighboring countries (chiefly, it would seem, through the instrumentality of one Paul of Tarsus, who had never seen him, or had beheld52 him only in what is vaguely53 called “a vision”) the cult 006of Jahweh went hand in hand with it, so that a sort of modified mystic monotheism, based on Judaism, became the early creed54 of the new cosmopolitan55 Christian church.
Other legends, of a sort familiar in the lives of the founders57 of creeds58 and churches elsewhere, grew up about the life of the Christian leader; or at any rate, incidents of a typical kind were narrated59 by his disciples as part of his history. That a god or a godlike person should be born of a woman by the ordinary physiological60 processes of humanity seems derogatory to his dignity—perhaps fatal to his godhead: * therefore it was asserted—we know not whether truly or otherwise—that the founder56 of Christianity, by some mysterious afflatus61, was born of a virgin62. Though described at times as the son of one Joseph, a carpenter, of Nazareth, and of Mary, his betrothed63 wife, he was also regarded in an alternative way as the son of the Hebrew god Jahweh, just as Alexander, though known to be the son of Philip, was also considered to be the offspring of Amon-Ra or Zeus Ammon. We are told, in order to lessen64 this discrepancy65 (on the slender authority of a dream of Joseph’s), how Jesus was miraculously66 conceived by the Holy Spirit of Jahweh in Mary’s womb. He was further provided with a royal pedigree from the house of David, a real or mythical68 early Hebrew king; and prophecies from the Hebrew sacred books were found to be fulfilled in his most childish adventures. In one of the existing biographies, commonly ascribed to Luke, the companion of Paul, but supposed to bear traces of much later authorship, many such marvellous stories are recounted of his infantile adventures: and in all our documents, miracles attest69 his supernatural powers, while appeal is constantly made to the fulfilment of supposed predictions (all of old Hebrew origin) as a test and credential of the reality of his divine mission.
* On this subject, see Mr. Sidney Hartland’s Legend of
Perseus, vol. i.
We 007shall see hereafter that these two points—the gradual growth of a myth or legend, and affiliation70 upon earlier local religious ideas—are common features in the evolution of gods in general, and of the God of monotheism in particular. In almost every case where we can definitely track him to his rise, the deity thus begins with a Deified Man, elevated by his worshippers to divine rank, and provided with a history of miraculous67 incident, often connected with the personality of preexistent deities.
In the earlier stages, it seems pretty clear that the relations of nascent71 Christianity to Judaism were vague and undefined: the Christians72 regarded themselves as a mere16 sect73 of the Jews, who paid special reverence27 to a particular dead teacher, now raised to heaven by a special apotheosis74 of a kind with which everyone was then familiar. But as the Christian church spread to other lands, by the great seaports75, it became on the one hand more distinct and exclusive, while on the other hand it became more definitely dogmatic and theological. It was in Egypt, it would seem, that the Christian Pantheon (if I may be allowed the expression in the case of a religion nominally76 monotheistic) first took its definite Trinitarian shape. Under the influence of the old Egyptian love for Triads or Trinities of gods, a sort of mystical triune deity was at last erected77 out of the Hebrew Jahweh and the man Jesus, with the aid of the Holy Spirit or Wisdom of Jahweh, which had come to be regarded by early Christian minds (under the influence of direct divine inspiration or otherwise) as a separate and coordinate78 person of this composite godhead. How far the familiar Egyptian Trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus may have influenced the conception of the Christian Trinity, thus finally made up of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we shall discuss at a later stage of our enquiry; for the present, it may suffice to point out that the Gr忙co-Egyptian Athanasius was the great upholder of the definite dogma of the Trinity against opposing (heretical) Christian thinkers; and 008that the hymn79 or so-called creed known by his name (though not in all probability of his own composition) bears the impress of the mystical Egyptian spirit, tempered by the Alexandrian Greek delight in definiteness and minuteness of philosophical distinction.
In this respect, too, we shall observe in the sequel that the history of Christianity, the most known among the religions, was exactly parallel to that of earlier and obscurer creeds. At first, the relations of the gods to one another are vague and undetermined; their pedigree is often confused and even contradictory80; and the pantheon lacks anything like due hierarchical system or subordination of persons. But as time goes on, and questions of theology or mythology81 are debated among the priests and other interested parties, details of this sort get settled in the form of rigid82 dogmas, while subtle distinctions of a philosophical or metaphysical sort tend to be imported by more civilised men into the crude primitive faith. The belief that began with frank acceptance of Judaism, plus a personal worship of the Deified Man, Jesus, crystallised at last into the Catholic Faith in one God, of three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Quibbles are even made, and discussions raised at last as to the question whether Father and Son are “of one substance” or only “of like substance”; whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, or from the Father only; and so on ad infinitum.
It was largely in other countries than Jud忙a, and especially in Gaul, Rome, and Egypt, too, as I believe, that symbolism came to the aid of mysticism: that the cross, the tau, the labarum, the fish, the Alpha and Omega, and all the other early Christian emblems83 were evolved and perfected; and that the beginnings of Christian art took their first definite forms. Such forms were especially to a great extent evolved in the Roman catacombs. Christianity, being a universal, not a local or national, religion, has 009adopted in its course many diverse elements from most varied84 sources.
Originally, it would seem, the Christian pantheon was almost exclusively filled by the triune God, in his three developments or “persons,” as thus rigorously conceived by the Alexandrian intelligence. But from a very early time, if not from the first dawn of the Christian cult, it was customary to reverence the remains85 of those who had suffered for the faith, and perhaps even to invoke86 their aid with Christ and the Father. The Roman branch of the church, especially, accustomed to the Roman ancestor-worship and the Roman reverence for the Du Manes, had its chief places of prayer in the catacombs, where its dead were laid. Thus arose the practice of the invocation of saints, at whose graves or relics87 prayers were offered, both to the supreme88 deity and to the faithful dead themselves as intercessors with Christ and the Father. The early Christians, accustomed in their heathen stage to pay respect and even worship to the spirits of their deceased friends, could not immediately give up this pious89 custom after their conversion90 to the new creed, and so grafted91 it on to their adopted religion. Thus the subsidiary founders of Christianity, Paul, Peter, the Apostles, the Evangelists, the martyrs93, the confessors, came to form, as it were, a subsidiary pantheon, and to rank to some extent almost as an inferior order of deities.
Among the persons who thus shared in the honours of the new faith, the mother of Jesus early assumed a peculiar94 prominence95. Goddesses had filled a very large part in the devotional spirit of the older religions: it was but natural that the devotees of Isis and Pasht, of Artemis and Aphrodite, should look for some corresponding object of feminine worship in the younger faith. The Theotokos, the mother of God, the blessed Madonna, soon came to possess a practical importance in Christian worship scarcely inferior to that enjoyed by the persons of the Trinity themselves—in certain southern countries, indeed, actually superior 010to it. The Virgin and Child, in pictorial96 representation, grew to be the favourite subject of Christian art. How far this particular development of the Christian spirit had its origin in Egypt, and was related to the well-known Egyptian figures of the goddess Isis with the child Horus in her lap, is a question which may demand consideration in some future treatise97. For the present, it will be enough to call attention in passing to the fact that in this secondary rank of deities or semi-divine persons, the saints and martyrs, all alike, from the Blessed Virgin Mary down to the newest canonised among Roman Catholic prelates, were at one time or another Living Men and Women. In other words, besides the one Deified Man, Jesus, round whom the entire system of Christianity centres, the Church now worships also in the second degree a whole host of minor98 Dead Men and Women, bishops99, priests, virgins100, and confessors.
From the earliest to the latest ages of the Church, the complexity101 thus long ago introduced into her practice has gone on increasing with every generation. Nominally from the very outset a monotheistic religion, Christianity gave up its strict monotheism almost at the first start by admitting the existence of three persons in the godhead, whom it vainly endeavoured to unify102 by its mystic but confessedly incomprehensible Athanasian dogma. The Madonna (with the Child) rose in time practically to the rank of an independent goddess (in all but esoteric Catholic theory): while St. Sebastian, St. George, St. John Baptist, St. Catherine, and even St. Thomas of Canterbury himself, became as important objects of worship in certain places as the deity in person. At Milan, for example, San Carlo Borromeo, at Compostella, Santiago, at Venice, St. Mark, usurped103 to a great extent the place of the original God. As more and more saints died in each generation, while the cult of the older saints still lingered on everywhere more or less locally, the secondary pantheon grew ever fuller and fuller. Obscure personages, 011like St. Crispin and St. Cosmas, St. Chad and St. Cuthbert rose to the rank of departmental or local patrons, like the departmental and local gods of earlier religions. Every trade, every guild104, every nation, every province, had its peculiar saint. And at the same time, the theory of the Church underwent a constant evolution. Creed was added to creed—Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian, and so forth105, each embodying106 some new and often subtle increment107 to the whole mass of accepted dogma. Council after council made fresh additions of articles of faith—the Unity51 of Substance, the Doctrine of the Atonement, the Immaculate Conception, the Authority of the Church, the Infallibility of the Pope in his spiritual capacity. And all these also are well-known incidents of every evolving cult: constant increase in the number of divine beings; constant refinements108 in the articles of religion, under the influence of priestly or scholastic109 metaphysics.
Two or three other points must still be noted110 in this hasty review of the evolution of Christianity, regarded as a standard of religion; and these I will now proceed to consider with all possible brevity.
In the matter of ceremonial and certain other important accessories of religion it must frankly be admitted that Christianity rather borrowed from the older cults than underwent a natural and original development on its own account. A priesthood, as such, does not seem to have formed any integral or necessary part of the earliest Christendom: and when the orders of bishops, priests, and deacons were introduced into the new creed, the idea seems to have been derived111 rather from the existing priesthoods of anterior112 religions than from any organic connexion with the central facts of the new worship. From the very nature of the circumstances this would inevitably113 result. For the primitive temple (as we shall see hereafter) was the Dead Man’s tomb; the altar was his gravestone; and the priest was the relative or representative who continued for him the customary gifts to the ghost 012at the grave. But the case of Jesus differs from almost every other case on record of a Deified Man in this—that his body seems to have disappeared at an early date; and that, inasmuch as his resurrection and ascension into heaven were made the corner-stone of the new faith, it was impossible for worship of his remains to take the same form as had been taken in the instances of almost all previously114 deified Dead Persons. Thus, the materials out of which the Temple, the Altar, Sacrifices, Priesthood, are usually evolved (as we shall hereafter see) were here to a very large extent necessarily wanting.
Nevertheless, so essential to religion in the minds of its followers are all these imposing115 and wonted accessories that our cult did actually manage to borrow them readymade from the great religions that went before it, and to bring them into some sort of artificial relation with its own system. You cannot revolutionize the human mind at one blow. The pagans had been accustomed to all these ideas as integral parts of religion as they understood it: and they proceeded as Christians to accommodate them by side-issues to the new faith, in which these elements had no such natural place as in the older creeds. Not only did sacred places arise at the graves or places of martyrdom of the saints; not only was worship performed beside the bones of the holy dead, in the catacombs and elsewhere; but even a mode of sacrifice and of sacrificial communion was invented in the mass,—a somewhat artificial development from the possibly unsacerdotal Agape-feasts of the primitive Christians. Gradually, churches gathered around the relics of the martyr92 saints: and in time it became a principle of usage that every church must contain an altar—made of stones on the analogy of the old sacred stones; containing the bones or other relics of a saint, like all earlier shrines116; consecrated117 by the pouring on of oil after the antique fashion; and devoted118 to the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass, which became by degrees more and more expiatory119 and sacerdotal in 013character. As the saints increased in importance, new holy places sprang up around their bodies; and some of these holy places, containing their tombs, became centres of pilgrimage for the most distant parts of Christendom; as did also in particular the empty tomb of Christ himself, the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.
The growth of the priesthood kept pace with the growth of ceremonial in general, till at last it culminated120 in the mediaeval papacy, with its hierarchy121 of cardinals122, archbishops, bishops, priests, and other endless functionaries123. Vestments, incense124, and like accompaniments of sacerdotalism also rapidly gained ground. All this, too, is a common trait of higher religious evolution everywhere. So likewise are fasting, vigils, and the ecstatic condition. But asceticism125, monasticism, celibacy126, and other forms of morbid127 abstinence are peculiarly rife128 in the east, and found their highest expression in the life of the Syrian and Egyptian hermits129.
Lastly, a few words must be devoted in passing to the rise and development of the Sacred Books, now excessively venerated130 in North-western Christendom. These consisted in the first instance of genuine or spurious letters of the apostles to the various local churches (the so-called Epistles), some of which would no doubt be preserved with considerable reverence; and later of lives or legends of Jesus and his immediate successors (the so-called Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles). Furthermore, as Christianity adopted from Judaism the cult of its one supreme divine figure, now no longer envisaged131 as Jahweh, the national deity of the Hebrews, but as a universal cosmopolitan God and Father, it followed naturally that the sacred books of the Jewish people, the literature of Jahweh-worship, should also receive considerable attention at the hands of the new priesthood. By a gradual process of selection and elimination132, the canon of scripture133 was evolved from these heterogeneous134 materials: the historical or quasi-historical and prophetic Hebrew 014tracts were adopted by the Church, with a few additions of later date, such as the Book of Daniel, under the style and title of the Old Testament135. The more generally accepted lives of Christ, again, known as Evangels or Gospels; the Acts of the Apostles; the epistles to the churches; and that curious mystical allegory of the Neronian persecution136 known as the Apocalypse, were chosen out of the mass of early Christian literature to form the authoritative37 collection of inspired writing which we call the New Testament. The importance of this heterogeneous anthology of works belonging to all ages and systems, but confounded together in popular fancy under the name of the Books, or more recently still as a singular noun, the Bible, grew apace with the growth of the Church: though the extreme and superstitions137 adoration138 of their mere verbal contents has only been reached in the debased and reactionary139 forms of Christianity followed at the present day by our half-educated English and American Protestant dissenters140.
From this very brief review of the most essential factors in the development of the Christian religion as a system, strung loosely together with a single eye to the requirements of our present investigation141, it will be obvious at once to every intelligent reader that Christianity cannot possibly throw for us any direct or immediate light on the problem of the evolution of the idea of God. Not only did the concept of a god and gods exist full-fledged long before Christianity took its rise at all, but also the purely monotheistic conception of a single supreme God, the creator and upholder of all things, had been reached in all its sublime142 simplicity143 by the Jewish teachers centuries before the birth of the man Jesus. Christianity borrowed from Judaism this magnificent concept, and, humanly speaking, proceeded to spoil it by its addition of the Son and the Holy Ghost, who mar39 the complete unity of the grand Hebrew ideal. Even outside Judaism, the selfsame notion had already been arrived at in a certain mystical 015form as the “esoteric doctrine” of the Egyptian priesthood; from whom, with their peculiar views as to emanations and Triads, the Christian dogmas of the Trinity, the Logos, the Incarnation, and the Holy Ghost were in large part borrowed. The Jews of Alexandria, that eastern London, formed the connecting link between Egyptian heathenism, Hellenic philosophy, and early Christianity; and their half-philosophical, half-religious ideas may be found permeating144 the first writings and the first systematic145 thought of the nascent church. In none of these ways, therefore, can we regard Christianity as affording us any direct or immediate guidance in our search for the origin and evolution of the concepts of many gods, and of one God the creator.
Still, in a certain secondary and illustrative sense, I think we are fully justified146 in saying that the history of Christianity, the religion whose beginnings are most surely known to us, forms a standard of reference for all the other religions of the world, and helps us indirectly to understand and explain the origin and evolution of these deepest among our fundamental spiritual conceptions.
Its value in this respect may best be understood if I point out briefly147 in two contrasted statements the points in which it may and the points in which it may not be fairly accepted as a typical religion.
Let us begin first with the points in which it may.
In the first place, Christianity is thoroughly148 typical in the fact that beyond all doubt its most central divine figure was at first, by common consent of orthodox and heterodox alike, nothing other than a particular Deified Man. All else that has been asserted about this particular Man—that he was the Son of God, that he was the incarnation of the Logos, that he existed previously from all eternity149, that he sits now on the right hand of the Father—all the rest of these theological stories do nothing in any way to obscure the plain and universally admitted historical fact that this Divine Person, the Very God of Very God, being of one 016substance with the Father, begotten150 of the Father before all worlds, was yet, at the moment when we first catch a glimpse of him in the writings of his followers, a Man recently deceased, respected, reverenced, and perhaps worshipped by a little group of fellow-peasants who had once known him as Jesus, the son of the carpenter. On that unassailable Rock of solid historical fact we may well be content to found our argument in this volume. Here at least nobody can accuse us of “crude and gross Euhemerism.” Or rather the crude and gross Euhemerism is here known to represent the solid truth. Jesus and his saints—Dominic, Francis, Catherine of Siena—are no mere verbal myths, no allegorical concepts, no personifications of the Sun, the Dawn, the Storm-cloud. Leaving aside for the present from our purview151 of the Faith that one element of the older supreme God—the Hebrew Jahweh,—whom Christianity borrowed from the earlier Jewish religion, we can say at least with perfect certainty that every single member of the Christian pantheon—Jesus, the Madonna, St. John Baptist, St. Peter, the Apostles, the Evangelists—were, just as much as San Carlo Borromeo or St. Thomas of Canterbury or St. Theresa, Dead Men or Women, worshipped after their death with divine or quasi-divine honours. In this the best-known of all human religions, the one that has grown up under the full eye of history, the one whose gods and saints are most distinctly traceable, every object of worship, save only the single early and as yet unresolved deity of the Hebrew cult, whose origin is lost for us in the mist of ages, turns out on enquiry to be indeed a purely Euhemeristic god or saint,—in ultimate analysis, a Real Man or Woman.
That point alone I hold to be of cardinal importance, and of immense or almost inestimable illustrative value, in seeking for the origin of the idea of a god in earlier epochs.
In the second place, Christianity is thoroughly typical in all that concerns its subsequent course of evolution; the gradual 017elevation of its central Venerated Man into a God of the highest might and power; the multiplication152 of secondary deities or saints by worship or adoration of other Dead Men and Women; the growth of a graduated and duly subordinated hierarchy of divine personages; the rise of a legend, with its miracles and other supernatural adjuncts; the formation of a definite theology, philosophy, and systematic dogmatism; the development of special artistic153 forms, and the growth or adoption154 of appropriate symbolism; the production of sacred books, rituals, and formularies; the rise of ceremonies, mysteries, initiations, and sacraments; the reverence paid to relics, sacred sites, tombs, and dead bodies; and the close connexion of the religion as a whole with the ideas of death, the soul, the ghost, the spirit, the resurrection of the body, the last judgment155, hell, heaven, the life everlasting156, and all the other vast group of concepts which surround the simple fact of death in the primitive human mind generally.
Now, in the second place, let us look wherein Christianity to a certain small extent fails to be typical, or at least to solve our fundamental problems.
It fails to be typical because it borrows largely a whole ready-made theology, and above all a single supreme God, from a pre-existent religion. In so far as it takes certain minor features from other cults, we can hardly say with truth that it does not represent the average run of religious systems; for almost every particular new creed so bases itself upon elements of still earlier faiths; and it is perhaps impossible for us at the present day to get back to anything like a really primitive or original form of cult. But Christianity is very far removed indeed from all primitive cults in that it accepts ready-made the monotheistic conception, the high-water-mark, so to speak, of religious philosophising. While in the frankness with which it exhibits to us what is practically one half of its supreme deity as a Galilean peasant of undoubted humanity, subsequently deified and etherealised, it allows us to get down at a single 018step to the very origin of godhead; yet in the strength with which it asserts for the other half of its supreme deity (the Father, with his shadowy satellite the Holy Ghost) an immemorial antiquity157 and a complete severance158 from human life, it is the least anthropomorphic and the most abstract of creeds. In order to track the idea of God to its very source, then, we must apply in the last resort to this unresolved element of Christianity—the Hebrew Jahweh—the same sort of treatment which we apply to the conception of Jesus or Buddha;—we must show it to be also the immensely transfigured and magnified ghost of a Human Being; in the simple and forcible language of Swinburne, “The shade cast by the soul of man.”
Furthermore, Christianity fails to be typical in that it borrows also from pre-existing religions to a great extent the ideas of priesthood, sacrifice, the temple, the altar, which, owing to the curious disappearance159 or at least un-recognisability of the body of its founder (or, rather, its central object of worship), have a less natural place in our Christian system than in any other known form of religious practice. It is quite true that magnificent churches, a highly-evolved sacerdotalism, the sacrifice of the mass, the altar, and the relics, have all been imported in their fullest shape into developed Christianity, especially in its central or Roman form. But every one of these things is partly borrowed, almost as a survival or even as an alien feature, from earlier religions, and partly grew up about the secondary worship of saints and martyrs, their bones, their tombs, their catacombs, and their reliquaries. Christianity itself, particularly when viewed as the worship of Christ (to which it has been largely reduced in Teutonic Europe), does not so naturally lend itself to these secondary ceremonies; and in those debased schismatic forms of the Church which confine themselves most strictly to the worship of Jesus and of the supreme God, sacerdotalism and sacramentalism have been brought down to a minimum, 019so that the temple and the altar have lost the greater part of their sacrificial importance.
I propose, then, in subsequent chapters, to trace the growth of the idea of a God from the most primitive origins to the most highly evolved forms; beginning with the ghost, and the early undeveloped deity: continuing through polytheism to the rise of monotheism; and then returning at last once more to the full Christian conception, which we shall understand far better in detail after we have explained the nature of the yet unresolved or but provisionally resolved Jehovistic element. I shall try to show, in short, the evolution of God, by starting with the evolution of gods in general, and coming down by gradual stages through various races to the evolution of the Hebrew, Christian, and Moslem160 God in particular. ‘And the goal towards which I shall move will be the one already foreshadowed in this introductory chapter,—the proof that in its origin the concept of a god is nothing more than that of a Dead Man, regarded as a still surviving ghost or spirit, and endowed with increased or supernatural powers, and qualities.
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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evolutionary
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| adj.进化的；演化的，演变的；[生]进化论的 | |
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enquirer
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| 寻问者，追究者 | |
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pervasive
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| adj.普遍的；遍布的，(到处)弥漫的；渗透性的 | |
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civilisation
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| n.文明，文化，开化，教化 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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deities
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| n.神，女神( deity的名词复数 )；神祗；神灵；神明 | |
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unlimited
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| adj.无限的，不受控制的，无条件的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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discredit
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| vt.使不可置信；n.丧失信义；不信，怀疑 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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abstruse
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| adj.深奥的，难解的 | |
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cult
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| n.异教，邪教；时尚，狂热的崇拜 | |
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collateral
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| adj.平行的；旁系的；n.担保品 | |
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cults
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| n.迷信( cult的名词复数 )；狂热的崇拜；（有极端宗教信仰的）异教团体 | |
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21
frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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22
cardinal
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| n.(天主教的)红衣主教；adj.首要的，基本的 | |
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23
indirectly
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| adv.间接地，不直接了当地 | |
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24
foes
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| 敌人，仇敌( foe的名词复数 ) | |
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25
kernel
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| n.(果实的)核，仁；(问题)的中心，核心 | |
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nucleus
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| n.核，核心，原子核 | |
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reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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reverenced
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| v.尊敬，崇敬( reverence的过去式和过去分词 )；敬礼 | |
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disciples
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| n.信徒( disciple的名词复数 )；门徒；耶稣的信徒；（尤指）耶稣十二门徒之一 | |
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adherents
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| n.支持者，拥护者( adherent的名词复数 )；党羽；徒子徒孙 | |
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Mediterranean
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| adj.地中海的；地中海沿岸的 | |
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32
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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33
revered
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| v.崇敬，尊崇，敬畏( revere的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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35
narratives
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| 记叙文( narrative的名词复数 )； 故事； 叙述； 叙述部分 | |
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followers
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| 追随者( follower的名词复数 )； 用户； 契据的附面； 从动件 | |
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authoritative
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| adj.有权威的，可相信的；命令式的；官方的 | |
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authoritatively
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| 命令式地，有权威地，可信地 | |
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39
mar
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| vt.破坏，毁坏，弄糟 | |
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40
doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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41
authenticity
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| n.真实性 | |
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42
vouched
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| v.保证( vouch的过去式和过去分词 )；担保；确定；确定地说 | |
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dubious
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| adj.怀疑的，无把握的；有问题的，靠不住的 | |
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44
testimony
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| n.证词；见证，证明 | |
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45
controversies
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| 争论 | |
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46
anthropological
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| adj.人类学的 | |
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47
ascended
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| v.上升，攀登( ascend的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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48
unnatural
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| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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49
affiliated
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| adj. 附属的, 有关连的 | |
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50
purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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51
unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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52
beheld
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| v.看，注视( behold的过去式和过去分词 )；瞧；看呀；（叙述中用于引出某人意外的出现）哎哟 | |
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53
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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54
creed
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| n.信条；信念，纲领 | |
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55
cosmopolitan
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| adj.世界性的，全世界的，四海为家的，全球的 | |
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56
Founder
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| n.创始者，缔造者 | |
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57
founders
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| n.创始人( founder的名词复数 ) | |
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58
creeds
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| （尤指宗教）信条，教条( creed的名词复数 ) | |
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59
narrated
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| v.故事( narrate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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60
physiological
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| adj.生理学的，生理学上的 | |
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61
afflatus
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| n.灵感，神感 | |
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62
virgin
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| n.处女，未婚女子；adj.未经使用的；未经开发的 | |
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63
betrothed
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| n. 已订婚者 动词betroth的过去式和过去分词 | |
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64
lessen
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| vt.减少，减轻；缩小 | |
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65
discrepancy
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| n.不同；不符；差异；矛盾 | |
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66
miraculously
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| ad.奇迹般地 | |
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67
miraculous
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| adj.像奇迹一样的，不可思议的 | |
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68
mythical
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| adj.神话的；虚构的；想像的 | |
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69
attest
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| vt.证明，证实；表明 | |
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70
affiliation
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| n.联系，联合 | |
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71
nascent
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| adj.初生的，发生中的 | |
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72
Christians
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| n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 ) | |
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73
sect
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| n.派别，宗教，学派，派系 | |
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74
apotheosis
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| n.神圣之理想；美化；颂扬 | |
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75
seaports
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| n.海港( seaport的名词复数 ) | |
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76
nominally
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| 在名义上，表面地； 应名儿 | |
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77
ERECTED
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| adj. 直立的，竖立的，笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立，建立 | |
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78
coordinate
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| adj.同等的，协调的；n.同等者；vt.协作，协调 | |
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79
hymn
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| n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌 | |
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80
contradictory
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| adj.反驳的，反对的，抗辩的；n.正反对，矛盾对立 | |
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81
mythology
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| n.神话，神话学，神话集 | |
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82
rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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83
emblems
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| n.象征，标记( emblem的名词复数 ) | |
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84
varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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85
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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86
invoke
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| v.求助于(神、法律)；恳求，乞求 | |
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87
relics
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| [pl.］n.遗物，遗迹，遗产；遗体，尸骸 | |
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88
supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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89
pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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90
conversion
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| n.转化，转换，转变 | |
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91
grafted
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| 移植( graft的过去式和过去分词 )； 嫁接； 使（思想、制度等）成为（…的一部份）； 植根 | |
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92
martyr
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| n.烈士，殉难者；vt.杀害，折磨，牺牲 | |
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93
martyrs
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| n.martyr的复数形式；烈士( martyr的名词复数 )；殉道者；殉教者；乞怜者（向人诉苦以博取同情） | |
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94
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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95
prominence
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| n.突出；显著；杰出；重要 | |
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96
pictorial
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| adj.绘画的；图片的；n．画报 | |
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97
treatise
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| n.专著；(专题)论文 | |
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98
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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99
bishops
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| （基督教某些教派管辖大教区的）主教( bishop的名词复数 )； （国际象棋的）象 | |
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100
virgins
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| 处女，童男( virgin的名词复数 )； 童贞玛利亚（耶稣之母） | |
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101
complexity
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| n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物 | |
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102
unify
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| vt.使联合，统一；使相同，使一致 | |
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103
usurped
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| 篡夺，霸占( usurp的过去式和过去分词 )； 盗用； 篡夺，篡权 | |
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104
guild
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| n.行会，同业公会，协会 | |
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105
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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106
embodying
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| v.表现( embody的现在分词 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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107
increment
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| n.增值，增价；提薪，增加工资 | |
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108
refinements
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| n.（生活）风雅；精炼( refinement的名词复数 )；改良品；细微的改良；优雅或高贵的动作 | |
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109
scholastic
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| adj.学校的，学院的，学术上的 | |
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110
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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111
derived
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| vi.起源；由来；衍生；导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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112
anterior
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| adj.较早的；在前的 | |
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113
inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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114
previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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115
imposing
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| adj.使人难忘的，壮丽的，堂皇的，雄伟的 | |
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116
shrines
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| 圣地，圣坛，神圣场所( shrine的名词复数 ) | |
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117
consecrated
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| adj.神圣的，被视为神圣的v.把…奉为神圣，给…祝圣( consecrate的过去式和过去分词 )；奉献 | |
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118
devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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119
expiatory
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| adj.赎罪的，补偿的 | |
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120
culminated
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| v.达到极点( culminate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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121
hierarchy
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| n.等级制度；统治集团，领导层 | |
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122
cardinals
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| 红衣主教( cardinal的名词复数 )； 红衣凤头鸟（见于北美，雄鸟为鲜红色）； 基数 | |
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123
functionaries
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| n.公职人员，官员( functionary的名词复数 ) | |
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124
incense
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| v.激怒；n.香，焚香时的烟，香气 | |
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125
asceticism
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| n.禁欲主义 | |
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126
celibacy
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| n.独身(主义) | |
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127
morbid
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| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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128
rife
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| adj.(指坏事情)充斥的，流行的，普遍的 | |
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129
hermits
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| （尤指早期基督教的）隐居修道士，隐士，遁世者( hermit的名词复数 ) | |
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130
venerated
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| 敬重（某人或某事物），崇敬( venerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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131
envisaged
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| 想像，设想( envisage的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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132
elimination
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| n.排除，消除，消灭 | |
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133
scripture
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| n.经文，圣书，手稿；Scripture:(常用复数)《圣经》，《圣经》中的一段 | |
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134
heterogeneous
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| adj.庞杂的；异类的 | |
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135
testament
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| n.遗嘱；证明 | |
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136
persecution
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| n. 迫害,烦扰 | |
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137
superstitions
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| 迷信，迷信行为( superstition的名词复数 ) | |
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138
adoration
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| n.爱慕，崇拜 | |
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139
reactionary
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| n.反动者，反动主义者；adj.反动的，反动主义的，反对改革的 | |
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140
dissenters
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| n.持异议者，持不同意见者( dissenter的名词复数 ) | |
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141
investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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142
sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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143
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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144
permeating
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| 弥漫( permeate的现在分词 )； 遍布； 渗入； 渗透 | |
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145
systematic
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| adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的 | |
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146
justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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147
briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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148
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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149
eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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150
begotten
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| v.为…之生父( beget的过去分词 )；产生，引起 | |
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151
purview
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| n.范围；眼界 | |
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152
multiplication
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| n.增加，增多，倍增；增殖，繁殖；乘法 | |
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153
artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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154
adoption
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| n.采用，采纳，通过；收养 | |
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155
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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156
everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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157
antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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158
severance
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| n.离职金；切断 | |
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159
disappearance
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| n.消失，消散，失踪 | |
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160
Moslem
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| n.回教徒，穆罕默德信徒；adj.回教徒的，回教的 | |
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